Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1903: Great Scott

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk (4:09) to baseball agent and attorney Scott Boras, the founder, owner, and president of the Boras Corporation (as if you didn’t know who Scott Boras was), about his busiest days, his process for brainstorming metaphors, similes, and puns, his fondness for nautical analogies, other wordplay-related matters, the CBA, his […]

Who's up for a metaphor? We're up for a metaphor! Are you chicks up for a metaphor? Yes, we're up for a metaphor! Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't mix them! We, we, we won't mix them! Don't, don't, don't, don't mix them! We're like a dream!

I'm mixing them! Use them wisely, use them well And you'll never know the hell of it! Hello and welcome to episode 1903 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Usually I would start here with some sort of news or nonsense, some frivolity. But today, I think we got to just get right to our guest, right? No time to mess around. We got a good guest today. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Boris is on the program. Yeah. How about that? Ever heard of him? Yeah. We've talked about him a time or two on this podcast. On occasion. And now we will be talking to him. Yeah, if you go to the Effectively Wild wiki page for Scott Boris, and there is one, it says, Scott Boris is a sports agent who is known on Effectively Wild for two things. Number one, negotiating some of the biggest contracts in the

history of baseball. Number two, really weird metaphors usually involving boats. And honestly, I would flip the order. Yeah. There then follows a list of 20 notable episodes featuring Boris quotes, not even the non-notable ones. notable ones. So we've been talking about him for, oh, at least five years or so, just about the quotes and the analogies and the puns and the witticisms or attempted witticisms. And many times I have speculated about how he comes up with these things. Does he have a staff? Does he have a writer's room? Is he workshopping these things beforehand? And I've wondered and hoped that the truth would one day come out. And now we're going straight to the source. We're going to ask Scott Boris about it.

Yeah, yeah, we really are. Sometimes you're like, we're going to get a big important guest, and we do. And then there are others where you're like, that's not going to ever happen. And then it does. And it's exciting stuff, stuff ben we should just get to it we don't need to people know we don't need to keep you know yeah you know scott boris big agent founder of the uh boris corporation named after scott boris and we didn't talk solely about the puns and the wordplay in fact not even even primarily. We did talk about baseball as well. Respectable in some ways. We wanted to have our fun, but you don't get to talk to Scott Boris every day. So we wanted to get his thoughts on some actual substantive matters. So we did

that. And then he was a good sport about the rest. He was, yes. And we did not give that subject short shrift either. Oh, no. We drilled down on that. But we also made time for a few other questions. So we will reconvene after the interview maybe to talk about it a bit and do a stat blast and a past blast. Usually we save the guest for last. But when you've got Scott, why bury the Boris? I feel like that was a little Scott Boris turn of phrase there in his honor. But originally, we had hoped to have him on for our 10th anniversary special week, actually. And we had sort of tentatively arranged that. And then a few things came up in Scott Boris's life during that period, which we will cover at the start of this interview. And so we postponed the conversation a bit, but I am glad that we were able to have it finally. And he's been ad nauseum about Juan Soto and the Padres in the past month or more. So we talked a little bit about that, but we didn't belabor it. We wanted to get a bit off the beaten path in a predictably,

effectively wild way. So let's just get to Scott. Well, some call him a super agent, although he prefers to go by baseball attorney. Here at Effectively Wild, we also know him as the creator of countless analogies and puns and other plays on words. We have talked about him many times, and now we're talking to him. Scott Boris, welcome to the show. Hi, Ben. Hi, May. How are you guys doing? Doing well. And we came close to having you on during All-Star Week, which we foolishly thought

might be a good time to talk to you. And it turned out to be a terrible time with the draft and the Soto extension talks and then the Soto trade. Not only were you representing Soto, you were also representing Josh Bell and James Wood and Eric Hosmer, who ended up in a different trade, plus a number of the top draftees. So was that about as busy as you get or have you had much busier periods? What were the most hectic times of your career? I told Dan Halem, I said, you know, you guys should be weathermen because you go out and create tornadoes for us.

And we are in this just deluge of very important times, particularly for the young players with the draft and all the preparation that it takes. and then you've got the logistics of you know many of our clients that for the first time are traveling you know to a major city and and playing in the futures games and then you have the all-star group and we had a a number of them so it's like we have logistics for 25 people players and then we have the draft and then you have the home run derby. And then for us having the All-Star game in your backyard, you have all the logistics of your families who have never been to an All-Star game, many of them, and office staff. So it was quite an effort for a week, for sure. Yeah, and all the Soto drama on top of that. So does that rank up there with the busiest times that you remember in 40 years of doing what you do? I mean, you've had

winter meetings where you're juggling major negotiations at the same time. So I'm very fortunate that we have about 140 people in our company and we were able to put together a very concentrated effort to manage each particular situation and player. But sometimes when you're doing the free agent dynamic, I know when I had, I think, Strasburg and Cole and Rendon all and seven others that you have the sequencing of just a number of influx of calls. And again, we have a design on this with each team and the information and we're able to accomplish a lot because we've got such experienced staff people. So it's frankly a great joy, but also you just want to make sure that the biggest problem is for us is that the decisions that have to be made in a moment by our clients and often, particularly in the draft, when you're looking into scenarios or sometimes in free agency, you have restraints on time, and those are when it's most difficult because you understand what burdens the players are under and having to make very important decisions in a short period of time.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned the difficulty of that sequencing. I would imagine that this past winter, the difficulty of that sequencing was ratcheted up by the effect of the lockout. I'm curious what that period of time was like for you and how your approach to the off-season was altered by the fact that you didn't know when clients were going to be able to sign, let alone report to camp. It's kind of like I watch Formula One. So I watch the start of the race and I see the position and then all cars begin at one time. For the teams, I think it was vastly more difficult than us because we're able to really control the information that is brought forward. is brought forward and we're able to, you know, sequence the process to where we can inform our clients what's going on from a variety of different sources.

But for the teams there, you know, those kinds of things, normally when they do something over two or three months, they're doing it over two or three weeks. And I think it was largely difficult. was largely difficult. But truth be known, you need a jet to get to a lot of these meetings, and you can have literally two or three of them in one day, where you can get clients and teams and everyone together to make sure that the process is as personal as possible and also as efficient as possible. So you just used a Formula One analogy, and we've talked about your analogies for years because you use them frequently. And even going back to the Soto trade, right, where you called him the Soto star,

one of the brightest in the MLB constellation, which will probably lead this USS San Diego to championship waters. You also called Josh Bell the Mission Bell. When and how do you come up with these lines? Are these off the cuff? Are you preparing these lines in advance? As you can tell by the quotations themselves, no, they're usually off the cuff. When we were driving down to San Diego, of course, they have the San Diego Mission, and you think of those things in your head, and then all of a sudden it comes out on the radio. I don't know.

But usually the one thing we try to do is make, for all of us, this is something that we hope is entertainment and creates a bit of levity for some very serious moments that go on in our game and for people's lives. And so we tend to, some of the best are not for publication, unfortunately. We try to make our culture about more of a Johnny Carson, Jimmy Fallon kind of effect where you're trying to be as creative as possible about situations to lighten the moment, if you will. one unless you want to, but I'm curious from your position as you look at the first couple of months that we have had this new collective bargaining agreement and have seen a number of top prospects promoted very early and put in a position to really help their teams advance to the postseason. How would you assess the early performance of this new CBA? We haven't had a normal off-season to really see what the free agent market will look like, but how do you grade the early going here?

Well, the hope of any collective bargaining agreement is you're going to have as many teams as competitive as possible. And you hope that there's elements in it that drive that so that there are not the league lackeys, as we call them, that sit back and just, in my mind, absorb the benefits of the game where you have so many other earnest owners that are trying to really compete and make the league better. And for me, there were minor inroads to that, but not anywhere near enough to where we evaluate players annually, daily, and they have to meet a standard to be a part of the major

leagues. I think ownership needs to have that same standard for competitiveness. And if they don't, there's a reduction in revenue sharing. There are a reduction in the benefits of the game because you're not contributing to the league. And if after a long standing period of time, you have a situation where a club has been non-competitive, and it's very clear that they're just, you know, a taking of the revenues, and there's no effort to be competitive, I think that those ownerships are subject to condition. And that condition is that they are put in a position to sell the franchise and get ownership in there that will certainly meet the requirements of league efficiency.

Meg asked a serious substantive question there. I was going to ask about five more about the puns and the analogies. We really have talked about that for years. So I guess we've confirmed now that you do have a large staff, but you do not have a writer's room. They're not people punching up jokes for you necessarily before the winter meetings. You're coming up with these on your own, or is this more of a collective effort? I'm sure if anybody ever attempted to do that professionally, if they saw the product,

I doubt that those would have much of a living. Really, a lot of it, as you know, has to be generated in the moment, because frankly, that's kind of the fun of it, you certainly I have staff members at times that come to me and they give me parodies, and some of them are pretty humorous. But we really try to make it as prompt, too, as possible. You're dealing with people that really are in an environment where until you get there, you really never know what, you know, what the status of that moment is and what it brings to light. And it changes sometimes as you're dealing with a group.

And sometimes someone asks you a question in a particular way with a particular tone where it invites levity. So it's a way in many ways of responding so that you're sometimes not responding, at least giving them something of merit that they can write about. Yeah, just throw them some red meat, a distraction. They'll laugh about the wordplay and not ask a follow-up maybe. I did wonder whether it was partly a tactic just because if you have a client and you want to get the word out about that client, now you represent a lot of superstars who don't necessarily need the publicity. But if you have a funny line or even a corny line that you come up with, then people will share that more so than if you were just to say, so-and-so is a good player and he hit this many home runs or whatever, right? So it's more shareable. It becomes a bit of a meme. It goes viral in a way, and I guess you get attention for your clients. I think the main thing is, and particularly this is often regional,

you know, like I said about Michael Conforto being the king of queens, if you will. Right. And then Michael, unfortunately, gets hurt in the offseason. And, you know, you get a whole backlash of, you know, particularly Mets fans who are, you know, talking about particular situations. But, you know, we really make, you know, when I was doing Bryce Harper's free agency, who else would you think of? But it's Harper's Bazaar. It's an item of appropriateness because he's in the marketplace and you've got that last name. I just thought, well, that's just coincidentally perfect for what we're talking about, the beginning of Bryce's free agency.

Sure. It's a slam dunk. The last thing I wanted to ask about this, we've noted that a lot of your analogies are of a nautical nature. I mean, you grew up as a dairy farmer, but you seem to use nautical analogies a lot with the U.S. and San Diego, as I mentioned. nautical analogies a lot with the US and San Diego, as I mentioned, or you did a memorably elaborate one a few years ago about the America's Cup and free agency. So have you become a sailor? Are you interested in sailing? Well, like we were doing free agency one, and they asked about the value of players. And I said, well, this guy's an aircraft carrier, this is a destroyer, but he's the submarine and you and you walk through and you have different ways of looking at this i i have all kinds of things i've bird analogies that

we've done and and uh we've we had one player who didn't have much hair and i called him the bald eagle of the free agent class which i'm sure that he appreciated the stature. But the idea of it is that you're again trying to associate the moment, the timing of it, and really making something that I think it's ironic that people remember sometimes more about your analogy than what you had to say in its entirety about the seriousness of the player. And that sometimes happens as well. But we certainly try to create a forum and often teams and club officials, owners, where they come to you and they have their own that they bring up and some are quite funny. Really? Oh, yeah.pt's a pretty good exchange sometimes, you know? Well, I promise that we will ask you a serious question or two

before we let you go because we don't want to pass up the opportunity. But you mentioned the unfortunate timing, as it turned out, with Conforto's injury. I was curious if there were any analogies that your clients, and you don't have to give away state secrets here or anything, but any that struck them as not quite landing. Did you ever get any pushback from anyone saying, that doesn't describe me at all? No, they obviously, if there's anything that's really personal with it, we would clear it beforehand with them. But for the most part, these are things that are often...

I think the players appreciate the idea that they get a lot of... I related to Chris Bryant being kind of a James Bond figure in our recent free agency. I think he kind of enjoyed that analogy. But for the most part, they're very positive for the player and I think represent something about them that is either well-known or their performances have created them

to be something at the forefront of the free agent market. I admit that I do think about things for each upcoming free agency. When Carlos Correa signed with Minnesota, I was talking about his potentials and what kind of force he brings to the lineup. And I said, we've now brought C4 to the Twin Cities.

And it's kind of caught on in the Minnesota ranks. And of course, he wore uniform for to, you know, acknowledge that. So it's these kinds of things typical journalistic question, maybe as a former minor leaguer yourself, how have you advised your minor league clients about whether to vote for unionization and support that effort? And I wonder what conditions you experienced during your playing career that you think collective bargaining could potentially address? Well, you're always for minor leaguers having a form of representation. I can't really tell you how that's going to work out or such, but I always think that owners love to group players into a group, but it's a very separate group and it's a very different group because, frankly, you have to go through the light. I never understood why minor league operators get to make millions of dollars

and they'll pay the popcorn vendor or the person taking the tickets more money in a night than what the minor league player will make, the performer. I've never understood that. I don't know why we don't have a system where minor league operators are paying players salaries, if not benefits, because they're performing for them. They provide an audience. They provide franchise value appreciation. They're making millions of dollars.

A AAA team in Sacramento just sold for $90 million, and they don't pay a dime to the players. And I think that the owners of baseball teams should be alleviated from costs related to the labor that's provided to those teams, which they benefit substantially from economically. So how that is addressed is something that needs to be put into the pocket of something where a proper representation force can create a, not only with Major League Baseball, but with the owners of the minor league teams. And so that is a big issue. But, you know, your living conditions, your nutritional elements of it are at the forefront but you know i think of it was better for us because those of us making you know when i made i think i made i don't know 1500 a month when i was playing double a and um i made the all-star team in able and i i fought hard for that extra $100 a month. But you always remember that that amount of money

is not all too different when I played years ago versus what it is today for a lot of these players. And our buying power was obviously extraordinarily different. So I think it's worse for players today, particularly in the lower levels of the amount of money they receive. And I think that on the other side of this is that most minor league players

are not of value to the major league systems other than providing a labor force that allows the prospects to play with them. And I think, I remember when you go to AA, you realize that all the players you played with in rookie, low A, high A, that 75% of them are gone. And they don't even, most players don't play beyond three years. And so you have this dynamic where it's a resource that is utilized for a small number of players.

And I've always been for college. I think that it's the proper place to raise most players because most of them aren't going to make it. And that when we look at the numbers and the factors of going into it, the best things is, you know, it's like my children. I wanted my children i wanted my children to go to college and play in the minor leagues and then they could get on with their life and that's something that happened and it was a great experience but it was not anything where

you had a design of what baseball was going to provide for it was not going to provide a major league career but and that's the problem is we're signing players out of high school we're not signing them out of out of college where they have a chance to complete their educations. And so we have all these things where we should major league baseball, if they're going to sign players, they need to provide an educational element so they can go on and improve themselves in life. Otherwise, don't sign them. That kind of burden should be placed on them.

And I frankly don't think that representation as it exists today, there's going to have to be a real force to drive proper benefits for minor league players. And I'm not sure what that representation unit looks like. All I know is that it's needed and I'm hopeful, but this is why I recommend most players to say, look, if you're good enough, you go to college, and the one thing great about college, you spend seven or eight months working on your body. You only play 60 games a year, and in doing so, you're more focused on the development from 18 to 21 of a of a physical body that's

required to sustain itself when you have to play 144 minor league games and and and play year around and do those things i just think it improves your chances and there are those elite players i mean like i told jackson holiday uh matt's son or drew j Jones, Andrew's son. And I said, look, this is the best thing for you because you're receiving $8 million in a lifetime guarantee to go take your chances. So for some players, it is really a beneficial place. But for most, I watched 40 players get released my first year. I was shocked.

You get off a bus, deliver you at the complex, you go up and look on the wall and say, did you make a team? And kids are crying their eyes out. You've seen draft picks with rusted out cars and kids and they go home to no jobs and no anything. That is what happens to the majority of minor league players. And we as an industry need to stop that. We need to remedy that. We certainly have the resources in this industry, which is probably at the $14 billion level now, to remedy that so that we can have a qualified system. We bonus players once they've been in the minor leagues for three years and you want them back it comes from a pool it doesn't come from a specific team so that there's no bias and you give a player a couple hundred thousand dollars for playing three years he plays four and another

couple hundred if he plays five or six or seven so he gets a reward for his tenure and and being valued and wanted and we need to develop those minor league pools to do that so that we have the best employees aiding and training our best young major leaguers and uh and there are a lot of great minor league players 4a players now triple a players that are really good at what they do there's only you only a few thousand of them in the world, but they need to be compensated for their skill level at that level, even though it's not the major league level. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that players go through a process of yearly, even daily evaluation. I'm curious how the role of

analytics has shifted for you and your staff over time, both in terms of the cases that you are making to baseball operations groups and to ownership, and then what the reception to that has been over time for owners, if there has been sort of an education process for them as well as for the agency side in terms of how to talk about modern baseball and who's good at it? Well, we've been using analytics before there were analytics in our offices. Because we've been, you know, this is our, I've been doing this for 40 years. Yeah. And what we realized is that our analytics are very different than teams analytics or league-wide analytics because they're very comprehensive, but they do not include many psychological and character evaluations, which are hugely important to determining the perseverance, the commitment, the durability and longevity of a player because of how hard he works in the off season you know part of our analytics you know we have a sports science institute i have staff and 10 trainers headed by very experienced baseball people that have been doing this for 20 and 30 years and training

baseball specific players so when you go to look at what we know about players and how well you know they will sustain themselves and what they do, it has a lot to do with how you value them. And so I think analytics are certainly a very valuable component, but how they institute them is a monstrous issue because if you play ball you really realize that you've got to react and and you you have to be there and you can't let your brain get in the way of your athletic reaction and so your preparation has to be narrowed to a very simplistic approach for each pitch you throw or every bat or every pitch you're going to hit, every ground ball you're going to field. You are really understanding how that works as an athlete and also how it can slow you down. how analytics are instituted, given to a player, what they need to do to prepare before a game, I think are an extremely important part of coaching and taking that to each individual player.

And then analytics will have a full value, a better value, because it's very much a stepwise application of it to on-the-field performance. But what we can't remember, we must remember about analytics. They are a post-performance evaluation. And we're asking, we're trying to prepare the athlete pre-performance for a performance. And those are two different worlds. Yeah. How do you see the role of an agency working with team resources when it comes to player improvement, because as you said, you were hiring statisticians and economists in the 80s, and of course, you became famous for the Boris binders, which you would prepare for big free agents. And that was partly, I suppose, about showing your clients how prepared you were in addition to swaying teams. But now we have so much potential to unlock latent

abilities in players, but teams themselves have invested more resources in that. They've outsourced at times to places like driveline, for instance, or they have improved their own player development. So do you coordinate with teams when it comes to a player's preparation? Or do you think that ultimately an agency, someone who's representing a player has their best interests at heart, maybe more so than the team? Well, my belief is in contract negotiation or in the theater of economics, obviously we have our separations at times. But the truth of the matter is 95% of the time we're working together to get a performance level that is optimum.

That should be the key goal. And so there's always communication between, you know, I know we have players that work at our facilities in the off season. We invite the teams in, we communicate with the teams and their training staffs and really make this a process of sharing both their best and our best to come to a best approach for an individual player. And a lot of this, again, is individual to each player. And so when you go through this, you do want a coordinated effort to, you know, like when we're raising a young pitcher, Andrew Friedman and I talked about, you know julio horius that we're gonna do this guy

was a precocious star and and i i think collectively we did a great job of getting this guy where his innings are no not anywhere like where he's throwing a a thousand innings before he's 25 years old and and it was titrated and managed and now we're getting a Cy Young level performance out of a 25 year old exactly how it's prescribed he doesn't have a lot of innings under him so there's an example of working together to really bring a very beneficial outcome for for both team and player it takes an amazing amount of staffing and investment to make sure you're setting up the certainly a coordinated and efficient appraisal and analysis because you have to follow your players year round. Many teams don't do that we do do that and and and we want

owners to know that we do do it so that they understand that we have an everyday understanding of what our players are doing and where they're at and and and what their goals are and that the messages are communicated all of those elements go into the best preparation for an optimal season, which, again, benefits both of us. you when you're able to do that in a novel way, the various times in your career when you have exploited a loophole that was subsequently closed, let's say, or you've found a way to establish some leverage, let's say, by having a player go to IndieBall or Japan, you know, things that maybe push the envelope a little or establish new strategies. I wonder whether if the outcome is the desired one, you enjoy that even more just having found a different tactic. Well, when new is old, you know you're prepared.

that have been, in my mind, prevented baseball from really getting to the agenda that it needed to get to, to keep it current with what we find fans to be entertained by, what we find to be the most competitive and such. And the one thing we know about, particularly the inception of baseball, it is misrepresented. They have no representation and didn't until I started representing draft picks. And so we had this antiquated system which says that draft picks are not worth anything. They're a high risk. This is all we heard back in the 80s when I got into this in the 70s when i played that they're not of value yet i play with gary templeton and i assure you he was a very valuable player organization and and he didn't get anywhere near the bonus that he should have gotten

and when you interrogated him and found out how this was done and what they say and all the rhetoric that went on you really realized that it was a system where it required representation. And now we have admissions from ownership where they agree after they've been given the information that draft picks are worth about five times the dollar that's spent. And so we know that the draft picks and such were of value and and for me certainly bringing that delight getting you know starting out when players got a hundred thousand dollars a year and 17 years in a row and then finding ways of showing players getting the first million

dollar bonus for ben mcdonald or having tem Belcher get a go from knowing that there's an NAIA rule where he could be eligible to play, but also be eligible for the draft, unlike an NCAA player. And I told him, thank God you went to Mount Vernon Nazarene College. And the teams didn't know the rule. So they were going, where else are you going to go play? And there's this wives' tale that juniors are worth more than seniors, which obviously has nothing to do with their pro-efficiency. But all of these things are finding the reserve system and not tendering contracts. It's all what representation does to give a right structure to

young men. Some mother's son who had a young boy at 18 that you're trying to make sure that he has a proper footing for what his rights are going into it. And so those things are really rewarding and and also you know it's a it's a it's a heavy task to keep up with the revenues of the game because we all know if revenues go up the player values go up because that performance is now worth more because the revenues are worth more in the and keeping the pretty quote pro of all of this is something that requires a great deal of monitoring studying negotiating but no different than any other you know labor management All of this is something that requires a great deal of monitoring, studying, negotiating, but no different than any other labor management market. And the main thing I hope for in our game is that we have a competitive platform,

because right now we don't. We have almost a good third of the league that's non-competitive, and they need to be incentivized and if not weaponized to go out and make sure their teams are keeping up with the requirements of a very, very good league. And that doesn't mean you have to win every year, but it means that you have to show and illustrate that you have the capacity to put together a winning franchise over a period of time. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, I mean, obviously, we've, as an industry had a challenging couple of years between the pandemic and the lockout, you mentioned the need, the continued need to

improve the competitiveness of the league. I wonder what other challenges you see facing the sport in the next five to 10 years? Well, again, how we're going to treat expansion, what we're going to do with the health of our players to the point where we can increase rosters to prevent all the injuries that are being absorbed by pitchers. So I think that is a very serious issue. I think the attraction of our game is one that we, we are the most popular sport from six to 12. And then we lose our,

our youth after that. And we have to devise very strong and committed efforts to create the continuance and interest of baseball from 13 to 18 to keep the infrastructure that we have in Little League. We carry that tide into it so we can keep some of the best athletes in our game. The other part of it is that we need to make sure that the audience becomes more and more familiar with the personalities of the players. There's an intimacy about it, both in advertising and in what we do to let the fans know about these players. Because in the end, we're only going to have about 300 to 400 players that are spending over

four or five years in the major leagues that we can get to know and live with and go through. And so we have to make our best effort to personalize the game as much as possible so that we can really bring to the regions that the players are playing in really that level of intimacy so that the fans have an experience that is personal to them. I think the gaming part of this is creating an amazing interest in the younger sector because of the fact that

they have a way of personalizing the game to them. And that is that they are now involved with a player that they take interest in because they've, you know, they've bet their dollar on it for whatever reason and i

think that had a lot to do with how people looked at the nfl is that they've shown an interest because they had a personal interest in it so all those elements of health development advancement of who the players are i also believe that we need to make our game that owners should not be allowed to come in and I remember there was McClatchy was an owner in Pittsburgh and he bought the team and finished last and he made you know two or three hundred million in the cell those are kinds of things we need to have restrictions on where if you do not in any way perform or benefit the league, you do not get the rewards of the appreciation when you purchase it. So those standards, I think, are not collectively bargained,

but certainly owners need to, I think, really be watchful of who they admit to the game from a competitive standpoint. And that's something that we really modernly need to govern. Last thing I'm wondering, as someone who doesn't have a great knack for negotiation myself, I'm wondering when you realized that you did, because I know that after your playing career concluded, you represented some of your former teammates almost on the side while you were primarily working with medical products. And maybe that's when you realized that this could be a career for you. But going back even further than that, I mean, were you negotiating for higher prices for

milk back on the farm? Or were you holding out as a minor league player? When did this ability, this penchant that you have for surface? Back when you milk cows, you hook up the milk machine, and then from the Ted Williams book, you'd cut the tire in half on the post. So you'd go over and try to get in your 12 swings and then run back and then hope that the machine would do it. So you learned what cows to pick so that you get more time. That would be about the first part of the things that you thought about

when you're a kid and you're thinking about it. But I remember my father. My father was a farmer and did not know much about baseball. And the scout came to sign me, and he said, we want to bring him to our organization, and he made an offer. My father said, I don't know much about baseball, but I know that my children work on the farm here. Without him, I'm going to have to go out and hire labor and everything

to do all the things if you want to take him away to play baseball. My father taught me something about it. It had nothing to do with the things if you want to take him away to play baseball and so my father taught me something about it had nothing to do with my playing skills it had to do with the amount of money it was going to take for him to hire another person to come in and do the work so it was it was a way of of thinking about something of value but putting a very different value on it. And I had no idea that my father was so great at bartering and doing all the things that he did. But I don't take credit for any of this other than the fact that I make sure I go to a ballpark every day, and I go there and watch it,

and it's cost a fortune to do it, a contribution to the owners. But the idea of being there every day and seeing the game live and watching it and watching the players and what they do, you get a sense for how they prepare, what their coaches have to say about it, what their value is, the uniqueness of their skill. You get a tone for it. And then you try to coordinate it to the best thing about negotiation is listening, is that if you can listen to someone's needs, you understand what their needs are. And then the other element is, is that you have to know through evaluation and fairness reasons for what you ask for and what you do. And if you don't have the reasons, then you really have not adequately prepared for what you do. And the hardest thing about sport is that what a person was paid before, everyone thinks has a lot to do with what the future is paid for. But the truth of the matter is there's many, many other variables that go into that other than what the past markets were. And really our

job in this thing is that fortunately, we've got a pretty good group of people that you work with over the years that have been in the game, and there's a fairness standard that we apply. And there are relative unknowns. You come to a negotiation, and you've surrounded the boundaries, and then you have the unknowns. you have the unknowns. And the best thing you can do about defining an unknown is that you step into it with an openness about that you're ready to hear anything. And it really doesn't matter from what side that you can reasonably base a method to get a truer definition of how to bridge that gap. And it doesn't have to be your thought. It has to be someone, if it's someone else's, but it has great reasoning behind it or thought, then you know you've really done the right thing for the people you represent. And so I think the best element about great negotiators are,

is they're about the information, it's not about the result. Something you just said about being at the ballpark every day spurred one last thought, I promise, which is that you've been doing this, as we've said, for 40 years now, and you've had some former prominent competitors who at some point decided to hang them up as agents and move on and retire, and you haven't. And it's been, I think, almost 10 years since Jay-Z said you were over, so that seems to have been a bit premature.

But there's something clearly that you find fulfilling and stimulating about this that has kept you going, and obviously it's been a lucrative career and an impactful career, and you've changed a lot of players' careers. But I wonder whether you would trade it all in for a healthy knee and a long big league career yourself, if you could do that. Oh, you know, when it comes to playing ball, you always wanted your life stream. And then again, when you're in your 20s and 30s, your life stream always is to be a major league player.

And then when you go out and you have some success and you're in pro ball and you're doing well, then you get hurt, then you get hurt again, then you get hurt again. It's a trying moment, but I've been blessed in the sense that you still get to compete. You still get to go to the ballpark for a reason.

And you realize that's what you loved about the game. And you always remember that feel where you can backspin a baseball, throw a 97, and you're sitting there in second base. I had gap power. I rarely hit it out. Good on base ability. Yeah, you're sitting there and you're going like,. I had gap power. I rarely hit it out. Good on base ability. Yeah, you're sitting there and you're going like, yeah, that's really rewarding. But on the other side of it is when you work with people and you see them achieve things,

particularly when you're involved in them making adjustments or their arrival and you're watching them apply information and with their skill, they execute it. It is so rewarding that you're able to beat the game for a day. You know that the game is always going to beat you. But my attitude about this career is that I'm a lawyer now and Supreme Court justices kind of begin their careers at around 55, 60. They go to 95, 100. They start getting really good in their 70s. And so that's kind of how I view this thing. I got another 30

years to go where I'm starting to get really efficient at what we do and how we do it. And I'm kind of, you know, I'm still a little bit of a Supreme Court rookie, if you would, but coming through these things. But it's kind of an attitude that I have every day where like, wow, you get up early. You don't have to milk cows. You can go out and work out. You do your thing, you get ready, you go and meet with your players, you go to the ballpark, you get home, you watch all the highlights. I mean, what a life, right? Well, we got one last analogy in there. So that was nice.

And yet you had 400 on-base percentages and lots of walks years before that was in vogue, so you were ahead of the game as a player. That was in A-ball, but still. Thank you so much for your time, Scott. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and we wish you the best of luck with your future puns and analogies.

I do hope that most of the FansGraph articles I'm like, I think they're very profound and I agree with them, but I always want to be able to figure out how I can get our advocacy across to aid the seismic methods of the fans graph to more associate with what our data says. You give me that route and path, I would love to have it because we would certainly like that dialogue to exist, maybe in panel form. Maybe we can have these discussions, but we would welcome that, you know? Well, what you got to do, I guess, and I'm speaking for Fangraphs here as a non-member

of the Fangraphs staff, but, you know, there are all sorts of projections on the Fangraphs player page. It's sort of an open source place. So you got to open your books and provide the Boris projections, those long term, you know, 10 year A-Rod Maddox aging curves, and maybe they'll be displayed on the player pages. We have a running joke that the projections made by the media as to our clients' values are about 90% way south of what they end up being. And I'm grateful for that, but I just don't know the metrics of how they choose it. But this forum we could call the FansGraph quake. I don't know what it is, but we can go through and discuss all of the parameters on how these decisions are made, what they're looked at. When we have the first and third situation and you can only throw over to first base twice, can you imagine the lead, the guy on third base? Oh, yeah.

I haven't quite figured out that rule yet. So we'll talk to start there. That sounds good. All right. Thank you, yeah. I haven't quite figured out that rule yet. So we'll talk to start there. That sounds good. All right. Thank you, Scott. Thanks so much. Ben, Meg, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

All right. Meg and I will be right back. Sans Scott Boris for a few reflections, plus a stat blast and a pass blast. More, too. You won't want to miss it. Maybe. Well, that was Scott Boris. Do you ever have days when you're doing your job, Ben, and you're like, I can't believe this is my job. You know, like if I had told me 10 years ago that this is what I'd be doing, I don't know that I would have believed me.

I feel like that was one of those for me where it's like, oh, I spent part of my day talking to Scott Boris. So here we are. And specifically about some of the things that we talked to him about, that was one of those things where I almost have to suspend my awareness that, yes, we are talking to Scott Boris and this is what we are choosing to ask Scott Boris during the time that we have with him. And sometimes that goes well because he probably doesn't get asked about that all that often, or maybe he does actually from the sound of it, but not on the record, at least in a public setting. So it seemed to tickle him a bit. He played along at least. That was nice. And at the end of that conversation, it sounded to me like he rebranded Fangraphs as Fansgraph yeah and i'm wondering whether you're gonna go

along with that i don't know i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to run that up the chain to david you know what is better to imply many fans worshiping at the feet of one graph right or one fan worshiping at the feet of a multitude of graphs you know i don't know i think each of those says something different about the company and i don't know which is better but you know i don't know i think each of those says something different about the company and i don't know which is better but i know i've been mulling that over ever since we stopped talking to it was this a missed opportunity all along should have been fans graph kind of like a collective you know fans coming together to create graph yeah Yeah, like, you know, like a attorney's general or court's marshal, you know. Right. As long as you still capitalize the G and do the camel case,

that's the important thing. Yeah. Do that for us, please. Well, if we'd had a little more time, I would have asked him what he thinks of his client, Juan Soto, being outplayed by Joey Manessis. But we did not get to that topic in this conversation, unfortunately, but had a lot of good things to say. And when we first called him up, he actually had to turn down his five TVs that he was watching baseball on at the time. I've got to turn down my... I've got five baseball games on. There we go. Okay, great.

All right. Scott Boris was grinding tape when we called him, which I think is admirable this deep into his career and maybe speaks to his affinity for baseball. Because I got to say that Scott Boris, like, even if you don't like him, and there are people who don't like him, you do have to hand it to him, I think. The guy's good at his job. Yeah. And at times he is so good at his job that that makes people dislike him.

Yeah. But he is quite good at it, and he has had some serious staying power. Like, commissioners come and go. Even players come and go. Owners and managers and GMs come and go, even players come and go, owners and managers and GMs come and go. Scott Boris, at least during our lifetimes, he's been doing his thing longer than we have been alive. And I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that he is one of the defining figures of the past 40 years of the sport. Is that true?

Strong influential figures, at least? A lot of continuity and the sport, the game does bear his fingerprints in some pretty significant ways, good or bad. He's not Marvin Miller. He's coming along after that whole revolution happens and sort of spinning it forward and taking advantage of it in some ways. But he really has managed to stay at the top of his profession for quite a long time. I'm not saying that anyone gets into baseball and falls in love with baseball because of the magical contract that Scott Boris negotiated. It's not about that. It's about the players. They're the ones who are making the memories. And I'm sure Scott Boris negotiated. It's not about that. It's about the players. They're the ones who are making the memories, and I'm sure Scott Boris would say so. But he really has managed to make his mark on the sport in a way that I don't know that anyone else

in his line of work has. Yeah. I think that when I think about the labor history of baseball, I would say that Marvin Miller is foundational to both our current understanding of what labor in sports and probably beyond sports should be and to the architecture and ecosystem in which labor operates. And I don't know that I want to bestow that sort of title to anyone else, but Boris is absolutely one of the... here's one of the problems with Twitter, Ben. He's one of the sport's main characters. And I don't mean that in, like, the Twitter way. And I worry people will read it that way.

That's not what I'm talking about. In the way that we say that prominent baseball people are the main characters. Right. He is a main character of the sport. he is a main character of the sport. You know, he, I think, has really altered players' understandings of what they can achieve through free agency. He certainly shaped the environment of free agency

in a pretty profound way based on his negotiations. So I don't know. I think if people have issues with him, like, that's fine. I don't mean it to be overly fawning, but, like, I think it would be silly to say that he isn't one of the sport's main characters. And I think you're right. Like the longevity and staying power is pretty remarkable given how many agents there are and how many agencies there are and how many, to your point, commissioners have sort of come and gone over his tenure. So, you know, we talked to Scott Boris. So, you know, we talked to Scott Boris.

Yeah. And, you know, there may be multiple reasons to dislike the guy and there may be legitimate reasons to dislike the guy. But I do think that most fans who have sort of the knee jerk reflexive reaction to dislike Scott Boris, that inclination, probably the main reason is that fans have historically tended to take ownership side in the sense that they want to keep their players you know they want their players whom they like to stay on their teams and scott boris is not necessarily in the business of keeping players with their teams not that he's necessarily trying to break them up either but he's trying to get his clients the best deal that he can. And often that means going to free agency. And so naturally, fans who don't want their players to go to free agency and maybe want them to sign team-friendly extensions perhaps are not going to be very positively disposed toward Scott Boris. It could be, but even they might have to admit

that, well, if they were a player, they might still want Scott Boris in their corner getting them the most possible money, which he definitely has a track record of doing. And he has portrayed that at times as – I don't want to say an altruistic thing. He hasn't said that. He has said pretty openly that it's a business. It's not a charity. He's not a nonprofit or anything. But he said, and here's an analogy for you from a while back, or maybe this is more of a simile. A record, like an umbrella, provides shade, Boris said.

This is a record as in a record contract. Everyone has something to look at as the ceiling. The hardest contract to negotiate is when you don't have a ceiling because the teams always want to relate to the prior record. And what I look to is something very different than that. the sizable cuts of contracts that he gets. He is quite a wealthy man. Or how much of it is just his competitiveness, his wanting to win a negotiation, wanting to get that higher number, or how much of it is a semi-selfless desire to get players paid. He is someone who talks a lot about the distribution of revenue and owners not

spending and competing. And that does seem to be pretty important to him. And you could imagine that as a former player himself, he would have some sympathies toward players and want them to do well, even though that was a while ago. And he obviously has a huge financial stake in players doing well financially. So it's hard to untangle all of that. But I do believe that in a sense, he has at least some of the best interests of the sport at heart. I believe that he cares deeply about the sport, which is not to say that he's good for the sport necessarily. I think Bud Selig cared deeply about the sport, and I don't know that he was always good for the sport necessarily. I think Bud Seelig cared deeply about the sport,

and I don't know that he was always good for the sport. So you could still screw the sport up while you're caring deeply about it. And you could argue that maybe the turnover that he has helped engender, not single-handedly, but he's been a contributing force, that maybe that is not entirely a positive trend from a spectator standpoint. But I don't think it's purely that he wants the last buck. I mean, he does probably want the last buck and the extra buck, but I do get the sense that there is more at stake for him than just that. So either he has pulled the wool over my eyes or there is some sincere desire there on his part. for even ownership. Like he is directionally aligned

in a lot of important ways with the fans in terms of what he wants to see, right? It is to his benefit via his client's benefit for the sport to be competitive, for players to get paid such that more people want to play baseball, right? All of those things sort of are down to the benefit of fans.

And that doesn't to say that like there are individual players where maybe like more money could be, could have been gotten or that there aren't agents who sometimes don't do as good a job for their clients as they ought to, right? And you don't even have to be Ozzy Albee's agent for that to be true. But I think that when you look at the landscape, it is clear that getting players more, getting the sport to be more exciting so that more people want to watch it and there's more money circulating for players, that is directionally aligned with fans' interests in a way that I think is pretty important. So again, we don't have to be overly fawning.

There are obviously going to be nits to pick, i i think you're right that there is a genuine desire for the the sport to be as good as it can be and to be as competitive as it can be and i don't know that it is really even necessary for us to decouple that from a purely monetary incentive like i think that because because of the nature of that relationship between an agent and his client, like, if all he wanted were to get as much money for his guys as possible, that still is going to come with wanting as competitive of a landscape as possible and more money in the sport for everyone's benefit, right? Like, I don't know that it's even necessary for us to decouple those things. baseball player agent at the time of the Beverly Hills Sports Council. And it talked about how they were so different stylistically and temperamentally, both effective in their own very different ways. And several years after that piece was published, Dennis Gilbert just walked away. He just sold his

share of the agency and he retired from sports agenting at 51, I think he was at the time. And he was still involved in baseball in some capacities, but he just walked away. He just gave it up. And it's hard to imagine Scott Poirier's doing that for better or worse. It seems like they're going to bury him with his cell phone attached to his ear, negotiating a deal for some big free agent. It just seems like he will never want to give this up. And he's never branched out into other sports. He's never tried to franchise Boris Corp into

football or basketball or anything else, really. He's just a baseball guy and also hasn't really even gotten that much into the lifestyle aspects of things. It just seems like he is very much a baseball rat, a very rich baseball rat who's come a long way since A-ball. But he likes to be at the ballpark, as he said, and as we know, because we see him on TV all the time behind home plate. And he just doesn't seem to want to get that out of his blood at any point, which doesn't mean you have to like him or that he can do no wrong. But the man does seem to care about baseball. So there's that. I mean, those behind home plate appearances are frequent enough that I think we can kind of take him at his word that he's there, at least in some capacity, pretty regularly.

Yeah, which is why it just endlessly amazes me that this guy, a titan of the industry, is so delighted by nicknaming Carlos Correa C4 or whatever that he's still talking about that much later. Look, man, we all got to have our little hobbies. We all got to have our little things at work, even when we like our jobs. And I would imagine even if, and I can't relate on this particular score, at least certainly not on the scale that Scott Boras can, but even when our professions prove to the fact that he's not just delights me and sort of mystifies me, although maybe I understand it a bit better after talking to him about it than I did before. It's like, how many many millions of dollars do you have to make before you are no longer so thrilled by wordplay and analogies? And evidently, the number is infinite. There is no number. So we learned that. And yeah, what I was saying about the influence, I guess, if you were to

remove Scott Boris from the last 40 years of baseball history somehow and play it all over again, it would be a very different sport. And I don't mean just in the sense that certain players would make less money or different amounts of money, but he has had a hand in so many transactions over that time, and many of them would have gone a different way had he not been involved. I think it's probably safe to say, even though he always says that he is taking orders from his clients, that they're the ones making the decisions. They're obviously listening to his advice and his counsel and perhaps taking his recommendations or factoring them in at times. And so if you were to remove him from the equation somehow, just imagine how many players

would have signed there instead of here you know or would have signed an extension instead of getting traded or just like the many different destinations and the different places that players would have gone and the different ways that those players careers would have played out it's the butterfly effect it's the boris effect the boris effect i don't know but it would change a lot. to championships and on and on and careers. And some players would have had their careers made who didn't make it and vice versa. I guess you could say that about any prominent agent, but he is the most prominent agent over that period.

So it's not quite the same sort of impact that a great player makes. It's not the emotional, indelible impact that a player makes upon a fan's memories, but it really has shaped and reshaped the sport and also left us with a lot of weird wordplay. I still don't totally understand the Soto star. What was he even going for there? I don't know. I guess I should have asked him when we had him on the phone. I know. I was going to say you missed your opportunity. I mean, sometimes I

think it's useful to remember that Juan Soto is in fact a star and it might not be that deep. Maybe. All right. Well, let's do a little stat blast here. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's StatBlast. Okay, so the StatBlast, as always, is brought to you by the StatHead tool at Baseball Reference. And we always sing its praises, and this time will be no different.

And I just use it so casually and almost unthinkingly because it becomes second nature and it becomes habit and you just know where to click and where to find things. And so I'm constantly just responding to listeners with a quick little stat head search. This is not even the stat blast, but just as an example, earlier this week, Brian wrote in to say, Can you help tell me if this is a thing? In Friday night's game against the Dodgers, Manny Machado went three for three with two walks, but failed to score a run or record an RBI. This was a game that the Padres won five to four. How rare is it for a player to reach base in all of his at-bats without taking part

in a scoring play? What's the best game a hitter has ever had in terms of total bases without a run or RBI? So I answered the second part of that question, and it's but a moment's work at Stat Head to look that up and find out that the most total bases that a player has had without a run or an RBI is nine. And it's a two-way tie at the top of the leaderboard between John Knight on September 1st, 1906, and Stan Musial on May 5th, 1943. Each of them had nine total bases without a run or an RBI. And now you know, courtesy of StatHead. And that is just an example of the simplest, most rudimentary query that one could do with StatHead. So I highly recommend that you subscribe. And when you do, go to StatHead.com, use our coupon code WILD20 to get a $20 discount on an $80 subscription.

They do not just baseball, but other sports as well. Okay. So the stat blast came from a listener, and this is something that I had wondered about and had an inkling about myself. But this question comes from Nat, who says, like all of us, I've been paying close attention to Angel's box scores, especially on Otani start days. Recently, I've developed the anecdotal impression that Otani doesn't hit as well on start days. So days when he pitches and hits. It makes sense to me that that would be the case, but I wonder if it's even true. How much, if any, better has he been as a hitter on non-pitching days? And with the absolute uniqueness of what he does, do we even have a large enough sample to draw a meaningful

conclusion from that information? Do his splits line up with the extremely limited data on other two-way players? I don't know if that's even worth looking at because who else other than Otani has hit and pitched on the same day with this sort of regularity in recent years. So I didn't even tackle that question. So I didn't even tackle that question. But the first part is interesting to me. And I had help here from semi-regular StatBlast consultant Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Prospectus who queried this for me. This is in some ways a simpler and less elaborate StatBlast than we often do. But it's not something that you can easily look up, right? You think it would be kind of easy to look up.

How does Otani do on days when he pitches versus other days? You could brute force that, but it would take a while. So Lucas did a little query here on the BP database, and he got me an answer. And I think it's an interesting answer. So he broke it down by 2021 and 2022. And then he also gave me combined lines of Otani on pitching days and Otani on non-pitching days. So the non-pitching days dominate, and from 2021 to 2022, in 1,054 plate appearances, which would all be at DH on non-pitching days. He has hit 263, 366, 586.

So that's a 952 OPS on non-pitching days. On pitching days, many fewer plate appearances, 170 trips to the plate. He has hit 238, 170 trips to the plate. He has hit.238,.341 586 slug, and 756 versus 952 OPS. So almost a 200-point OPS gap, and he has been worse on the days that he has pitched than he has on the other days. I did look into a couple other details here, but what's your initial reaction to this knowledge bomb that I just dropped on you? Give me the number difference one more time. 952 on non-pitching days OPS versus 756 OPS on pitching days. 156 OPS on pitching days.

I guess that that's, I don't know if I would have thought that the magnitude of the gap would be that significant, but that is directionally the gap I would expect, right? So you would have expected him to be worse on days when he was doing both. Yeah. Or at least so you claim now that you know the answer, now that you've seen the answer key, we'll never know what you're actually thinking, but I believe you. sounds like he's going to give it up. I don't think he will. But like an indication and an acknowledgement of how hard I imagine it would be to do both of those things. You know, there's like a couple of buckets of difficulty, right? There's the bucket that is the preparation that you're having to do on one of those days, right? So you are having to do your typical preparation,

both physically and mentally as a starter, but then also you're still hitting, right? And you don't even get breaks anymore if you're Otani because we changed the whole rules for him so that he can keep hitting and not have them get their DH situation mucked up, right? So you got to keep going even after you've just thrown maybe 100 pitches. You're very tired because that's a lot of work. And then there's the actual doing of it, right? And some of that is going to be the difficulty of shifting back and forth. For instance, in a comparison that is completely apt and not at all silly, I struggle greatly, Ben, to edit and write on the same day. I struggle to find time to write

just generally, but switching that mental track is challenging I was gonna make exactly that same comp which it's like we're struggling futilely to try to compare anything at all right to try to find anything at all that might be remotely the same

because we are tiny weak children and he is showing her daddy yeah but these are the these are the comps we have ben these are the comparisons we can make right this is what we have at our disposal so that does feel real to me though because there are days when i only have to do one thing and then there are days when i have to do two or three things that are maybe semi-related, but maybe I have to write and I have to do a podcast and I have to edit something or interview someone or whatever.

And it is extra taxing, I find, not just because of the extra time it takes or the sleep I lose, although I guess that's part of it, the physical component, but also the psychological component, that knowledge that I have some other looming assignment hanging over my head. I have to finish this by this time because then I have to do that by that time. And it taxes you. It puts a little extra strain. And I don't know whether I could quantify, like, do my articles on days when I have to write and podcast come out slightly worse than they do on other days? Are the Effectively Wilds on the days when we are multitasking worse than on the days when we can focus solely on the podcast? I don't know.

We'll never know. It's hard to quantify that because we don't have OPSs the way that Shohei Otani does. But I suppose that is possible. I mean, first of all, way to brag about actually writing stuff and getting it done. I guess some people do that. And part of it for me, and this is where it's very different from Otani, the only place where it's different, right? It's like, you know, the version of Meg who's writing Meg is like a total dirtbag. I'm like eating pickles out of the jar while I'm trying to write something. I'm listening to like one particular album.

It is the only thing that can bring that piece to the finish line. And then, you know, if I get tired of listening to like the Newsies soundtrack or like when I'm in like deep, like deep like deep terrible territory it's like I'll listen to like the social network soundtrack and then I'm like am I a sociopath am I secretly a serial killer who could say right and then editor Meg is like collected and together and like can do administrative tasks and perform executive functions so you're fixing other people's mistakes instead of maybe making your own oh yeah definitely making a bunch of mistakes when i'm writing myself so it's like switching tracks

seems like it would be really hard and then there are moments and this is i don't know if this is actually an article maybe this is just me saying this out loud on the podcast like there have been times where otani is the last hitter to hit in an inning, and then he's got to go back out there on the mound the next inning. I would find that impossible. We focused here on his OPS, one versus the other, but I would be curious, what is the difference in performance on the mound

when he has closed the prior half inning as a hitter and is now up to pitch? Does he do worse as a pitcher when he has just been hitting, when he's just been at the plate? And then he's got to, I mean, it's easier than being a catcher who closes things out. And then you got to go back to the dugout, you got to put all your gear on, and someone else has to catch the warmup pitches because you got to put on all your stuff. So it's less logistically complicated in that respect because he just hands someone his batting helmet

and takes his cap and his glove and then goes up there. But is he worse then? I wouldn't be surprised. I just think it's really hard. I think what he's doing is really hard. And those transition points are going to be points of difficulty because it's just a really impossibly hard thing he's attempting. So yeah, I'm vaguely recalling some research that I may have mentioned or at least linked to on a previous podcast about looking at whether pitchers pitch worse after they hit in the preceding half inning.

This was obviously pre-universal DH and also maybe after they'd been on base. I want to say this was a Russell Carlton piece because it's usually a Russell Carlton piece. I'll dig it up and link to it on the show page. As I recall, the conclusion was that there didn't seem to be much signal there. But most of those guys are lousy hitters. They're not Otani. Otani is a one of one kind of case. So when Otani is like doing his full Otani, even though it is diminished Otani relative to the days that he doesn't have to pitch us, they're like a weird feedback loop of it being hard anyway.

Yeah. And we should say 1054 plate appearances. That's a lot of plate appearances of him on days that he's not pitching. 170 on days that he is pitching. Not so many plate appearances. Sure. I didn't run a t-test on this sucker or anything to try to determine the statistical significance. I would imagine that there is a little bit of signal here, but there might also be a good deal of randomness making him look worse than his true talent on pitching days. That's possible. Maybe there's also some other lurking variable here, like Otani started opening day for the Angels this year,

so he would have been going up against the opposing team's ace. And so maybe if he was matched up more often with top of the rotation pitchers for the other team, then he would be facing better pitching on the days when he is also pitching and thus he would be worse at hitting. Although the Angels had a six pitcher rotation when the year started, so I don't know how long those rotations would have been synced up. I guess you could also say that on days when Otani is pitching, the Angels tend not to allow a lot of runs. And so maybe there would be more close games and the other team would use its better relievers more often on those days than other days. Really getting in the weeds here, possibly overthinking this. I did want to look at a couple other things. We can go deeper.

Another layer here. One thing I wondered was, did he handle this better last year or this year? Maybe it took him time to get used to hitting on the days that he pitches because he didn't always do that. So I thought, well, maybe it took him some time to get used to this and maybe he'd be better at it this year having done it last year, and now he has the dedicated Otani rule as well, so he doesn't have to stress about not being in the lineup once he's removed from the game as a pitcher. Well, it turns out, no, actually. If anything, he has gotten worse at it or has had worse results this year. So last year, 2021, 570 played appearances when he was not pitching, 983 OPS, 69 plate appearances. Dylan, you're nice at home. When he was pitching, 817 OPS.

I won't give you the full slash line, but I will post this spreadsheet here if you're interested. So the split again there, 817 versus 983. This year, 480 plate appearances when not pitching, 922 OPS, and 101 plate appearances on days when he was pitching, 714 OPS, 922 minus 714. So now we have more than a 200-point OPS, 922 minus 714. So now we have more than a 200 point OPS split there. So a little bit worse, a little bit bigger split this year. So if anything, it doesn't look like he has gotten the hang of this suddenly. Last thing I wanted to look at, and this is getting into extreme small sample territory, but I wondered whether on the days when he pitches, he would be better or worse than his baseline for those days after he is removed as a pitcher.

So it's on the day when he pitched, but he's no longer pitching. He's out of the game as a pitcher, but he's still hitting as the DH. the game as a pitcher, but he's still hitting as the DH. And so I wondered, would he be even worse at that point once he was removed from the game as a pitcher, or would he be better at that point? And it could go either way. You could come up with a rationale, an explanation that might make some sense either way. So here's the conclusion. 129 plate appearances on his pitching days while he is actually pitching. Okay. 213, 341, 398 slash stats. That is a 739 OPS. And in 41 plate appearances, again, I warned you it was going to be a small sample. So this is 41 plate appearances. Again, I warned you it was going this is a small sample and not such a huge split. This is probably not statistically significant.

But if you're interested in the direction, 739 OPS on his pitching days while he's pitching, 803 OPS on his pitching days after he stops pitching. So make of that what you will. You could conclude that it is meaningless and random. Or if you want to read into it, you can conclude that even though by that point he's got to be his most fatigued, right? Because it's going to be toward the end of that game. He has had his entire pitching outing by that point. You would think he'd be running on fumes.

And yet he is actually better weird yeah i guess though maybe there could be some confounding variables there now that i think about it because like he would be facing the opposing pitcher the third or fourth time sometimes through the order right so so that would help too and it would it would take care of his like let me see if i articulate this in a way that makes any sense to you at all. Right. So maybe it also removes from the sample those days where like something goes terribly, terribly wrong. And he is removed as a pitcher and also his pinch hit for I don't know how often that's even happened. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Disaster scenario. Is that even a thing? Yeah. And I guess you could also say, well, maybe he is better because suddenly a weight has been lifted. He's not pitching anymore.

He can just kind of close off that part of his brain and say, okay. Right. I'm done with that part of my day. Now I can just focus on hitting and he's even better. Again, I would not make too much of that, but I thought it was worth looking into. So this is all fascinating to me. I guess the takeaway is that even though he has not been good by the usual Otani offensive standards on the, when he's had a 714 OPS on the days when he pitches, still playable, I guess, even though that's not great. He's not helping you a whole lot if that's actually his true talent. Like the MLB average OPS for DHs this year is 716, essentially that.

and 16, essentially that. So diminished DH Otani on the days that he pitches is basically still a league average DH offensively. And I guess if you're the Angels and you probably don't have some big bat that's not playing because Otani's in the lineup, probably still worth sticking him in there, even if you think his performance is diminished in some way. And of course, unlike last year, you don't have to give up the DH to get him in the lineup. So there's not nearly the tradeoff that there was last season. And the last consideration I'll give you here is that he wants to do it. So I don't know whether he knows these numbers or whether if we quizzed him, he would know that this is the case.

He must have some sense that he is not hit as well, especially this season on the days when he is pitched. But at the beginning of last season, he addressed this a couple times. Last April in a Time magazine piece, he said that hitting on the days that he pitches helps mentally. He did not specify how exactly it helps mentally, but he said it helps mentally. So he's not like us then. I think that is safe to say. He's not eating pickles out of the jar. Right. So yeah, we're saying it adds stress for us.

Right. Yeah, we are. I guess that it removes stress or maybe he thrives on stress. He embraces the stress. So he said it helps mentally. And in another piece at MLB.com that same month, he said, one of the reasons why I like it, doing both on the same day, is because if I can help my own cause and score some runs for myself, it's going to lead to confidence. Although I guess you could say that if he doesn't hit as well in those days and he does not help his own cause, then does it detract from his confidence? I don't know. But he seems to prefer doing it. And I suppose that whatever mental boost he gets from this might even extend beyond that actual day

and that actual game, and it might just contribute to his general well-being. So for all of those reasons, I think that it is probably for the best that he continued to do this. For one thing, it's fun. But even just from an on-the-field performance basis, I think it probably still makes sense for him to do this, even if it's not giving you that great an edge the way that you might have thought it would, and even if he is not the typical Otani on those days. So it might be fair to slightly lower your offensive expectations for Otani on the days that he pitches, at least based on what we've seen so far. And if you notice him starting to listen to the social network soundtrack, be very concerned. Yeah, I hope we have not disillusioned anyone here, punctured the

illusion of the perfect two-way player by pointing out that perhaps he can be distracted, he can be weighed down by the world the way that we all can. Maybe we have humanized him here. Even Otani has feet of clay. He can perhaps be hamstrung ever so slightly while he's doing something that no one else can hope to even come close to accomplishing. All right, let's end with the past blast. So this is episode 1903, and we are handing it over to Jacob Pomeranke again of Sabre, director of editorial content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. And this 1903 past blast, this is about a fairly significant event, a wild account from the first quote-unquote modern World Series. So 1903, Boston fans cause a near riot, seven ground rule doubles in game three. So Jacob writes the first quote-unquote

modern World Series, because again, it's 1903, was known as much for the crazy crowd antics in Boston as it was for the baseball played on the field. Here's an example from Game 3 on October 3rd, 1903, as reported by the Boston Herald. Before the biggest throng that ever gathered to see a ballgame in the city, the Boston Americans went down before the Pittsburgh National League champions yesterday afternoon by a score of 4-2. It was the general verdict that the throng defeated the locals. There were not enough policemen to cope with the crowd, and the result was that the outfielders could not field their positions, and balls went for two base hits that would have been easy outs under ordinary circumstances. Like a naughty child, the crowd broke all bounds of propriety and ropes and launched its noisy, careless self into the very diamond and hampered, as it turned out, the Boston players in their effort to win the second game against Pittsburgh.

Jacob continues, the official attendance was 18,801 fans, more than double the 9,000-seat capacity of Boston's Huntington Avenue grounds, their home from 1901 to 1911 before Fenway Park was built. That seems unsafe to double your capacity. I'm not shocked that this went wrong. And Boston's Cy Young pulled double duty, helping to take tickets in the team office before the game, then putting on his uniform to pitch seven innings of relief. The excerpt says Cy Young was in the club office in his street clothes assisting in the work of counting the returns when he was summoned to get into his suit and go in and pitch. Jacob says because any ball hit past the outfield rope in game three was scored as a ground rule double. The Pirates smashed five doubles into the Boston crowd while the Americans had two of their own.

Once the World Series moved to Pittsburgh, Boston got a measure of revenge. The teams agreed that hits into the crowd would now be scored as ground rule triples instead. This led to a preposterous total of 25 combined triples in the 1903 World Series, 16 by Boston and 9 by Pittsburgh, which remains an all-time record. Well, yeah. In the last 75 years, the only other team to hit even five triples in a

single World Series is the 1993 Blue Jays. Oh, I thought you were going to say the Houston Astros, and they were all hit by Evan Gattis. Remember when Evan Gattis hit a bunch of triples? Yeah, I do remember that. That was funny. Weren't they like all in one season too?

Yeah, I think so. And you were like, you know what, good for you. One of them too. Yeah. That was weird. But I like that they just surrendered and they were like, well, we can't control the crowd. So we'll just count them all as triples.

We can only hope to contain them. Yeah. Wait, how many triples? 11 triples Evan Gattis had in 2015? That cannot be right all as triples. We can only hope to contain them. Yeah. Wait, how many triples? 11 triples Evan Gaddis had in 2015? That cannot be right. 11 triples. Sean Foreman, are you sure that this is correct on Evan Gaddis' baseball reference page? I think so.

He actually had one in 2014, so that sort of spoils it. But he had 11 in 2015 and none thereafter. Weird. Weird. Wild. Wild. Wild. I actually have a secondary supplementary past blast here that I have been waiting to divulge and looking forward to divulging.

So I got a couple emails from listeners who suggested this passage as a 1903 past blast some time ago, and I got quite curious and I did some sleuthing. So a couple of people sent us articles from 1939, different papers in 1939, about an event that purportedly happened in 1907. So I will just read this clip from the Springfield News Sun, July 20th, 1939. The headline says, Grim Oddity. And the subhead says, Dead man scored tying run in 1903 game with semi-pro nines. So as one of our listeners joked, a literal zombie runner seemingly was happening here. So St. Paul, Minnesota. I don't know why there's a dateline here, July 20th, since this is recounting something that had supposedly happened 36 years earlier.

But Grimmest of Baseball's Oddities took place when the Wilmar and Benson Semi-Pro Nines played at Wilmar, Minnesota on July 14, 1903. The community's baseball fans were at fever pitch as the teams battled nine innings to a scoreless tie. In the first half of the 10th, their hearts sank low when Benson sent a run across the plate. In the home team's half, Thielman, Wilmar pitcher, came out nearly exhausted but slapped a scratch single. O'Toole, next batter, responded to the crowd's appeals for a hit with a smash to center field. Calling on his last burst of energy, Thielman, Thielman, Thielman, rounded second, then staggered into third and collapsed. then staggered into third and collapsed. O'Toole tore around the bases, came to third, realized that he'd be out if he passed Thielman,

so he lifted the prostrate player in his arms and carried him to home plate, then touched the rubber himself to win the game. It wasn't until a doctor came down from the stands that they discovered a dead man had scored the tying run. Heart failure killed Thielmann on that fateful dash around the bases. Oh my god. Yeah. So you've heard or possibly seen instances of, let's say, a base runner getting injured and being unable to complete their trip around the bases and someone helps carry them around the rest of the way.

In this case, supposedly, the player had actually died on third base and O'Toole came around, realized this player had passed out, just picked him up and carried him home. And I guess was not out the idea was because he didn't actually pass him. He just carried him along with him. So that's the story as recounted 36 years later. So I did some digging here because you would think that if this had happened in 1903, that it would have been reported in 1903, that that would have been newsworthy. If a dead man scored a run in a baseball game, even if it was a lower level, non-professional baseball game,

you'd think that that would have made the rounds if people were still talking about it 36 years later. Well, I looked and looked. I couldn't find anything from 1903. And the first reference I could find to this was from 1907, which is somewhat suspicious, right? Why did it take four years for this news to spread? But there were quite a few accounts. This seemed to be almost a syndicated column maybe that made the rounds in like August, September, October of 1907. This story kept getting reprinted and circulated as fact unquestioned. And then I dug a little bit deeper and I found a clip from October 16th, 1907 from the Wilmar Tribune. So if you'll recall Wilmar, that's the town where this

supposedly happened. So again, we're going straight to the source, the people on the spot here. And here's the headline from the Wilmar Tribune, October 16th, 1907, a baseball story that got mixed up in a curve. So here's what it says. The following weird tale is going the rounds of the press. The clipping in this instance being taken from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is supposed to have been told by Ollie Anderson, umpire of the Wisconsin State League. So this is the account that was printed in various other papers, and the Wilmar Tribune is reprinting it here. So here's what Ollie Anderson, supposedly the umpire in that league, said. And he's remembering this four years later.

In 1903, I was umpiring independent ball in Minnesota. I was umpiring independent ball in Minnesota. Superiority of teams between the towns Wilmar and Benson was to be determined by a doubleheader at Benson July 4th. It was one of the hottest days I have known. Benson won the morning game 2-1 by a fluke play in the ninth. Wilmar was somewhat disheartened, but for the afternoon game they were pitching Thielmann, a twirler on whom every Wilmar fan would bet his last dollar. About the end of the ninth inning, Thielmann began to show the effects of the heat, and the score was still a tie. Had been, in fact, since the second inning. In the first half of the 10th, Benson got a run by a base on balls, an error and a hit. Wilmar fans looked pretty sick.

Thielmann was first up, and I could see that he was about down and out. With 2-3 on him, however, he got lucky and biffed a single. 2-3, I guess that is a full count. The next man up, O'Toole, was a player with a head that he could use. He met the first ball fair and square and got what had every appearance of being a home run. Thielmann started for the plate, got to second all right, staggered a little on the way to third and fell flat on the bag. O'Toole came along and knowing that two runs would win the game and that he could not score ahead of Thielman, picked him up and carried him to home plate and touched it himself.

I decided that the two runs counted. A doctor came out on the field, looked at Thielman and pronounced him dead, overcome by the country. And here is the last paragraph of this piece from the Wilmar Tribune, which simply says, there are a few minor inaccuracies in the above hair-raising story. In the first place, Wilmar did not play at Benson in 1903. What? In the second place, Anderson did not umpire games in this locality that year. Oh my gosh. In the third place, Thielman was not with Wilmar that year, but several years earlier. In the fourth place, and this seems pretty conclusive, Thielman is still pitching ball in Eastern leagues.

And then the concluding sentence, with these exceptions, the story is probably correct. Wow. Mic drop by the Wilmar Tribune. Man. And that's why we need to support local news. Because they were the ones on the scene doing the shoe leather reporting here, getting to the bottom of this fact checking this Anderson, who was just spinning tall tales. Yeah, fast and loose. That were not being fact-checked at all and just reprinted because I guess it's a print

the legend sort of case. It's the story's too good to check. And I guess that Ali Anderson just made up this yarn out of whole cloth, told it to some gullible reporter or columnist who was just looking to fill some column inches. And one of the columns I found was called baseball gossip. So I guess the standards, the journalistic standards were probably not super high for baseball gossip. It was baseball gossip. But I'm so grateful that someone at the Wilmar Tribune decided to chase down this story and disprove it. But it's such a good story that it was still circulating decades later. And the last little coda is that I found another reference to this in the New York Times on May

29th, 1949, because a book had just come out called Low and Inside by Ira L. Smith and H. Allen Smith, one of whom was a humorist. And this was a collection of humorous baseball stories that I think were supposedly still true. And I found a review of this book by Tallulah Bankhead, who, if anyone does not know Tallulah Bankhead, look up her Wikipedia page because it's quite a ride. She was a prominent actress and celebrity, probably best known for being in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. That is probably her most memorable screen role. screen role, but she was a stage actress and on the radio and on TV and just an extremely colorful character in many ways. And again, go check out the Wikipedia page. But she was also a big baseball fan and a big fan of the New York Giants, the baseball team. And so she just reviewed this book of baseball stories for The New York Times.

And one of them was, quote, that a dead man once scored the winning run in a game between Benson and Wilmar out in Minnesota. Oh, my gosh. This is 46 years after this is supposed to have happened, 42 years after it was first reported, if we want to call it reporting. And it was still circulating and being aggregated. So aggregation, not a new phenomenon, maybe a worse phenomenon, but it was happening even then. So I guess a good baseball story just never dies. No one wants to be the Wilmar Tribune and say, excuse me, actually, this couldn't have happened because Benson and Wilmar didn't play and Ali Anderson wasn't the umpire and also the guy who died, he's still alive. But I really applaud that they fact check it.

Just the politifact of the Wilmar Tribune fact check however many Pinocchios, many Pinocchios in this case. I mean, it's stat head, you know? Yep. I don't know. I need stat head, you know? Yep. I don't know if this is stat headable. I'm not sure if Thielman is in the baseball reference. Yeah, fair enough. In one way or another, he's dead now. But he did not die on third base and then posthumously score.

All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. Thanks to Scott Boris for indulging us. Thanks to you all, as usual, for indulging us. And you heard us speak to Scott about the MLBPA's unionization effort. Well, after we spoke to Scott and after we spoke to each other, it happened. It became official. So the MLBPA is now officially representing minor leaguers in a union. representing minor leaguers in a union. How about that? Would have been shocked if you had told me a few weeks ago that I would be saying this today. Took a very long time for the wheels to be set in motion, but once they started spinning, they went zero to 60 right quick. So we've already discussed that at length, but I'm sure that we will touch on it next time, along with a bunch of other banter

and news and perhaps emails that we didn't get to today. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get yourself access to some perks, and help us stay ad-free aside from our StatHead sponsorship, Scott Rosen, Andrew Taylor, Chris Hilton, Ryan Quans, and Mr. John C. Betzler.

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That's a little perk too. Easier for us to see your emails if you message us through the Patreon site. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at ewpod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode this week. We'll be back with it pretty soon, so talk to you then. The internet said I had passed away Well, if I died, I wasn't dead to stay

And I woke up still not dead again today Well, I woke up still not dead again today The gardener did not find me that way You can't believe a word that people say. And I woke up still not dead again today. Scott Boris on why the off-season has gone like it has. The off-season is like the America's Cup. We have 30 boats in the water.

They take off and eventually they get to the free agent docks. Normally, there are trade winds and there are economic investments in the capacity of the boat, which allow those boats to get to the appropriate free agent docks. This year, there was a detour to Japan where there was a $250 million asset available for $3 million. All boats went to Japan. Then they sailed back a good distance. They came to Florida and found a sinking ship and all of its cargo was in the water. All teams tried to load it onto their boats.

That took additional time. Then, as they moved forward to the free agent docks, they found other ships dumping cargo. Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay and a few others, which then slowed their arrivals to the free agent docks. So, trade winds, Japan, shipwreck in Florida, more cargo spewing, all those things artificially delayed the arrival to the free agent docks. What in the fuck is Scott Morris talking about? This analogy just really clears everything up for me. I totally understand the market now.