Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1802: EW, David

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the election of David Ortiz, the ballot banishments of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, and the rest of the Hall of Fame voting results (including Scott Rolen’s auspicious surge), react to reports about the latest labor talks (with an emphasis on the problems with using public […]

Big Pop Lemon Drops have been the whole way through Tip Top Circus Cop I've got something crazy to tell you Yeah I've been hoping and praying and it's nothing new You're an amazing artist, thank you Hello and welcome to episode 1802 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm excited for the ultimate rarity this winter, which is a pretty newsy episode. We actually have some stuff to discuss. We don't have to come up with wild and creative topics. I mean, maybe they'll still be creative, but news has actually supplied some potential topics for us

today. Yeah, we got news. We'll try to have some takes about the news. News. Yeah. Yeah, we waited. We're recording here on Tuesday evening because we wanted to wait for the official unveiling of the BBWA Hall of Fame ballot results. And as it turns out, David Ortiz is a first ballot Hall of Famer. The results are bang on the projections, specifically the projections from Jason Sardell. I don't know how he pronounces it, but kudos to him because he essentially nailed everything. I mean, this is what we were talking to Emma Batchelori about last week, right? That the tracker that Ryan Thibodeau does with all of the public ballots that are announced before the official results come out has informed the coverage and maybe led to better coverage and increased coverage. maybe led to better coverage and increased coverage. And it has sapped some of the suspense from the actual announcement because we tend to have a pretty good idea of who's getting in and

who's not and how everyone's going to do before the actual results come out. So based on the last little round of projections there, I mean, just eyeballing the actual results and the projections, it's like everyone is spot on or maybe off by a percentage point or two. So everything sort of proceeded as it seemed to. And that means that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling are off the ballot, off the BBWA ballot, at least for good. And David Ortiz is a Hall of Famer with 77.9% support. That is above the 75% minimum needed for election. Yeah, I guess I'm glad that there will be a player there during induction weekend who is familiar and well-liked among a younger generation of fan, right?

liked among a younger generation of fan right there are a lot of other really wonderful candidates who are going to be inducted that weekend but many of them you know some of them are no longer alive and some of them are many generations removed from sort of our current moment and i think having a blend to connect baseball's present with its past is is moving right that is sort of evocative and i think it's good for the weekend to have that. I won't miss the discourse, Ben. We won't totally be spared it because, you know, these guys are going to turn up on the era committees

in, you know, dude sweet. This year, we don't even get a full year without Bond's Clemens Schilling discourse. I mean, assuming that they are all added to that today's game ballot,

which I think covers players up to those who retired after 2007, maybe it is this year, which was the last year of Schilling's career. So that does include those three. So presumably they will all be on the ballot and maybe there will be a little less debate just because writers will not be contributing to it.

So that'll be a 16-member committee of former Hall of Famers and other luminaries. And so it really depends on the Today's Game Committee than they did on the BBWA ballot just because next three Decembers, potentially, there will be more conversation about all these guys. Just when you thought they were gone, it pulls you back in. via that route than he did via the writer's ballot. It really depends. I don't know. I don't want to impugn anyone on those committees, but it's possible that they might be more willing to overlook off the field's missteps as opposed to PDs, I would think. Yeah, I could see that cutting either way, though, because I think that the request to not be considered, that the hall had to say,

no, you're like, you still are on the ballot though. Yeah. Might end up proving persuasive to some folks. So I don't quite know how that will go. I think you are right that people will likely be surprised at how much resistance bonds and Clemens meet when they move into the committee

structure, as opposed to the public writer's ballot. I think that when you look at the way that those two players trended over time, you know, they did much better on the ballots that were publicly disclosed. Those public ballots tend to skew a little younger among the electorate, right? They tend to tend to be more in favor of those two. And then the private ballots are really what ends up sinking them. So I would be surprised, at least in this iteration of that committee, if they find their way in. That doesn't mean that future versions potentially with a shifting electorate of its own might not

find it in their wisdom to include them. But I think it's going to be an odd one. I can't believe we have to do this again so soon so soon yeah they got little bumps in their last year Bonds and Clemens that is they went from 61.8 and 61.6 percent support last year to 66.0 and 65.2 so little it itty bitty bumps there, maybe largely with new voters coming into the rolls there, but not nearly enough to get them to 75%. And Schilling tanked. I think he lost 54 votes, partly maybe because he supported and voiced his support for January 6th last year, but also because he asked to be removed from the ballot. And I think a lot of voters took that as an excuse to get out of voting for him. Yep.

So he went down from 71.1% last year. He was quite close to only 58.6% this year. And just scanning the list of other names, there were some significant climbs for other players down the ballot. So Scott Rowland, everyone's favorite wholesome Hall of Fame candidate, went from 52.9 last year to 63.2. And he is steadily climbing. And I got to think that next year could be his year, right? Because you clear out the clutter of Ortiz and Bonds and Clemens and Schilling, all of those guys who will not be on the ballot next year. Suddenly, a ton of votes

free up. And I would have to think that a lot of people will be throwing those votes Scott Rowland's way. So I'm going to guess next year will be his year. Yeah, I think that given what we know about how these things tend to trend and the likelihood that players are inducted once they've met certain thresholds, the odds that he doesn't get in, even if it isn't on next year's ballot, seem quite low. But I agree with you. I think that with ballot space cleared, he's just going to be an obvious candidate for induction. So Scott Rowland. I felt bad for Joe Nathan. Yeah.

Did he fall off? He fell off. He fell off. Narrowly, I think he appeared on 4.3% of ballots, which means that he will not clear the 5% bar necessary to remain on. And look, I don't know. I don't know if I were constructing my ballot, if I would include him on it.

I do appreciate some of the arguments that have been made about just how dominant he was during that stretch. But it felt like something that we should consider for more than one year. Like I was willing to entertain that discourse for a little longer. We got stuck with 10 years of PD nonsense. We only are going to think about Joe Nathan for one year. Poor Joe. That seems unfair.

Yeah, I have high standards when it comes to relievers in the Hall of Fame. Sure. Great career, Joe. But yeah, there were others who did clear that threshold by a little bit. So Tim Hudson fell off, which I think that that would be a little more upsetting to me than Nathan, frankly. I think there is sort of some reevaluation of what is a modern Hall of Fame pitching Cooperstown candidate even look like these days in lower innings totals, lower win totals, etc. So Lincecum and Hudson both fell off. Yeah.

And Nathan and then Torrey Hunter barely scraped by. Mark Burley stayed on. Bobby Abreu, Jimmy Rollins, Andy Pettit stayed on. Oh, and Sammy Sosa, by the way, also in his final year in the ballot. A meager 18.5%, which was right around where he was last year as well. So for the most part, people had made up their minds on the PD, guys, and they just were not going to go far in either direction. And so at least we got it over with. We don't have to stretch this out for 15 years, which is what it used to be. So that's something. listeners that the decision to truncate the eligibility window was not one that the writers made. In fact, it was made over the writers' objections. And I think given the way that

Bonds and Clemens have trended, even though it has been at times a slow climb after their initial sort of burst, I imagine that with 15 years, they likely would have made their way into Cooperstown on the writers's ballot. And I don't know that to be true for sure. Of course, we can't prove that counterfactual, but it seems likely to me, given sort of the turnover that we continue to see in the voting body and the way that the younger voters who weren't necessarily covering the sport at the time of the PD scandals, engage with this stuff and sort of think about guys who've tested positive versus those who haven't and what have you. So I don't know for sure that it would have happened,

but I think it would have. And I do, I do resent that, that choice being taken away just because the hall wanted to decide that it, it was, it was done with bonds and Clemens, even if the BBWA wasn't necessarily. You need a new acronym.

It's so hard to say, Ben. I know. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, BBWA. That doesn't help. No, it's bad. But I wish that that were a choice that the writers were able to make for themselves over the initial election period.

Although I guess it would have made things harder for you, I still would have scraped by without having to consider them. So it's very easy for me to say though I guess it would have made things harder for you, I still would have scraped by without having to consider them. So it's very easy for me to say that, you know, it should have been hoisted upon us for a couple of years more. Yeah, I see what you're saying. But a large part of me is relieved to be done with it. Just move on to the next phase. Maybe they can get in via some other method. Although if the hall really does have a vendetta against those guys and wants to stack the deck, then I guess it could keep them off the Today's Game Committee ballot entirely, which would be quite controversial.

But I suppose that's an option open to them. And some other names, Manny Ramirez essentially stayed flat, just under 30% support. Gary Sheffield did not budge one way or another, Identical 40.6 percentages in each year, which is interesting. If I had voted, I would have voted for Gary Sheffield, I think. But he is not making any progress there. Todd Helton climbed pretty significantly from 44.9 to 52. Billy Wagner got a bit of a bump. Andrew Jones got a bit of a bump. Andrew Jones got a bit of a bump. Of course, Omar Vizquel plummeted precipitously after the recent revelations about his character. And I guess that about covers the big candidates other than A-Rod, who in his first year on the ballot ended up at 34.3%. So he has a long and presumably slow climb ahead of him if he is going to make it,

I would think. Yeah, I would imagine so. I think that, I don't know, I think I would struggle to vote for A-Rod. I think that Jay's sort of standard around this, that there is a Wild West period during which players likely were using, indeed these players may well have been using, but that it was not in violation of a specific policy is a clean and sort of ideologically consistent delineation for me. And I think especially after Scylla got in, you know, the argument that you look at someone who oversaw that era of baseball and didn't really do all that they likely could have to course correct being in and the the players who participated not being in it strikes

you wrong but like a rod like really told us a lot about using peds he just he told us a lot he told us stuff and then he took tests that told us stuff so i think that there is a delineation there now don't don't anyone hold me to it because I haven't really decided my thinking on this may change. But I would I think that he will struggle more significantly than the guys who were on the ballot and, you know, were reported to have failed the survey test or reported to have participated, but who never served a suspension and didn't test positive. So I'll be curious to see kind of how he moves and shakes. Yeah. He never tested positive other than the leaked survey test. Right. Right, I think. But it doesn't make much of a difference.

Right. Yeah, sorry. I don't mean to suggest that there was like another test there that people are not aware of. There's that leaked. And then he admitted to using them. Yes, he did. And then he was suspended. And then he lied. And then he admitted to using them. And then he was suspended. And then he lied. And then he, yes, ultimately came clean, if you can call it that, under duress.

So we know stuff about his steroid use in much starker and clearer terms than some of the other folks on that ballot. So that's that. And I guess the important takeaway is that no one needs to be mad at me for abstaining because my vote didn't keep anyone out or fail to keep anyone from getting in. So I guess I skated by on that score. Also, I think there's been a whole little round of outrage about, oh, this is such a failure. How could these guys not get in? They're some of the best players of all time. And I don't know. I think it's a very frustrating conversation for reasons that we have discussed ad nauseum and don't need to redo the whole discussion here. But if you are going to have a Hall of Fame that explicitly considers sportsmanship and integrity and character, and you are considering people like Curt Schilling and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa, I mean, they have a lot of significant strikes against them. So if that's the way that you're going to instruct people to vote, well, you're going to end up with some of the best players potentially not getting in there.

And it's a whole mess. And I know, you know, Jeff Passan wrote his column this week about how, oh, the Hall's whole mission is to tell the story of baseball, et cetera. And this is an abject failure on that score. I guess that's true in a sense. I mean, they can still be in the museum in some way. And of course, they're in no danger of being forgotten. And we have plenty of places to consult lists of the best baseball

players, if that is what we're looking for here. But unless there's going to be some change to the character clause or some change to how those plaques are presented and whether they actually present a fuller picture of the players, not just on-field performance, but personalities and off-field issues, then this was kind of inevitable, I guess. And this is, in a sense, what the Hall is asking for when it draws up the instructions this way and lets these players stay on the ballot without any other clarifying instructions. Well, you know what is really exciting that I just realized? What's that? Well, so we know we're going to have the continuation of a red discourse. We're not going to get out of that. But you know who else enters the arena on next year's ballot?

Oh, who is it? I haven't looked ahead. Carlos Beltran. Oh, goody. So we get to have a different kind of cheating discourse that's right yes that's right of course uh some people didn't think beltran was a hall of famer anyway just based on the performance i would but yes that's gonna be fun in a whole new and different way. Yeah. I think that our humble request as baseball scribes would simply be to live your life cleanly so that we don't have to talk about you not doing that. Yes. Just be blameless.

Have spotless records. Yeah. Be a tiny angel who throws a ball or swings a, and don't stray from the straight and narrow. And we need never engage in discourse ever again. All right. So that closes the book on the ballot for one more year. And we will see you later this year, Schilling and Bonds and Clemens, etc. So this has also been a busy week for labor news or what passes for bargaining news this winter in that there were multiple meetings. There were some proposals exchanged.

There was a two-way exchange of ideas in that sense. This is progress. This is an improvement. It seems as if there's still a lot of distance between the two parties on specific proposals. And we are probably nowhere near a resolution to this, but there is at least a glimmer of hope that things could be resolved in time to start the season on time. on time. Maybe I'm jumping the gun on that, but it looks a little likelier than it did, say, last week at this time when the last news was that the owners had gone more than a month without doing anything and then had sent a proposal that didn't really make any concessions at all. And the players responded to that by making some concessions of their own so i guess in that

sense the owners holding firm may have precipitated the players backing off certain positions a little bit but they still held firm to certain core proposals mlb budged a little bit in certain respects i suppose but what is your impression and it's hard to know because all this stuff like it leaks and dribs and drabs and you get these little like anecdotes about things that were said at the table and the two sides have different interpretations of them or different spin to reporters at least so for, for instance, it was leaked that MLB's deputy commissioner made some comment about how MLB is willing to lose games, right? Which in itself is nothing revelatory, however we are pronouncing that on this podcast these days, because of course you're going to say that.

You're not going to say well we're unwilling to cancel games because that weakens your leverage considerably but there was a lot of disagreement about whether he said it in a matter-of-fact way or whether he said it as a threat and so there were different spins about this and conflicting comments about the the spirit in which that comment was intended so So it's all sort of, you know, passed to us secondhand or thirdhand. And it's kind of through a funhouse mirror at times. And we don't get the full proposals. We just get little aspects of them here and there. But what's your impression of how things have gone this week?

I think that the fact that there were multiple meetings is a sign that the negotiations are at least continuing at a pace, right? I think the fact that the players responded to the league pretty promptly, especially when you consider the feet dragging that we saw from the league since the lockout, is an indication that things are moving. I'm hesitant to put a value judgment on it because since we don't know all of the ins and outs of the different proposals and sort of how they're fitting with one another, I

think that we ought to exercise some caution about saying that things are going well or poorly for one side. I think that the fact that we did see some concessions would indicate, and from both sides, although we could argue about whether they were sort of of similar scale, I suppose suggests that at least that there is some good faith negotiation going on, even if some of the counters that the league has put to the players don't seem to be particularly compelling. You know, when you're looking at like more than $100,000 gap in the amount that they want to raise minimum salaries, for instance, you can still sort of get a sense and appreciate the scale of the chasm between them.

But the fact that they have not completely broken down suggests that they are at least progressing toward a deal. Again, I think we need to sort of reserve judgment about how beneficial that deal is proving to be one side or the other until we know more about it. I would, for instance, love it if we could talk less about war. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Some groceries. That seems to be the one thing or one of the things that the sides are semi-agreed on, although very far apart on the specifics, is this idea of a bonus pool for pre-arbitration players or at least some subset of them that end up among the league leaders. And one of the things that the players conceded or walked back a bit was trying to shorten the path to free agency by one way. And again, it was always probably going to stay at six years for most players,

but the players had proposed that there could also be some age component to it. Players had proposed that there could also be some age component to it. So it would be like six years unless you are, you know, 38.5 or 29.5 as one of the subsequent proposals said. And then you could, in theory, qualify earlier. So I think that always would have affected a fairly small number of players. number of players. Yeah. So I think the more important thing from their perspective and the thing that would affect more players is getting players paid earlier in their career via arbitration, some change to the arbitration system or by qualifying for arbitration earlier.

And they are still sticking to that. And this one idea, which is not totally dissimilar from the idea that Jonathan Judge at Baseball Perspectives had proposed a long time ago and we talked about on the podcast with him, is just this idea of a predetermined bonus pool that would then be paid out to some pre-arbitration players. And the size of the pool, again, a vast chasm between a chasmous gap between the two sides. But they both seem to be okay with going ahead with the idea of basing that on some sort of third-party war formulation. And they seem to keep name-checking fan graphs when it comes to that proposal. Have we seen a particular war specified here? Not in the slightest. I think that they kept us out of their mouths, at least in that respect.

I don't know what version of war they seek to employ here. So, you know, I don't mean to make it about me when it's not. But I find the, the fixation with war to be very interesting that could encompass all manner of things. Allow me to be specific. So I think that one thing that we've talked about with this, both within the context of these proposals and then just generally is that this assumes like a precision to war that I think even people like me and you who think that war is a really useful framework through which to understand baseball would be very quick to tell you is not present, right? Yes.

So what happens if you are the 31st most valuable pre-ARP player and the difference in war between you and the 30th most valuable is like, you know, less than half a win. Like you're the same, you're the same basically. And you're probably not the same, but you're, you're within sort of the, our margin for error on this pretty profoundly. So I worry about this, um, sort of imbuing a precision that isn't really present or assuming a precision that isn't present. I think that, you know, just war changes. It doesn't tend to change a lot, but it changes sometimes. You know, positional adjustments get tinkered with, or, you know, this happened with baseball reference

where Sports Info Solutions reformulated DRS, and they made some adjustments that improved DRS and made it a more precise defensive metric. And so war changed at BRF because they had to rerun it with a more precise metric. That's good. Like we won. It's by design. War is always evolving. I mean, it would be great if we knew everything and had perfect information and then it wouldn't have to change. But as we get better information and uncover errors sometimes or things change, and it's like it's built into the system.

I mean, like park factors, for instance, are calculated retroactively at times. You use multiple seasons worth of data to calculate park factors. And so sometimes you get an additional year of data. It gives you a better picture of how that park actually played in a previous year in theory. And so you adjust the values retroactively. And that's just wars having framing and other wars not having framing or just the differences in pitcher war across sites and metrics. And, you know, occasionally data errors or oversights will come into play.

It's just, you know, to put that responsibility on fan graphs or baseball reference or baseball prospectus. responsibility on fan graphs or baseball reference or baseball prospectus. It's just not what this was designed for, not what anyone envisions, not really what anyone wants seemingly. And Sean Foreman had a Twitter thread about that that you quote tweeted and kind of co-signed and the folks at Baseball Prospectus seem to endorse as well. Well, and I think that it sort of, it fundamentally misunderstands what war is supposed to be like war is supposed to be an expression of value it's not supposed to determine value right like and i know that it's used that way i don't want to be naive i think that it's not as if my website hasn't like been surplus value curious right like i don't want to suggest that that's not analysis that we have in the past and and at times still do engage in but

it it i think it sort of turns on its head what what the metric was designed for and i think more fundamentally as i was thinking about this today i just think that the the fixation on on how we make these kinds of compensation structures more precise sort of fundamentally misunderstands and misexpresses what the problem is in baseball's economic system. Like the issue is not that we are not precisely measuring the value of players because we're, you know, we are skeptical of war, we are using RBI and saves like that is not the the project that we're engaged in. And it's not what's holding the project back, right? The problem is that there's just a fundamental disagreement between the players and ownership about what percentage and what share of revenue players should be

entitled to within the broader ecosystem. And that is not a measurement problem, right? That is a philosophical difference. And I think that that difference is the gap that sort of needs to be bridged. And that's where we need to sort of think about solutions. And then once you've done that, I think trying to, you know, as precisely as you are able, say what someone has done so that they can be compensated for the value that they have brought either when they were, you know, arbitration eligible or in their early years of free agency, like that, that's fine. But that project is sort of skip, it's jumping the line in terms of what we need to resolve. It's not a measurement question. Like,

I think that's the, that's one of the big problems here. That's part of what is making me bristle. And it's not just the stress of like my or one of, you know, sort of our other colleagues in the baseball research space's metrics determining someone's compensation in the early part of their career. This is why I think I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with MVP clauses, incentive clauses, and contracts. That's not what the writer's job is supposed to be. Our votes shouldn't determine what someone makes. I get why it's used as a proxy, and I understand why it can really resonate with some players, and it can serve players well if they are doing well.

But I'm just, on a fundamental level, uncomfortable with that being a responsibility that sits with the writers in much the same way that I'd be uncomfortable with war being the determining factor for pre-arbitration salaries or bonuses. It's just like, I don't know. Thank you. So what's the solution to this? If there is something that is based on performance, I mean, this idea of the bonus pool, it has to be based on performance in some way. You have to decide

who gets what bonus, right? And it's weird to use some third-party system that was designed by a sabermetric site not for this purpose. On the other hand, it would be weird to use a non-third-party independent metric. I mean, I know that there's a StatCast war in progress, right? And presumably sometime within the next year or two, there'll be some sort of stat cast war at Baseball Savant, but stat cast war, you know, that'll be based on a system that is operated by MLB. The framework for the stat itself will have been designed by people employed by MLB. So that's kind of weird. I mean, do you have some sort of joint MLB, MLBPA war metric that is designed by both or is, you know, not a black box and its guts are provided to both parties so that, you know, Fangraph's alum, Craig Edwards, who works for the MLBPA now, he can have a hand in

designing it or at least investigating it i mean how do you do that i mean i'm gonna end up defending the arbitration system and i don't feel great about it i want to make that clear up front but i think that i don't have a problem with players or teams relying on third-party metrics to make a case to a third-party arbitrator about what a player's salary should be. If we're going to have a system by which players are not able to choose their employers for six years, then I think having some sort of well-informed, baseball-informed third party sort of look at a case and assess a case for a particular salary is maybe the best option that we have available to us. wants to design their own version of war and present that in an arbitration hearing and the player wants to bring fangraphs war or baseball prospectuses warp or b refs war like into the mix and and make an argument based on those metrics as to what they should be paid i think that's fine

i think that the consolidation of the metric generation into the body that is then determining salaries where things get kind of funky and i wonder if the solution to this bonus pool question is decide what you want the bonus pool to be you know it's probably gonna fall somewhere between 10 and 100 million dollars because somewhere in there those are our ends right so like let's say you have a bonus pool we'll say 50 million million to pick a number. If you're the team, if you're the league, once you've decided what the number is, and once teams know what they have to pay into that, why do you care how the money is allocated after that? Right? Like, it seems to me that one of the ways to help to resolve some of these issues

and neutralize the appearance of potential conflicts is to say, okay, we've agreed on the number. You're the MLBPA. You get to decide how you want to allocate this bonus pool. And if you are comfortable with a hard ranking of players by war, fine. If you want it to be some sort of sliding scale, if you want it to be based on awards voting, you should lay out what the criteria are so that your membership understands the methodology, but you get to decide and you can allocate it how you want. I don't think teams really need to care. Once everyone is on the hook for the money. It doesn't matter if it's going to your guy or not. So why not let the union decide how it's going to allocate it?

That isn't going to be a perfect system necessarily. I think there are always going to be these tensions when we're trying to say this less than precise stat is being used with great precision in mind, but it at least allows them some control over what matters. And, you know, if the team has a say in who's getting what and what the criteria are, like, I don't know, maybe they want to juice that bonus pool for their guy. Maybe they want to deflate those numbers. You're fundamentally using fundamentally using accounting stat so how much you play is going to determine you know how much war you can accrue so i i just think like let the union sort it out let them let that be their problem and i think that the players will

be probably much more likely to accept the answers to those questions if they're coming from the organization that is charged with advocating for them rather than one that is in an inherently adversarial relationship with them. Eh? Yeah. Eh? Yeah. And then if you guys want to use our version of war, you know what?

You go nuts. You just have a great time. I don't want to take any phone calls, but you enjoy after that. All right. Well, more to come on that specific issue. Yeah, we pulled out all my hair. Yeah, I mean,

hey, at least they're talking, which is not a guarantee of progress, but it is a prerequisite for progress. So that's something. And I always enjoy the adjective bingo that is used to describe the tone, the tenor of the talks when the leaks start coming out. I often see contentious. I see heated. I see spirited. I see tense. I don't see chummy, jovial, nor would what expected to be. But you see those same adjectives and descriptors applied.

But hey, it can be heated and tense and spirited. Sometimes that's how you get a deal done. All the adjectives that my family uses to describe playing wingspan. So one other little bit of news I wanted to mention that has to do with paying players so kevin gossman came out this week and tweeted that he was never offered a contract by the san francisco giants he tweeted i want to set the record straight for y'all because there has been a lot of bs out there about this sf never made me an offer. Simple as that. Anyone or anything that says otherwise is hashtag fake news. Kevin Gosselin, of course, ended up signing with the

Blue Jays and, you know, Robbie Ray ended up going to the Mariners. And there were some big pitcher contracts handed out, but not by the Giants. And so I was reading the coverage of this at NBCSports.com by Alex Pavlovich, and he sort of said, well, I'll quote exactly what he said. The news here shouldn't really come as a surprise. The biggest deal the Giants have given out since Farhan Zaidi took over is the three-year, $36 million contract Anthony DiScofani signed around the time Gossman was finishing up his own foray into free agency. This is not a front office that likes long-term deals for pitchers. Anxiety shied away from them even while in Los Angeles. And it goes on to say that Gossman wanted to stay. He was

interested in staying. They had talked about an extension previously, but he took the qualifying offer. And then he pitched very well in 2021 and set himself up as one of the most appealing pitchers on the free agent market. And then Pavlovich writes, Giants officials knew Gossman's market would get away from them, although the right-hander talked during the season about wanting to stay if a match could be found. if a match could be found. Now, this is interesting because why should this have gotten away from the Giants if they wanted to keep Gossman? And look, a specific player,

maybe they didn't evaluate Gossman the way that the Bouges did. Maybe they would have been willing to make some other commitment to someone else, but they weren't as big believers in Gossman long-term. Who knows?

But the way that Pavlovich presents this, he's basically saying, yeah, the Giants aren't going to sign anyone to this kind of contract. And that is curious, right? I mean, we're talking about the Giants here. This is a team that ranked fifth on the most recent round of Forbes franchise value ratings. I mean, they weren't way up there in attendance in 2021, I think, but this is a pretty big market, high revenue club with, I guess they had a top 10 payroll last year, but not one of the tippy top ones. And look,

they just won 107 games, right? can't question their methods and if they want to go raise style on this well maybe they can do it as successfully as the rays did like clearly they have had success finding undervalued pitchers as gossman was when he came to the giants or discofani or alex wood or or Logan Webb, whom they drafted. I mean, almost their entire rotation last year was guys that were either homegrown or that they signed or traded for or whatever, who reached new heights with the Giants, other than, I guess, Johnny Cueto, who actually was on a big long-term deal and is probably not the best argument in favor of them. So even though Cueto recovered and pitched pretty well last year when he was pitching,

his contract as a whole is not the most ringing endorsement of the strategy of signing Johnny Cueto-esque contracts. But I'm just saying it puts a lot of pressure on a front office to take yourself out of the top of the free agent market or even the top of the free agent pitching market. And so maybe Zaydi and the rest of his crew there and Brian Bannister and co. can keep finding hidden gems and getting more out of players. a tough thing to ask them to do year in and year out, especially when you're in a division with the Dodgers, who also have that ability, but will occasionally at least break the bank and sign a player for a larger amount. So I'm just saying it doesn't seem like there's any reason why the Giants should necessarily be out of play for a contract of Gossman's length and size. Yeah, I wonder how right this ends up being.

Because I agree with you, it would seem very strange, given the resources that are available to them, that there would never be a circumstance under which they would entertain a large free agent deal. And, you know, pitchers break a lot. And so I can completely understand a greater reticence to expend those resources over a long time and commit them over a long time to a pitcher. But it isn't as if there aren't guys who have been free agents who have been pitchers and have been worth their contracts many times over. And so I hope that this is just sort of a potential, mostly an expression of potential squirminess with Gaussman. And maybe they looked at his second half and they were just like, eh, not for us. And that would be

understandable, right? They could have made the determination that while he is still a very good pitcher, perhaps not one that they wanted to have to rely on long term. Maybe they have other free agent targets that they are more excited about and that they are keen to commit resources to. You know, it's hard. I don't want to give anyone a pass, but I also don't want to be overly critical because we haven't concluded this free agency period. And so, you know, we have a whole other half of free agency to write about, edit, same time as positional power rankings. Anyway, so I'm looking to acquire more hours in the day in my second half of free agency, if anyone has some to spare. So there's that. But I don't't know it does strike me as very strange that a team who

arguably is positioned to really challenge the dodgers not only for acumen but for resources would elect to kind of take themselves out of that so i hope that proves to not be true or maybe they're like getting ready to sign carlosrea. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Chris Bryant or someone. But yeah. And sometimes there can be a bit of a game of telephone when it comes to contracts and offers. And, you know, teams are talking to agents and agents are talking to players. And maybe there isn't an official offer on paper, but there's kind of a loose proposal or a framework. And so I don't know the exact circumstances here about what was and wasn't said or exchanged, but if we take the tweet at face

value. So I think that, yeah, they're going to make a go of it with Webb and they bring back Tisco Fani and Wood and they signed Alex Cobb, right? And they're just, hey, they had one of the best pitching staffs in baseball last year. So maybe they can make that work, but you lose some name brand players. You lose maybe your best or your second best starter last year and Buster Posey retires and there's less margin for error. And it's just, it's hard to strike gold year after year after year with players that 29 other teams have missed on, right? So if they can keep doing it, well, they've done it for the past couple of years, so more power to them. But I'm just saying, you know, if you're the Giants, you don't necessarily need to take that option off the

table. Right. As I have said many times when we have discussed the raise, I think that if you as a team have the ability to utilize to its fullest extent, as many resources as you can during roster construction, it's only ever going to accrue to your benefit, right? And if you are a team that can be great at scouting and player development and then can use your financial might to sign free agents who are going to improve your organization, you should do that because it reduces the risk attendant with any one of those, right? You lower your risk and you broaden your margins, right? Lower, broader doing stuff.

So I think that for a team like the giants you know maybe they think that the time we want to spend big big money is on a pitcher is later maybe all of the guys we were the most interested in in this class have been taken off the market they've already signed their deals and so like our free agent resources this year are going to be devoted to position players we don't know the answer to that because we haven't seen that half a free agency yet. But I think that, you know, if that is what they're thinking, it's very different than saying we're not going to commit long term dollars to pitchers like ever. And I would be surprised if that's what they mean. And if it is, they should think about it differently, I think. Yeah, there have been some teams that have that maybe as a general philosophy. And then there are some teams that really do just draw a line and say, we will not hand out deals above X number of years for pitchers or whatever. Which was, I think, part of the story of why John Lester ended up signing with the Cubs and leaving the Red Sox because the Red Sox at that time kind of had a hard and fast policy on that. And, you know,

John Lester went on to have, well, identical numbers with the Cubs and Red Sox, right? That's kind of a meme. I mean, not adjusted for Park, et cetera. If we just use the surface stats, what was it? Identical E eras and winning percentages or something with the cops and red socks that stat was bandied about after he retired anyway you can make exceptions for some guys is what i'm saying especially if you're a team like the giants and on the topic of gossman just a quick plug for justin choi's excellent article at fangraphs this week which was titled just throw it Down the Middle. Just throw it down the middle man. Yeah Justin

determined that pitches right down the middle or fastballs right down the middle were more advantageous for pitchers than usual this past season and they are always semi advantageous which is kind of counterintuitive right you wouldn't

think that, but it's a combination of factors. It's that if you take pitches down the middle, they are almost always strikes. It's that not everyone throws a lot of fastballs down the middle. You tend not to do that unless you have a pretty good fastball, et cetera. There are various reasons for that kind of counterintuitive finding. But this past year, more than ever, at least in the sample he looked at, pitches down the middle really worked out for pitchers, and especially pitchers like Gossman and Robbie Ray, whom he found were the two biggest increasers in terms of the percentage of their pitches, or I guess just their fastballs maybe, that were right over the heart of the plate.

And I would say it worked out quite well for those two guys. And Justin points out that maybe one of the inefficiencies these days is just the idea of laying it in there because pitcher stuff is so good now. And that certainly applies to Gossman and Ray. And whether you have a really great fastball or you have really good complimentary stuff that helps your fastball play up often it can really be beneficial to you not to nibble just pour it in there yep because pitchers yeah pitchers are so good now they throw so hard and fastball speed on average did tick up again this year and there's so much movement even post sticky stuff that often even if you do here it is hit it they won't they can't so in a way this post was a good illustration of

the fact that the pitcher batter balance is a little bit broken in some ways and he suggested that maybe it also has to do with the fact that pitchers are throwing high in the zone more and maybe batters have tailored their swings to that and so maybe if you're not throwing high in the zone they're less prepared for that etc but this is a pretty good endorsement of the idea and he notes that the rays and some other teams have more often it seems at least with some pitchers just instructed them hey throw strikes just put it over the plate and it will work out fine for you. So that's just sort of a sign of the times. But interesting article I'll link to on the show page. we have this it is so ingrained in us the idea that that just like throwing one down the middle is a bad idea that it is often the way that we express ourselves when a pitcher like gives up a home run right that he hung one in there and he laid it right down the middle i was right down

main street but stuff is so good now it's like trust your trust your stuff Have self-confidence. Yep. And last thing here, just two related topics about sudden death. So the first, that sounds very morbid. But enough about the CBA negotiations. Good on them. Sudden death in the sense of ending sports contests, not the slog to rigor mortis here. So I'm talking about the Frontier League, one of the independent leagues that in the past, last year, had adopted a home run derby format

in order to end games. And everyone hated that, seemingly. The teams hated it. It was just a very very abbreviated like you have eight pitches or something and it was all very dependent on the quality of the pitcher who was throwing it right over the middle for you as we were just saying and you know also like home run derby is kind of a weird way to end a baseball game it's like like a shootout, I suppose, but maybe even more divorced from just the normal course of play. Anyway, no one liked that. It was a weird, wacky experiment. And so they're moving away from that to a new extra innings format for 2022, which is that the 10th inning, the first extra inning, whether it's the 10th or the 8th if it's a doubleheader, will be played with the zombie runner, the good old zombie runner that we know and love,

the runner starting on second. But after that, if the game does not end in that inning, then there will be a new sudden death format in which a team elects, the home team gets to choose whether they want to hit or they want to take the field. And then a runner will be placed on first with no outs. And if that runner scores, the batting team wins.

If the runner does not score, the pitching team wins. And that's it. Game over. So games will not be able to go beyond 10 and a half innings or eight and a half innings if it's a doubleheader. So they are guaranteeing that it will end, but they have a new wrinkle on the zombie runner that at least strategically is a little more interesting, I suppose. But what's your take on this particular proposal? But what's your take on this particular proposal? I guess that I enjoy the strategy of it more than any of the non just let them play extras until they're done options.

Yes. Because you would need to determine, you know, where do you think you have the greatest advantage? Wouldn't you almost always take the field well yeah so it is kind of an interesting question i think which is why i don't hate this i mean to be clear i would hate this for mlb right but oh yeah our position remains that they should just play extras yes at least at the major league level. And I would suggest I would implore people to just become more comfortable with ties. You know, maybe maybe it's OK to just not have someone win every contest. But also at this level, you know, you don't have huge attendance. You have smaller rosters. You have a lot of uncertainty with, you you know sometimes players will get signed by a higher indie league or affiliated ball and so you can't even count on your players from today being there tomorrow right and you don't want to stress your staffs and you know generally like i'm much more forgiving even as an anti-zombie zealot when it comes to the major league level i'm okay with

these measures for even minor league games and certainly for indie ball games. The only reason I don't like them is that it does become a slippery slope and you see them introduced these measures at the minor league level and then that normalizes them and makes them more palatable and suddenly you have a zombie runner in the big league. So I don't like that. But if it could just stay and the slope could not be slippery, then I'd be fine with ending games quicker and having some certainty at these levels where players are not paid a huge amount and their health risks and roster restrictions and so forth. So much more willing to entertain this in the Frontier League. And I think analytically,

it's interesting. J.J. Cooper wrote about this at Baseball America and looked at that a little bit. Tom Tango was tweeting about it too in response to J.J. And we don't have Frontier League specific run expectancy tables. But Tango tweeted at 5.33 runs per nine innings pitched on average, which I think he was taken from the 2021 Frontier League, I estimate that the chances of scoring will get pretty close to 50%. So he's saying that this is kind of properly calibrated based on the offensive environment last year. Now, I don't know whether in this situation you can extrapolate from the regular run expectancy tables because in a lot of situations you're not playing for one run only, whereas in this case you are. That could change some strategies. But, you know, he's saying that based on what we can tell, this is pretty well balanced where it is kind of a

coin flip and it could vary very much depending on the teams and depending on where you are in the batting order, which is a pretty big deal too. So that makes this more interesting to me. There would be a lot to analyze, at least if you had data for that level because depending on which hitters are coming up and who's pitching and you know your defense and who's due up next and and all of those things like it might actually affect your decision and swing things one way or another so it's it's finally enough balanced that it's like set right around the the right place seemingly but it could vary for individual games how many fewer position players pitching do you think that we would see if this were the rule yeah a lot fewer a lot fewer i mean not not zero because sometimes you just like

really don't have a guy to throw and you gotta you just gotta eat it i guess but just a lot fewer i would think i mean if you're in a tie game you're gonna see fewer of them anyway because you only use position players pitching in blowouts if you can help it you know you can never help it but even fewer still i would think right yeah so yeah points for creativity at least. There's a little nuance to it that I kind of enjoy. Yeah. So, you know, if you have to do something, I still kind of like the idea that we've talked about in the past of just like removing one fielder each inning, which would be kind of interesting. But this gives you the certainty of knowing that, OK, games cannot go beyond this point, which would be useful at that level. So, you know, I like it better than a home run derby.

I don't want to see it metastasize beyond the Frontier League, but as long as it stays there. You want dry slopes. You want drought-ridden slopes. I guess that on the one hand, part of why we bristle at these rules and proposals for extra innings is that it feels fundamentally strange to us that the the moments that will prove to be theoretically decisive in a game are ones where the rules deviate so dramatically from what they are just

in the normal course of play i think that that's part of what bugs us about this right it's like that's not baseball right that's not the same brand of baseball that you were playing for the nine innings before and so why would you play something different now and i guess on that score this is still a deviation because famously we do not let teams decide whether they will pitch or hit they have to do things in sequence but it's more like real baseball than say a home run derby so there too you might just be looking at kind of a 50 50 situation yeah and it would be exciting i mean yeah i'm imagining watching this and you know some people find the zombie runner exciting because it it does raise the stakes i find the sideshow aspects of it

to take away from that but in this, when it really is sudden death, and you know that's going to be the last half inning one way or another, and it's like, hey, we've got to hold them here or we got to push this run across. I mean, that would be pretty compelling entertainment, I think. Yeah, I think that that part is right. I mean, we would be moved, but we might also be annoyed that we are being moved differently than we had been previously. Yes. And so that brings me to the last thing, which is also about sudden death. And this is a proposal that Joshian made in his newsletter, although this one is also opened up to the public at joshian.com. And this is for single elimination playoffs.

And I know a lot of you are bristling at this already, but let me walk you through it here. So this was inspired by the all-time great NFL weekend that just transpired, I am given to understand. You've probably experienced more of this weekend than I did. There were four playoff games, right? And they all ended in, what, the last play or something? Yeah.

Oh, Ben, you wouldn't have... Here's the thing, though. If you had watched them, I think you probably would have said to yourself, that seems exciting, but you wouldn't have felt it in quite the same way because you're not a football fan but i wish you could uh i wish you could uh because yeah it was a great weekend of

football it was yeah i felt some some fomo on my twitter feed because it was quite strong so much fun yeah but speaking of bad overtime rolls you can just take my word for it that i'm right yes no i i didn't see a whole lot of disagreement on that score, so to speak. But yes, there was the classic game with the Bills and the Chiefs, right? And just two great quarterbacks going at it and driving down the field over and over and everything coming down to the last second and over time and so on and so forth. It's easily one of the top five best games i've ever watched that didn't involve my team you know because you have a couple of of games that are just like all timers for you but you recognize that they're not necessarily all timers for other people because

like they don't care about the dumb old seahawks as much as you do although the seahawks have had some at least weird games that are are wild and compelling in that respect. But yeah, it was an all-timer great game. So fun. Right. And so as often happens when something in another sport generalates a lot of excitement. We wonder why we can't do that. Right.

Which always happens. And I think it's sort of a silly impulse because sports are structurally different and they have their strengths and they have their weaknesses and there's some huge problems with football that baseball is immune to or more resistant to. Right. That sport, you can say, you know, GM, I'm glad that the sport I care about does not have that particular problem. Right. But then there are also times when other sports are exciting in ways that maybe baseball isn't. And, you know, vice versa, I guess. But that leads to this whole, well, how do we replicate this? Can we have this in baseball? Like often it'll be free agency, right? Like often it'll be free agency, right, which plays out in this frenzy, in this flurry of signings in the NBA and the NFL and say we'll say, oh, wouldn't it be fun if ML taste of that. And so that's something I think we talked about at the time.

Like, would this just be good if it were a permanent feature of baseball? And there are upsides to that and there are also downsides to that. But there's this impulse of, gee, well, they're having fun over there. I wish we could have that same sort of fun. And so there was kind of a conversation about MLB and the fact that MLB doesn't often generate the same excitement that the NFL did on that weekend because MLB doesn't have as many sudden death playoff games. And there are so many more MLB games, both in the regular season and in the postseason. And for baseball fans, that is a feature in itself. postseason and for baseball fans that is a feature in itself and that's why i'm saying sometimes it's sort of a silly impulse to try to graft one sports framework onto another because yeah well you could have you know 18 games or 17 games in the mlb regular season too if you wanted to and they would all mean a lot right the stakes would be sky high but then we wouldn't have all the baseball that we have.

And it's kind of nice that we have just a huge supply, a glut, some might say, of baseball games because it's the sport that's just kind of constantly on in the background. And it's the soundtrack to your summer. And yeah, maybe that means you can fall asleep during a game now and then, or you can miss one here and there and it's okay and it is maybe more onerous to have 162 three-hour games than 17 three-hour games and that's why people understandably make a bigger deal of the pace of play and the length of games in mlb than they do in other sports because you are subjected to those games so many more times in a given season and the stakes are so much lower, and they will be even lower if we expand the playoffs in this upcoming CBA. But Joshian said, well, why don't we lean into this? Why don't we embrace this and have a baseball version,

not of the NFL regular season, where you were constrained in how many games you played just because physically the players need time to recover, in the postseason why don't we just go full sudden death because of course we have that in the wild card round right and it's a lot of fun right and so if we are going to let more teams into the playoffs and it's going to take even longer and there have been conversations about well maybe you should expand the wildcard round to best of three. And maybe you should expand the division series round to best of seven. Stop. and everything. But Joe's basically just saying, look, it's not much better than a coin flip as it is in MLB playoffs. Best of seven is not all that different from the coin flip 50-50 sudden death game. And that much is true. And he links to some studies that I have referenced on this podcast

many times and linked to in my writing many times, one by Neil Payne at 538, another by Michael Lopez and some colleagues. And they found that to match the NBA's rate of the better team advancing in its playoffs, its best of seven series, which is like 80% of the time the better team advances, MLB would have to play a best of 75 series to get the same certainty about, you know, that team actually won because it was better. And you're not going to play a best of 75 series. So is best of seven really all that better? Because in MLB with best of seven, the better team advances only about 60% of the time. the time. So you're not gaining that much in finding out something about the relative strengths and true talents of those teams by going from one game to best of seven. So if we're going to let

all these teams in, why don't we just go full sudden death and just say, hey, this won't tell us which team is the best, but it'll be extremely exciting. And it'll be the kind of excitement that football fans had this past weekend. So I want to ask you what you think this would do to roster construction. Yeah. Because I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of reimagining the playoff format. to the idea of reimagining the playoff format, I find Joe's argument that the playoffs are, whether we are used to thinking of them in these terms or not fundamentally different from the regular season,

I find that compelling. And I think embracing that difference is fine. We can just say this is goofy playoff ball and it's just going to be different than what the regular season looks like. That's where you get a sense of real team quality, and this is where we decide who is the World Series champion, and those are not necessarily related projects, right?

So I find that okay. I'm into that. I do wonder how teams would think about constructing their teams for the postseason and what that might do to their willingness to be aggressive at the trade deadline and spirited. Because right now, you obviously use your rotation and your bullpen very differently in the postseason than you do in the regular season. And the way that it's constructed allows you flexibility that you don't have. do in the regular season and the way that it's constructed allows you flexibility that you don't have but like we look at teams that have a couple of really good starters at the top of their

rotation like oh we're gonna see those guys you're gonna run through all of them and i wonder what how teams would react to the incentives that this gives them because on the one hand if you advance you still need good starters like you still need guys. But can you cover more innings with like a good starter and a strong bullpen? Does that change the way you think about how you fit the pieces of your staff together? And does that change lead to more or less entertaining baseball? And I don't know the answer to that. I'm open to the idea that it actually maybe just doesn't change very much at all because you still have to go through a 16-game stretch, right? That's what he's envisioning. So I guess it would be eight games because you only have to play on one side of the bracket. games and so you still want to have good pitching at the top of your rotation and you'd still benefit from a dominant bullpen but i do think that it might allow some teams to pull their foot

off the gas a little bit depending on how they're able to cover innings out of the bullpen for less dominant starters but you know they kind of have to do that anyway now so yeah maybe it doesn't change anything yeah he points out that a we would mind the length of the games less as it is. October baseball is extremely slow, painfully slow. Oh, it's so long. But if it was sudden death, you wouldn't mind as much because the stakes would just be ratcheted up so high. And also. Wait, sorry. Joe has so much more faith in other people than I do. Well, that's true because I don't want to contemplate how many ads you would have. He points out that you might have fewer pitching changes because it might be a more starter-centric model. If you have an ace, maybe they go deeper into games. I guess it depends on how much time you have between games. There would still be a temptation to just go full bullpen, right? And just throw out, you know, seven dominant one inning guys at times too, potentially. But he points out that one of the hurdles here, just from a practical perspective,

is that you're losing a lot of inventory. These are games that people get paid for. The players in particular are paid for the playoffs based on gate revenue. So you would have to find some way to reimburse them for the lost attendance and lost concessions and all of that. I mean, there would be like 15 games in this format as opposed to close to 40 as it is and maybe more if we expand the playoffs. So there's that. And then there's also the matter of tv deals and you know joe makes the argument that what you lose in bulk maybe you gain

in ratings just because you're going to have a lot more eyeballs on these sudden deaths games than you do on the playoff games that are on some network that you can't even find and doesn't have high stakes. So he suggests that maybe that would kind of end up in a wash. I don't know. But beyond that, I think, you know, if you've read Joe Sheehan before, you will know that he is a strong advocate for the value of the regular season. for the value of the regular season. And he has lamented the prioritization of the playoffs when it comes to celebrating certain seasons or determining which teams had successful seasons. And so one of the reasons why he is in favor of this idea

or at least proposing this idea is that he thinks it would make the difference between the playoffs and the regular season more stark, more apparent, undeniable to everyone, that it would be perfectly clear that the regular season is one animal and the playoffs are an entirely different beast. And they're more like March Madness and it's random and it's fluky and it's fun, but no one thinks that it actually determines the best baseball team. Now, he is putting a lot of faith in people to draw that distinction,

I think. And we'd still make fun of the Mariners, like, just to be clear. Yeah, I mean, I like the idea that, you know, and we can all prize and celebrate whatever we want, as it is in our hearts and minds. But I like the idea that it would just be impossible to ignore that, okay, you're playing 162 games or whatever you're playing, and that determines with some certainty which were the superior teams in the regular season. And then you just kind of wipe the slate clean. Whoever qualifies starts anew, and it's just about who has the best few weeks or whatever. And, you know, it's fun, and yeah, you crown a champion or maybe you crown

two different champions. I don't know. But he is suggesting that people would understand that this is different. This is not telling in the way that the regular season is. Is that true? I don't know. Would people actually content themselves with their team having a great regular season if they went one and done in the playoffs would they be able to make that mental adjustment and say what you know what we had a great year and uh this was meaningful and things didn't work out in this playoff tournament but that's okay it's a separate entity or would people just double down on the idea that all that matters is the rings and now there's even less way to increase your odds of getting a ring because it's all just going to be fluky and random and that leads to even more frustration and then as

you said what does that do for trade deadline dynamics and construction and investing in your roster down the stretch if you don't have to rearm and get good for the playoffs because you're going to win the regular season and then it's all just a fluke anyway. And it comes down to, you know, do you have a great number one starter or whatever? Right. So that's a complication too. But I don't know. I don't know whether people would draw that distinction, but I like that idea that we would do away with some of the confusion, the misapprehension that people can have about the playoffs being

meaningful in terms of, you know, true talent. Yeah, I think that, you know, it would be interesting to see kind of how long that adjustment took, because I think that people would eventually come around to that idea. Not everyone. I think that people really enjoy having their team be part of the narrative of baseball, like capital B baseball. And I think that those narrative moments are often most obvious in the postseason, right? Like there's a reason that we want to see what guys do come October.

We prioritize that baseball and think that it is something special. And I think that there would be a lot of people who are kind of reticent to let go of that so it might take a while for us to settle into something fun and new i do think that in a sport that prioritizes tradition it would be interesting to see how we grapple with the question of the postseason and tradition because we have this notion of oct October being a static kind of gauntlet. But of course, it isn't, right? It wasn't even static in our lifetime.

It has changed forms in our lifetime. And so seeing people kind of deal with that might be interesting. I think that the idea of there being less baseball at like two o'clock on a Wednesday probably would be fine with a lot of people who aren't us, right? Because most people aren't watching those games and they have to get new cable packages to watch them potentially. Because I still don't know. I don't know what channels those are. It's challenging. So I think that there would be people who are really excited about it. But I do think that even if it isn't truly an indication of the best team, it's a long enough slog that you can believe it's a real indication of that.

And so I think that there would be a lot of people who were sort of reticent to let go of that because they're like, well, you play all these games. You play an extra month of baseball. What do you mean it doesn't tell me something about the value of that team and the caliber of that team? Of course it does. They just played a whole other month.

They had to go through that and all the travel and stress. So I think that would be hard. It would make tickets so expensive. Yeah, there's that too. If it were only 15 games, teams would jack up the price of those tickets through the sky. They're already expensive, but gosh, it would make it hard to go to one of those games in person yeah i do kind of like the idea that you have to have the playoffs in the back of your mind when you build your roster and that you know like in the the shortened postseason where there were fewer off days right and it

really it changed it changes everything about how you use players, depending on how many off days there are or aren't in the playoffs. And I think if you have a ton of off days to the point that you can deploy your roster in a completely different way from the way that you do during the regular season, you know, during that shortened postseason when there were fewer off days, suddenly it was like, oh, well, you have to take into account fatigue and workload and all of that in almost a regular season-esque way. And I kind of like that. I like the idea that you have to be built to win in the postseason in the same way that you're built to win in the regular season. And this would totally blow that up. But it would also be a recognition of the fact that it's just two totally different environments and maybe that would be okay. I would say that if you expand to 14 playoff teams or 16 playoff teams or whatever it ends up being, I'd be even more in favor of this idea just because the idea of having 162 game regular season and then playing a month or more of playoffs in which half the teams or almost half the teams

or more than half the teams get in, that's just too much, you know? And I don't necessarily want there to be less regular season baseball. There are good arguments for it, but I do kind of like the idea that it's just kind of a constant for several months of the season. But you can't just take all the stakes away from the regular season and say, we're going to play 162 games and then pretty

much all the decent teams are going to get into the playoffs anyway. I mean, the regular season is hardly deciding anything at that point. So if you are going to do that, then I think it would be helpful to say, okay, the regular season actually means something separate from the postseason, and you just kind of compress the postseason. The last thing I'll say is that I do think there is some aesthetic and narrative value to the series as a construct.

Sudden death is extremely exciting. Winner take all, one and done. Of course, the stakes are huge, tons of adrenaline and everything, but I think it would lose something in the back and forth of a series and the break that comes between games to discuss and debate things and reflect on what you've seen. And then you play in one city and then you play in another city. So you get the change of scenery and each team's fans get to see their team play. And, you know, you can have comebacks, right?

And you can have teams blow it. And of course, you can have that within a single game as well. But if a series goes seven, it's epic. It's Homeric at times, not to exaggerate too much, but you get really exciting narratives over the course of a series. And you also get teams adjusting to each other and seeing each other multiple times and maybe figuring each other out and coming up with ways to defeat each other and neutralize certain strategies. So there is something to be said for the series.

And I think you would lose a little something if you had exclusively sudden death. I think that that's right. I think that we like the idea of having to, you know, and you'd have to plan for the post season. having to you know and you'd have to plan for the postseason it's not like you wouldn't have future problems you had to grapple with but depending on how the games were spaced like you know who knows what this would do to the dynamic of like who does the manager use how long does he let a guy go like i know that there are future considerations but the the stakes shifted in an important way.

And I don't know. I mostly just don't want expanded playoffs. Just leave them like they are. This feels like a concession to an idea that I don't think that Joe is wrong to assume that it's just going to happen. But I don't like that we're already at the point where we have to make a 16-te feel more like palatable it's like oh

so we did lose the war didn't we oh we lost the war international war we come up with these convoluted solutions to things that are not necessarily always problems i mean right playing extra innings is okay yeah at least at some levels and not having all the teams make the playoffs also okay. So coming up with these ways to make things palatable that already were palatable for plenty of people. Yeah. You don't always have to mess with success. But anyway. All right. By the way, the public-private ballot split for Omar Rizkal, he got support on 10.2% of the public ballots and then 38.6% of the

anonymous undisclosed ballots. Isn't that wild? Yeah. The splits between these two bodies, the people who put their ballots out there and the people who don't, and maybe demographically, they're a little different and you tend to have maybe older and less online voters who are doing things privately but it's so strange the things that one group condemns and the other doesn't it's like yeah the public balloting much more willing to remove viscal because of the non-PED character clause violations. Right.

Whereas the private voters seemingly are much more eager to ding candidates for PED-related character clause violations and ignore the non-PED violations or be more likely to overlook them. It is very strange. It is very, very strange. We should just have all public ballots. Yeah, we probably should. Well, the writers tried to.

We did try. Hall of Fame said no. Yeah. I'm not saying that it's a perfect electorate, but we have had a couple of good ideas. All right. Well, we've had some good ideas on this episode, so we will end here. Okay, that'll do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. And by the way, I actually wrote about baseball. It's been a while, but I took this opportunity of the Hall of Fame voting results announcement to write about Curt Schilling. he's become after his career, but who he was at the beginning of his career. One of the sort of lamentable aspects of the fact that the character clause has come to dominate HAL discussions is

that it takes some time away from appreciating the players themselves for their performance, for what they were on the field. I'm not suggesting that it's necessarily a bad thing, or that we should not give plenty of time to the character clause concerns. I certainly did. Those conversations are valuable and important to have. But even if it's tough to separate performance and character in Hall of Fame voting, or at least I found it tough to do so, it is possible to reflect on athletes' careers and learn lessons from them. And the beginning of Schilling's career fascinates me because he is unique in the way that he was a late bloomer. He really didn't do much, didn't amass much value until he turned 25. And

before his age 25 season started, he was traded three times. And no player who has been traded three or more times prior to the start of their age 25 season has ever gone on to have a career like Curt Schilling's, nowhere near in terms of war or whatever. And because he was traded three times before he accrued almost all of his value, he is also the only player ever to have been involved in more than one of the 15 most lopsided trades ever in the AL or NL as measured by future war produced by the players on both sides. And not only is he the only player to have been involved in more than one of those deals, he was involved in three.

So I find that endlessly fascinating. The Red Sox, the Orioles, and the Astros all made brilliant moves to acquire Curt Schilling, and then they made major blunders in sending him away. So I talked to the architects of those trades and dived deep into the contemporary coverage to try to figure out why it was that Curt Schilling was dealt so many times early in his career and how he ultimately put it together and made his former employers regret losing him. And what, if anything, we can learn from the mistakes that were made there. That piece should be posted not long after this episode is.

So check my author page at The Ringer, and I will add it to the show page when the link is available. And if you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you will support it by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or annual amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks, including an invitation to the Patreon only Effectively Wild Discord group and monthly bonus podcasts, one of which Meg and I will be recording soon. Today's thank yous go to Megan Schink, Michael Sawi, Chong-Ki Bourgeois, go to Megan Schink, Michael Sawi, Chong-Ki Bourgeois, John Gattermeyer,

and Peter Bonney. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system

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