Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1820: Ban the Grift

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs author Dan Szymborski discuss the drawbacks and virtues of expanded playoffs, the ideal expanded-playoff format, and the biggest beneficiaries of playoff expansion in 2022, why the competitive balance tax functions as a soft cap and how MLB could actually promote competitive integrity, whether banning the shift is a bad […]

I can hardly stand upright, in my head upon the light I have faith but don't believe it, there's not enough to leave it Everything I love is on the table Everything I love is out to sea I have only two emotions Care for fear and dead devotion I can't get the balance right Though my mom was in the fight

Hello and welcome to episode 1820 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are both joined today by Fangraphs' own Dan Szymborski. Hello, Dan. Welcome back.

Hi, how's it going today? Well, the deal is done. That is the deal between MLB and Apple to stream two Friday night games per week. The good news is that those games won't be blacked out. The bad news is that you'll need to subscribe to Apple TV Plus if you want to watch them, although there are some good shows on there I could recommend if you do, but that will be in place starting with the 2022 season. Of course,

that's contingent on there being a 2022 season, which depends on a different deal that still isn't done as we record this on Tuesday afternoon. Help me out here. Am I experiencing deja vu or did we already go through a Tuesday deadline to save the season last week? Because that seems sort of familiar. I feel like we've also, while it wasn't a strict deadline, gone through a period of not knowing exactly where the negotiations stood while we were recording with Dan. Yeah. Yeah, we had bad news go while we were. I remember being cautiously optimistic, and then I think it was Ben who said, check Twitter. Yeah, right.

And what did we discover when we did? Another Taco Tuesday has been ruined. Yeah. As a writer, I appreciate flexible deadlines, not so much as an editor, I guess. And now that I'm wearing both of those hats again, I have to kind of divide my mind. But, you know, if you're running a little late on a piece, you appreciate when a deadline can be moved. If you are waiting to see whether there will be an MLB season and how long it will be and what it will look like, not quite as fun. So this is the latest in a series of totally real. This is the absolute last deadline

deadline. So we'll see if this one produces any movement or whether it actually turns out to be a deadline at all. But I would gladly accept this episode being a bit out of date. It means the season will start in a few weeks. And if that's the case, we'll probably record another episode soon. I guess that goes without saying, we'll probably record another episode soon. I guess that goes without saying because we always record another episode soon. Anyway, I don't think you need to pause your podcast player or archive this episode if there has been a deal since we recorded this because I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today should apply regardless of where that situation stands. On the docket, we've got expanded playoff formats, the competitive balance tax,

maybe some potential rules changes and free agent destinations, all of which just so happen to be subjects that Dan has recently written about for Fangraphs.com. Isn't that convenient? It is. Maybe we could record two episodes, a happy one and a sad one kind of like they how they made animated different endings of who shot mr burns on the simpsons and then we can have kind of that lost episode that leaks right archives yeah choose your own adventure effectively wild style just listen to the episode, even if the actual reality is not that happy. But that reminds me, I'm hoping, Dan, that you can cheer me up a bit, irrepressible optimist that you are,

because I have been feeling a bit bummed, not just about the fact that there's no deal and that the season is potentially slipping away, but also I think about the fact that it seems like even if the season is saved, even if it comes back quickly, the ship has sort of sailed on baseball being better when the deal is done in any meaningful way. I mean, I like baseball the way it was as well, so that wouldn't be the worst thing. But it seemed like there was some potential for significant shifts, not just in the revenue distribution in baseball or things that affect the player's bottom line, let's say, but also things that affect the fans as well, whether it's competitive integrity or competitive balance or whatever you want to call it, or

on-field rules changes. And the longer time has gone on, the more some of the ambitious proposals have been dispensed with or walked back to the point that it seems like where we are now is basically just agreeing on more or less preserving the status quo with a decimal point changed here or there or an extra zero added or removed or not even an extra zero, just one digit slightly changing. Not that these things aren't important to the people involved in the negotiations, but it doesn't seem like any longstanding issues with baseball are necessarily going to be addressed. And the ones that maybe have the best chance to be changed are ones that I have mixed feelings about at best, namely expanded playoffs, banning the shift, etc. namely expanded playoffs, banning the shift, etc. And it seems like you've kind of come around on both of those issues,

at least to an extent, after previously being where I am, which is pretty doom and gloom. So maybe we can start with expanded playoffs because you've written about that topic multiple times. And again, we still don't know for sure if the playoffs will be expanded or how much they will be expanded to 12 teams or 14 teams or what the format will be. But you wrote about this first, I think, back in February, where the headline was, let's try to make expanded playoffs not stink. And then more recently, you projected what the league would actually look like in a 12-team playoff structure. So do you want to describe the evolution in your thinking if there has been a change?

Well, I hate the idea of expanded playoffs because on a fundamental level, it's what baseball is different than other sports in that it is the marathon, not the sprint. I mean, who cares about the NBA regular season? And I know people say that the nba has eight teams in each conference it's it would be fine but the problem is in the nba the eighth seed is mostly dead in the water there are some exceptions but i look back at that uh lopez matthews baumer study that to have the same record of of basketball's better team advancing in the playoffs baseball would have to play best of 75 playoff series i don't think the mlbpa would be down with that uh

necessarily so that's probably an unrealistic thing so i i'm a traditionalist when it comes to the structure but i did like 10 teams better than eight teams simply because that wildcard play in and that little mini buy provided a way to differentiate a division winner from the second place team. And during the early wildcard era, we had a problem, I think, that winning the division, if you were the wildcard, wasn't really that big a deal because home field advantage just isn't that huge a bonus in baseball. that big a deal because home field advantage just isn't that huge a bonus in baseball and it's hard to make that that's why you see players talking about things like ghost wins or however you want to call them i think that you can design a 12 team or a 14 team playoff to still not alter the the incentives in a perverse fashion but becomes it becomes tricky because, again, unless you're willing to kind

of break those rules about how many wins teams have to win, you don't have that good reward. Earlier, when I was talking about a 14-team playoff system, I argued that the division winner that didn't get the bye should have to play against the lowest wildcard team in what I called the knockout round, where that seventh seed in the league would have to sweep a three-game series, make them really be the underdog victor in order to advance as a real incentive to be a better team, because you don't want an 83-win team and a 95-win team to have roughly the same probability, because there's a lot of negative consequences for fans in that. Players can watch out for themselves, but we have to watch out for the fans.

And I think it would just cheapen baseball's experience considerably. And for the folks who didn't read that initial article, what you were endeavoring to do in the Zimborski lab is come up with a scenario where you are at least as incentivized to add wins through free agency as you would be in our existing playoff structure. And then you've revised it to look at sort of the 12 team proposal that it seems as if there is some amount of consensus around between the players association and the league, although it sounds like this might be an issue of bargaining that moves back onto the

table if the players feel that they might that they need to concede a 14 team field in order to get what they want on the CBT. So when you looked at the 12 team field, you were not assuming ghost wins or anything like that. No fun, you have to win a bunch in a row kind of things that you were doing in your little lab. So how big a difference do you think the Ghost win makes in terms of how well-incentivized teams will be to improve their rosters or are buys sort of sufficient, do you think? I think it's a significant difference. But when I projected out a 12-team playoff structure using 20-22 teams, not just some random team, so a whole different configuration could move things one way or the other.

It wasn't as bad as I expected. In the end, when I actually ran the numbers, you still had a significant incentive to be a better division winner. And unlike the 14-team configuration, you didn't have to be the best division winner. So there was still a possibility like if the dodgers are winning like 105 games it doesn't just make winning division uh for everyone else a crapshoot after that it seemed that in a lot of circumstances it was actually helping the the top team or two in the league because the average opponent they were facing uh was worse than in the current system because a lot of times that number three seed that third division winner was getting knocked off which was frequently the al central or nl central winner

i would still prefer 10 but i don't think 12 is as awful as it could be let's just say could be 14 could be 16 oh 16 16 is the worst because 16, nobody gets a bye. And I know people are, this is something I'm going to look at in the future, but when I've looked at Korea, which does have this kind of gauntlet structure where teams sit for quite a good length of time, there wasn't the same problem. There wasn't any real problem of higher seeds underperforming because of the layoffs. So I think that's not a worry, even though people have brought it up. I think you do want to have a buy because a buy is so much more powerful and incentive than home field advantage and a three game coin flip. By the way, I misspoke in my intro when I said that you need to subscribe to Apple TV Plus. intro when I said that you'd need to subscribe to Apple TV+. At least initially, the press release says that it will be available for a limited time without the need for a subscription. Although,

again, for all mankind and Mythic Quest, a lot of good shows on there. But you'd need an app of some sort or to access it differently than you would otherwise. Again, would be happy to go the extra mile if it means that there are Major League games to watch on friday night but back to the playoff structure so are there any other proposals or formats that you've heard or that you've considered that make sense to you and do you think that the ghost win idea which i i feel like i should be calling the zombie win just because that's what i've been calling the zombie runner that people call the ghost runner. We have to differentiate that. Yes, it's different. This is, I think, ghost applies more accurately to the concept of the ghost win than to the ghost runner, which is different from the traditional term ghost runner. But what do you think that would do

to the spectator experience? I mean, if you come into a series and you're already down without having actually lost a game to that team, although you have, in a sense, earned that deficit by being worse over the course of the regular season, do you think that would be just as fun to dig yourself out of that hole? Or would it be demoralizing? Or would it seem unearned in some way, that advantage? whole or would it be demoralizing or would it seem unearned in some way that advantage it's hard to say i think you can market that in a way because you could mlb doesn't want to do that but i also get the impression they're not really thinking of trying to put it in the best light possible because you can sell it as the knockout series sudden death for that last place team like just like a handicap that they can overcome i mean every sports movie the good guys start down

they don't usually start even with the with the with the antagonists they have to fight their way back so i think there are ways you can spin this i'm not a marketing person but i i think if they use their imaginations they could figure that out uh and i think maybe you don't necessarily call it a ghost win you just say that the team has to sweep the other team or win one more game. I don't think you actually pretend that there was a game that was won that wasn't. That'd be kind of weird. But I think you could call it, you know, knockout round, sudden death round. There's all sorts of things you could do. And really, there's only so many logical ways you can create an advantage for a team with a better record. I mean, it's a lot less extreme than, say, starting them off every game with a run or something, which would be very weird.

I don't want a zombie run any more than I want a zombie runner. But I think it's one of those situations where if MLB saw money in it that would benefit them, all of a sudden that they would have an imagination because they seem to be able to do that when it benefits them. I guess that we should have known this was coming when we put the postseason in October, which is famously spooky season. I'm going to escape Ghosts and Ghouls that way. I know that you were encouraged by the sort of relative insulation that this structure seemed to give to the really good teams. But I want to talk about the potential for really bad teams here. I know that you ran

odds on just how bad the third wild card in this scenario would be. So what are the odds that we're going to see just a truly dreadful team make it into this structure? It happened occasionally. On average, I got a losing team in the playoffs about 5% of the time in both leagues. So it's a little more often than when you count entire years. But in a million years, I got ranges of that third team from 73 wins to 99 wins. Both, of course, were very crazy simulations. Right. What would you think of the prospect of just expanding the playoffs that we already have, which is something that we have suggested from our listeners every now and then.

A listener named Daniel emailed us this week to say, when it comes to expanded playoffs, what about just making the division series a best of seven? It seems like everyone gets what they want here since it makes it less of a coin flip, but still gives the owners more revenue. If that's not enough of a cash grab, then making the wildcard game into a best of three would add more revenue. And at that point, you've added six to 12 more playoff games without having to expand the field at all. Do you think that would satisfy anyone or would you prefer that? It would satisfy me because all of a sudden you're making it even better to have

a good team because the players are aware of and the owners are aware of that the more you decouple team quality from world series championships the less value it is to invest in a player to win a world series championship yeah you still have pride but pride and profit is better than just pride i don't think that i think that if the owners would be satisfied to just expand the length of the series that this wouldn't be an issue anymore i think they just want more teams in there because the the marginal value of a whole new fan base following is probably more than just keeping the existing fan base for an additional game or two every year i can't read minds, but that's what my guess is that where they're at.

I guess that one of the things that I've been thinking about in the last couple of days after I've read your piece was not only that this sort of takes the knees out from under team entropy, which will be devastating to Jay Jaffe and the fellow adherents to that team. But how did this, and I'm putting this question to both of you, kind of complicate the potential for tiebreakers? Because if we have an expanded field and we have to start playing playoff games right away in order to not have the playoffs leak too deep into November, are we just going to have to do like paper tiebreakers for stuff? Oh, I hope not. I would really hate if there was ever a tiebreak for either a buy versus no buy

or making the playoffs versus not making the playoffs. I think that would be just a disaster because that's one of the most exciting parts. It's like an extra playoff round and owners should like that. Whenever there's a one-day playoff, it's like having an additional team in the playoffs if we had one last year we would have had 11 team playoffs in a kind of a de facto

manner i don't think they really need to be as scared of pushing into november as people think i looked at this a few years ago and in the majority of major league markets the average temperature on november 1st was higher than on April 5th. So I think they could push it a few more days. Especially as the weather warms up forever until we're all boiling. But I wonder also, this is something that we talked about last time, the idea of potentially shortening the regular season, especially if the playoffs expand. Just because the stakes will at that point be a lot lower. They're already pretty low in a lot of late regular season games, and you're a projections whiz. So how much would lopping off some not

inordinate number of games reduce the predictability of the season or, I guess, make underdogs more likely? I mean, you've been through this with 2020, which was a 60-game season. And of course, that made it far more feasible for not very good teams, the Marlins, to make the playoffs. How many could you lop off before you had a meaningful reduction in, say, how much true talent dictates your actual record and your playoff position? I know it's kind of just a sliding scale and each game you cost yourself some amount of predictiveness or reflection of true talent. But at what point do you think you would really be sacrificing something meaningful? would really be sacrificing something meaningful. I mean, on a fundamental level, depending where you draw the line, you can say that 162 games is already lopping off of what the true talent says, because that's sometimes the frustrating thing about projections is that we never really know if the answer is the right answer. We never know that if the 300 hitter was actually a 300 hitter or a 280 hitter who was lucky, a 320 hitter who was not. That kind of becomes a problem

no matter what the length of a season is. I think that, you know, 154 games, 144 games, I don't think those are a problem. But I think once you start getting past like 20 or 30 games, then it starts to become increasingly silly in a way in which we leave baseball with kind of a situation where it becomes hard to identify who the actual best team is because now when the best team by the regular season loses in the playoffs in the first round and in some fluky game we can at least still say that oh we we think they were probably the best team but if you you have, say, an 80-game season and an 18-team playoff, I don't think you actually have any finality to the season. They're just games that happened. And I think without some kind of at least perceived belief that the world champion is the best or just some way to

identify the best, then you don't really have much to kind of use as kind of a guiding point for a season to define it in the future. Well, hopefully that turns out not to be relevant for 2022, but I would not be surprised if it does in a future season. And the more you expand the playoffs, the harder it gets really to argue against that much as I just like baseball being on for a lot of the year. But say we do end up with a 12-team playoff format this year, or I don't know whether you projected a 14-team format or not, but your most recent post, you looked at how that changes the playoff probabilities. In such a scenario, even the Pirates would have a 1% chance to make the playoffs if you round up. They don't quite get there otherwise.

a 1% chance to make the playoffs if you round up. They don't quite get there otherwise. But who are the big beneficiaries of that? With the caveat, of course, that many prominent free agents still remain unsigned. So your projections for team strength right now are pretty provisional. Yeah, this is the farthest behind I've been in projections in a year. It's not your fault. Yeah, it's March and I still don't know what teams I'm projecting. Generally speaking, the 12-team playoffs, the top division winners, obviously, It's not your fault. were kind of the big losers there simply because they're the most likely division winners to be

thrown into a three-game series for their lives. The teams that benefit are the teams that are good like in that 85 to 92 win territory in a really deep division. All the AL East teams, off the top of my head, I believe that they were like the top of competitive teams in the World Championships added simply because their risk is a lot lower. Because as we saw last year, you had, you know, the Blue Jays were a really good team looking out at the rest of the division. So I don't know necessarily if people are going to like the idea of an AL East team getting the most benefit as a good thing. But I mean, this changes year to year based on the relative strength of the teams. And that was the biggest difference between the existing playoff field

and the 12 team field, right? Pretty much. When you got into 14 teams, there was less of an advantage simply because teams like the Dodgers, who have a relatively high chance of being the best team in the league, they don't get hurt, but kind of everybody else does. And that I can see being really just deleterious to competition because all of a sudden, once you have 105 or however many win team in the league, then wins like win number 98 doesn't mean that much. That's not good.

Even under the expanded playoff format, you have the Angels with a 35% chance to make the playoffs. So even that doesn't necessarily get Trout and Otani to October, which would be one silver lining at least, but need to expand it more for that to happen, evidently, or for us to feel secure in that happening. And you noted in that post that your projections have changed slightly since the last time we talked to you a month or two ago. And that's not because rosters have changed, obviously. It is because, as you note, you consider the distribution of performances on rosters and calculate playoff team strength slightly

differently than regular season strength what does that mean in this case this was something i was working on over the winter i've had a lot of space to work on these things for some reason generally speaking normally when zips projects the playoffs before the actual playoffs it uses kind of the regular season measure of strength when you talk about the playoffs it's a playoff model now similar to the postseason projections that you see with the exact pictures, the lineups, because certain teams, especially if they have a disproportionate amount of their strength kind of in their rotation, the top few pictures in their starting lineup, that tends to be better because depth just isn't as big a deal in the postseason as the regular season. depth just isn't as big a deal in the postseason as the regular season so teams that do have a very top heavy rotation and lineup like the dodgers did kind of eke out a few more percentage points it wasn't a major difference but someone who read the previous piece would say hey why why did the diamondbacks go from 0.1 to 0.0 is something sneaky going on.

And there were actually a few minor league signings that kind of got into the back of the depth charts, too, I should mention. Some of our listeners are thinking, surely no one noticed that. And those people have never looked at our comment sections. The other big thing that you have looked at this week, Dan, is sort of competitive balance as a concept. We want a playoff structure that finally incentivizes the Angels to get Mike Trout and Shoya Ohtani into October. But playoff structure is not enough on its own. The economics obviously play a role here. So for the folks who have not had a chance to read your piece today, what were you endeavoring to do with your look at the competitive balance tax? Well, generally, what I was talking about is the owners have talked a lot

about the competitive balance tax as a competitive balance tax and necessary for competition. But on a fundamental level, it's not really designed as you would design something designed for competitive balance. I talked a bit about a luxury tax. Luxury tax literally have approached luxury goods, which kind of sometimes fall out of the normal realm of supply and demand called Verbaland goods, that sometimes their actual demand increases because they're expensive. You can say that for certain marquee players in baseball. So as I said, it's not really about competitive balance, not really luxury tax. It's in a lot of ways it functions like a soft salary cap. And it's kind of tied to the revenue sharing system, which the owners very, very clearly made sure that they were not going to talk about at all. The players kind of backed off from that.

The players kind of backed off from that. But baseball has long sold the revenue sharing system as a source of competitive balance to help smaller markets compete. But it's not really distributed on the basis of being a small market. It's the way that revenue is pooled. It's distributed largely in addition to market on actual revenue. So it becomes a tax on increasing revenue and a subsidy on having low revenues in a to market, on actual revenue. So it becomes a tax on increasing revenue and a subsidy on having low revenues in a small market. And what that does is it kind of perverts the whole incentive structure considerably.

I talk about the raise a lot, but the raise are in a position where their revenue is not coupled with winning all that much. The shared revenue they get certainly isn't uh they've they've been nearly unable to coax more fans into the park when they're winning so on a fundamental level the rays are incentivized to act as they do they do want to win the front office certainly wants to win i'm sure they'd be happy to spend any money that Stuart Sternberg would give them.

But it's just really it's not in their financial – there's nothing pushing them to make it a good idea for them. And I think if you want to correct this, you need to make investing in the team not just a good idea, not just a morally superior idea, but a financially superior one. And you do that by, or at least the way I see it, is by using baseball's revenue sharing pool. I use the sum of about $400 million, just for this structural example, to distribute it based on winning so that the Rays get more money at 95 wins than they would at 65 wins. No, you're not going to suddenly make them act in a completely different way, but you're providing a framework in which the marginal revenue they get for an additional win is out there, it is fixed, and teams will have just a real incentive beyond pride to improve and not just put it in their pockets.

Now, large owners don't necessarily want that because the last thing that Hal Steinbrenner wants is to pay the raise to bid against him. So this system works out well for both large markets and small markets, So this system works out well for both large markets and small markets, but it fundamentally creates the structure we're in now where teams at the bottom on where the CPT is set, it comes with strings, right? It's like, well, we'll raise it a little bit, not as much as you want us to raise it, but a little bit if you give us, insert pretty significant concession here. And obviously, it's their prerogative to bargain for these things and to try to get the most and give the least that they can. But it seems strange that the expectation is that the CBT will just stay frozen in time forever, seemingly, and that to have any kind of concession there to raise it to keep pace not just with MLB revenues but with inflation that seems to be something that MLB has taken the position throughout these negotiations that will require some significant concession on the players part or even when the players make concessions seemingly

it will require some additional concession so it's hard to see other than pure just intransigence how they have come to the conclusion that this should just stay the same forever. If you're going to have it, then it seems like, you know, if it's not necessarily pegged to inflation or to rising revenue or something like that, that it would kind of be a starting point that it's going to go up at least a little bit over time as things generally do. But that just does not seem to have been an assumption that the two sides came to the table with, or at least were willing to admit that they did. Yeah, I'm not a labor lawyer and I'm also not a player. So I obviously cannot act in their interest. They act in their own interest and they have very good representation but i my personal feeling is that on the player side their focus should be on doing what the owners did uh the owners didn't get the last friendly cba all of a sudden they incrementally you know boiled the. They put the frog in the cold pot and turned up the heat. They got the CBT in the door in 2002 and kind of used it to constrict the players over time. They got the steroid penalties into the system, and then it was much easier to just increase them, increase them, and put pressure on the players should prioritize not necessarily maximizing the bottom line dollars they get, but maximizing the new structures that they have physically in place.

I don't think like this new bonus pool for pre-arbitration players. I don't think the amount, the exact amount is as important as getting it established and part of the game the way the cbt is because once it's there it's hard to disengage i also think that the the player should be willing even to start at a lower cbt just to get a fig a percentage that it grows up every year even the players are only proposing it go up like two and a half percent a year the owners proposed it was like 0.9 percent per year uh for the course of the deal i i think that if the players came down a little low and said okay we'll start at 225 but it's going to go up by 1.7 percent a year you were all of a sudden putting it in the system making it kind of, you know, the fait accompli that it's the structure and that there is a number to go up.

And once it's there, you can argue about what a number is. It would be much harder for the owners to completely disengage from that. So I think they need to think long term, get the structures in place as best they can in this deal. And then over time, I mean, that's not really satisfying for players now who aren't going to be around in 20 years, but that's how you beat the owners. You have to think 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years down the road. Yeah, it seems like a lot of these measures are intended not so much to incentivize teams to behave the right way as to maybe give them slaps on the wrist if they

don't i mean there's something you know in the draft lottery idea which seems to be something that is intended to increase competitive integrity or to disincentivize tanking but doesn't seem like it actually will to the extent that that is currently a problem, just because most tanking, if you want to call it tanking, doesn't really happen to tank for draft picks the way that it might in other sports or even might have under earlier CPAs. It's more about just kind of cashing the checks that you're already receiving because you can make money without necessarily putting the best product on the field. So there's that kind of arrangement where it's like, well, if you're really serious about this, wouldn't you put some other system of solving it in place? Or things like service time manipulation, which I understand is a difficult thing to regulate and to erase every loophole, but a lot of it seems to be sort of after the fact, you know, like if you win awards or something like that, then maybe there is some condition

put in place for that as opposed to, you just can't do this, we're going to make it impossible for you to do this, that kind of thing. So a lot of it seems like acknowledging, conceding that these things are going to happen and then maybe building in some slight measures to make them less advantageous more so than actually legislating them out of the game which might be easier said than done yeah i have my own scheme on on a service time manipulation that the owners would never agree to what's your proposal my suggestion is that you treat the extra service time that they steal as kind of a loan from the player to the team that has to be repaid when they hit free agency so if chris bryant you know hits free agency with six years and 171 days of service

time the cubs owe him 170 170 seconds of of the average annual value of his next deal or something to that effect or a percentage of the next deal but i don't think there's any chance unless you i think you'd have to crush the owners together to agree to that but i think it would be fair in a way simply because while you can't stop salary manipulation, you can set the cost of it, a cost that naturally adjusts to the value of the player and the theft of their service time. But it would be unlikely to see that happening since you can't even get the owners to agree on a slightly higher cap that 26 teams won't even come near. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the idea that has been raised recently in political circles

of just the fact that maybe people crack the code and figure out that, well, if you just don't have shame or you don't admit that you were wrong or you refuse to budge on something, then ultimately maybe it works out and the norms can't actually contain you. It's sort of like if you come to the bargaining table and you refuse to budge on certain things or even refuse to entertain the idea of changing certain things, then if the other side is sort of more committed to the process of negotiation and give and take, well, it might work out for you. It'd be hard to say that the owner strategy thus far in the CBA talks is not working for

them. I mean, it's not working in the sense that, at least as we speak, there's no agreement and thus no baseball season, which doesn't really benefit anyone in the long term, but in the sense that they have probably given up less and maybe came to the table agreeing to give up less. That has kind of maybe supported the wisdom of that strategy. I hate to say it, but you'd be hard-pressed to say that they are losing this negotiation to the extent that anyone is actually ahead. I mean, the owners always will have a built-in advantage

in that they have more time than players do. An owner can wait 10 years to recoup their investment. A lot of these guys don't even see themselves as baseball owners there. I think many of them see themselves as real estate moguls that have kind of their little baseball lifestyle brand to maximize their real estate portfolios. I also kind of feel like you're

trying to get me to back off my position that a hot dog is not a sandwich, which I never will, and you can never make me. Yeah, I just wonder if, you know, I appreciate that incentives are always going to be like the preferred approach to this stuff because it allows teams that don't want to spend the way other teams do, don't want't want to spend the way other teams do, don't want to sign free agents the way other teams do, want to continue to monkey with service time, the wiggle room to do that. But I just wonder if we've reached sort of the natural edge of the usefulness of incentives and need there to be actual sort of sticks as well as carrots, because it's hard to enforce service time right it's hard to say for sure when

a guy's service time is being monkeyed with although there are plenty of teams that are happy to just tell you that's what they're doing but i wonder if rather than having this be a matter of additional bonus pools or draft picks or whatever if we need to better fortify a grievance process that allows players the opportunity to really try to take this stuff to some sort of arbiter and say, I've clearly been had here in a way that is going to delay my future earnings meaningfully. I don't know. Yeah. The problem is that a player like Chris Bryant, I mean, he has to prove a case for what proof will there be. I'm not a lawyer, so you'd need a lawyer to talk about the practicality.

But I'd love if major league teams were required to preserve any communications that dealt with a player's promotion that had to be preserved on the record. I don't know if they could make that happen either, because, again, we look at what they haven't been able to leverage but i i think that would be a fairer system yeah because a grievance process doesn't work unless there's an actual realistic set of conditions in which the aggrieved can win when they're wronged it's not really it's the same with the requirement you you read the theBA, and teams are supposed to use that revenue sharing money to improve their team, not to pay off their personal loans or anything. And one of the mechanisms for enforcement is the commissioner is supposed to look out for that. But the commissioner is an employee of the owners. And so that just leaves the players in the situation where they had to

prove that Robert Nutting did not use the money in that way. And that's really hard to win. You basically have to have a hidden camera that says, ha ha, Chris Bryant's not really better than Michael. Right. It seems like in the meantime, we just need a new name for at least the CBT because we've gone along with this terminology, this competitive balance tax, which every time we say it or write it really reinforces the idea that it actually does promote competitive balance or is necessary for competitive balance. It's like the Save America's Pastime Act, quote unquote, from a few years ago, which posited that the way to save America's pastime was to pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage. So I don't know what the solution is for the CBT, whether we just call it the payroll tax or what.

But it seems like we need to maybe get away from its official name. I've been calling it a soft cap a lot. Yeah. It's what it is. Yeah. name. I've been calling it a soft cap a lot. It's what it is. Yeah. So let's move on to another topic, which is on-field rules changes. And again, we don't know where all this is going to end up, but we do know from some reporting that this was a subject of conversation recently and that the league has been pushing for the right to unilaterally institute changes to the game after 45 days rather than after one year, one year after notifying the PA, which is where things stand now.

And also, according to Ken Rosenthal, I believe the Players Association, at least in one incarnation of the deal, which was, of course, not formalized, incarnation of the deal, which was, of course, not formalized. They agreed to grant the league the ability to change three things as early as 2023 while denying the request to, say, institute robozones. But the pitch clock, larger bases, and shift restrictions were the three that were named that we could see as soon as next year. Totally on board with the pitch clock, fine with bigger bases, but the shift is one that I think makes a lot of us instinctively recoil. And part of it is just a philosophical opposition to legislating where you can and can't stand. Part of it, I think, is also just some doubt that it would actually have the intended effect. So you have kind of come around, right? At least according to a recent Twitter thread of yours where you said that you have kind of resigned yourself to it or come to terms with some aspects of it. So what's your thinking about the possibility of a shift ban well my natural my natural inclination towards baseball conservative was like how dare they tell them where they can stand but i've come around to the idea partially from i think my experience covering esports uh for espn uh as weird as this analogy is i do think that i

probably need to get over that philosophical boundary the the, because on a fundamental level, if it makes the sport more dynamic, it makes the sport more exciting, and it makes the sport from an analytic standpoint less solved, why should a philosophical thing stand in the way of that? I think games do have to change. When they talk about balancing esports titles, or really any game, but mostly the ones that focus on competition, there's something that they call the meta, which is the kind of the rules that exist at that time and balance out the strategic and tactical considerations. Like in a game like Overwatch, the meta is which heroes are more powerful at high level play at any certain time. And what game companies do to keep their game interesting and to keep it from coming in a rut is when these metas are solved,

they do try to balance things out somewhat. If baseball could solve the issue and you actually had a situation in which teams of varying different types of offenses could compete, will we really miss the shift that much? Because all great offenses look the same. They hit a lot of home runs. They draw walks. But, you know, every bad offense is what looks different. It's the old Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy thing where, you know, all happy families are alike.

I think that baseball could get a benefit of having more balls in play uh i don't and i think there are subtle ways to do that i think maybe you know the increasing the bag might actually help that one of my favorite ideas which i'd love from the test of the minors i mean if you have the atlantic league for that purpose they should be testing all sorts of crazy things because if it makes the sport better, don't avoid it. I would love to see them experiment with 88-foot base paths, but I think a lot of people would recall for that because they picked 90 feet in the 19th century because that just seemed like a good balance at the time. But this is a different – it's 2022. I don't think that the exact balance of things 140 years ago is what's persists today.

You incentivize – we've talked a lot about incentives in this episode. You incentivize a style of baseball in which putting the ball in play isn't just aesthetically pleasing but beneficial. And I think you will have more variety of offense. And I don't want my fogeyism to stand in the way of that. Right. And I don't want my foge to hit everything in the air and just go for power, and then you'll end up with even more of that archetype kind of paradoxically. As you say, though, there is the counterargument that, well, maybe if balls in play are more beneficial, then you do give players more incentive to put the ball in play. I think

one of my reservations comes back to the fact that it's just so hard to put the ball in play at this point, given the way that pitchers pitch, that I kind of doubt that it will have that huge an effect. Like, as you say, you know, you want more balls in play. Will this actually lead to more balls in play? I don't know. Because is it even under players' control now that they can put the ball in play in a productive way? Can they actually place the ball? Can they decide to make contact? Or is it just almost impossible to do because pitchers are tunneling and they're throwing so hard and they're refining their movement and they've just become these perfect creatures out there that are optimized in the lab before they even go out to the major league mound so that's the thing that gives me some pause aside from the philosophical argument because i'm fine with changing things in principle and i think more things should be changed if there's one area where i'm probably more aligned with the owners than with the players it's in the idea that no we actually do need to keep changing baseball. You know, players, understandably, I think, kind of drag their feet a bit when it comes to

certain changes, whether it was steroid testing decades ago or whether it's on-field changes now. Maybe the role of a league is to step in and say, hey, even if you like it the way it was, this is not great for our fans or for building the game. And so we need to do something different here. And that's what the NFL has largely done, seemingly to great success and aided by the fact that the NFLPA was basically broken and thus cannot actually stand in the way of any of these moves. But that has kind of helped the game evolve and maybe normalize the idea that it is constantly evolving. Whereas in baseball, obviously there have been rules changes dating back to the beginning, but it's been a while since some of the more significant ones. I'm more on board with the idea of removing certain restrictions than imposing new ones. I mean, if you go back to the beginning and

there are rules against where you can throw the ball or how you can throw it. You know, you can't throw sidearm, you can't throw overhand. You have to tell the batter whether you're throwing a high pitch or a low pitch, you know, changing those rules and giving players greater choice and freedom is an easier sell for me than saying you can't do this or you can do that. And I'm okay with certain aspects of that. If we're talking about, say, putting restrictions on rosters and how many pitchers you can have on a certain roster, that's maybe heavy-handed, but I think it might be necessary and beneficial at

this point. And so I guess part of my attachment to the shift partly is that I think its effectiveness is somewhat exaggerated, as Russell Carlton let's say has documented over and over that often the shift can be inefficient as used and teams shift on righties although they've started to curtail that a bit and that can almost balance out the benefit that they get from shifting on lefties or maybe it makes pitchers less effective in some sort of hidden way and just the idea that for a while there, the shift was fun, right? Maybe we've passed that point, but there was a time when it was creative and innovative and it was, you know, quote unquote smart and progressive. And it just made sense to position defenders where the ball was going to be hit.

and defenders where the ball was going to be hit. And it led to a lot of variety for a while because you'd have some teams shifting and some teams not, or some teams shifting in a certain way that no one else shifted. And you still do see some of that with outfield shifting, by the way, which may have a big impact too. And you'd have to craft the rule in such a way that it forbids that too, potentially, which I guess could be done depending on how you frame it. But we've maybe gotten to the point where it's so standardized now that the shift, as we would have called it, is now kind of the default defensive alignment. Maybe it's no longer

fun or an area of differentiation. It's just the new standard, except maybe in theory, it's more effective and suppresses hits on balls in play i just wonder about the prospects who are coming up right now who are thought to be sort of big league viable in a non-dh capacity because you'd be able to hide them in the shift like what's going to happen to those guys right like what happens to the shift aided second baseman who's bat you really want in the lineup but who is just an absolute butcher in the field? I mean, I guess some of that pressure is perhaps alleviated when we get the universal DH,

because at least on the NL side, they'll have somewhere to put that guy, but they'll only have one somewhere to put that guy. So what if the overall effect of losing the shift is actually a little bit worse for offense, because now big bats don't have a place in the lineup that they might have otherwise. That's a good point.

Yeah, in a way, I wouldn't mind that because I don't mind the idea that you do have different body types and different skill sets that go with certain positions. And if you can just stick anyone anywhere, then maybe there's a little less differentiation. But you're right that one side effect of that is that it might be harder to find a spot for a masher than you might end up hurting offense anyway.

It's a complicated subject. And that, I think, if anything, it feels like a little too soon for me. Like we need more testing of this idea or more lab league or something because it was not conclusive in the minors last year as i've written and as i think mlb has conceded it wasn't like there was some huge uptick in batting average or babip when the shift was implemented in some minor league levels although at those levels the shift is not quite as pervasive as it is in the majors and maybe not as efficient either but i just still have some misgivings when it comes to this like i think at this point we can probably

conclude that there's not going to be a a natural reaction to it i'd like that to be the case but i just don't know if that is really an option available to hitters at this point like hey just choke up and go the other way like it's just it's too hard to hit this pitching and the types of production that are valued and that players are paid for now don't really lend themselves to that and so i don't know whether you're going to get like hey just give it a few years and we'll have a new wave of hitters who just slap the ball the other way i I'm not sure that that's going to happen. And yet I'm still just uneasy about this. Yeah. People always act like when you bring up like Benny the chef,

they says, well, players just take it the other way. It's like, Oh no, nobody thought of this yet. It's like, like Eureka moment for everyone.

Wait, we could just hit it the other way. It's easier said than done to, you know, when, when half the league can throw 97 right in on your hands on command, you're not going to take that the other way for a blooper in the left unless you're Tony Gwynn. And most players are not Tony Gwynn.

I think that when we talk about rule changes as they go with the CBA, that might be a little harder, you know, for writers to feel the player's position than say money because we all understand money but it's it's hard to say how much they value those working conditions uh relative to money so i mean i could say yeah maybe that's how you trade for money but maybe that it's important to them uh like i mean if if meg messaged me one day and said dan we can't use oxford commas anymore i might be kind of upset about that. She would never. And trade like money to not have to do that. And be able to say comma and. How much is it worth it to you to use that extra comma?

I like it too. But yeah. But I do think that baseball, I mean, does have to be open to change. And it might not be the shift, might not be the best way, but they do have to explore it. And I think you do need to have some kind of system in place where at the end of the day, I mean, the game will have to move on and try new rules.

Now, I would like them to see if they accelerate the approval process of new rules. I would like there to be an exception for rules that could have an impact on injuries. I think that players, especially pictures, like if you're talking about changing the mound all of a sudden uh say they just said okay 2022 we're having uh 62 foot mounds uh from the plate i think in that case i don't think you want that to be implemented that quickly because

there is a real risk of injury it's a it becomes a health issue and i think that working conditions that affect health players should have more veto power over. Yeah, I'm with you on that. And probably you could argue that many or most on-field rules changes could, in theory, have some sort of injury effect. I mean, you could say that about the pitch clock too, right? There's been some suggestion that, well, maybe if you have less time to recover between pitches, you might be more susceptible to injury. Of course, you could just not throw max effort every time, but pitchers have been trained to do that. Not that I've seen any compelling evidence that in the minors, for instance, that has caused a major uptick in injuries relative to the majors, but there have been some theoretical

proposals that that could be the case. Anyway, I'm with you on the idea that things need to change and that you have to be willing to shake up the rules a little bit. This just wouldn't be at the top of my list. And I kind of worry that, you know, even though, say, bunting against the shift, which was a fun idea at one time and something that we probably advocated, Russell recently revisited his research on that subject too and found that even that probably doesn't make sense now. For one thing, it's hard to do, but it seems like defenses have maybe adjusted or pitchers have adjusted shift is something that everyone defaults to because, A, it's obvious and very visible, and B, it's maybe more practical to actually ban it and to say, hey, you need to have two fielders on this side of the field and that side of the field,

or you can't stand on the outfield grass, or however you formulate it. It's easier to sell that maybe than to sell moving the mound back, the effects of which are admittedly unproven, or changing the strike zone, let's say. Everyone has been annoyed by the shift at some point. Even if you are fine with it philosophically, everyone's had that moment of the ball gets hit up the middle and you think it's going to be the big base hit for your team. And then it's just a routine grounder. And you think, oh, man, I wish this were pre-shift.

So I think a lot of people would not be sorry to see it go. And I wonder whether that's what leads to it being at the top of the list when it comes to rules changes more so than whether it's addressing the real root cause. Because we remember those things as being hits and that they're not hits. As for the bunting thing, I'd be in favor of a rule that anyone that says, just bunt it to third, they should be forced to demonstrate that against a Corbin Burns cutter. Like, okay, just stand in line and you're going to show them how to do it. Show Joey Gallo how to bunt that to third. Right. So before we let you go, a couple things.

I have been feeling for Seiya Suzuki, who has really just arrived at the worst possible time to be posted and to potentially sign with a major league team. And as of last week, he or his agent was still saying that he's completely committed to waiting this out, but bad timing for him. They don't do lockouts in NPB, and now he has had to deal with one before even signing with a major league team.

But assuming a deal is done, he will sign somewhere at some point. And you ran through the exercise recently of where he might help a team and also just how good he might be because opinions really vary there. And I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit just about how much more predictable NPB players or international players in general have gotten projections wise as more and more players have made that jump and you've gotten a bigger sample size does that mean that the error bars on a cross-league comparison like that are smaller than they once were and how confident are you

in what Zip says about Suzuki as opposed to just looking at his really eye-popping stats in Japan or some of the more glowing things that scouts have said. NPB is getting to the point where it's fairly accurate, you know, as projections go, which means horribly inaccurate, but it's a little less horribly inaccurate than, say, Korea. We have a longer history of players coming from Japan to here, players going from the majors here or the minors here to over there, that we do have a pretty

large group of players to look at and a whole bunch of varieties we have stars in japan coming over we have minor leaguers here going over there so we have a a pretty good idea now zips has suzuki kind of near three wins uh like a two to three win player. Given how thin the outfield free agent market is when there is a free agent market, I think that pretty much any team should be very highly interested in him, especially if you believe he can play center because I don't want to see Michael Conforto in center. Actually, I kind of would be curious about seeing Nick Castellanos in center. That would kind of be amusing. Or kyle schwarber in the center that that was more of a a brewster's millions kind of thing with defense but i think that most teams should be interested in him i

when i ran the projections uh teams that include the phillies the brewers uh the mets especially because now that it looks likely there's going to be a DH there are a lot more offensive jobs open in the NL the Red Sox are up there and they're one of the teams that were linked to him heavily in you know the rumor mill but I think that no he's not going to make the same impact that Otani is Otani was a a special player who who who, you know, kind of a once in a generation type of talent. I don't think Suzuki is that guy, but any way you can add a terrific player to a team. I mean, you can't, you can't avoid that. And I do like having, you know, more players from Japan come here. Some of our minor leaguers go over there or major leaguers. I think it, it does foster a more

international game. It's the kind I'd love to see some more regular season games overseas in all sorts of places. So I do think it's good for the sport. And last thing, since we talked to you at the beginning of February, you did a couple posts called, let's sign some hitters and let's sign some pitchers. No one has taken your advice and done that thus far, unless you count minor league deals. But I am allowing a moment for you here to pull up those posts and refresh your memory on what you actually wrote at the time. Yeah, because this is what happens. Meg says, hey, Dan, can you just write about some free agent guys for us, please? And Dan goes, yeah, I'm an easy sort to work with so i'd be happy to do that and

then he gets two columns out of it players can sign somewhere yeah so are there any fits that you have had on your mind since that point that seem either like they would be beneficial for both parties or that would just be fun for you personally that you've been hoping that whenever the transaction freeze thaws, some of these matches between player and team happen. And I don't know what the pace will be, whether we will see a ton of trades happen the second the lockout is lifted and then a bunch of signings following quickly as the market moves in advance of opening day or what it'll even do to the dollars that are being handed out i don't know what it would look like in that period of presumably a few frantic weeks but what are you hoping might happen or thinking that should happen

well what i'm worried might happen from what you said just now i'm worried that like a lot of players will suddenly sign like within hours of it being lifted and then there will be there will be accusations thrown back and forth around baseball of of people talk were you talking to them during the lockout right it just kind of seems like baseball likes to do that that self-immolation quite a bit my favorite one and i'd love to see for for like a number of different reasons i really want to see freddie freeman become a san diego podger why would you do this to atlanta fans it's it's kind of mean but you know you just won a world series so i don't feel too bad about it i'm like oh no you won a world series we know they can afford freeman yeah

given the braves financial position and the fact they didn't blow him away with an offer before last season, you kind of feel like on some mystical level that they should be punished for that a little bit. And on a personal standpoint, since we're talking about things I like, the Padres did not make me look smart this year when they played like the worst team in baseball for the last two months of the season so for them to make me look less dumb they need another bad on that on the on the easy side of the defensive spectrum because their first base situation is is let's be honest it's a mess they don't really have a left fielder i mean we have no more mazzara last i checked really high on their depth chart and left which is not what you want will myers i mean normally someone you look to upgrade but i don't think you will given their position then

they don't have really a dh i think that you can bring in freddie freeman maybe move hosmer to dh and that would be a lot of fun uh and i like fun and you know having baseball games is fun and not looking stupid is fun and so anything that causes all these things to happen i'm for right yeah it would be nice just to be able to talk about players signing somewhere as more than a pure hypothetical. I guess one of your suggested moves has already been denied, right? Because Kwang-Yun Kim, who I think you had going to the Dodgers in a hypothetical contract, he has since pieced out of MLB entirely and gone back to the landers of kbo so hard to blame him oh i'm so sad to see him go because it feels like i forgot to to have his potential met in the u.s

you know there was the covid year last year he had some issues last year and i always think like this is the final year everything works out for him. Everything's going to come up Kim. And then the season's in jeopardy. And it's hard not to blame him going back, given the situation. I'm actually mildly surprised that Suzuki is so determined. But, I mean, it's hard to walk into a league. And the first thing you do in the league when you haven't even signed is you don't play. Right. you do in the league when you haven't even signed is you don't play right yeah you had kershaw to

the rangers which would be fun given their earlier signings but also very strange to see him in any other uniform radon to the twins kikuchi to the giants tapera to the cardinals everyone wondering where will ryan tapera go that's what's been occupying our minds during the walkout. And Granke to the Royals. That would be fun. That would be nice. Yeah, kind of in keeping with their trait of seemingly bringing back Royals legends or not even legends.

And you also had Carlos Correa to the Angels. That would be one way potentially to get the Angels playoff odds above 50%. That might help. That's what it might take. Yeah, I think Art Moreno wants a playoff odds above 50%. That might help. That's what it might take. Yeah, I think Art Moreno wants a playoff structure that's large enough to give the Angels a chance, and they're going to keep trying until there is.

Okay, we still missed it. We need a 2014 playoff. Yes, and he also wants the CBT to be the same in perpetuity, seemingly. But going back to the Royals, I really like the idea. That idea tickled me because i i guess it's i guess it's kind of that writer instinct it's fun to see like the story go full circle back to the beginning you know right check off's picture you you don't send you don't send

granky away in the first act unless you're going to bring him home in the third act yes and you know he they have a young pitching rotation they could use a guy who maybe can eat some innings when he came back uh the first time to Kansas City he was really the the fans were really into it and he was he actually expressed how happy he was about that and as I said I don't think he's the type of player who's going to be obsessed with kind of the symbolic idea of winning a ring cranky's kind of I don't want to say different, but I mean, he's blunter in a way. Like, I loved when he went to the Diamondbacks and said he did it for the money, which no other player does, even when they say, oh, the schools are great here.

Right. Yeah. It had nothing to do with they offered me $50 million more than anyone else. I just like Denver schools. I think that's what Mike Hampton pretty much said, if I recall right. Or maybe it was Nagel. But I digress. It would be fun to see that.

And it's kind of hard to dislike the Royals. I don't think they're the best-run team. But they also ranked very high in the non-douchey category in 2020. Dayton Moore of the Royals, I think he cares more about his minor leaguers and the health of his team from a baseball standpoint than probably most people in baseball do. And it feels like a fun going away present to have Granke back there.

Well, all of those things could come to pass. Conforto to the Phillies, Bryant to the Blue Jays, Schwarber to the Brewers also on your list, but a CBA needs to be agreed to before any of that can happen. Perhaps that will happen soon. In the meantime, you can read Dan at Fangraphs and find him on Twitter where he is quite active, even when MLB is not, at DSimborski.

There's an S before the Z. And before I hit stop here, should I just allow either of you or both of you a minute to stump for fan graphs, which David Eppelman did on the site this week, given that lockouts can be hard on baseball websites and their staffs? Well, I'll give one because Meg's had to do so much of them. So I'll do one. Thanks, Dan. Now, I want to remind our listeners that if you've enjoyed the features we've had at

Fangraphs, you know, projections, prospects, all the various things we do, positional reports, future rankings, we are in a position where our revenues are down. Baseball's lockout does have an effect on on third parties that have based their livings on baseball and if you have the wherewithal to do so we would love if you became members the fangraphs community is great if you noticed it's one of the few sites on the internet where you can actually interact in the comment section and not hate everything about life we should tell you the strength of our community. You all came out for us very well in 2020. Yeah. And we we want to keep bring you

good stuff in in in the season, hopefully to come in the years to come. Yeah, we just, you know, do need a little bit of a boost right now. Yeah. And, you know, as David said, like the situation we're in right now isn't as dire as it was in 2020, in large part because of the membership support that we got from a really great community in 2020. But this is our busy time of year. And when site views are down 44% relative to what we'd expect this time of year, it has a big impact on our revenue and we have a lot of stuff we're really excited about that is coming to the site. We can't talk about it just yet, but we're constantly adding site features and trying to add new voices and everything at

Fangraphs is free to access, but it all takes money to create. So if you're in a spot where you can spare us an ad-free membership, it's really the best way to support the site. And it's the best way to experience the site. You know, if you do anything with our leaderboards or the board or any of the other stuff that's a little more sort of processing intensive, the difference between ad-free and non is really incredible. So we appreciate the sort of rally that we saw yesterday.

And we hope that people will continue to think of us as we wait out the lockout because we're we're ready and raring to go as soon as there is baseball back and you supporting us make sure we'll be there when it is all right i guarantee you i have like 70 articles i'm gonna end up having to write that two-week period oh yeah we're going to be very busy so uh if you want to see me go gray in real time, buy a membership so that you can be around when we can be around, rather, when baseball comes back. All right, pretty persuasive plea, if you ask me. Well, thanks to both of you, and thanks for coming on, Dan.

Thanks for having me, guys. Always fun. Well, I waited as long as I could, but as midnight Monday night approaches on the East Coast, there is still no news. I will hope against hope that there will be happy news by the time you hear this, in which case we will be back in your podcast feed sometime soon. If not, buck up, and we'll be back a little later this week. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going

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