Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1808: The Multisport Player Draft

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up on or banter about minor league free agent draftee reportedly Matt Shoemaker departing for the NPB, raising kids to root for one franchise, precedents for out-of-nowhere sports video game cover models, players nominated by listeners for the nickname “Three-and-Two,” the possible effects of MLB suspending drug testing during […]

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1808 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? So-so. How are you? I guess I'm better than so-so. Why only so-so, Ben? No particular reason. Just, you know, day 60 whatever of the lockout, I guess.

I just wanted to mix things up because if I say I'm good or great or fine every time, then no one will believe me because no one's good all the time, right? So I have to vary my mood a little bit in these intros. I mean, we want to keep it upbeat for the listeners and everything, but we're only human. Yeah, I suppose that's fair. As we are speaking, Rob Manfred and the Deputy Commissioner and the owners are meeting at a hotel in Florida, and Tony Clark and Bruce Meyer are meeting with players in Arizona, and we are meeting here to do a dumb draft. So we may get as much done here as they will in their respective locations.

I expect that we will make some progress in the draft that we are going to do. I do have a few follow-ups and bits of banter, but do you want to lay out the concept for this draft that we're doing, since it was your brilliant idea? Can you say that sincerely? I don't know how brilliant it is, but I have been, after thinking I would not watch any at all, I've been watching some Winter Olympics and also the Super Bowl is this coming Sunday. And the Winter Olympics, I think even more than the summer games, often make me think, how'd you find out you were good at this? Right.

You know, like there are so many sports in the Winter Games. And I don't say that as a knock on the sport. It's mostly just a testament to my own ignorance of how, like, I guess Nordic people recreate more than anything. But, you know, I'll be watching the Olympics and it's like skiing. Okay, like people have a concept of Olympics and it's like skiing. Okay, people have a concept of skiing. I have been skiing before, but at what point in being a young skier does someone say, what if you did it over speed bumps though? I think you'd be really good at that. Also, how attached are you to your knees and them remaining attached to you? So I was thinking about sport and sort of how people discover a proficiency

in particular sports, especially enough proficiency that they can compete at the Olympic level or at a professional level. And as you mentioned, we're deep into the lockout here. So I thought, well, we should do a dumb draft about major leaguers playing other sports. Right. Right. Yeah. This is prompted by the Olympics and the Super Bowl, but let's be honest. It's prompted by the lockout. The extended lockout.

Oh, yeah. And we've talked about baseball players who are very good at other sports before. We've talked about Mookie Betts' bowling prowess, and we've talked about the various good basketball players and football players. This draft isn't going to concern any of those people, right? It's so obvious to say, well, Mookie Betts should bowl. It's like, well, yeah. I mean, he thinks so too.

Clearly, that's why he does it as often as he does. No, no, no. No, no, no, Ben. What we are here to do is to say, that guy over there who's never done that thing, I think for whatever reason he'd be good at it. So let's put that guy in that sport and see what he could do. So that's the purpose of this draft.

Yeah. This is not, we know this guy is good because he played in college and he was scouted or whatever. This is, well, we think he might be good at that based on something that he's good at in baseball, I guess. Or, you know, I'm going to allow, I don't know if this ended up being a motivator for you. I think it's perfectly fine if you say, I just want to see him try it. I think it would be aesthetically pleasing to see

X guy try Y sport. I'm leaving it purposefully vague because we should confess to the listeners, we're very nervous that we're not going to have enough guys here. Yeah, this is difficult. We'll get into why this is kind of tough to do. But, alright, that's the tease. We are drafting

baseball players we want to see play some other sport. Yeah. So just a few follow-ups from previous episodes here. There was some news that is relevant to my minor league free agent team. Upsetting news.

And last I heard, this is not final, but Matt Shoemaker is reportedly nearing a deal with the Yomiuri Giants of the NPP. Don't do it, Matt. Don't do it. Don't sign. I don't think he has yet, or at least I haven't seen it confirmed that this is Official but it was on MLB Trade rumors and everything it sounds like he's Nearing a deal with that team and To be honest if I were giving him Career advice I could not in good conscience

Tell him not to do this I can only tell him not To do it because he was my third round pick In the minor league free agent draft And I don't know whether I needed to Take him in the third round or whether he Would have been sitting there in the last round For agent draft. And I don't know whether I needed to take him in the third round or whether he would have been sitting there in the last round for me. I suspect he would have. But I didn't want to take any chances because I felt so strongly about Matt Shoemaker,

and I made the case for why he might be the new Rich Hill in that he had a late season breakout in AAA. He didn't make it back to the majors. He started in the majors with the Twins and was terrible. Then he went to the Giants system and Brian Bannister, who had rehabilitated Rich Hill and discovered him and used the spin rates and all of that, helped set him right again seemingly. And he had a great few starts at the end of the AAA season. And I thought, okay, the Matt Shoemaker sense is upon us. I'm going to get in on the ground floor on the new Rich Hill. He's the same age as Rich Hill when he broke out with the Red

Sox. I was so excited that I just could not wait. I had to take him in the third round. And this is what happens sometimes. This is one of the pitfalls of the minor league free agent draft is that the players don't always comply. And if they go to NPB or KBO or wherever other than MLB, we don't get credit for their playing time. And so I am concerned that I will be losing Matt Shoemaker here. I wish him well. And for all I know, someone from the Yomiuri Giants was listening to the minor league free agent draft

and decided to snipe me here. Yeah. Heard the case and said, we got to sign this guy up. But can't blame Matt Shoemaker for doing this because I don't know that he would have gotten a major league deal given how he pitched in the majors last season. And of course, you can't sign those anyway right now because of the lockout. So he seems like a prime candidate to go test his skills overseas. So this may be a wise career move and maybe he'll make much more money there than he would have here. And yet I will get nothing. I will get no proceeds from his decision. I mean, I think that if you wanted to, Ben, you could view this as validation of your

scouting acumen, right? Because sure, I think he did seem perhaps in retrospect, even an Sure, I think he did seem perhaps in retrospect even an obvious candidate to go overseas. I didn't think that at the time he drafted him. But now that I think about it, I can see why he appeals. But, you know, that's a professional league. That's a professional league that operates at a high standard. So it is not as if, you know, he's some schmo. He's going to play ball at a high competitive level, a high pro level. And so I think that you had a good eye for talent.

It's just that this is a strange exercise in a normal year and a particularly strange one this year when so few of the guys who we were able to draft were were signed anywhere at all so yep do you feel as if i've been sufficiently gracious so that if i win i can gloat and not feel badly about it yes i think you have okay that's good i'm not saying i'm not saying i will win but you know if like you were really down about it and then i i run away with it i mean the the odds that either of us win with other Ben's first pick seem low. So there's that part of it. But if I do win, I don't want you to look back and be like, I would have done it. I already felt so bad. So you feel okay? You feel like I've been honorable here? Yeah. Although, hey, Ben's first pick, Jose Iglesias, still a free agent, right? For all we

know, he could sign with the Omnijuri Giantsuri giants too right and then it'll be the era of meg yeah well i'm down to nine players now seemingly if this becomes official good for you matt shoemaker bad for me but that probably shouldn't have been a consideration for him or for his agent or his family so i don't understand his decision all right a few follow-ups from last time when we did some emails and one of those emails was about what a player would have to do to kind of come out of nowhere to be a cover model for MLB The Show, to randomly select a name of unremarkable veteran who hasn't accomplished a lot? What would he have to do to get on the cover? And we ran through some possibilities and they seemed somewhat extreme. But I was reminded after we recorded by a couple of people, including my friend and colleague at The Ringer, Zach Cram, that there is kind of a comp for this, not with MLB The Show, but with Madden. So the cover model of Madden NFL 12 was Peyton Hillis.

Not exactly a brand name. Sure. And the way that this happened was there was an internet vote. And whenever there's an internet vote, things can go horribly wrong. And that's how you end up with Boaty McBoatface. And I guess votes can go horribly wrong in other contexts too. But you have to assume that the internet is going to try to stuff the ballot model that year had a 32 person bracket, one player per team and fan votes determined which players would advance and would be the next cover athlete. And Peyton Hillis was a pretty unremarkable NFL running back. He had rushed for 1100 plus yards in 2010, I think, and that more than doubled his next highest total from any season

before then, and as it turned out, any season after then also. And that even wasn't that special. He was like 11th in the league, I think. And somehow everyone got behind the idea of sending Peyton Hillis to the cover. He was the Cleveland Browns representative. And of course, the Cleveland Browns, typically and certainly historically, not great. And I guess he was the best that they had. So along the way, he beat the players seeded first, second, third, sixth, and seventh. Oh, my gosh. The Browns were not good that year, as they usually are not. And Peyton Ellis was hardly a household name, but he ended up on the cover of that game.

So that's a good comp. Obviously, that was not something Electronic Arts intended to do, decided to do, which was kind of the premise of the question. But something along those lines did actually happen in the not-too-distant past. And I guess it's kind of analogous to what happened with Eric Sogard in 2014 when MLB did its face of baseball online fan vote. And somehow Eric Sogard almost won because he became a kind of folk hero. I forget why, because he had glasses and looked

a little nerdy. And Eric Sogard was knocking off actual stars. He defeated Anthony Rizzo, Tulewitzki, Buster Posey, Jose Bautista, and then it came down to a final vote between Sogard and David Wright and Wright barely won. I think a come from behind victory, 51% to 49%. And there was some suspicion that maybe MLB had cooked the book somehow, but same sort of idea. And speaking of Batista, someone else mentioned also that there were Canadian covers of MLB The Show. And in MLB 12 and 13 The Show, there were Canadian covers that Jose Batista was on. And Jose Batista probably is the closest comp to what we were talking about, like just a journeyman veteran who hadn't done anything all that remarkable and then suddenly broke out right he had had two years like that

i think prior to appearing on the cover of mlp 12 the show he had led the majors in home runs in the two previous seasons but before that of course he was just a journeyman guy, you know, utility player. And then he went through the whole swing change and the fly ball revolution and all of that, which was super exciting and kind of confounding at the time. But maybe that's the closest you could come. So it took two years for him, but that was that kind of Kyle Higashioka type transformation. So if Kyle Higashioka leads the majors in home runs the next two seasons, then he too could be at least a regional cover model for MLB The Show potentially. I'm kind of surprised that there isn't more regional variation. I mean, I know there are some international covers, right? So you just mentioned Canada. And then when we talked about this last time, there was one for Korea and one for Taiwan. But I'm sort of surprised that they don't print it with every team having a version in addition to the one version. I guess it sort of is more expensive and they can just sell a bunch of copies with Otani on it because he's awesome. So they don't really need to do that.

But in a world of niche merch, that's hard to say. I'm sort of surprised that there isn't, you know, like a foil version, basically. Right. Yeah, I guess there are only so many markets that are super into baseball and super into that video game, maybe. And then you only have so many face of baseball types. But yeah, I'm all for it. I like the special edition covers There's a special edition Otani

Cover this year and Just the regular Otani cover is Special to me so I Am all for it but wanted To pass along those two kind of Close comps to what we were talking about and then We also answered an email From someone who wanted to know

How to inculcate Some affection for a particular team in your kids. Do you try to indoctrinate fandom for a certain team? And someone had emailed us because it was a household of a Yankee fan and Red Sox fan parent. And so there was some question of what do you do? Do you teach the kid to be a Yankees fan or Red Sox fan or. And so there was some question of what do you do? Do you teach the kid to be a Yankees fan or Red Sox fan or just leave things up to chance? And we got a couple responses. One was from Michael, Patreon supporter, who roots for Atlanta. And he certainly hopes, he says, that my nine-month-old daughter grows up to become a Braves fan as well. We bought her a Braves onesie

during the World Series, but my stepson's favorite team is the Angels simply because they were on one day and his favorite color is red. Kids are who they are. So that's sort of what we were saying. You could try, but A, they might not like baseball at all and that particular team might not take and there might be some entirely random uncontrollable reason that they develop an affection for a certain team and that's fine too. So they might like the cover of the uniform that might dictate their entire course of rooting life. life and we also got a response from matt who says i grew up in new york and our immediate family are yankees fans but my sister has now settled in boston where we have many red socks fan cousins she has two kids one of whom is too young to understand what baseball is and one who has a love of the game although already at four years old they complained to me that there aren't enough plays where people slide at the end my mother has tried about as hard as she can to get him to be a Yankees fan, but we have decided

not to talk about the Red Sox rivalry because a lot of the people he knows are Red Sox fans, and we don't want him to dislike anyone because of their fandom. This has led to a situation where his favorite team is the Yankees and his other favorite team is the Red Sox. He has both hats and decides which one he wears depending on who he is seeing that day. I think this is great. I assume that society will not let him get away with this forever, but I think the world needs more hybrid fans, and the Questioner's Kid is a perfect candidate.

So, yeah, you can try. I said on that episode, if it were any other group of mixed fandom, it would be easier. I mean, if you had one AL team and one NL team, fine. But because it's Yankees-Red Sox, because there's this rivalry, it would be tough to maintain some affection for both. So if you're four and you don't know that you're supposed to hate the Red Sox, then you don't see color when you look at other teams, I guess, except the colors that you like. And so you don't have those prejudices. But at some point, I imagine that, yes, that might be tough to maintain and the scales will fall from their eyes and it will not be sustainable. But I hope it is. I hope somehow they defy the pressure to pledge your allegiance to one tribe

and have that automatically mean that you are anti someone else. Wow. Which is harder. Wait, I'm going to. So parents who are listening to this podcast with your children in the vicinity who are young and might believe in some magical stuff. I'm giving you a warning that I'm going to say something about that. This is me giving you a warning, okay?

Okay, so you should skip ahead for like, I don't know, 30, 40 seconds, a minute, whatever, which is harder? Maintaining the illusion that there is not a Yankees-Red Sox rivalry or keeping your kid believing in Santa Claus? Do you think I gave enough of a warning? I hope I didn't shatter any childhoods. That would be terrible. This is why I gave you a warning.

So really, it's warning, warning. Again, after the fact, in case they didn't hear it, we're going to talk about it for a little bit now. So which is harder? Again, after the fact, in case they didn't hear it, we're going to talk about it for a little bit now. So wishes herder. I mean, the thing about Santa is that the other kids, in theory, also are under that mess, delusion, right? For a while. For a while, yeah. And ultimately, you're going to get someone who finds out about it and then probably wants to tell everyone else, right? Because they're super superior and they know something that everyone else doesn't and they want to ruin it

for everyone else. But for a while, initially, I would think it's easier just because probably everyone's on the same page, or at least most people are. Whereas if you're the Yankees fan who also has affection for the Red Sox, I mean, you are the lone voice in the wilderness, right? There's probably not going to be anyone else in your class in your region who feels that way. So I think it might be tougher to maintain because there's not going to be any kind of critical mass of people with the same sentiment for any period of time. Right. And in theory, I think you're right. any period of time right and and in theory i think you're right and i think part of that is also that you know it's not just the the children that are under the sway of a particular belief like their parents are invested for a while at least and in allowing them to believe in this fun thing right

that if you know not all of them like not everybody celebrates christmas not everybody cares about maintaining the illusion of s, even if they do. But, you know, like your parents are also trying to keep things from you. But yeah, you know, you might have fans in one direction or the other that are like, what are you talking about? Like we hate you guys. Right. Yeah. And, you know, maybe who knows, maybe this kid will be the long awaited hero who unites the warring factions and brings the Red Sox and Yankees fan bases together forever. But probably not.

At some point, he'll probably pick a side. But I think that's not necessarily a bad thing because rivalries can be fun, right? I mean, they can be taken too far, obviously. But that's a big part of fandom. Oh, yeah. I think a large part of it should be rooting for your team more so than rooting against another team. But those things do go hand in hand when you're talking about the Yankees and the Red Sox and they're in the same division. So, I mean, they're competing head to head very often and they are trying to win the same division title.

So it would be tough, I think, to maintain the stance that they're both cool yeah you know you don't have to have deep-seated hatred necessarily for red sox fans as people if you are a yankees fan but you do kind of have to root against the red sox i mean there's no way around that so it would not be the worst thing if uh ultimately there's some disillusionment that sets in here or maybe we shouldn't even call it disillusionment. It's just getting wise to the world, but not necessarily a bad thing. I think that games between rivals are among the most fun to watch in a playoff setting. When the Niners and the Rams played one another as divisional foes

to advance to the Super bowl like that was super fun and i think that it you know there is a contempt that comes with that familiarity that can make them very intense and sort of hard-fought contests i think that for for me at least the balance that i try to strike on this is that you never want to get to the point where like a legitimately good player who appears to be a non-jerk isn't someone who you can like feel excited for when something really incredible happens for them i think that's where i hope to set the outer boundary of of any experience of rivalry like i'm a seahawks fan and i don't particularly care for the rams but you know like i can't help but feel happy for aaron

arnold because like he he deserves to have a super So, you know, like I think you want to be able to come up for air from the rival enough to be able to say, well, that guy's really good at this sport and good for him. You know, maybe not when you're playing that team, but after the fact, you should be able to access that part of a broader fandom, too, ideally. All right. One more follow up from that episode. That part of a broader fandom too, ideally. And so he had a higher on base percentage than he did slugging percentage and was basically a league average hitter just solely because he was able to of walks and get to a lot of full counts, but they do everything else well, too. And so I sort of rejected them as solutions. And I'm looking for someone who does that and only that well. And it's tough to find a perfect comp because we're not in the dead ball era anymore he does not have much in the way of an offensive skill set. But what he does have is the ability to get to full counts and work walks. And I put it out there. I asked for other submissions. And we got some suggestions of Yasmany Grandal, probably because of his strange slash line last season and the low batting average And the high OBP but again

He's got power I mean he's like a 25 homer guy comfortably Well above his on base Percentage his slugging percentage so I don't know that he is perfect we got Some other mentions of Tommy Pham Carlos Santana Aaron Hicks but one

Popular name was Matt Carpenter and Matt Carpenter. And Matt Carpenter kind of falls into the Roberto Perez zone of not actually a viable offensive player anymore. But that wasn't always true. No, he was a very good offensive player. But when he was a good offensive player, he also did other things. And so I don't know that he would have quite fit the description either. I mean, I guess he would have fit fairly well. But you know, he hit 36 homers one year. It wasn't even that many years ago. It was 2018. So he had that in his bag of tricks. And now he does not. His bag of tricks now is one trick. And unlike Roberto Perez, he is not an elite defensive catcher. So that doesn't bode well for his future in the majors. But in the past couple seasons, he has posted a 71 OPS plus, which is roughly Roberto Perez-esque, but he's done it with a 176 batting average and a 313 OBP and a 291 slugging percentage. So he has the Jack Graney style OBP that's higher than slug, but he is not nearly a league average hitter.

However, he has walked like 14% of the time. And apparently this was a talking point on Cardinals broadcast, someone tweeted at us to say that Cardinals announcers John Rooney and Ricky Horton had a bit where when Carpenter worked the count full, they would say Matt Carpenter is the count of three and two. And I have not heard that myself, but if that's the case, then that's a pretty good qualification for this. I think we can go with three and two carp at least for now. Yeah, I think that that's that that's reasonable all right and just one little bit of news that i wanted to mention this was not surprising it may have been a surprise to some people it was not something that had not been reported previously

but it really came to the fore this week and that's's that there has been no PD testing happening recently for Major League players, for players who are members of the union because of the lockout. When the CBA expired, the joint drug agreement was set to expire too. And if there had not been a work stoppage, then the provisions of the old CBA could have continued and the JDA could have continued and testing could have continued. But because MLB and the owners implemented a lockout, that made the CBA void and also made it so that MLB could not continue to drug test players who were in the union. And this was something that I think Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick had reported would probably be the case back in November, but it was confirmed this week, and seeminglyEDs, but PEDs more relevant to most fans' interests, probably. And I do kind of wonder whether there will be any effects from that, because if we're talking,

you know, more than two months now that there has been no testing in place, I'm not suggesting that the steroid era is about to be back. And there are people who would welcome the steroid era back. There are people who miss the steroid era, and there were some positives to the steroid era is about to be back and there are people who would welcome the steroid era back there are people who miss the steroid era and there were some positives to the steroid era but what do you think do you think anyone will test this like obviously no one knew how long the lockout would last so you couldn't necessarily count on testing being suspended for this long a period. But if you had known, then there would have been time to take something in theory and get it out of your system. I mean, as I understand it, there are substances you can take that will be out of your system in a matter of weeks or a month. And that could have happened. And as I understand it as well, there are possible

long-term benefits even to doing, say, a single cycle of something because that can have some effects where the drugs, you know, boost the number of nuclei in your muscle fiber cells and enable you to build more muscle later even when you're no longer taking that substance. And so I kind of have to wonder. I mean, not that there was nothing going on and no one taking anything as it was. Surely there were people finding a way around the testing program. But removing the testing program entirely means, in theory, it's open-seas. You can use just the old-school 80s steroids or whatever you want.

Just go to town as long as it's out of your system by the time the lockout ends and testing resumes. So I don't know if anyone would have availed themselves of that possibility, but I would not be shocked if someone did. Yeah, it's a tricky subject because I don't want to speculate recklessly. But since I'm anonymizing my speculation, I guess I can. I mean, like, my instinct is to say, yes, of course, there's someone who's tried to test the testing or the lack thereof. Because as you said, we have guys who get popped for PD use when there is a testing regimen. And so there's clearly enough of an incentive in some players' minds to try to use PEDs and get away with it even when they are in a situation where they may face detection. So it stands to reason that those incentives continue to exist in the absence of a testing

regime, even if you still are incurring some amount of risk because you don't know when the lockout's going to end. And like you said, some stuff lingers, you don't know how long, da, da, da. So it seems likely. I would imagine that PEDs for a lot of players are sort of a firm and binary yes or no decision, and that that decision is probably informed for at least some of them by the possibility of detection, but for some of them is sort of a principled stance about how the game should be conducted. And so I would imagine that if you were already inclined

to maybe try PEDs, that you're like now really inclined to try PEDs. Because like the risk calculus just changed really dramatically for you. And maybe that temptation erodes the moral stand of a couple of guys. But I would think that if you were already in that camp, you're like, let's give this a go and see if we can get away with it meanwhile the poor minor leaguers just a couple of them just got popped yep yeah uh don't use pds but like also you know so we can note the the strangeness of the difference here so yeah i think that what's more likely is that a bunch of people tried

edibles for the first time. Although I guess that the major leaguers don't get tested. Yeah, in MLB you can do that. Yeah, they don't get tested for weed anyway. Yeah, but I'm not suggesting that this was widespread and suddenly everyone did it because they were just waiting for the guard to go down. It didn't sound like you were suggesting that, Ben. Yeah, but someone somewhere would not surprise me. I wonder whether the union had any kind of internal conversations about some sort of self-policing when it comes to that stuff. Because generally in recent years, not so much in the 90s, let's say, but post-congressional hearings, the union, the players have been pretty on board with testing and have wanted

it to be rooted out and a lot of players have been outspoken about wanting to clean up the game in that respect so i wonder obviously they have a lot of other issues on their plate these days so there may just be a bandwidth issue there and obviously the jda and all the drug testing provisions are subject to collective bargaining. So maybe you wouldn't necessarily want to just say, let's implement what we had before while you're still negotiating on all of these other issues. But I wonder whether there was any conversation about some sort of internal, hey, let's just police ourselves somehow here so that we don't have anyone come under suspicion

when the season starts and they show up in the best shape of their life. I would imagine that there was. It wouldn't be a PR win for the deal to finally get done and then to have a bunch of players, particularly high-profile players, get popped for PEDs. So I imagine that they were encouraging guys to make good choices and to continue to act

as if there were testing and a ban still in place. But I would suspect that the players for whom that kind of a plea is persuasive probably didn't need to be told to begin with. But who's to say? All right. didn't need to be told to begin with but who's to say all right so as a way of segueing into our draft here i'll just say i've been enjoying mike trout's social media presence lately which has been a topic of conversation on this podcast in the past mostly because of his punctuation which still remains confusing he is still doing the thing where he has exclamation points

or multiple exclamation points after a space after the word. So it's word space exclamation point. And we speculated on many previous episodes about why that might be, and we assumed it was some kind of autocorrect, autofill option on his phone that is just automatically inserting that space. No matter, he is still doing that. However, I think there was some conversation, I don't know, a few years ago about, oh, Mike Trout is boring and wouldn't it be better if Mike Trout were more entertaining and more quotable

or even more controversial in some way so that he could get more attention and be better known, not just for having a high war, but for being a personality and non-baseball fans would know him. And I feel like in recent years, that has sort of subsided, maybe because so many alternative faces of baseball have emerged, right? One on his own team, and then of course the new generation of tatis and acuna and soda and on and on right so there's no shortage of personality paired with superstars anymore but also i think it's just nice to have a wholesome guy like mike trout at least based on everything we know there is just nothing objectionable about trout nothing that you wouldn't want a kid to emulate or treat as a role model. And you never know with anyone, of course, but we have learned so many things about so many unsavory characters.

And so it's nice to have Mike Trout, who is just the Wheaties box guy, basically, just kind of an old school, you know, role model. And I've also been enjoying that he has been showing a little more personality, I think. I like his personality of just Mr. Wholesome, but also he's getting some good zingers and some good lines in here lately. So he tweeted on January 2nd, just 2022. That's what he tweeted, just observing that it was, in fact, a new year. And someone replied to him to say, I need your thoughts here, Mike, and then had an image of two ways that one could cut a sandwich, either diagonally or vertically, A or B. And Trout replied to this reply and said, not a final decision. You'd be leaving experiences on the table, bro.

More recently, he has tweeted about weather quite a bit and snow. Of course, he was very excited about the recent snowstorms on the East Coast. And he posted a GIF of himself attached via rope to a radar image of the snowstorm trying to pull the clouds west, which he seemingly did successfully because it snowed where he was. And then he tweeted a video of the snow coming down and he said snowing hard under that band in South Jersey. So he was jazzed about the snow. That's standard Mike Trout material, of course. about the snow. That's standard Mike Trout material, of course. But earlier this week, the hitting coach Matt Lyle, formerly of the White Sox, posted a video on Twitter captioned, My friend's son needs help. Any tips or suggestions? And it was a video of Mike Trout taking batting practice in an indoor cage against his dad. And most of the people replying recognized

Trout and left sarcastic replies about, oh, this guy's never going to amount to anything. But one account of the Evansville Devils baseball team, a 17 and under travel team in Indiana, did not know it was Trout and said, pitching machine swing works great when you're eight, not so much against any velocity. Work with him on keeping his hands inside the line and keeping shoulders level. Balance is key. Went on to say that it would be a low batting average swing because it gives you one point of contact through the zone. Then someone says, you realize that's Mike Trout, right? And the account says, did not. And Mike Trout responded to that with three thinking face emojis, which was fun. But then just to show that there were no hard feelings, he tweeted at that Evansville Devil Baseball account, keep loving the game.

Appreciate you caring about kids in the game. DM me an address so I can get you this gear your way and sent a picture of bats and shirts and caps. So again, fun, but no hard feelings. Not taking the opportunity to dunk on this account. on this account. But speaking of dunking, I also saw, and this was posted in our Facebook group, I didn't see the original comment, but he posted a picture of himself on a basketball court sprinting. And that kind of leads into our draft in a second here. But someone said to him, how's it going, Mike? Can you dunk though? And evidently, according to this image he responded on you yeah bro so he's showing a little more edge he's uh showing a little more personality lately his twitter is just you know he'll just

like reply to people who don't have a lot of followers and as far as i know it's not anyone he knows or anything and yeah sometimes he'll just like retweet family photos and he'll just be like have a nice day bud to fans who tweeted him i mean it's just it's nice but yeah he's getting some good lines off and that gave me the opportunity to imagine mike trout dunking which i think is the perfect setup for our draft yes that's very good that's very very good so this is difficult we found um yeah we're gonna draft five players each or at least that was the idea although often i will come to a draft prepared with enough players that even if we had some duplicates i would have enough and this time it's gonna be tight because i had a hard time, as did you, trying to do this.

And I guess that's maybe because baseball skills are not analogous to that many other sports. Is that potentially why? Like, certainly it requires a hand-eye coordination, but there aren't that many sports where there's an equivalent to, well, hitting a round ball with the round bat, right? Or throwing. I mean, obviously, a lot of athletic endeavors involve throwing, but not quite in the way that one throws in baseball. on to that and since we were trying to avoid the obvious you know amir garrett plays basketball or mookie bets bowls not that i don't support those things i'm all for multi-sport players would love to see that but we're trying to get a little more creative here but it was difficult i'm sure that our listeners will have many creative suggestions that did not come to our minds but oh yeah it was it was a struggle yeah and also like um you know we were busy and had to do other stuff that too yeah uh and i think that part of it you know i am willing to admit and this might

become obvious in some of my choices that like i got kind of wound around the axle on some sports that i just don't know very much oh yeah, yeah. I know nothing about anything. In an effort to anticipate potential overlap and try to keep safe my picks here, I have ventured into territory that I feel very inexpert in. And so I think that there are a lot of individual elements of playing baseball in terms of the actions and tools and what have you that are applicable to other sports just maybe not the sports i pay yes so with that in mind i guess we should draft and i gosh you know i guess the thing to keep in mind is that this is silly and if we end up only making like five picks between us it wouldn't be the end of the world although it will make the episode short

so there is a perception I think that baseball players would be better at other sports than players of other sports would be at baseball and I was looking for something to back up my perception that this is a perception and I found a

Tim Kirchhen piece at ESPN where he basically makes that case. And he quotes a lot of baseball players saying so, including Adam Jones, who said, I've told players from other sports, we baseball players could play your sport better than you could play our sport. And Kirchhen was citing some examples of basketball players who have been seen taking batting practice and just looked completely incompetent. I guess that's the thing. I mean, no one questions the athleticism of NBA players or NFL players. I mean, if anything, they're on the whole more athletic in kind of the traditional ways than MLB players. But there is that specialized skill, right, of like hitting a ball, throwing a ball. I mean, if you haven't done that at some point in your past, it's not necessarily something

you can just pick up and do automatically. Whereas, I don't know, I guess you could look bad trying to throw a ball through a hoop or something. Maybe it's just that like almost everyone has played pickup basketball or like played horse at some point in their life right and maybe fewer people have picked up a bat and played baseball so it could just be a lack of experience potentially but i have seen that sometimes you know you'll see like the the superstar athlete who will take bp for fun and will just look way worse than me you know oh yeah it's like they've just never swung a bat before seemingly and doesn't come naturally

maybe yeah i think part of it is that like i imagine you could bring a pro athlete in another sport in and with you know assuming that they had had some experience even at a very young age like they wouldn't be a profession they wouldn't beB level, but you could probably get them up to something that didn't look embarrassing in the field. Like I think that is doable. Maybe not catching. Yeah. Maybe not catching. A big part of other sports is running more so than baseball probably.

And every athlete, you know, in mlb can run right and i mean not well necessarily but they can run and other athletes and other sports can't necessarily hit a batting practice fastball so right it's a slightly more specialized skill perhaps yes yeah i think that that's right i think that hitting is just really really really really hard yeah so yeah all right who's going first i want to go okay it's your idea so you get to go first it's not a nice pick i'm gonna make okay i'm sorry i'm apologizing in advance i'm taking otani of course and i'm i'm saying that shoya otani should play wide receiver uh-huh and i'm Of course. that he's as good a base runner as he is. The speed there is really, really impressive. And for whatever reason, when I think of someone that size, I assume that there will be some amount of lumbering.

Now, someone might say, shouldn't he play tight end? And you know what? I'll take that feedback, but I'm drafting him here as a wide receiver because I think that the speed is impressive. I think that when you see highlights of him playing the outfield, you can get a good sense of what the body control would look like there. I'm just going to make an assumption that his hands are as good as everything else. That's a weird sentence out of context, but it's one I'm putting on the podcast. I think that he would be just a really great big receiving target. I think he's got an impressive wingspan that would be useful.

And so I'm taking Otani to play wide receiver. Sorry. Yep. No, that's okay. And I always wonder how well catching with a mitt maps on to catching with your bare hands. Fair question. I mean, I have no doubt that he could be a good outfielder does that mean he could catch a football i don't know is it safer to pick someone who like makes bare

hand plays at third base or something because you know that they're good at actually having control of the ball without the aid of a glove i don't know but yeah look i think it's probably safe to assume that otani would be pretty good at catching a football. So I think that is fair. And we were talking about this before the draft started, whether we could kind of double up. And I also obviously have an Otani pick, but it is a different sport. So I think that's okay, right? I mean, inevitably, we were going to both have Otani on our board somewhere here. I think it's fine. I think this is... I don't have a wide receiver on my board, but if I did have someone then I could potentially take someone else at wide receiver. Sure.

I will not do that. However, I will with your leave take Otani. Okay. Deal. And I want to take Otani. Since this was inspired by the Olympics, I'm not necessarily going Olympics themed here and this is not Winter Olympics anyway, but I want Otani in this was inspired by the Olympics I'm not necessarily going Olympics themed here and this is not Winter Olympics anyway but I want Otani in the decathlon because Otani's whole thing is that he's good at everything right at least in a baseball context and so there is the

question of well is he really good at everything I mean we know he's good at hitting we know he's good at pitching we've seen him be good at like flipping cups in the dugout sometimes. It seems like he could be good at everything, but I haven't seen it all. And so I want to see him master as many sports as he potentially could. And so the decathlon, you know, you've got your 10 events and some of them I have no doubt that he would be good at. I mean, Otani in the javelin throw. Don't see why he wouldn't be great at that. Right.

I would think that anyone who can throw a baseball as hard as he can and has that sort of arm strength and just overall strength, probably pretty good at javelin throw. You've got various races, 100 meters, 1500,500 meters, 400 meters, hurdles as well. He's fast. You know, is he Olympic quality fast? Probably not. But I could see him holding his own in an event like this where, again, you're going for jack of all trades, more so than best in the world at any one thing. More so than best in the world at any one thing. And, you know, if he could be good at javelin throw, then who's to say he wouldn't be good at the discus or the shot put, right? He's a big, strong guy, and he's got the giant shoulders and obviously has the arm. So I could see him doing those things. Long jump, high jump, I don't know, pole vault. I mean, why not? He seems like a great all-around athlete. So I would like to just test how many things he is good at. And I think historically, the title of world's greatest athlete has often been associated with the winner of the decathlon, I think starting with Jim Thorpe, maybe more than a century ago. And there was some discussion last year of like, is Otani the greatest athlete? Like, is what he is doing the most impressive thing in athletics right now? And I think we even had the conversation maybe of like, if you were picking one athlete from the wide world of sports to test themselves in a contest against the aliens

for the survival of the species or something do you pick otani at this point so i think the decathlon would be revealing it would enable us to gauge his athleticism in a number of arenas where we don't typically see it and we could validate the idea that he is not just an incredible athlete by baseball standards but an all-around great. Yeah, I think that that is a very defensible pick. Okay. And yeah, I love that we're just willing to be like, you'd be good at anything because you're amazing. Yeah, why not?

Okay, now I have to think about whether I think any of the rest of these are going to be overlaps in either direction. I think any of the rest of these are going to be overlaps in either direction. Okay, I'm going to do this one. And I should say, did you ask anyone what they thought about this, Ben? Yes. I asked a little bit too. So I'm going to give credit where I asked if there was a particularly good suggestion that I feel compelled to draft. And this is one of those.

So Jake Mintz made this suggestion to me about Ramon Lariano doing the javelin as an event. And boy, is that a good idea. As I said to Jake, oh, I love that. I really only needed to see like a couple of throws to think that he'd be amazing at this. But like his arm is just, you know, his arm and the precision is incredible with something that,

I don't know, is it harder to throw a baseball or a javelin? I mean, they weigh different things, but in terms of landing it with accuracy, I wonder which is harder. I have never thrown a javelin. I really couldn't tell you. Yeah, I haven't either. How many people do you think have thrown a javelin? This is another good example.

It's like, how did you figure out you were good at this? That's real weird that you know that. That's weird that we know that about enough people to have this be an event where we give people prizes what a cool thing sports are great so i'm taking him in the javelin throw our understanding of sport if people can't have uh figured this out by now is pretty uh forgiving and broad so you know javelin is definitely a sport but like are there professional javelin throwers? Probably not. Not anymore.

There might have been in like a war setting many, many, many moons ago. Yes, certainly. But not in modern times, I would imagine. I don't know what kind of endorsement deals are out there for the javelin pros these days. But I guess I will go with my man Mike Trout since I segued into this by bringing up Mike Trout. And I would take Mike Trout as a linebacker, I guess, just because how many times have you heard Mike Trout is built like a linebacker? I mean, it's a cliche. It's like one of the most common things you've heard about Mike Trout in his career is that he is built like a linebacker.

So let's see him be a linebacker. Let's see how that would go. Would he be a linebacker? Is he a free safety? I don't know enough about football to say what he is best suited to do on a football field, but I do know that his body type is always described as linebacker. I also know that Adam Jones, to quote him again, has called Mike Trout the White Bo Jackson. And he called him the White Bo Jackson since he appeared on the scene because his body looks like a linebacker. That is what Adam Jones said. Interesting. So I think Mike Trout has some scant football experience. We know he's a big football fan,

of course, and we know that he would jump at this opportunity if the Eagles were to offer him a spot. I'm sure he would be there. And he played youth football growing up in New Jersey. I think he played a little football as a freshman at Millville High. He said he was a tight end and safety, and he played a little bit of quarterback. and he hadn't really grown at that point.

He didn't have his growth spurt until later, and then after his freshman year, he was focusing on baseball, and they would have loved to have him play high school football once he was built more like a linebacker. But of course, by that time, he was a prospect. And didn't want to endanger his health. And I shudder to think of what would happen to Mike Trout on a football field these days. Given what has happened to him lately on baseball fields. But let's see. And maybe this might have been more fun when he first came up. And was at his fastest. Although he is still extremely fast and strong.

So he still has the linebacker body. So that's my pick. Okay. I think that's respectable. I feel like you stayed, well, I don't know, you had decathlon, so maybe we're on the same plane here. I've got some weird ones ahead. So this one was the result of a protracted conversation

with our mutual friend, Michael Bauman. One thing I learned in my conversation with Michael about baseball players playing other sports is that I think that all athletes are a lot bigger than they are. I just think that they're all really tall. And some of them are legitimately quite tall, but some sports lend themselves better to people who are less tall. themselves better to people who are less tall and are able to do certain things as a result of their comparatively smaller stature, including Jose Altuve, who I think would be an excellent platform diver. Oh, platform. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I thought you were going to go with jockey or something. No, no. Platform diving because, well, because because well because you know again he is a slider guy and i have learned through googling and finding a site called famewatcher.com that the

average height for individual medalists from the sydney olympics was five foot seven inches the shortest diver to win a gold in an olympic was 5'1", and the tallest was 5'10". And, you know, LTV sits between those. And it's strange for me to say that we've seen him without his shirt on, but we have. It's been the subject of much conversation. And he has sort of the right build for it. You know, he's, like,, but still muscular and the right height.

And so I'd like to see him try flipping around in the air a bunch of times and taking a twirl at platform diving. I do find platform diving to be very anxiety provoking because I'm always worried they're going to smack their heads on the platform when they first exit. But I've never actually seen that happen. So I don't think that that's an anxiety that's rooted in anything apart from my own neuroses. So Jose Altuve, platform diver. Yeah, that's a creative one. I would not have come up with that. If you had asked me what platform diving was, I don't know that I could have given you a good definition. I mean, I know

what diving is and I know what platforms are, so maybe, but- They dive off of one Ben and they want the they want apart from anything else I mean this is the other great thing about the Olympics of course is that we all become experts in sports we've never really seen before but you know they they've grade the dive and I have to think that the size of the splash also matters so there's that part too you know you don't want a belly flop you want it to be clean and then they have a camera under the water. You can see how deep they go.

It's great. Yeah. I thought they were really tall though. I thought they were like big, tall, like, you know, Otani sized folks. And no, they tend to be smaller stature. So I learned something and I hope you guys have too. Yeah. And, you know, Jose Altuve would be tall for a jockey.

So he would not be fit for jockeying, I don't think. And he is too muscular and too thick to be a jockey, I believe, or the optimal size for one. And that's the thing. I mean, you were saying you think all athletes are big. And they are in some sense because baseball players are not the biggest of the athletes necessarily, but they are very large. And it's not just that they're tall, but they are heavy set compared to your typical person. I mean, they are beefy in a muscular way often and not always in solely a muscular way. But that's the thing.

Jose Altuve, he's listed at 5'6". Is he actually 5'6"? Perhaps not. But he is's listed at 5'6". Is he actually 5'6"? Perhaps not. But he is also listed at 166 pounds. I don't know whether that's accurate either, although the fact that it's not a multiple of 5 or 10 makes it seem accurate. But if we take that at face value, 166, if you are 5'6", and if anything, he is probably shorter than that, I mean, you have to be very beefy and strong or, you know, overweight in some way, which he taller than Jose Altuve, he would still look big in a sense.

And he's like the small baseball player who everyone cites. So, yeah. All right. For my next pick, I will take a less prominent player, although one we have discussed on this podcast before, and that is Tim Lacastro. Tim Lacastro, probably the fastest player in baseball these days, and I just want to see him in the 100 meters. So this is not super creative, I guess,

but I just want to see how fast the fastest baseball person is compared to the actual fastest people, which has been a topic of conversation with Billy Hamilton, right? You know, people were always asking, how fast is Billy Hamilton really? Sam Miller wrote about this at Baseball Prospectus. You know, people asked Billy Hamilton, like, could you beat Usain Bolt in a race? And he kind of went along with it. And he was like, well, I'm super competitive. So I'm going to say yes, which is kind of like acknowledging that he knows that he couldn't. But he's just going to say that he could because he's competitive.

But I would like to see, like, would he get lapped by Usain Bolt or by some other prominent sprinter? And I think probably, but I would want to know. And there was an NFL player who became a professional sprinter recently, right? And had kind of a credible performance, but not an elite one and, you know, handled himself well, but was not like out there keeping pace with the very fastest sprinters in the world, as I recall. And Hamilton would have been the best pick for this a few years ago. still extremely fast, faster than almost everyone, but his sprint speeds have declined slightly relative to a few years ago. You know, instead of being over 30 feet per second, it's like 29 and a half feet per second or something. Still pretty darn fast, but Tim Lacastro has been like the fastest in sprint speed for a few years running now. I think maybe he was tied with Trey Turner last season, and he famously set that record for the most successful stolen base attempts to start a career, which I believe we discussed at the time. So I don't know whether he has any background in

sprinting or track and field or interest in it or anything, but I would very much like to see him get on a track with actual elite runners and just see you know how many lengths behind them is he if you give him the proper gear and a little time to train presumably and you know so much of speed in baseball is like well do you get a good jump out of the box and do you have good base running instincts and do you round the bases do you take an efficient route around the bases you know it's not just pure speed and sometimes pure sprint speed is not necessarily the best

measure of how quickly you actually get from point A to point B but if he is kind of the default fastest right now I just want to see him test his speed and his mettle against the actual fastest in the world. I like it very much. All right.

Oh. You didn't take any of my picks, so I don't know why I'm humming and hawing as much as I am. The reason I am making the, like, oh, no, what do I do sound is that I had to ask opinions on this again from from Bauman and he had a very firm opinion about it and I just don't know enough to know if I disagree with him but I'm gonna go with this I also you can tell me this isn't a sport and then I will scramble to make a different pick okay I'm giving you that option okay i think that jonathan india should drive formula one oh it's formula one a sport i know this is like debates about what is and isn't a sport because often it's this kind of gatekeeping thing and you know i've written about esports before and that's always a point of contention so generally i'm happy to concede that anything

that people say is a sport is a sport. So fine. I don't even know much about Formula One. We've had that conversation, right, about feeling that we have to find out what Formula One is because people are into it now. People are so into Formula One. Including Bauman, and Bauman's into all sorts of sports that I have zero experience for. The catalog there is so impressive. It is. Yeah, the catalog there is so impressive. And there were a couple of them where, you know, I know that about him. And I particularly was interested in some of the Olympic sports, obviously Formula One, not in the Olympics.

But I would say, oh, can this person like be a speed skater? And he was like, no, that's not a thing. Well, Eddie Alvarez could probably be. Well, sure. I was like, apart from the guy who literally meddled in this. Oh, did he medal or was he just an Olympian? He did. He did. He meddled. Good for you, friend. I will allow this. Okay. But why? But why? So let me tell you why. So I am given to understand that there are a couple of things that are required to be a good Formula One driver. One,

you can't be overwhelmingly large. They tend to be, you know, sort of average-heighted guys or even a little bit more diminutive than that. I also considered Ozzy Albies in the Formula One role because, you know, India is like six foot and Albies is a little under that. You have to have really good reflexes. To me, that said, a middle infielder.

You got to have a middle infielder because you need someone who has that sort of quick reaction and is going to be able to, I don't know. You wouldn't say dodge cars, veer away from cars. Why am I asking you about cars? That's another thing about this. Worst possible person you could ask. Yeah, you're maybe not the most reliable narrator when it comes to the driving experience. But I figured someone, you know, who was a middle infielder would be appropriate here. And then I think that one of the things that I observe about Formula One and car racing in general is

that there seems to be some flair associated with the people who do it. Not always, but sometimes, particularly in Formula One, as opposed to, say, NASCAR. And, you know, Jonathan, he's got that hair. And it seems like hair that would play in Formula One because he looks like he could be in a movie about the Three Musketeers.

He looks like he could be one of the Musketeers. And something about that says Formula One to me. I don't know if it's because I associate Formula One with the French. That's also a possibility. and something about that says says formula one to me i don't know if it's because i associate formula one with the french that's also a possibility but i think the combination of stature and reflexes are the are the things that might lend him to actually being able to do the

car part and his look lends him to the sport more generally i think Albies would have been a very good pick here also, but I think I'm going with Jonathan India. So that's my pick here. First sport that I have watched, zero minutes of. I could say the same. Well, I'm glad that you went there anyway so that we could avoid overlapping this draft because I don't have any F1 picks. There you go.

You will be shocked to learn. Okay, for my next pick, this is what our fourth, my fourth pick. because I don't have any F1 picks. There you go. You will be shocked to learn. Okay. For my next pick, this is what our fourth, my fourth pick. Correct. I will take Jacob Stallings, the catcher, as a hockey goalie. Oh, sure. Yeah. Seems like a natural transfer of skills, right? Catcher to goalie.

And I think Stallings would be a perfect pick Because he is probably The reigning best blocker In baseball right now I think Roberto Perez certainly Has a case and he had A notable streak without Passed balls a couple years ago and I think he led in baseball

Prospectus' blocking runs in 2019 but Stallings Led this year and it's something he prides himself on and has worked on a lot. And he won the gold glove and he won the fielding Bible award. And part of that is because of his blocking. And he did not allow a single pass ball this whole season, which is pretty impressive because he got a lot of playing time. And there are quotes, I'm quoting from an athletic story here where former Effectively Wild guest Steven Brault is lauding Stallings' blocking skills and says he blocks everything all the time.

And that is exactly a goalie's job description, right? And he is used to wearing the pads, of course. He is also a large man, 6'5", 225. And as I understand it, there has been an embiggening of goalies, both their frames and their pads and their protective gear. There was a good Atlantic article by Ken Dryden about that last year. Hockey has a gigantic goalie problem. It is a problem for people who are trying to score on the goalies, and Stallings would be a pretty gigantic goalie. And he is apparently extremely mobile and flexible. He has God-given hyper

mobility in his hips, ankles, and knees, according to a quote in this athletic article where someone says, I'm almost a foot shorter than him and I can't even come remotely close to doing some of the things that he can do. So he can contort himself all over the place. And I got to think, I mean, it must take a lot of nerve to stand in there against a hard puck and slap shots that are going extremely fast, but probably not more nerve than it takes to be a big league catcher. Oh, yeah. So I think that Jacob Stallings could pull it off. Yeah, I think that that's a great pick. I'd like to think that I made weird picks so that you could make normal ones.

Like, I think this is service. Even though I, well, I didn't really take Otani from you, did I? You got to take Otani also. We both got to share him. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to be able to say really a whole lot about this because I don't know the rules of this particularly well,

although I did spend like 10 minutes today watching highlights this is my weirdest pick and i've made some weird ones are you ready ben yes i'm taking o'neill cruz who's a prospect for the pittsburgh pirates to play hi eli oh wow okay are you familiar with this wonderful sport yes which was once supposed to sweep the nation. It was supposed to sweep the nation. It was supposed to become one of our national pastimes. It did not do that. It is a supremely cool looking sport.

I get why people were excited about it. It's also kind of odd, so I get why it didn't really take off. But if you will allow me to quote from O'Neill Cruz's prospect blurb from the recently released Pittsburgh Pirates list at fangrass.com, it's very rare to find a player with 80 raw, a 70 arm, and plus wheels. Cruz brings all of that to the table while playing a passable shortstop, which is remarkable even without accounting for his size. For people who are not familiar with O'Neill Cruz,

he is 6'7", and he plays shortstop which is weird you know not a lot of six seven guys doing that uh and yeah and pittsburgh seems like they're gonna let him play it until he shows that he can't uh at a competitive level so he is he is a big and imposing guy and then when you think about i don't even know what the, it's not a bat. What is it? It's a- It's a highlight stick. Highlight stick? Yeah, that's definitely wrong. That's the technical term. It almost certainly has a specific name.

They have this curved bat almost. It looks sort of like if you took a cricket bat and then you put a little basket in it. That's terrible. I hope people will look up this sport because it's really quite something. But when you think about putting one of those in the hands of a guy who is 6'7 and has the wingspan of a 6'7 guy and is able to chuck things very hard, I think that he'd be, I don't know if he'd be good at it but i think i'd

like to see him try maybe this would make the sport actually sweep the nation see you thought i was gonna be like this guy will be a power forward and like this guy is gonna be a wing no we have o'neill cruz playing highlight that is good yeah yeah we're not going with like aaron judge as a linebacker or whatever. No, see, I tried to stay away. I mean, maybe that's your next pick, but. No, this was my last pick. That was five.

Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. So we tried to steer away from the most obvious ones. And, you know, we didn't go with this guy could be a cricketer because probably a lot of them could with the proper preparation, but yes. Like I did contemplate a cricket selection but like think about uh think about like asadio being a batsman in cricket i bet he could do it oh yeah

yeah given where he tried to find a spot for asadio there are some possibilities there but all right for my fifth pick i i do have a six that i feel good about. I don't know whether we still have a bonus one. But for my, well, professionally last one, I will go with Javier Baez as a professional tag player. Do people play tag professionally? Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, given my last pick, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that there are a lot of different kinds of sports, right?

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether you would give me this one but it is a sport I I've seen it I can't claim to be an aficionado of professional tag but there's an international championship called world chase tag and it's on like the NBC sports network I think it's been on ESPN and I will see it sometimes like on the TV at the gym. I will just see people like running around this arena trying to catch each other. And every time I see it, I will remember that professional tag is actually a sport and it brings me joy. I guess it's like technically called game of tag is the name of the sport. It's like technically called Game of Tag is the name of the sport. World Chase Tag is the championship. But who could be better positioned for this than Javier Baez?

I was trying to think of like, okay, we know that Baez seems to be great at tagging and he seems to be great at sliding. What would that transfer to? What would being good at tagging transfer over to? Tagging would be an area where he could apply those skills. So it's basically, it's like competitive parkour, kind of. It's like there's this arena where jungle gym type setups are there, and you have to climb over things and jump over things and under and through various structures in order to get to the other person. And there's a time limit, so you have to tag them within a certain amount of time. And so you have to be agile and you have to be coordinated.

And maybe you don't need quite as much fine motor control as you do to apply a tag the way Javier Baez does. But I think he would probably be good at it and it would be a lot of fun. does but i think he would probably be good at it and it would be a lot of fun the sports slogan apparently is keep chasing and don't get caught which does pretty much sum it up where do you play professional tag how many anywhere you want is there well not if you're a professional this isn't this isn't pickup tag this is the big leagues this is big yeah tag are there tag leagues yeah yeah there's a well i don't know if it's a league but it's a championship and and there are you know like courses basically it's like obstacles it's almost like an aggro crag kind of global gut sort of setup where you have to

hop around so yeah check out some some highlights of game of tag but that's my pick for hobby bias wow wow okay i'm into that all right do you want to do a bonus round here i have one more i feel good about i have i want to make sure that i actually know what this event is called hold on i mean yeah i can make one pick it might be be to, oh, I guess it's just literally called that. Okay. I would like to see Tyler O'Neill do rings in gymnastics. Oh, yeah. He's got the gymnast upper body.

Yeah, because powerlifting for him is like that. That's the easy way out with Tyler O'Neill, right? Because he's got these arms that it's incredible he can lift because they just are like so enormous. But I want to see those arms put to work on the, I guess they're technically called still rings. But they move around when the guys are around them. Anyway, rings. I want to see Tyler O'Neill do rings in gymnastics. I think that he would be good at it. All right. Yeah, that sounds good. Fit him for a leotard. You can find one that will fit him. Sounds good to me. All right.

Well, my last pick, I was trying to think of something where accuracy would come into play for a pitcher particularly. And I'm going to go with Tyler Rogers, the Giants reliever, as a professional cornhole player. Cool.

Remember that period of time when cornhole was like on every network because sports were stopped because of the pandemic. And I don't know whether there was a archive of cornhole content or whether you could keep playing it because it was socially distanced or something. But suddenly like ESPN was airing cornhole 24-7. So with Cornhole, I think you have to throw underhand, right? And Tyler Rogers throws underhand or close to it, right? He's a submariner, submariner. I've never been clear on how to say that exactly. And he is extraordinarily accurate. He is one of the best control pitchers in baseball. So you combine the underhand delivery with the precise control. Would that transfer perfectly to throwing a sack through a hole? I don't know, but I don't see why not. It seems, if anything, easier than the kind of control that Tyler Rogers has.

So I think I would like to see it, and I think he would be good at it. I think that that's great. All right. I was thinking like maybe darts, you know, like I was thinking like Kyle Hendricks or some other kind of finesse control artist maybe would have the hand control to be good at darts and just rack up bullseyes as well so that's an option but i preferred the image of tama rogers playing cornhole yeah i think that i think that that's great i wondered i tried to decide if there was like a pitcher who i thought would be a particularly good archer um because of accuracy but I think you're doing a different thing there. You know, I think it's a different sort of thing. So I put the kibosh on that. All right. Well, that was fun. I'm sure we left out a lot of possibilities. So if anyone wants to

share some with us, please do. I was trying to think to think i mean we left some major sports on the board here i mean we didn't draft tennis or golf or basketball i guess we were trying to be off the beaten path yeah a little bit and go with less obvious ones and some of those are just like oh he's tall maybe he'd be good at basketball i mean mean, that's not very fun. So you're trying to think more deeply about it. And this is where we ended up. Yeah, I think that we were keen to avoid really obvious choices, maybe to our detriment at times, or at least to mine. I thought about making Nick Madrigal a platform diver, but I thought the hamstring injury might indicate that the flexibility wasn't quite there in a way that you needed.

I'm trying to think if I had any others that were. Yeah, I was trying to think of like hand-eye coordination because you can't beat baseball players for hand-eye coordination, at least hitters. Right. So maybe like table tennis, something like that, where it's less about brute strength and is kind of about quick twitch reactions and hand eye. That came to mind, but I was trying to think of some application for that skill set. Yeah, I wanted to think about like, are there any great hacky sack players? I imagine a lot of them are good at golf. Like a lot of them just golf recreationally. So that was something I tried to stay away from for that reason.

Are there any great trampoliners? We're kind of an anti-trampoline podcast historically. Danger. We can't encourage that. No. All right. Well, that was fun. Yeah.

Now we just have to come up with a bunch more. Yep. We'll be back next time with who knows what. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. Wanted to find a place for an ultimate Frisbee pick. I think some would work, but I just had better options available. I don't think Meg would have let me get away with Pokemon Trainer, but it came to my attention this week that the new Pokemon game for Nintendo Switch, Pokemon Legends Arceus, is a baseball game. I have not played it yet because I have my hands full now with Horizon Forbidden West, but apparently there is a character in the game, and I won't disclose who because it seems to be a spoiler, who throws a Pokeball in a manner very reminiscent of the former delivery of Hisashi Iwakuma, who of course pitched for the Mariners, but also for Kintetsu and Rakuten in Japan. And while he was playing for Kintetsu, he had a hitch in his delivery that he later ironed out,

but this is kind of a cool reference in the Pokemon game. And evidently, former Pokemon games have also had references to the motions of Japanese pitchers, including Hideo Nomo and Choji Murata. I like it a lot. So pick a pitcher and imagine him as a Pokemon trainer or at least someone who throws Pokeballs. Not Pokebowls, but balls. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Effectively Wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks, while also helping us stay ad-free. Eleanor, Dan Bauman, Eli Ashe, Rebecca Fleming,

and Lucas Allen Dawson. Thanks to all of you. Patreon supporters can get access to exclusive monthly bonus episodes, as well as a Patreon-only Effectively Wild Discord group. Anyone can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and many other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming

via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Feel free to suggest topics for episodes. As evidenced by today, nothing is off limits. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod.

You can browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Bye.