Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1822: Nutting Doing

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Cardinals breaking the post-lockout free-agent signing seal, what the pre-Opening Day market will look like, day-after reflections on the new CBA (including an alternative term for tanking), the benefits and drawbacks of MLB broadcasts on streaming services, how Canadian vaccination policies could affect the Blue Jays, the […]

After the clouds disappear, after the rainbow has gone, I'm left with a song in my ear The melody is lingering on Hello and welcome to episode 1822 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graaff's presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Well, who had Drew Verhagen in the pool of potential first free agents to sign big league

deals post-lockout? I missed that one. He was not my first guess, actually. Yeah, gosh. Two years, $5.5 million. Yeah, to the Cardinals. Yeah. It's fun just to have contract terms to talk about again.

And not minor league contracts. But yeah, not the name I would have expected. Former Tiger and most recently, former Nippon Ham fighter, Drew Verhagen. But maybe that'll break the seal and the floodgates will open. But honestly, I'm sort of surprised and impressed at the league's restraint, team's restraint, players' restraint. As we speak here on Friday afternoon, it's been, what, 17 hours or so since the lockout was lifted? And we've got Drew Verhagen. I kind of was thinking maybe there would be a deluge of deals. So I don't know whether it is that everyone was really honestly abiding by the rules and regulations and not talking to each other during that whole lockout or whether everyone was afraid to go first and out themselves as someone who was doing negotiations that they weren't supposed to be doing.

doing negotiations that they weren't supposed to be doing. So maybe Juverhagen has now given everyone else cover and they can hop on board. But yeah, I'm semi-surprised, I guess, that there weren't at least a bunch of trades, let's say, ready to go because you actually could have talked about trades if you wanted to. Yeah, I think that we've learned a couple of things in the last 17 hours, the first of which might be that both AJ Preller and Jerry DePoto have been locked in coat closets or are perhaps down the bottom of a well. And a well without reception, right? Because- Oh, yeah. They could work in a well. Right. Simply being down the well does not preclude them from being engaged in activity. I think an interesting question for us to contemplate is where in the sequence of phone calls 911 would be for those two guys if they had a deal to get done.

Would it be the first call that they would make or would they conclude some business before they contacted authorities or like Lassie? Was it Lassie that got people out of Wells? Anyway. DePoto has made deals while hospitalized. Yeah, I guess I shouldn't joke about that part. But he has done that. And so if he were healthy in a well, I'm sure he would be working the phones. Right.

Like maybe he went down there to do some sort of minor repairs and got stuck. I'm not envisioning them falling down wells because that would lead to injury and we're not trying to hurt anybody. We're just imagining a scenario where they propelled themselves down in the little bucket. Anyway, it is weird that we haven't gotten a deal. I wonder if they're really concerned about tampering. Although I will say that in the conversations that I have had with ops people, they have been busy doing other stuff. I think that no one wants to put their team in a disadvantageous position

because they're found to have been breaking the rules. But the lack of trades is kind of surprising. You know, even just like a, I don't want to, I'm not trying to denigrate the careers or contributions

of relievers, but like a little reliever amuse-bouche kind of surprised we haven't gotten one of those. Like I'm not expecting either of the Mets to move today or Luis Castillo, although i do kind of expect those guys to be on the move in the next little while here but yeah i wonder what the lockout was like for a's fans and reds fans let's say who as long as the lockout was ongoing they could pretend that their roster was still going

to look the way it does. It's like, well, as long as they never lift the lockout, maybe we won't trade all our good players. And there were rumors even during the lockout about discussions that had gone on. But now one of the top stories on MLB trade rumors is Rangers, Yankees resuming pursuit of athletics. Matt Olson. There must have just been an impending dread for fans of those teams,

more so even than everyone else who was worried baseball might not come back. For those fans, it was like, well, when it does come back, that's going to be nice, but it's also going to be not nice because we might lose a lot of our good players. So mixed bag. Yeah, and if I were one of the players involved, I guess they make their peace with the possibility of having to relocate on a moment's notice at someone else's behest in order to pursue

the careers that they do. I guess that my preference would probably be at least don't make me change states for spring training, right? Let me stay. If I'm one of the mats, if I'm Matt Olsen and I'm picking between the two teams that you just listed, and of course he doesn't really get to say, but I'd be like, well, yeah, Rangers, let's, you know, let's get to know one another because then at least you're like, you're having to drive across the Valley for a couple of weeks potentially, but it gives you a little bit of time undisrupted to anticipate the major

disruption that is coming for you. So yeah, I don't know. Must be very, it's a weird career as we've remarked several times before. We've wondered about the pace of transactions to come in the next few weeks. I know you have wondered particularly as an assigning editor, but also I wonder about the prices and how this will affect the actual contracts signed. Because I think generally there's been some evidence in the past that teams have historically gotten more war per dollar or whatever metric you want to use when free agents sign later

in the offseason. And maybe time pressure starts to build on those free agents because, hey, the season's going to start for those teams regardless. But if the players don't sign somewhere, then the season doesn't start for them. And so once you get antsy and the clock is ticking down and players are about to report to spring training, you say, oh, well, this isn't a deal I wanted, but I'll take it. And so I wonder now, because you have so many free agents still available, and spring training has started, right, just about, and mandatory report dates are in a few days, but it's begun even now. And so I wonder if there's some FOMO that goes on and just some,

hey, opening day is less than a month away. And meanwhile, all these other free agents are out there. Do I just have to take the first offer I get just to get back in uniform and not be bumped by some other free agent at that position? So I wonder, I'm sure this was maybe something that those free agents were talking about during the last few months, and maybe they talked to each other about it. But I do wonder whether there will be some deals signed for Yeah. seeing more sort of pillow contracts from these guys to sit out and kind of retest the market this coming off season when you're another year removed from the pandemic. You have a full and normal revenue year. You don't have the sort of uncertainty of the CBA negotiations clouding things. So I do wonder if we'll see more of that guys who are just like,

let's get a reset and see where we are come the next year. Because we're going to have, it's not just that you'll have the uncertainty behind you. It's not just that you'll have a normal revenue year, but you're also going to have a year where we start to get a sense of like, what does it mean to have some of these new revenue streams at the disposal of teams, right? All of a sudden, you're going to be able to get money from jersey patches, as we discussed yesterday. We have a better idea of what it's going to bring into the league once we have expanded playoffs,

but it's going to take a minute for the economic environment to settle in any number of ways, I would imagine. Well, there will be a lot to discuss in the coming weeks, I'm sure. So any day after CBA thoughts or reflections from you that we missed out on our immediate reaction episode? I'm still feeling the afterglow. I'm still riding high here. Yeah. in the afterglow. I'm still riding high here and just generally in a good mood about the whole thing and averting the worst case scenario. But don't know whether any other thoughts have occurred to you since we last spoke. Let's see. I don't know. I think that we're going to have a lot more to say once we are able to really dig in on the actual text of the thing. I'm trying to think of things that sort of came through in the hours after we recorded.

I know that, and this is, I don't know that this is actually a result of the, well, it has CBA implications, but unvaccinated players aren't going to be able to play in Canada. And under the new CBA, they will not be paid or receive service time for the games that they've missed. So MLB seemingly taking an approach kind of more akin to what the NFL did in an effort to get guys to vaccinate. So that was a late wrinkle that sort of arrived.

Yeah. So when players who have not been vaccinated go to Toronto, they'll just be on the restricted list and will not be able to play. I think the vaccination rules aren't a problem for the current Blue Jays, Shai Davidi said, but it's something that they've been thinking about in their player moves this offseason, as you would think. And he mentioned that the rate at the end of the 2021 postseason was about 88% of all tier one individuals were fully vaccinated at that point. That's not just players, right? That's also the staff, the surrounding staff. But the rates, I'm sure, are quite high at this point as they have continued climbing in the country as a whole.

But you know that there are going to be holdouts and probably some significant holdouts and maybe some holdouts that people would not have known or suspected if they haven't been public about it. So probably throughout the season, as teams go to Toronto, we're just going to get a little trickle of, well, this guy's not making that trip. And we're going to learn a lot about certain players' political beliefs, possibly, which will be a whole lot of fun. But I guess you could say that other than the fact that it is probably making and has probably made it harder for the Blue Jays to sign players or trade for players just because this is a consideration and maybe some players are essentially off limits to them. But besides that, I guess it's a competitive benefit to them that they may face some somewhat shorthanded teams at times. I don't know whether that's something that we would be able to

quantify at the end of the season. I mean, potentially, right? Like if we're able to identify which players were on the restricted list for games in Toronto and thus were not available for those games and prorate the war that those players produced in other games or something, like you could, in theory, come up with some sort of rough estimate of how much did the Boudets benefit from that? I mean, be nice if they didn't benefit at all, because everyone was fully vaccinated, but we're living in the actual world. So this will continue to be a story throughout the season, I suppose. Yeah. So that struck me as something that we hadn't mentioned on the pod. I don't know. I think that I will try to approach my assessment of the

CBA the way that I do draft classes, which is that, like you said yesterday, it takes time to see sort of how these things play out. Sometimes there are unintended consequences of aspects of the deal that maybe today we look at and say, well, that's great. Like that's going to work out well for everyone. Sometimes incentives and loopholes take a while to reveal themselves. Although if anyone's going to find one, it's going to be a major league baseball team. So I don't know that I, I have a lot more. I, I do have sort of an overwhelming sense of relief that we will be able to have a year that is normal. I hope that, you know, in the quiet moments that they have away from reporters that the union feels as if it has accomplished at least some of the goals that it set out to do. Because as you said yesterday,

I think that, you know, when the sport is aligned directionally with the players rather than the owners, we tend to get baseball that we enjoy more which isn't terribly surprising i don't think it's even like a particularly controversial political statement to make so i hope that they feel like they they did what they set out to do at least in part so there's that i can't believe that like our first positional power ranking is gonna run on march 28th. That feels very soon, Ben. Yeah, along those lines of fans' interests aligning with players more closely, I think if there is a disappointment,

and again, my overwhelming feeling is one of relief and pleasure as well, but I guess you could say that one core concern of players and also fans was that there wasn't really a whole lot done to address whatever we're calling it, competitive integrity or tanking, as some people call it. Although I think that's not quite an apt term at this point. As we discussed last time, there is this draft pick lottery, which is something that in theory would dissuade old school tanking or tanking as it exists in other sports, but not so much as it exists in baseball. And I don't know how much of a problem this is because as we have discussed, competitive balance has actually been pretty good relative to other sports leagues in baseball. And so I don't know that it's at the top of my list of league wide problems. Now, like if you're an Orioles fan or if you're a fan of some other terrible team that has not been trying to win for a while, then it's a huge problem for you, I think that there is still a decent amount of competitive balance and parity or

whatever we want to call it, or teams that still have a chance. And now that there are 12 playoff teams, that will be even more true. But if anything, the fact that there are more playoff teams and you don't have to get as good to make the playoffs, the player's concern was that that would lead to less spending. And I don't really want to call it tanking because, again, I don't see it as teams intentionally trying to lose so much as teams just sort of, well, maybe we could call it banking, just like banking the dollars that they're getting without having to compete. And banking kind of captures it also because it turns it into a financial exercise as opposed to a competitive athletic one.

And that, I think, is the issue to the extent that this is an issue. And I don't think there was really anything done to address that. And so that will continue to be an issue. And that seems like something that the owners were pretty eager to protect. I think they like being able to make money without having to spend a lot on player payroll or try to win that much in the current season. And I do make

some distinction between some teams that actually are getting worse in the short term so that they can build back up and actually really be competitive and good in the future, which is not something that everyone has succeeded at, but a lot of teams have had some success with that. But banking, as I'm calling it, I'm workshopping this. I'm not sure that I'm going to stick with that. Yeah, but it needs a noun after it is the problem. Yeah. I get that the rhyming is really tempting, but it means a banking. It needs another noun. We'll work on it.

But if anything, that is maybe exacerbated by just a new wave of national broadcast deals. Right. So we got some news on that front this week. And I alluded to it the other day, the Apple TV Plus streaming deal, but there's also an NBC Sports deal to stream games on Peacock. So the Apple deal is for Friday night games. The NBC deal is what Monday and Wednesday night games that used to be on ESPN. And so the first deal is worth 85 million a year seven years, and the Peacock deal is smaller. It's $30 million a year. But I think this could be part of the problem in the sense that this is more money that's going into teams' coffers, whether or not they actually try to put a competitive product on the field. So I think prior to these agreements, the annual average of the league's national media deals was like 1.84 billion, which gets split evenly among the 30 teams. And now

it's 1.96 billion, so up 26% and basically 2 billion. And just cribbing from Craig Calcaterra's newsletter earlier this week, doing the math, that means that each team now gets $65 million plus a year from national TV deals alone, just national deals, not local broadcast deals, which themselves average around $50 million a year. Not ticket sales, not concession sales, not sponsorships, not merch sales, and not revenue sharing checks from other teams, just the national TV deals. And so you think of how much money that is, like $115 million or something, just as a starting point.

And then there are teams that have payrolls a lot lower than that. So they have other expenses, obviously, other than player payrolls as well. But still, do the math, and maybe the incentive to push your payroll higher is not always there. So I don't think that was addressed in this deal. And that seems like something that hopefully will have to be addressed at some point, although I think it'll just get harder and harder to address as time goes on. Yeah, I think that it's something that requires a more precise assessment of the issue rather than saying like tanking generally. Oh, Ben, I have a terrible suggestion for what you're talking about. Oh no, Ben, it's really bad. I'm going to say it. And then if you're like,

Meg, that's not worth it for us to have to grapple with in the Facebook group. You can just say that and we'll cut it. But you know what? I think that want to call it? It's not tanking. It's nutting. Ooh. Oh, yeah. Because this is the problem, right? We have to, yeah, yeah. Okay. So thank you for laughing. And also, this is the distinction that we're trying to draw. And I think that if philosophically, the idea of sort of down periods bothers you, I think that there are still ways that you can access that annoyance if you want to and be reasonable about it and think about it in a way that's sort of rigorous. But I think that the problem that we're really trying to solve for here is the pirates. to solve for here is the pirates like and and i want to acknowledge and make sure that we continue to do a good job of differentiating between the ownership issue that exists in these teams and like the team personnel issue that exists because sometimes you know as we've discussed a gm

candidate is appealing to an owner because they have a proven track record of doing well with less, right? And they are sort of ideologically aligned on that, or at least they are willing to engage in that in order to be a GM. But I do think that we want to distinguish amongst ourselves between ownership and its goals and the goals of team employees. And, you know, maybe this makes me a softie or maybe this makes me overly sympathetic to friends I have who work on the team side. But I do think that there are a lot of people who are working really, really hard to get a freaking ring.

And those people are often doing so within budget constraints that they would chafe against publicly if it didn't, you know, mean that they wouldn't work in baseball anymore. So I do want us to draw that distinction. But i think that what you're really concerned by ben the thing that you uh worry is destabilizing baseball is nutting this is going to be a field day for no context ew pod the twitter account so michael mattin get your tweets ready. But I like it. You're welcome. I endorse nutting as our preferred term for tanking.

Oh, no. I mean, the nice- There it is. There you go. That's the poll quote for this. And I think that one of the nice things about that particular entendre is that the folks who are overly concerned about swearing, know it passes the first threshold something for them yeah yeah it does it does introduce the possibility of some real strangeness um amongst

your children at school and for that we apologize but uh you know sometimes a joke is just there and it it works and it feels right and you gotta you gotta let it into the world so there you go gotta go for that one all right are you gonna name the episode that we have like a serious do i call this i endorse serious interview you know yeah to share here so maybe not maybe we don't want to we don't want to wet those concepts together perhaps no but uh maybe in the podcast summary at least but i did want to ask like what is your take on fracturing the streaming distribution of mlb because i don't know if this is terrible or whether it's in some senses forward looking like i think one take has basically been this is mlb

and the owners just trying to maximize their short-term revenue at the expense of the growth of the game, right? So they can just splinter up the schedule and have some games here and some games there, and they can maximize the revenue that they get but make discoverability harder, make it harder to find baseball and thus make it harder to create fans. And in the long term, you're kind of cannibalizing your audience in order to make a quick buck. Another perspective is streaming is the future, right? And for now, you have a bunch of broadcast deals with cable providers and cable networks, but will those go away long term? Who knows? Will that money be there? Maybe this is sort of future-proofing MLB or positioning it to get exposure via the ways that people will be consuming content in the future.

And maybe that could reach a different audience, you know, an audience that, say, has Apple TV Plus because it wants to watch Ted Lasso or whatever. Right. And doesn't subscribe to MLB TV. But if it sees an MLB game on a Friday night, might tune in and who knows, get hooked on baseball that way. So maybe you are making it harder for some people to find baseball. Maybe you're making it easier for other people to find baseball. If you're an MLB TV subscriber, I guess it pretty inarguably reduces the value of what you're getting to some extent if those games are blacked out on MLPTV, although not blacked out locally. And with the

Apple deal, at least, it seems like you will be able to access those games for free initially, but I would guess not for long, as long as you have the app or register for an account or however you access it. So I'm of two minds about this. I don't know that it's universally bad. It's certainly not universally good. It would be great, obviously, if MLP were the NFL and you just had every game on networks that everyone had and knew how to find. But you do kind of have to work within the reality

of what MLB is now and how people tend to follow the game, which is locally. And so there are some challenges there. And I know that some other sports leagues have explored other streaming deals of their own. So it's not solely an MLB phenomenon either. Right. Yeah. I'm very much of two minds about it because on the one hand, I think that putting games behind a paywall, another paywall where people are having to choose between which streaming services they pick and they might not be choosing right now on the basis of baseball, that strikes me as tricky. but I also think that having some forward-looking acknowledgement that as more and more folks move towards streaming, we have this sort of looming RSN problem from a revenue perspective is an unfortunate reality that it's probably not bad for us to try to get out ahead of a little bit, right? And so I think it stinks. But also, I think that if we have more avenues whereby some games might not be subject to

blackout, and granted, we're not exactly gaining games in that regard, right? Because these deals that were just signed are replacing what would be existing ESPN coverage. So we're not actually tipping the scales in favor of more access, at least from a blackout perspective. But I mean, at some point, it's going to be a problem that a lot of our revenue in the sport is dependent on carriage fees that are at least going to have to decline based on the amount of cord cutting we're going to experience in the next however many years. So I don't know, it does feel like there should be a solution there that is meaningful and sort of forward looking to try to prevent that bubble from bursting, or at least minimizing the impact of that bubble bursting. We can't have an NFL model because it's

just so many games. But I don't know, maybe the future of baseball broadcasting looks like a really kind of expensive and souped up MLB TV. I don't know. Yeah. And I know that there have been some discussions about more streaming within local markets so that you would have a workaround for blackouts potentially. And there are some places where you can do that. If you're a cable subscriber already, you can also stream. But yeah, it's all in flux. And so I have some sympathy in that they're trying to navigate this changing media and

broadcast market. And I just hope it ends up with baseball being in front of as many eyeballs as possible. I don't know that I have a ton of faith that that's what will happen. But there are definitely some challenges, not just because of the ways that people are finding these things changing, but also just because of the way that people watch baseball as opposed to some other sports. And you can't really pretend that that's not the case. It'd be nice if you could make everyone interested in every team at all times. But that's not the case. It'd be nice if you could make everyone interested in every team at all times, but that's not the reality. So you do kind of have to meet people where they are and how their fandom works. So just wanted to mention that. And also wanted to mention, I played Wardle this morning. I don't know whether you're going to be a Wardle person. I'm probably not going to be

a, I'm not a Wordle tweets in addition to Wordle tweets. So Wordle is from Jeremy Frank at MLB Random Stats on Twitter, and he's been at Baseball Reference. And it is an MLB variant of Wordle. There are a zillion variants of Wordle. And so I've been waiting for a baseball one. I kind of hoped that there would be a statistical component to it, which there isn't currently, despite the name having war in it. This is just a player guessing game. And there are player guessing games for other sports out there as well. But the way that it works is you just have to guess a player name, and probably people will figure out the optimal first name to guess. But there are a bunch of different categories,

team, league, division, handedness for batting, handedness for throwing, country of birth, year of birth, and position. And you get eight guesses. And similar to Wordle, there's a color coded scheme here where if you get one of the categories right, then it's green. If you are close on a couple of the categories, then it's yellow, and you just have to narrow it down and hopefully do it within eight guesses. And it's not easy. I was able to do the first one successfully. I will not spoil it, but it is not easy. And obviously, there are only so many MLB players out there. There are fewer MLB players than there are words. So that's nice, I guess.

But it's still tough. And it challenges my face blindness, butt forehandedness kind of thing. And it's difficult even for someone like me. So I imagine a lot of our listeners will be playing and enjoying it. But I'm just not a word game guy for whatever reason. I'm a video game guy, just not really a trivia person, not a word game guy. You'd think I would be. I enjoy words.

I care about words, but not so much word games for whatever reason. So don't think I'll be a regular Wordle guy and I will not be broadcasting my Wordle results, but I'm sure that many people will. And it fills a niche need in the market. I'm sure that there were people out there who were hoping for a Wordle for baseball. But yeah, I kind of wanted, like, I don't know what the stat version of this would be. And it would probably be an even more niche product if you brought advanced stats into it. But that would make it a little more fun to me. Although it's tough. You know, even when I narrowed down a date of birth, it was like, is this guy 30 or is he like

28 or 29 or 31? Like it's hard even if you have the ballpark, so to speak. It's tough to pin down the specifics. Yeah, I don't know why I don't. It doesn't resonate with me. Like people are probably thinking, but Meg, your puns. Like surely you like these. But I think part of it is that I'm a bad speller. Like I'm a, this is a fun fact about me, like probably a surprisingly bad speller, both in terms of what my job is and also how much I read.

But I'm just I've never been a good speller. And so I think part of it is anticipated frustration with an ability to get stuff right, if only for being able to spell. So there's that part of it. I don't know. I just have a couple too many things going on, I guess, which I don't say like people who play word alone. I don't have anything going on. But it's just hasn't it hasn't spoken to me. I haven't felt moved.

But if you like it, then I'm happy for you. I'm happy you're all happy. And if Wordle isn't your thing, maybe weather splits at FanCrafts. Yeah. Are you all just pandering to Mike Trout now? Is that what this is? Gosh, I didn't even think of that. But yes, yes, we are.

We want, you know, like Mike had one good day and we didn't want to stop there. So we thought, you know, now that the CBA is resolved and he might turn his attention to other things, perhaps that will also include weather. I don't know if I will end up using this all that much. Yes, it's cool. I can imagine interesting applications of this. It's not information that's easy to obtain otherwise. I mean, you can now, since 2010, you can look at splits by temperature and barometric pressure and air density and wind direction and wind speed. pressure and air density and wind direction and wind speed. And it's like actually granular, like down to the hour instead of just the starting figures at the beginning of the game.

So this is impressive. And I'm sure that there will be interesting analytical applications of this. Although I think it's playing into the stat head stereotype of trivial splits. When people think of stat heads in baseball, the stereotype is like, here's what this guy did in night games on Wednesdays, when the weather was this or whatever, and now we can actually get closer to that. Whereas that is trivia, maybe. That is fun facts, potentially. That's not sabermetrics. Whereas that is trivia, maybe. That is fun facts, potentially. That's not sabermetrics. That's not analysis necessarily. But this can be both. I think you could find trivia and you could also do analysis. But yes, I think those are the two possible

ramifications of this is that Mike Trout may spend a lot more time browsing Fangrass.com, even aside from the war leaderboards where he is typically at the top. And this may reinforce people's sense that baseball nerds only care about slicing and dicing into ever smaller slivers of production. Well, I am given to understand, Ben. the things that I'm given to understand is that if you are a daily fantasy player, that this is perhaps relevant to you in some sort of meaningful way. And so, you know, if that is true for you- Or perhaps a close cousin of daily fantasy sports betting. I don't acknowledge that use case as one that we are catering to although i suppose i have to um acknowledge that it might be important for some perhaps but yes uh i think that i'm given to

understand that this would be useful information for those who play daily fantasy and so there it is for you if you find other interesting research applications, I hope that you will write about them so that we might all benefit. But yeah, I don't know. We just would like, we want you to be able to find any data that you might find interesting for your, your, uh, your uses as a, as a fan or a researcher at Fangraphs. And there's, there's sort of more to come on that score, but if you will allow me to make a slightly less urgent but still appreciative membership plea, this is the kind of stuff that your membership money goes towards. So help us build better fan graphs, including with weather data, if that's your yen.

Last thing we should say, because I know people have been wondering about season previews team previews oh yeah so a little psa here we have discussed and we have considered some feedback and also the realities of the calendar yeah and we are not going to and really cannot do what we usually do which is 15 full team preview episodes where we talk about two teams per podcast. There's just not enough time to do that. Opening day is in less than four weeks. And that series typically takes us, what, at least six, if not more.

And that's with some non preview episodes mixed in. So is there a way that we could potentially cram it in where we just do nothing else for the next month and do some extra episodes or something? I guess like in theory, we could do that. But a we don't really want to. And also, it would be difficult. It's hard enough to schedule that series as it is because, you know, we try to talk to people who cover those teams and they're always on the move and they are covering those teams and they're at spring training. And so it can be tough from a scheduling perspective. And so to do three or more of those per week with six guests would be very difficult. And beyond that, it's just going to be a really busy few weeks regardless. I mean, there's going to be a ton of news, right? We're going to have a lot of signings to discuss. And so I think in the interest of just not making it impossible from a logistical standpoint and

not ending up with three-hour episodes because we have so many signings to discuss in addition to previews and who knows what else, we're to scale it back we're still gonna do some previewing oh yeah we we haven't decided exactly on the form but we will probably do some sort of divisional format i think yeah probably so we'll still have episodes and i don't know how we'll handle the guests or the experts for those things but we will definitely do team preview content it will just not be the comprehensive exhaustive series that we generally do and we know that some people love those episodes some people totally tune out of those episodes so your mileage may vary on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but we hope that people will understand just uh hey

there was a lockout. It's strange circumstances. It's a weird year. Nothing else was normal. And so the Effectively Wild season preview series will not be entirely normal either, but we will still do what we can. Yeah. And unless we get a planet-altering pandemic or another unanticipated somehow major labor dispute like we will be back to our normal approach next year i'm trying not to be seduced by the idea of normalcy ben

because it feels like well a miss sort of misdiagnosis of our current moment and also setting myself up to be just horribly disappointed by global events later but you know like we appreciate people being flexible with us this year and we look forward to having more sort of normal grist for the mill in addition to the the other grist for the mill here so i don't know we'll figure it out in the next little bit i don't think any no one will feel neglected except for apparently because we are contractually obligated Reds fans. Right. Yeah.

And one downside is that a lot of people, it seems like anecdotally, do find Effectively Wild through the team preview series. And, you know, they enter through a team-centric preview pod and then suddenly we're talking about like, what would happen if you did this weird rule change? We're talking about nutting, Ben. We're talking about like what would happen if you did this weird we're talking about nutting ben we're talking about nutting so the team preview series is like not really reflective of what effectively wild is like right for the vast majority of the year so probably some people who find the podcast through that are like well this is not what i thought it was going to be right but but it seems like a number of people do find it and stick around. And so, you know, just having all of those guests in all of those different markets come on the show and promote their appearances then leads to people finding it who wouldn't otherwise. So maybe we're missing out on a little of that.

So you'll just have to help us compensate, I guess, by telling your friends about the podcast you enjoy, Effectively Wild. I guess, by telling your friends about the podcast you enjoy, Effectively Wild. So we'll get that started, I don't know, in a couple of weeks or we'll talk about it. We'll see how much there is to discuss transaction-wise. Another reason, by the way, that we didn't start this, say, earlier. I mean, one option is that we could have just started team previews before the lockout was lifted. But A, we didn't know for sure if or when the lockout would be lifted. And also just so many teams are incomplete relative to where they are typically at this stage. So we figured, well, why do a preview for this team that is then going to make a bunch of major moves? And there are some teams

that are done probably for all intents and purposes. So we could have maybe front loaded those. But, you know, things are just going to be changing. And, you know, to press people on what's your win total prediction for this team? And then that team signs Carlos Correa the next day. I mean, yeah. Felt silly. Not that there's all that much utility to team win total predictions in a usual year. But anyway, that's an update for you all.

And just perhaps to put an exclamation point on the point, Jerry DiPoto on Seattle Radio, I woke up this morning ready to transact. Wow, what a quote. He can only ever be himself, you know? I mean, we can all only ever be ourselves, but you know what? Jerry? Still Jerry.

So there you go. Yeah. I don't know that the Mariners have as many moves to make as some teams do or whether they will make as many, but you know that he has to be just itching to put the trigger on some transactions. This must have been hard for him. So we'll see. Oh, yeah. We recorded this interview on Thursday, but I don't think that will actually affect any of the content because nothing has changed as regards this specific issue. But earlier this week, it became a major sticking point, point of contention, and really occupied a central role for a day or so there. So there, the push and pull about the international draft, which the league wants and the players don't want, and they have agreed to table those discussions.

Not table, but extend those discussions. There is a new deadline, which I'm sure is just ironclad and could never move under any circumstances. But July 25th is the new deadline. But July 25th is the new deadline. And the thing is that MLB has tied the issue of the international draft, as we talked about last time, to the issue of the qualifying offers and free agent compensation. And so the players obviously would like qualifying offers to be removed. The league would like the international draft to be imposed. So it's kind of a tit for tat. And if they are able to agree on that, then there will be an international draft imposed maybe a few years down the road and qualifying offers will be dropped. And if they don't agree, then status quo, right? They may just decide, well, we will stick with no international draft and continue with qualifying offer systems. So we don't know how that will work out, but it's like almost too complex a subject to cover in a single podcast segment. So consider this an overview more so than a comprehensive chronicle of the issues at stake. It is important, even though it didn't end up sabotaging the CBA.

It's still a matter that is really important to a lot of players and also to the future of the sport. So we wanted to have Maria on to tell us a little bit about it. And one thing I should say, I was kind of heartened, I guess, that the players held the line on that as opposed to just using it as a chip. the players held the line on that as opposed to just using it as a chip because in the past you know there have been times when the union has either not been diligent about representing the interests of people who are not actually in the bargaining unit or has kind of actively traded yeah traded their welfare for things that they wanted, which, you know, I mean, I guess they have an obligation to represent their own members. So I get how it works, but it's been unfortunate. And I think it's good that in this case, enough of the major league players, particularly the players from Latin countries who in many cases came up through the international free agent system,

they communicated that, no, this is actually really important to us, even though it no longer affects us personally in that we would not be subject to this draft. We care enough about our countries and our countrymen, et cetera, that we do not just want to totally sell them out here to get rid of the qualifying offer compensation for free agents. So I think that is good. And I will also say that there has been some confusion about why this even is a matter subject to bargaining. This doesn't come up on the interview because it's a subject that we were all a bit hazy

about when we were talking. But since then, I have tried to enlighten myself, by which I mean mostly that I have talked to Dan Zimborski about it, and Dan has consulted the labor lawyer Eugene Friedman about it. So there might be a bit of telephone happening here, but this is my understanding. Basically, in collective bargaining, you have mandatory subjects that have a duty to be bargained and permissive subjects that don't have a duty to be bargained but can be bargained over if both sides agree. And negotiations that involve people who are not part of the bargaining unit are permissive subjects. And everyone other than major league players is not part of the MLBPA bargaining unit. They're not in the union because they're not in the majors.

So international amateur players who would be subject to the international draft and who are currently subject to international free agency, they're not part of the union. They're not part of the bargaining unit. And so you might say, well, why is the union negotiating over what happens to them then? However, the MLBPA can say that they have authority to discuss that subject because those players are entering the bargaining unit. They will be in the bargaining unit at some point. That's what happens in the NBA and the NFL, I think. But obviously in those sports and those leagues, players go directly from the draft to the majors essentially very often. Whereas you're not typically going to get an international free agent, at least an international amateur free

agent who is going from that to the big leagues without passing go, go being maybe several seasons in the minor leagues. But they could say that some of those players would very quickly join the unit, and so the terms need to be discussed. Now, MLB could try to just impose an international draft and say, hey, this is not a mandatory subject. You have no say here. We're just going to do it. And they could dare the union to strike over it. And according to Eugene and other labor lawyers that Dan has talked to, the MLBPA would likely lose a dispute over that with the National Labor Relations Board. However, there is still some value for the league in negotiating over this rather than just issuing a proclamation.

For one thing, because it would lead to a lot of bad blood because there are many members of the union who do care deeply about this issue. And so it would ruffle feathers to say the least if MLB just unilaterally said this is what we're doing. Also, there's the potential for nuisance and legal fees because if MLB did strike over it and there were a dispute, even if MLB ended up winning that dispute, it could be a hassle. And there's some slight possibility, I suppose, that they could lose the dispute, that the court could say that, no, this actually is a mandatory subject that you're supposed to have bargained over, in which case MLB could be found at fault and could be subject to

back wages and other penalties. So essentially, they may have the option available to them of just saying, we have an international draft now, but it's easier if they can come to an agreement and they would prefer to do it that way. However, there's a limit to the incentives for them and the amount that they're motivated to give up to get it because there's some possibility that they could get it without giving up anything concrete in the long term. And there's some precedent for this because obviously the amateur draft, the domestic amateur draft, has been somewhat subject to bargaining. Like that was part of the CBA too, that the draft is going to be 20 rounds now. And you might say, well,

domestic amateurs are not part of the union either. But the union has historically had some say in how the draft works. Partly though, because there is a more direct relationship between the draft and the pay of unit members in that you have the qualifying offer system you have draft pick compensation so how the draft works actually does have some bearing on how mlb players are paid and that may be one reason why the owners are willing to give up the qualifying offer system because if you take that away then the union has a shakier case to have any say over how the draft works. But it's kind of a gray area. It's kind of complicated. Once you start extending into

areas that do not actually cover bargaining unit members, I mean, you could say, well, why doesn't the union make us think about minor league pay or working conditions? Because some minor leaguers are closer to being bargaining unit members than international amateur free agents are, and they haven't really been motivated to make that a priority, and they probably don't have the legal standing to actually do it if they wanted to. But that's the impression, the loose understanding I have formed about why the international draft is actually a matter that has been discussed in CBA negotiations. Don't take it as gospel necessarily. We might need to get a labor lawyer on here or consult one at some point. And maybe you are one listening to this one and feel free to fill us in if that's the case. But I

figured other people might have that question too. Yeah. All right. So we will be back in just a moment with Maria. in the silent lonely plea When they march them off the prison They will go for you and me Shame, disgrace, and all dishonor Wrongly placed upon their heads Who will not rob them of the courage Which betrays the innocent Well, we are joined now by Maria Torres, who is a staff writer for The Athletic.

She covers prospects and she covers the international market. She wrote a great feature along with Ken Rosenthal on the international draft, the benefits and drawbacks back in January. And I'm guessing that piece has gotten a lot of traffic this week. We are having her on here to school us on this pretty complex subject. So Maria, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. So I'd be interested in what you've heard about how these negotiations have happened when it concerns this specific subject, because we know that for now, the union and the league have agreed

to disagree and continue negotiating for a few months about the international draft. But I think a lot of fans maybe were somewhat surprised that this became such a contentious topic this week. But it's been part of the negotiations all along and in previous rounds of the CBA, right? And I saw some people express the sentiment that, oh, well, they can't let this hold up the deal. And I guess they did ultimately come to that conclusion and say, well, we'll figure out later. But this is a very important topic. It's very important to the league. It's very important to a lot of players. It's very important to the future of the sport. And there was a difference of opinion or at least a difference of statements about who offered what,

when, and when exactly this came up. And so I wonder what you have concluded about how this kind of came to a head this week and when it was really introduced. Based on the comments that were made Wednesday night on Twitter, it seems like MLB backed out of wanting to include an international draft in the proposal in some time in the last few months, like before these negotiations really took off at the end of February. And what it seems like there is that players decided, well, we're just not going to include anything related to the international draft in our own proposals. And we're just going to take a vote and the vote is no. As you've mentioned already, international draft has been talked about for a long, long time. And it's not just as of yesterday.

It's not just as of Saturday. I think the first proposal introduced in this round of negotiations was submitted on Saturday that included the international draft. And it seems a little disingenuous to me to say that there was no inkling that an international draft proposal was coming because it was part of negotiations in 2016 and it was a very contentious issue in 2016 as well. And things have only gotten worse in the international market since then, and players weren't happy with the hard cap that was placed at the CBA. So naturally, something was going to come of that. Yeah, maybe before we get into the specifics of MLB's proposal here and how those proposals are sort of being received in different parts of the

playing population, we can take a step back and make reference to some of those issues that have emerged since the hard capping system has been introduced. I know that asking you to explain all of the abuses and complications that take place in the international amateur market is probably a podcast in and of itself. But for our listeners who are perhaps less familiar with some of the issues there, can you lay out sort of a broad outline of the state of affairs in international amateur signings as they stand now? Absolutely. The international market didn't used to be capped. There was a soft cap that was introduced in the CBA before the 2017-21 CBA. And the teams didn't really care that there was a cap.

They just overspent anyhow, which is why you got those deals like the Moncada deal and the Luis Robert deal. Those are really big numbers for international free agents that you just didn't see after the 2017 CBA was implemented. Because that CBA made it so that teams had a hard bonus pool that they had to abide by. And they could trade for some additional space, but that's pretty much what you got. So because for five years teams knew exactly how much money they were going to have available to them in the international market, they figured they could get ahead on their competition by just starting to scout players younger and younger. So generally speaking, players are not allowed to sign or commit to signing to teams until

they're 16 or about to turn 16. I think it's actually 16, to be fair. But at that point, if a team is waiting to sign a player when he turns 16 or to get a verbal agreement with a player at 16, he's already behind because there's however many other teams that have already seen this guy and already probably put in an offer on him for multiple years. So teams just started to like scout earlier and earlier. And it got to the point where there were handshake improvements made, verbal commitments made, where even 12 and 13 year olds were just

moved off the market because an MLB team saw a 12 year old and was like, this kid could probably be pretty good by that time he's 16. Let's put a number out there. Let's offer him a million dollars. So once that kid gets the million dollar offer and he and his group decide to accept that offer, they just come off of the international market. So they no longer are showcasing their talents to other teams. They aren't working out with other teams. They have committed themselves to X team, and that's the team they're going to sign with when they turn 16 four years later. I mean, besides the fact that that's kind of disgusting in itself, like there's also the fact that, you know, if the kid gets to the point he's almost about to sign, he's turned 16, and he was offered a million dollars. In those four years, like he's probably made a lot of strides in his development.

He probably is worth more than a million dollars. he's probably made a lot of strides in his development. He probably is worth more than a million dollars. But there's also the possibility that the team that saw him at 12 and was like, here, we'll give you a million, that they have seen somebody else in the interim and decided they're going to use part of his bonus and give it to someone else. And that leaves the kid in a bind because by that point, he's already probably been come after by loan sharks in his native country who have said hey we'll give you this million dollars now

and then the kids has no leverage he also hasn't been seen by another team so he has no choice but to take the discounted bonus and then he's in a lurch because he's already probably spent most of the million dollars by then because the reason these kids, a lot of them are pursuing baseball is because it's the only way for them to give it out of poverty. The countries that are for the most part governed by the international free agent market are really poor countries. And particularly in the Dominican Republic, where I feel like I have a little bit more of a sense of how things happen there, that's a really big chunk of the players who are signing every year. A lot of those players are very poor. And they're just being exploited by the time they're 12, because teams decided

they were going to start to scout younger and younger. Yeah. And just about everyone seemingly agrees that the current system is pretty broken, even people who oppose the idea of a draft. But where does the blame lie? And maybe it lies in multiple areas. Is it that MLB is not enforcing rules that are on the books? Is it that those rules just have never been on the books? Is it that the system is just unmanageable in some ways that would make it tough to enforce, even if there were the right rules and regulations. As you just suggested, it's very complicated to determine where the blame goes. Yeah. teams can also like acknowledge that they've had a very big role in in all of this because trainers that trainers being the amateur trainers who develop the young players that are signing

internationally they don't have that much they don't have as much leverage as the teams do they don't have they have the player but they don't have the money so like the teams are the ones who are forcing trainers to kind of adhere to their demands so a trainer is not going to say to a team like oh we're going to take back we not going to say to a team like, oh, we're going to take back. We're going to like renege on this agreement that you made with X kid because he's getting more money from a different team. Like trainers can't do that because then they lose, they lose everything. They lose all their credibility in the market. So really it's a combination of like teams, like forcing the hands of the amateurs in the foreign countries. It's

also a combination of the fact that major League Baseball hasn't really done anything to clean anything up. You know, they've done, they've implemented things like more like intense, like steroid testing. They implemented the trainer partnership program. And that was intended to make sure that, intended to put as many amateur trainers in a program that would allow MLB to have direct communication with the people who are in charge of developing amateur talent abroad. And that comes with a whole other aspect. But MLB, besides those kind of things, they haven't really cracked down on anything. And MLB will say that the reason they haven't been able to pursue action against people who have done

things wrongly is because they can't they don't actually have literal evidence that they can use but a lot because a lot of it is allegedly hearsay so it's a combination i think and i think it's a combination of the people that are in power which always feels like such a sort of weak retort to the question of why aren't you enforcing your own rules? Because it's not like any of this is particularly secret, right? Like if you go on the Instagram accounts of some of these kids who have handshake deals that have been reported by the league's own prospect outlet, like they're wearing gear from the team that they're going to be signing for in two years, right? They're not hiding it particularly well. So it always strikes me as sort of a weak retort and lends some credibility to the

idea that they are letting it to some extent degrade to this point so that they have an argument for a draft because it's not a secret right now. Exactly. I mean, there was an international or at least a former international scouting director who told me that there was one point who where he had gone into an academy had a handshake deal done with a very high prospect. And by the time he had walked out of that academy within 30 minutes, like everyone knew everyone being like, you know, people like in the know, right? But like there were a lot of people who knew that this kid was now off the market. So do the players deserve some of the blame for conceding the hard cap system in the previous round of negotiations? Is that a decision that maybe they would want

back or that they didn't consider enough at the time, the fact that that might exacerbate some of these issues? I don't know whether or not I can say that the players deserve the blame for conceding that, but I can say that they definitely regret that being in there. I spoke to Juan Soto a little bit about the international draft at the end of this previous season just to get his perspective on it. He came from the previous system, the one before the 17 CBA, where there was no cap, really. It was just that soft cap. And he remembers really not hitting the showcase scene until he was like late 14, almost 15, which is unheard of now.

Because if you're not entering the prospects showcase scene until you're 14, you're way behind as a player. So he expressed that he just wished things would 14, you're way behind as a player. So he just, he expressed that he just wished things would go back to the way it used to be. So there was just a soft cap, if anything at all. Can you talk a little bit more about the perspective of the contingent of the player base now that is opposed to the implementation of an international draft? Because we've heard in recent days from active players like Fernando Tatis Jr. and retired players like David Ortiz expressing concern either with the implementation of a draft at all or the implementation of one immediately, right? I think a lot of what Ortiz seemed to be saying was that this is going to take time to develop the infrastructure necessary to do it

in a way that doesn't introduce its own host of issues. So what's the current consensus among the union membership around the idea of a draft? What it sounds like right now is that players are against any form of draft, which they should be. I mean, in terms of labor, like, yeah, they should not be for a draft at all. I think the bigger concern is just they're afraid that there will be even less opportunity for Latin American players to become professional baseball players. Because when you look at the numbers, a 600-pick draft plus undrafted free agents plus whatever compensatory rounds there are, whatever like compensatory rounds there are like that probably wouldn't be I mean they might not it might be hard to to make up the same numbers that you would have seen in like 2019 before COVID in terms of players signing every year I don't know off the top of my head exactly how

many players signed in the 2019-20 signing period but I imagine it's much higher than 600 or maybe not much higher but at least higher than 600. So that plus the minor league teams falling off the map now with many fewer rosters than it used to exist, it's kind of hard for them to probably balance, like, okay, how would we get a draft? If we have a draft, where are these players going to go when they're signed? Major League Baseball says that they'll still allow two rosters per team in the Dominican Summer League, which is where a lot of the international prospects go when they first sign. But after the DSL, there's still fewer opportunities, there's still less opportunity in the United States. So I think that's, I think their biggest concern is just not having opportunity for as many young players as there is right now. Yeah, you note in your article with Ken that more than a fifth of the MLB playing population is players from Latin America, that it's more than that in the minors. I was going to ask, because the MLBPA executive committee demographics are not quite that way, right? I think all eight players there are American and came through the

domestic amateur draft system. So one might think, well, can they really represent the interest? Can they speak to this from a personal perspective? But it sounds as if the players who care the most about this are making their opinions heard and that those voices are being heeded to a great extent. I mean, I guess none of us knows exactly the inner workings of the union, but it sounds like even if those players are not directly represented necessarily on the subcommittee, their interests are probably being represented pretty well from what we can tell. I wouldn't say that their interests are being represented all that well. I still think that there's, I mean, it just seems to me like there has to be more. And I think that there's not enough representation on that executive subcommittee to properly gauge.

I mean, it's a lot of people. And granted, it's a fraternity, right? Like, you know, all the baseball players know all baseball players, essentially, especially if you're from the same town in the Dominican Republic. Like, you're going to know and that information can probably be spread to the right place. But at the same time, I am not 100% sure that everyone's opinion is being heard on this topic, which I think is maybe why they're very insistent on at least elongating the deadline on it. And one of those eight is Francisco Lindor, who's from Puerto Rico, and he put out a statement on Thursday where he said the issue is bigger than just Latin players

or amateur players. It's about all players and about the future of the game. We need to get it right. And he might at least be pretty familiar with the after effects of imposing a draft. And that's something that you hear a lot. People will decry the effect that the draft has had on the Puerto Rican baseball community. So I wonder what you've learned about that or whether you think that would potentially apply if an international draft were imposed in other countries. thing to keep in mind when it comes to Puerto Rico being folded into the domestic draft is that Puerto Rico's infrastructure for developing amateur talent at that time was nowhere near where it is now in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. I'm not saying that the infrastructure that's in place now in those countries doesn't need to be bolstered to make sure that an international draft is successful, but I do think they're in a much better spot just based on my conversations with trainers

in the Dominican Republic who have heard the same criticisms from trainers who are opposed to the draft. Generally speaking, like a majority of trainers involved who are affected by the international draft are for it because of all the corruption that's in place. Their systems are really, there's not a lot more that they can do

to bring their systems up to speed, that is. Like, they've already got, a lot of them have their own stadiums that they work at. A lot of them even might have their own facilities that they can use because they've built it and have earned enough money to kind of put aside their own place to work. The instruction that goes on there, there are trainers who have like former baseball players, former professional baseball players on their staff that are helping these kids learn the skills that they need to become successful, at least in the minor leagues. So one thing that Puerto Rico was kind of slow to get up to speed

on the infrastructure, that's coming from like someone who was involved in Puerto Rican amateur baseball in the 90s who did a lot of work to kind of bring in that wave of Puerto Rican baseball academies that you see now. It just took them some time to kind of figure it out. But to a pretty large extent, the infrastructure is pretty figured out in Venezuela and the Dominican. Venezuela and the Dominican. So let's spend some time now breaking down at least what the most recent proposal is, obviously, with the decision to sort of delay an implementation decision until July. This could change pretty dramatically between now and then, and we'll just have to have you back on when the time comes to lay out where we land. But what was the most, the contours of the most recent proposal, both in terms of how many rounds, the bonuses that would apply, amateur eligibility. Take us through what the league has proposed.

The league has proposed a draft with 20 rounds, about 600 picks, and we know the possibility for more depending on how many rounds they add. The top slot at this moment would earn $5.5 million. And these slots are like hard slots. So the idea is there's no negotiating up or down like you can see in the domestic draft. So the top player out of Latin America in that year, when that first year would make $5.5 million. And in terms of how that compares to the domestic draft, I think if I remember correctly, it's a seventh pick. The seventh pick of the 2021 domestic draft was slotted for that much money. And automatically that kind of raises a red flag because you're saying,

okay, the top pick out of Latin America isn't worth the same as even the seventh pick in the domestic draft. But there are a lot of other things that go into play. Besides that, there's slots all the way down to the 600 range. I think the 20 round draft would feature slots totaling about $181 million. And that's about a $23 million increase in international spending compared to the 164, sorry, 166 that was spent internationally in 2021. This is all by like MLB calculations. So MLB also calculates there would be an additional 9 million spent on undrafted free agents who would sign for no more than $20,000. And those undrafted free agents would not count

toward a team's like international pool. The bottom 100 slots in an international draft would be allocated about $3 million for an average about $30,000 per pick. And according to MLB, the average spent on all bonuses for the bottom 100 players in the 19, 20, and 2021 signing periods was $1.78 million. 20 and 2021 signing periods was 1.78 million dollars so mlb is contending essentially that there will be more money available to players through a draft system than through the current like signing system in place yeah which when you hear that you have to be somewhat skeptical because generally it doesn't seem as if mlb or any business management, I assume, would push for something that would cost them more money or lead to the players getting more money. So that certainly raises an eyebrow. So I guess one question is, do you buy that? But then another question is, do you think this is mostly about money, entirely about money, or is it very largely for both sides about actually

improving the current system? Man, I wish I could answer that last question. I think everybody wants to see a better system in place from the trainers to the players and the league, of course, but I don't know if it's all about money either because, I mean, the trainers definitely want to see more money go to their players because that's better for their pockets too. But in the end, everybody being on the labor side, not so much necessarily on the league side, I think it's really just about opportunity.

And I just find it – I just wonder how incentivized teams will be to spend $9 million on undrafted free agents. Right. If they're not, if they're able, I mean, they're essentially able to do that now. So you're still seeing a lot of people left out in the cold. And one thing that trainers are really concerned about is that they're seeing a lot of players, once they turn 17, they don't even have a chance, especially if they're a position player. I mean, teams like do give a little bit more leeway or i guess runway to pitchers and catchers but when it comes

to other position players like if you're 17 and you haven't gotten and you haven't even been offered anything like the most you're probably going to sign for is like ten thousand dollars and that to trainers is demoralizing because it kind of forces them to either really like expedite the kids development in some way which you know that forces them to either really like expedite the kid's development in some way, which, you know, that that leads to a whole other like murky issue of PEDs. Or they just have to give up on a 17 year old kid who by this point has pretty much like not completed his high school education. I mean, hardly even completed his middle school education and just spent all his childhood on baseball and then just turned him back out into society where how is he going to be productive?

How is he going to help his family? That's what trainers don't like. And they're hopeful that in a new system, if it is an international draft, then their 17-year-old, 18-year-old players will get a chance to be drafted, you know, if they're not drafted at 16. And if they're not, then at least they'll get up to 20,000 as an undrafted free agent. Where do you think the rubber is going to have to meet the road in terms of a draft versus the kids and trainers who already have handshake deals with

teams? Because especially with the way that the pandemic altered the signing periods, right, and shifted everything back back we have a good idea of who is set to sign in the 2023 signing period and even a number of the 2024 kids so what happens in the interim to the players who you know had an assumption that they were going to become a cub or a yankee or whatever and now are sort of in limbo between a deal they put a handshake deal to and a potential spot in this draft? I have really no idea. They can't wait much longer to implement the draft because then you just continue the same

cycle. At the same time, the kids who have had who have had fanchic deals for 2024 like i mentioned earlier they probably got that money already somewhere like and then what do they do i just don't know i don't know what comes after if they do agree to international draft what comes after that how will a league clean up that mess i have no possible I just have no idea. Yeah, that's kind of the theme of all of these negotiations for all of us. We just have no idea. But I guess, you know, I can see the case for the draft, given that if you've already conceded the hard caps, then maybe you're most of the way there in some respects, and you've exacerbated some of the issues and the status quo is so bad in many

ways that maybe it would be the fastest way to fix it. Is the union or do people who oppose the draft but still want to see reform, do they have concrete workable ideas for here's how we can get the benefits of a draft without the drawbacks? And do you think that they're actually feasible? Or is it like, well, yes, in an ideal world, here's what you do, but MLB isn't going to do that. And so the only way to actually improve things is to settle for not the perfect system, but something in between. It's kind of like you just said the ideal solution is mlb enforces its own rules and they have for five years not enforced those rules so the likelihood of them doing that is pretty slim so really all they can do now is find a different solution and it's it's

obviously it's unfair because you didn't really see what the system should have been like if rules had been actually enforced. you think things will stand on July 25th. But I guess there's always the possibility of just kicking the can down the road a little bit farther, right? Deadlines are fluid. We have learned that. We have absolutely learned that multiple times per day, seemingly. But do you think there will be a resolution to this sometime this year, let's say? I mean, is it close enough to say that that could happen? And of course, you know, in a lot of these cases, we're talking about, well, you might agree on it now, and then you might have a few years to actually implement it, which maybe makes it a little easier. But I don't know, do you get the sense that this is close to resolution? I'm going to say, let's just go out on a limb.

I'm going to say there's a chance it could be close in July between now and then. Like MLB already has an infrastructure in place. They've already presented what the draft system would look like. They've committed to all the prospect showcases that they think would help. all the prospect showcases that they think would help. They've thought this out, which is why it's very silly for there to be any kind of suggestion that this is a last minute. Because MLB has a plan for what a draft would look like and what they could do abroad to make sure it's successful.

So now it's just really up to the players to decide whether or not they find that acceptable. And I think in the next few months, as they hopefully return to the players to decide whether or not they find that acceptable. And I think in the next few months, as they hopefully returned to the field and to their clubhouses and are able to talk in person with the people who are actually most affected, I would hope that they can come to a consensus on maybe what needs to be added to the international draft structure that MLB is proposing. I do understand from their perspective, the international draft structure that MLB is proposing.

I do understand from their perspective, like, why just throwing it in at the last minute is very, very shocking and not okay with them. It makes a lot of sense because they haven't really gotten the chance to sit down with it and consider other alternatives. But I think with that buffer that's put in there right now, that things could go their way. Okay. Well, we encourage everyone to read Maria's feature and find her on Twitter as well, at Maria underscore Taurus3. And maybe we will have her back if and when there is an actual end to this saga.

And even if there is a draft, I guess that might not be the end to this saga, really, because you and Ken quoted an agent, Ulysses Cabrera, who said that even if there were a draft, he doesn't think that it would stop, quote, unquote, nefarious dealings between trainers and scouts, which some of your other sources seem to corroborate. So maybe it's not even as simple as just implementing a draft, although that would curtail some of the activity that you've documented here. But this has been a story for years, and it seems like it's probably going to continue to be a story for years. So it's good that people like you are on top of it. Thank you so much for having me on to talk about it. We didn't even get into the nefarious dealings, so that's how much we already had to talk about. Do you want to share any nefarious dealings before we let you go? Seems relevant. Yeah, I mean. We know about some of them.

We know about the Braves, for instance. Right. Right, exactly. But the one that seems to be the biggest sticking point for trainers right now, let's kind of break it down. Scouting works by region. Scouts are assigned to different areas in different countries and that's the area they're supposed to scout in. They're not supposed to go outside of that region to scout a player. The way things have worked, especially since COVID, is that they're like trainers have seen scouts from outside of their region going to scout players

and going to trainers who are developing these players and making an agreement with them where and they'll say hey we want to sign this kid but we have to sign him out of this region out with this trainer because that's where we can get you the money that we think that this kid deserves so if you transfer this player to this new trainer, we can work out a deal where you get a cut of his signing bonus and things go from there. You know, the trainer gets the cut. There's a scout who also gets the cut from the new trainer because that scout brought them that player. And then, of course, the scout would also get a benefit from, would get another kind of kickback just because, you know, their team was the one who signed the player. So it's just kind of a whole like thing.

And this only exists with a number, like a small number of trainers compared to like how many trainers there actually are. I've heard anywhere from like scouts from like eight to ten teams are the ones who are doing these deals. And there's like basically like a handful of trainers, like five trainers or so who deal this way. So it's a very small number, but it's trainers who are getting a lot of big players, like with big signing bonuses. Yeah. Well, on that discouraging note, we can let you go. And I'm sure we will have occasion to talk about this topic again. So thanks very much for coming on in the midst of this midweek madness. I really appreciate you, Ben and Meg. Thanks so much.

All right. That will do it for today and for this week. And what a momentous week it was. So thanks to everyone for listening. And thanks again for sticking with us, if you did, during the lockout. Martin Perez signed with the Rangers after we recorded. Buster Only says, according to an agent, that the market is zooming. So we have brighter days ahead.

And another little CBA tidbit relevant to our discussion today I saw Marley Rivera report. A great detail in the new CBA is that each team will make available English as a second language and Spanish as a second language courses at its expense, provided that at least one player on that club requests such a course on or before April 15th each year. So that's cool. Sounds like there's some discussion of potentially expanding rosters at the start of the season as well to address some of the concerns we mentioned last time about pitchers being behind in their preparations. Also, some of you may have heard that in recent days there's been a bit of buzz about some senators who have brought up the idea

of revoking MLB's antitrust exemption. Dick Durbin, Bernie Sanders almost certainly won't go anywhere. It comes up from time to time whenever MLB is making a mess of itself. But given the amount the league spends on lobbying, don't hold your breath. I did want to mention, though, that when Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois, sent a tweet earlier this week about the lockout, kind of dovetailed with what I was saying last time about just the different way that this lockout was covered and perceived as far as which side was responsible. And this is just sort of your standard grandstanding cheap heat political tweet, probably not one that applied any real pressure that led to a deal.

But Durbin said, message to the owners, unlock the lockout and play ball. So it did seem somewhat significant that that was specifically addressed to the owners. It wasn't, hey, you guys figure it out. Both sides get back on the field. It was message to the owners. And maybe this is partly just a function of the fact that this was a lockout and not a strike, which made it more obvious which party the complaint should be directed toward. Anyway, Jerry DePoto is ready to transact, and we are ready to discuss transactions. So we will be back next week, presumably with some of those. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild by going to patreon.com slash effectively

wild, signing up for Patreon, pledging some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks, including special monthly bonus pods and a discord group that is open only to Patreon supporters, including the following five, Matt Gwynn, Mark Martella, Robert Amon Stimel, Trevor Nunez, and Megan Schenck. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. One other programming note, as some of you may have seen on twitter this week the ringer baseball feed has been discontinued so there will be no more ringer mlb show there will be no more baseball barbecue so i'm sorry that i won't be podcasting about baseball regularly over at the ringer with michael bauman and zach cram and bobby wagner it wasn't our decision as you might imagine And for those of you who have listened to

both shows, I thank you for that. You will still obviously find me talking about baseball all the time here. So at least I have that platform and I am very grateful for it. And I have it because of the fine folks at Fangraphs, but primarily because of the listeners and the Patreon supporters who enable us to keep doing this however and whenever and as often as we want. And that is a great pleasure and luxury that I am very appreciative of. And hopefully the podcast listening community will survive having to hear me a mere three times per week talking about baseball as opposed to four.

Thanks again. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. We don't know.