Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1954: ’Los Got Physical

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the conclusion of the Carlos Correa free agency saga, breaking down his new, actually finalized contract with the Twins, reviewing his offseason odyssey, and trying to anticipate his future. Then (28:20) they banter about Trevor Story’s elbow surgery, the Blue Jays’ and Marlins’ signings of Brandon Belt and Johnny […]

This is the story of your red right ankle And how it came to meet your leg And how the muscle bone and the sinews tangled And how the skin was softly shed And how it whispered, oh, it's here to me For we are bound by symmetry Hello and welcome to episode 1954 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello! We no longer have to Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. We no longer have to say pending physical. Oh, my God. I mean, we might have to say it at some point. And I know we're all technically pending physical, just as we're all day to day, as they say. Even Carlos Correa pending some physical someday. I'm sure he'll still have to have some sort of physicals, just routine checkups like we all do. But the big one, the one that was holding up his contract, that one, he has passed. He passed his physical. Congratulations, Carlos Correa, Minnesota twin. Still a Minnesota twin.

Again, the once in future Minnesota twin. Yeah. I remember when I think Aaron Judge signed and we were saying that sometimes it's a little less interesting when a big player just re-signs with the same team. I mean, it might be better for baseball in some sense, but also there's just less to analyze. The circumstances didn't change as much as if that player had changed teams. This is maybe the exception, I think,

because future generations might look at Carlos Correa's baseball reference page and think, oh, he was a twin in 2022. And look, still a twin in 2023. Nothing to see here. I guess he just stayed with the twins. And you won't know unless you were there or this story and its legacy lives on, which I'm sure it will for some time that

he was uh almost technically a member of two teams between those two seasons with the twins two other teams yeah it's um look ben one of my responsibilities ben as a managing editor of fancraft let's try to to anticipate when news will break. Because we want to respond to it in a timely way. And I use a variety of mechanisms to do that. Some of them involve sorcery, a.k.a. talking to people I know who work for teams. And them saying, hey, just so you know, Meg know meg i'm gonna have a this and that happening on this in that time notice that i didn't uh betray any this is or that specifically because

i don't want to get anyone in trouble kept your sources protected yeah and i i'm not a i'm not a news breaker you know and uh we don't really we don't really have any news breakers except maybe around like the draft you know then then there's a little bit of woe-jing that goes on. Yeah, you're no Carlos Bayerica. You're not dropping Bayerica bombs left and right. Yeah, I mean, I do love sport, but I am not a newsbreaker, right? So there's that piece of it.

And then the other piece of it is like, you know, I think that we have talked about how there are certain newsbreakers who seem to maybe, who could say have um some regular sources of their own on the on the agent or team side and when they start saying stuff you your ears perk up a little bit you go okay so this is maybe starting to and some of those folks have occasionally been had by agents you know we, we're just going to call it straight. Like they've occasionally gotten played a little bit by agents, perhaps to manufacture or further the market for that agent's client.

You know, that's part of it. That's part of the Casa Duum business. I don't tend to think of Ken Rosenthal as one of those newsbreakers who gets got very often. It doesn't seem to happen with Ken. And he's not the only newsbreaker for whom that is true, but he is one of the newsbreakers for whom that is true. So when Ken wrote about how the twins were sort of back in, in a real way,

I was like, Oh yeah, I maybe need to get ready to, to edit a Carlos Correa signing react again, you know? And so we, we ran it up the flagpole here at Fangraphs. And I said, it's Ben Clements. Ben, here's our plan.

You know, here's what we're going to do in the various scenarios, you know, one involving him actually getting a deal done with the twins and there with the Mets rather. And one involving him signing with literally anyone else. And we had that ready to go. And then sure enough, Carlos Correa, not a forever twin, you know, but a for a long time twin for, you know, parts of our lives that are relevant stretches that might involve big life

movement twin, you know, that's harder to say, but it's sort of reflective of it. And you know what, like what a weird winter, you know, you've got a lot of climates you're considering if you're Carlos Correa, right? Yeah, really. You're thinking about living in a lot of different places. I wonder, I think a lot about moving and how inconvenient that is. And so I wonder, did Carlos Correa and his wife, did they own a home in Minnesota? Did they rent a home in Minnesota? own a home in Minnesota? Did they rent a home in Minnesota? If they did one or the other,

can they go back to that same home? Or now that he's going to be there for at least six years, are they like, well, we want to have a more permanent residence that is perhaps more bespoke to our likings? Because I think think we all knew and so did they that absent a really terrible 2022 that he was likely to opt out and test free agency again we didn't know what a saga it would be no we did not it's funny i'm gonna continue rambling ever so briefly like if you had told me on november 6th when free agency you know guys were declared free agents or whatever you know if you had told me when the last out was recorded in the World Series, it's going to take Carlos Correa until January 10th to sign a deal, I would have been like, wow, the off-season is moving along in a nice clip.

We're doing great. We don't have any of this wait until March business that we've seen for some big names, either because of stinginess or the pandemic, I guess not the pandemic, but stinginess or the lockout. I mean, what a normal. He didn't sign until March 22nd last time. Right.

I would have sat there and said, what a regular ass off season we're dealing with. Much like his baseball reference page. What a lie that would be yep wow it's it's yeah he flirted with three different time zones i guess so he was almost a west coaster then almost an east coaster now remains a midwesterner at least during baseball season and gosh so much to discuss it's just it continues to be tremendous content. You've gotten more Fangraphs posts out of the Carlos Correa signings than you ever could have anticipated. The press conference is scheduled to start very shortly as we speak here. So if we get any updates, we'll have some real time reactions.

Or if Scott Boris drops any puns or anything, we will bring them to you live for us, but not for you. But really, we have to talk about the terms, obviously, because the terms have changed dramatically. have all reported and confirmed that it's done and that he passed the physical until he gets to put on that twins uniform and that jersey the way he did not quite get to don the giants jersey for his press conference that got canceled at the last second there we will soon see him at a podium and then and only then will i believe that this is done but it is reportedly a six-year, $200 million contract with four additional vesting options that can take it up to $270 million over a 10-year term. No opt-outs. He does get a new trade clause.

So this is a weird one. I guess it's even weirder than his contract last winter. This whole saga, you wouldn't have thought that things could be weirder than they were for him last year, where things got delayed by the lockout, and then he signed late with a team that no one had really expected him to sign with. It got so much weirder this year. As many people noted, he signed with three of the 30 teams, like a tenth of all the teams, signed Carlos Correa and agreed to terms with him. But these terms, so if you compare this to his initial agreement with the Giants, which was 13 years and 350 million, this is obviously a big

step down in terms of total guaranteed dollars and years. It's basically like a Carlos Rodan or Dansby Swanson contract almost got subtracted from Carlos Correa's initial contract because of the concerns about his ankle or lower right leg or whatever it is exactly that both the Giants and the Mets flagged. Yeah. By the way, I noticed that the Mets put out an extremely terse statement about this. Yeah, they sure did. Even more terse than the Giants' statement, although they did add one word because at the end, the Giants said, we wish Carlos the best. The Mets said, we wish Carlos all the best.

Yeah, just some one-upsmanship there, I guess. All the best the Mets said we wish Carlos all the best yeah just some one-upsmanship there I guess all the best but this deal I mean kudos to the twins for capitalizing on strange circumstances in two consecutive winters to land a player who otherwise might have been out of whatever price range they probably would have set for themselves. And they have to be thrilled. At least Twins fans have to be thrilled. Of course, there's just the concern about his leg or his ankle hanging over all of this. We might be about to find out that he just he has a peg leg. That's the problem.

He has a peg leg and it's fine. He can play on it. But if termites get in there, then that could be an issue at some point. So that kind of concerns you long term. I don't know what the issue is. We may never know. We may not know now. But whatever it was, was apparently severe enough for two teams to dramatically mark down their offers or want to walk away. There have been multiple reports also that the Mets, after the physical, basically halved the guaranteed dollars that they had offered him and term, right? And so like the ultimate dollars might have come to the same if he had continued to stay healthy, but it was a dramatic reduction and reportedly almost like a NFL style non-guaranteed arrangement where he would have had to take a physical every year. It would have just twins who initially had offered 285, right, over 10 years. Yes. And instead they got him for considerably less than that.

And also the structure of it is odd in that it seems like the longer it goes, the better it gets for the twins in theory, right? Because there are all these vesting options tacked on. So the contract is kind of front loaded. So he gets more millions in the early years of the deal. And then the latter years of the deal, which I guess if he surpasses certain playing time, plate appearance thresholds, then more years get tacked on to the end at a low aav right especially low by that point so yeah it's weird it's almost like you would typically see options or something but instead it's like player options or whatever but instead you get these vesting options that it seems like the longer it

goes and the healthier he stays and remains productive, like in theory, the better the deal this gets for the twins. So it's a strange one. It's a strange one. I think that the six years that are guaranteed, right? Like they're in line with what you would expect him to make from an AAV perspective, right? And they're juiced relative to the AAVs that he would have gotten

on the other prior alternate timeline deals, right? And then, you know, then they build in a lot of protection on the back end. Like, I think that if teams had their druthers, this is exactly how they would structure contracts, right? Like they would say, hey, we think that the production that will be the very best is the stuff that's going to come right up front. And then we have a bunch of optionality on the back end, and it's not going to cost us very much anyway.

Like, I think that because of the declining AAVs in the later years, right, he's much more likely to be a twin for the full 10 years, unless something catastrophic happens in year six, right? Doesn't this make you feel like he's more likely to just be a twin the whole time? Because the amount of production decline you would have to see before it's worth it to Minnesota to just be like, yeah, we'll just keep Carlos Correa around

for like $10 million a year or whatever. It would have to be pretty profound. So this makes me think that like he is more likely to be a twin in year, I don't know, like eight or nine or 10 of this deal than he might have been if the numbers were higher. That's an obvious point to make, but you know, I don't know. He's just like a mostly forever twin maybe. It's weird. It is, right. And I don't know. He's just like a mostly forever twin, maybe. Yeah. It is. Right. And I wonder what would have happened if he hadn't opted out at all.

Right. I wonder in retrospect. I guess it's still better for him probably that he opted out now. Yeah. Unless whatever the issue is with his ankle or his leg could somehow be less concerning in a year or two if he were to opt out that way. Again, we don't know what it is, so I don't know whether it's something that could somehow resolve itself or whether it would just be even more concerning then, or if he has another healthy season or two, it would be less concerning, or it actually is a real imminent problem

and he hurt himself in the next season or two. Right. And then that would be bad. So I guess there are all kinds of ways that it could have worked out. But I suppose that is not something that he would regret, even though he ended up staying in the same place. It's got to be somewhat disappointing for him, I guess. Not that he's unhappy to be with the twins. for him, I guess. Not that he's unhappy to be with the Twins. I mean, I don't know if it's somewhat awkward because you know you weren't his first choice or at least really, I guess it

doesn't really come down to he liked those other teams more. It's just that they had offered more money, right? So you don't know whether if the Twins had matched the Giants' initial offer or then the Mets' next offer, whether he would have chosen to stay with the Twins then. So it's a little different from if the Twins had offered the same amount of money and he had gone somewhere else and then he had had to come crawling back to the Twins and say, actually, I will take that deal. So probably no one will hold that against him. And I think everyone who roots for the Twins, you just like,'ve got to be happy to have Carlos Correa. And you still have to be disappointed if you're a Giants fan or a Mets fan, even though there is the specter of whatever is happening with his lower right leg hanging over you. In the short term, you figure you're probably going to continue to get a good, productive Carlos Correa.

And if something does happen to him long term, it's not your money as a fan. It's Steve Cohen's money or someone else's money. So you probably would still rather have him in the short term and get good seasons out of him maybe before disaster strikes, if it ever does. It's just going to be fascinating just to watch this deal evolve because unfortunately for him this is going to be hanging over his head to some extent right i mean now that we know that two teams were quite concerned about this then you're almost waiting to find out if they're vindicated by an injury like if he makes it through this contract completely healthy then you'll look back and think, gee, if only the Giants had just gone for it or the Mets had gone for it. I guess you can only make the decision based on what you know at

the time and what your doctors are telling you. And who knows if he plays in one place, he might hurt himself in a different way from if he was playing in some other place. And I don't know that it would even be apparent if he hurt some other body part, it's not necessarily that, like, the peg leg will fall off all of a sudden and we'll all go, aha, it was that all along. I guess, like, in theory, that weakness or whatever it is could cause some kind of cascading injury elsewhere. So you'll never know for sure whether it affected him or not. But if he avoids some specific ankle or leg injury for the entirety of this contract, then I think fans will look back and say, darn, we missed out.

I mean, assuming he's been healthy and productive in other ways during the term of that contract. And if it doesn't work out, if he does hurt that specific part, then I guess you'll look back and say oh actually the giants and the mets they knew what they were doing although if he propels the twins to a championship in the meantime or even division titles or something then maybe twins fans would say well we got what we could out of him so happy we had him while we did yeah i mean i do wonder

how much it will weigh i mean it's gonna be a story at least this year for sure. Like we won't be able to escape it, particularly in opening day. And I'm sure that when twins coverage starts to roll out in spring training, people are going to be like, oh, here's Carlos Correa. Like, what's his ankle located? He grimace, you know? But I do think the fact that he ended up back on the team that had employed him most recently provides some sort of countervailing force to that

because the twins are clearly quite familiar with Carlos Correa. It would be one thing if he had had this issue with the Giants and he had the issue with the Mets and then the Mariners were like, Carlos, and he was like, yes. And then he was a Mariner, which as an aside would have been great, but I would have been fine with that. And then it's a team that doesn't have a year's worth of history,

that hasn't had the prior physical. So I don't know. It's like I think that there's a lot of variation team to team in terms of what they are looking at. There's obviously going to be a higher level of scrutiny when you're getting ready to sign a guy for six years versus having a contract structure like he has with Minnesota. And so it's possible that there's just like a disagreement amongst these clubs. And because the deals were going to be longer and more lucrative with San Francisco

and New York that they couldn't get themselves comfortable. And then here he is with Minnesota. And they're like, we know him. We know what we're getting. And we're fine with it. Yeah. And it's a huge upgrade for them. It would have been huge for the Giants.

It's very costly that they didn't get a good, healthy Carlos Correa or Aaron Judge. And for the Mets, as we said, he was sort of a luxury for them to some extent. I mean, he would have had to change positions, and they're a very good team without him. He certainly would have given them a much better chance of winning the division, but they project as a playoff team anyway, whereas the Twins without Carlos Correa have a much worse chance of of making the playoffs than they do now yeah so this is a very big upgrade for them and the twins i mean they don't often sign the super expensive superstar and they have now the same one two off seasons in a row because uh something threw a wrench into Carlos Correa's plans.

And there they were, willing to step up and structure a contract however they could to get it done and maybe take a slight risk on the health and all these things. So credit to them. And Twins fans are very pleased to have him back. I mean, they were surprised that they had him at all and then kind of counted on him leaving. And now here he is again. You can't get rid of the guy. So I think they're quite pleased. And I mean, it's sort of a satisfying resolution to the saga. I mean, this has been so amusing all along. And I have some sympathy for caris correa because it can't have been fun to go through this especially publicly like having all this stuff out is and obviously we don't know everything

related to his injury which is fine and we don't need to but yeah yeah right i'm still able to enjoy it because there's a limit to my sympathy for him. He ended up making $200 million instead of $350 million or something. He's doing well. He's made $60 plus million in his career to date, and he still gets to play for a major league team and stick at shortstop and all those things. It's a perfectly fine outcome, if slightly less ideal than what we thought it was going to be. So it's still rough, obviously, not to know where you're going to be, but that kind of comes with the territory of being a Major League Baseball player and being a free agent. There was always going to be some unsettled period this winter.

And it's odd, I guess, that everyone's like, what's wrong with this guy's ankle? I mean, I guess there are much more embarrassing or stigmatized ailments that this could have been in theory. So it's just an ankle or a lower leg thing, whatever it is. So I get it. It's like kind of feel for the guy,

but also not so much that I feel bad about just like reveling in the drama and just the entire soap opera that went on here over the past month. Just wild. It's almost like it's kind of like put the sign stealing saga in the rear view mirror. Like when I think of Carlos Correa now, I don't know that that was the first thing I thought of. Probably I just thought of like him being a really good baseball player. But for a lot of people, it was, I think. And now, I don't know that it will be.

It's almost overshadowed now. He's not Carlos Correa, the former signs dealer. He's Carlos Correa, the guy who agreed to terms with three different teams as a free agent in one offseason. That's way more unprecedented than being a signs dealer. So, in a way way he's changed the narrative oh boy what a weird what a weird life it has to be right it just has to be the weirdest thing to be a professional athlete i'm like you know most of the time the only person who cares where you're gonna live is your mom i mean like and your you know significant others but like in

terms of like the vested parties outside your immediate family it's like your parents like maybe your friends depending on how good the friends they are but you know we got random people in cities that carlos correa has never been to being like where's carlos correa gonna go yeah it's a weird it's a weird thing. I don't know. I wouldn't want people speculating. Maybe that's why I'm not a professional baseball player, Ben. Just that. Yeah, that's the only reason. But if one of us had a bum ankle, no one would know or care. And it would not affect our earning potential or where we were employed or anything long term. Maybe we would be more likely to roll it someday at the gym.

Maybe we'd have to tape it up eventually. But it really would not have any long term impact on our livelihood. And no one would know about it. So it is a very different kind of job. Anyway, Coriam miss has come really really late but it has finally come it seems like so congrats to cars korea on actually having a completed contract it's official he has a team and i suppose we can put this to rest but i'll look back fondly on this episode.

Yeah, and you can't even stretch it and try to do an epiphany thing, because that was on January 6th. Yeah, I know, right. I was like, maybe he's going to really lean into it and try to force an epiphany metaphor in there. But nope, didn't do it, couldn't do it. force an epiphany metaphor in there, but nope. Didn't do it. Couldn't do it. It's bad news, I guess, for Kyle Garlick, who was designated for assignment to free up the spot on the roster for Carlos Correa. And it's also bad news, although kind of inconsequential, for your free agent over-under transition. Oh, terrible. Terrible. Oh, yeah. I got totally, I got totally toast. To recap, you took the over. Just washed by it. Oh, yeah. I got wrecked and I was doing great. $288 million guaranteed dollars for Carlos Correa and the initial 350 with the Giants.

You were 62 above that with the $10 million bonus. So you were 72 million in the right direction. And then when it got cut down to 315, you were still making, I think, 27 plus the 10 million bonus, 37. But now he's down to 200. You're at negative 88 on this transaction, which takes you into negative territory on the whole. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So- Wrecked. I got wrecked.

The outcome was determined prior to this downward revision, but now it's just, it's adding insults. Oh, yeah. I went from like a respectable showing. Like I was like, I didn't win, but you know, last year I did pretty poorly

as I recall. Yeah. And this year I was like, well, I didn't win, but you know, I showed- You're in positive territory. Yeah, I showed improvement.

I was like, okay, I did fine. Like I did fine. Yep. No, not anymore. Yeah. I don't think we could like, okay, I did fine. Like, I did fine. Yep. No. Not anymore. Yeah. I don't think we could hold this one against you.

I think it really should go in the win column for you. I agree. It doesn't, but. I know. But, like, there should be an asterisk attached to it, you know? Yeah. Much like, you know, this isn't consistent with some other aspects of Carlos Carrera's resume like maybe we just put a little star next to it but um right no i uh i got i got truly worked by a ticking time bomb an injury from years ago you know it just got well and thoroughly worked and i i feel good being mad about this one right because like the thing about that draft is

that well we want to win but if we're gonna be wrong we want to be wrong you know to the player's benefit right like it's it's nice when a player dramatically outperforms our expectations and so this one i feel good being really worked up about because Carlos and I, we're aligned, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You're feeling the pain here too, just like he is. Yeah. It's exactly the same. So, you know, yeah. Yeah. That's an underreported aspect of all of this is how it affected your free agent over under draft, I think. So just wanted to shine a little light on that. All right. We'll see if anything else comes out in the press conference,

which is getting underway here. But thanks for the memories, Carlos and Scott and Steve and Farhan and everyone else involved in creating this story. Yeah. So in other injury news, in actual injury that has already occurred, not just might occur someday news, Trevor Story is out for quite some time, potentially the entire season. So we talked about the concerns about whether Trevor Story could still handle shortstop, which he was slated to do, Xander Bogarts having departed the Red Sox. And he really had issues with arm strength. And it was an open question about whether he could still play that position. And now, at least we know that he cannot now because he recently learned and realized

that he needs elbow surgery. He's having not Tommy John exactly, but the internal brace procedure that is sort of like a quicker Tommy John. And he evidently just realized that his elbow was hurt when he started ramping up his throwing program, getting ready for the season. And he had elbow pain and they got that checked out.

Initially, I saw this and was like, why are you getting the surgery now in mid-January when you could have gotten it months ago, early October? But it was apparently something that he was not aware of or I don't know. Sometimes you see this sort of thing when spring training rolls around that's when a lot of pitchers tend to have tommy johns because either they ramped up too quickly maybe or they just had a little twinge maybe at the end of the previous season but they thought oh i haven't a whole off season to rest it and it'll be good as new by spring and then they come back and it is not good as new i don't know which this was but it was uh recently determined that he needs to have the surgery. And typically the return time for a position player is maybe four to six months or so.

But from the sound of it, the Red Sox are not counting on having him back this season at all. Heimbloom said as much that, you know, they're not really penning him in to play shortstop. Yeah. Thus, they don't really have a shortstop. Yeah. Which is just a minor problem. I guess they could go get Kyle Garlick. I can't get Carlos Correa.

He is spoken for. I know. If only, if they could have swooped in at the last second and said, hey, we need a shortstop here, then we could have had just a whole other episode. Oh, my God. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the drama? Yeah. Oh, boy.

I can because we just saw it happen with multiple teams. But anyway, they will have to, I guess, move Kike Hernandez there. Yeah, that's how we have it charted out on our depth charts at Roster Resource right now. Pick up someone. They need to pick up maybe multiple someones, and there aren't that many someones out there at this point. So we've talked about the issues with the Red Sox roster already, but this is a pretty severe one that just popped up at a point where there's only so much you can do to address it so not not good not good for the red socks to have this happen at this point yeah it feels like their whole like we talked about before it's like they have an off

season sequencing problem and this just feels like the latest example of it where they didn't get Devers done early enough to go into the rest of the offseason with like a, hey, we definitely have a Rafael Devers for a long time. Maybe let's build a team that might win some games around him. And now that situation is looking worse. situation is looking worse. So I don't really have a lot to add to our earlier discussion, other than it seems like there's just like a shocking amount of work to do on this roster that still is somehow looking at a payroll right around $200 million and one that is, you know, not that far removed from the first luxury tax thresholds when you're looking at it from a CBT perspective. So it's just a weird team. It's a weird team that's worse. It strikes me as very strange that like, and look, you know, I don't know what they all knew when at what point,

but you don't have to, I think, be like a scout to have watched Trevor Story throwing and be like, that seems bad. Like something seems like something's wrong there. You know, I think his arm strength had been noteworthy or at least his lack of arm strength had been noteworthy for a while now. You know, as we get more data from StatCast about like the zip on those throws, like it's bad out there, Ben, you know, it's bad for him. I was like, it's bad out there, Ben.

You know, it's bad for him. So the whole thing just seems very strange. And I might not make much of that. And it might be unfair for me to make something of it even now. But just taken with the rest of their offseason, it feels like even though they got Devers done and that is a big deal, the winter for Boston has not been a good one. It's largely just not been positive. I feel bad. It's like Devers has an introductory press conference and it's got this Paul hanging over it.

None of this is his fault. I don't know. It's a weird winter in Boston, I think. Yep. And a couple more minor signings, one-year deals. The Blue Jays signed Brandon Belt. Yeah, they did. Who's And a couple more minor signings, one-year deals. The Blue Jays signed Brandon Belt. Yeah, they did. Who's been a career giant.

Gonna be really weird to see him in a different uniform, huh? Yeah, it's gonna take some getting used to. So, I don't know exactly how he fits in there. I know Justin Choi wrote about him at FanCrafts and pointed out that he's very good against breaking balls, which seems like

something that would benefit the Blue Jays. And they have been very right-handed, of course. They already acquired Dalton Varshow and got a little less right-handed, but this gives them a little more left-handedness and Belt can just sub in. You can kind of use him to spell people or in certain matchups or as a pinch hitter. He doesn't have to be an everyday guy anymore and may not be physically capable of being an everyday guy with a knee issue that he has had over the years. But he's been a very good player and he's been a player who probably his stats have been depressed by the park a bit. And a friend of the show, Jesse Thorne, pointed out in our Facebook group, he noted that Belt was a truly great giant and a great way to filter the dumbbell fans from the bright ones, which is good. That's a useful thing. If there's a player on your team who has some sort of generally undervalued skill set, something maybe that doesn't show up in the back of the baseball cards,

but counts in some way, adds value. Maybe it's a great defense that isn't super apparent to the eye test, or maybe it's just getting on base or whatever it is. I think it's handy to have someone who, if you have a conversation with a fan and they're slagging off this guy as not being a good player, you can kind of just, I don't know, dismiss their opinions, but kind of classify them as, oh, they're that kind of fan, or this is the way that they look at baseball. And either we're on different wavelengths here, or maybe I have to modulate how I'm going to talk about this player. I'm going to talk about this player.

I'm going to have to do some persuading here. That can be frustrating, I think, when there is a player who is perennially underrated and maybe maligned by some segment of the fan base. But it's also kind of a nice tip to you. It's like, oh, I can discount this person's opinions if they don't think this is a good player. Maybe this was more common in earlier eras when there was more of a disparity in the way that fans would typically look at players. But Belt has been that guy, I think, just because he's been a good on-base guy and good defense and the power suppressed by the park and all, and you put it all together. And he's

been a really good hitter when healthy over the course of his career so you know he's into his uh his clubhouse mentor part-time player phase and it sounded like he was maybe convinced to sign with the blue jays at least in part because he had incredible chicken tenders at the hotel when he was there on a road trip and the the tendies were so good and available late at night after the game that he had a great trip there. He had a couple of good games and had some extra base hits and gave the tendies credit. And I don't know whether he will try to get the chicken tenders, even though he will be a Toronto resident for much of the time. I don't know if he'll be

living in that hotel full time so he can just get the chicken tenters or whether he can stop by. But you never know what's going to persuade someone to sign somewhere. Because we talked in the past about how sometimes the Blue Jays have extra obstacles in signing free agents because, you know, bagged milk. And they've got to play in a different country and in the past vaccine issues and all kinds of different complications of playing in a different country. But maybe they have great chicken tenders, at least at this one venue on their side. So that's something. I have two questions for you. The first of which is, did he refer to them as tendies?

He did not. Okay, that's a Ben Lindbergh original. Okay, I don't have any, you know, I've called them tendies before, so I don't have judgment about the use of tendies, but I was going to, you know, use that to fill in some of the belts profile I have in my mind. Like, here's a he did not call them tendies. Tendies. And I love that, you know, as you noted, we have devoted probably at this point hours to trying to establish a coherent baseball hierarchy of needs for free agents. And Brandon Belt's here to say, no, no, it's the tendies, you know? It's just the tendies. Yeah, it's the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto, if anyone wants to check these out. Oh, so they're fancy tendies? Well, he said the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto had the best chicken tenders I've ever had in my life. Wow.

Just the right amount of crisp and super tender. Okay. He had a Homer and a Double in the two-game series, and he said, I think it was the tenders. And he has a method. two-game series, and he said, I think it was the tenders. And he has a method. He said, I get my ketchup and my ranch, and I dip the tenders, ketchup first, then ranch, then lots of black pepper on the fries. So he's like creating an aioli. Yeah, I guess so. Basically. I mean, it's not with ranch as a mayo sub. He's just doing a little aioli there. Well, I think ranch dressing is gross, so that doesn't appeal to me, but I'm happy that

he is happy. You know my take on food, which is as long as you're not eating dolphins, I don't really care what you like to eat. Don't eat dolphins. There's other stuff on that list, but that one feels like it really drives the point home for people. But I'm glad for him and his fancy tendies. Yep, me too.

And I'm sure that the Ritz-Carlton is appreciative. Hats off to their kitchen staff. I feel like the Blue Jays should send their kitchen staff some tickets or something as a thank you. I've never been to Toronto. I appreciate that there are complications for U.S. residents who sign deals there, but I'm given to understand that it is a wonderful city.

So I feel like it should be easy to appeal to people, and perhaps if Americans are worried that they're going to have culture shock, they can rest assured, because you know what they have in Toronto? Tendies. They get some tendies. They get some.

And do Canadians call chicken tenders something different? Do they call them, I don't know. I don't know. As a dual citizen, I should know that. Shameful, Ben. But I do not. Maybe they reject tendies. Could be.

But Belt didn't call them that, so that's fine. No. Yeah. So that was a one-year $9.3 million deal. And then the other one in that genre was the Marlins. Yeah, another pitcher. Yeah, another pitcher. One-year $8.5 million.

So I guess he's either trade bait to flip at the deadline or he's additional starting pitcher depth in case they do get a deal done with one of their other starters who might have more trade value. And then they got Johnny Cueto's round, who's perfectly serviceable still. And just high on the delight scale, right? It's just a real treat to watch. I know that some of his peripherals suggested that there were parts of his 2022 performance that might have been unsustainable. But he, especially for a guy who signed on opening day, right? Didn't he sign a minor league deal on opening day with Chicago? Sure put together a heck of a campaign. I appreciate Johnny Cueto because he's 36,

so I need him to stay around so that I don't turn into a pillar of salt. Yeah, 37 next month. Yeah, I'm not 37 next month, but it's closer than it used to be, Ben. It would be bad if Johnny Cueto were a pillar of salt because I imagine the shimmy would mean he'd fall apart. That's true. But yeah, I think it's not what Miami needs, but I'm never going to be mad about Johnny Cueto signing somewhere and being cool

because that's Johnny Cueto's thing. Yep. And another little bit of news that came out on Wednesday is that the Tigers are moving some fences and lowering some fences at Comerica. Yeah. So the fences center field, the very deep center field is moving in 10 feet. And then the center field wall

is also lowering from eight and a half feet to seven feet. The right center field wall is also going to be a lot shorter, seven feet instead of 13 feet. So this will be a pretty good home run robbery park now with those lower fences. I'm in favor of that. And then the right field wall also goes from eight and a half feet to seven feet. So it's mostly shorter fences and then the very deep center field will be a little

less deep. And I get that, but I'm also sort of sad about it, I guess, just because it was kind of an outlier when you look at hard-hit balls and the quality of contact and the actual results you get in America. A lot of hitters have been jobbed by those fences. And if you look at baseball savants, three-year park factors, the Tigers do have the most extreme home run factor on the low end. Now, the other factors are not so extreme. In fact, the overall park factor is not that extreme toward pitchers, slightly, but all the other kinds of hits are basically either neutral or like doubles and triples. It's actually quite a good park because of the big outfield and the big high walls and everything. But for homers, it's been tough. And I get the appeal. I don't know that there is that much of a competitive advantage when it comes to extreme environments, really. And often it can make it harder to retain people or it's sort of discouraging or people don't want to sign there. And so I understand why. But I also just kind of lament how homogenous the park dimensions are getting because we always celebrate that as an unusual aspect of baseball. And as we've noted, parks, the dimensions, the fence heights, the fence depths, they have gotten more standardized over time, just fewer weird ones. So that deep center at Comerica will not be quite as deep. And I'm sure the hitters will be happy about it.

I'm given to understand that when Miguel Cabrera first arrived there, he asked them, like, why did they make it so big? So I'm sure he's sitting at home now being like, what the f***? Yeah, right. Sorry, I did a swear, everyone. I didn't give you advanced warning. Someone will learn a lesson or something. I don't Yeah, right. Sorry, I did a swear, everyone. I didn't give you advanced warning. Yeah.

Someone will learn a lesson or something. I don't know, man. Yeah. Apparently, Carlos Correa has just said, my heart was here, which, you know,

I mean, I guess you have to say that, but he did not leave his heart in San Francisco, but really, can you... Oh, no. That feels like he got teed up for that one from Boris.

He didn't say that. I know, but you know that Scott Boris is going to make that joke. He's thinking it probably, but- I bet Scott Boris listens to Tony Bennett. Can you really sell the, my heart was here all along when I agreed to terms with two other teams? I think you can. Or could you just say say my heart was here,

but I like money more than my heart? Well, no. I think we've seen stuff in recent days that he was still in group chats with all the Twins guys and they were talking ball. He seems like he was very popular in that clubhouse. I think that people understand the way that, I'm sure Carlos Correa would say it is like my heart was here, but I had to do what I felt was right for my family.

And now I'm glad that I'm able to have made this work with the twins. See, you gotta let people finesse this stuff, Ben. You know, you gotta let them finesse it. Another Carlos Correa quote, one thing I learned through the process is doctors have differences of opinions. Yeah.

It seems like an understatement, but yes. All right. Just a couple of quick follow-ups, just more submissions, listener submissions for ways in which baseball is unique or at least unusual. So we talked about Brandon Belt. Nathan nominates baseball players wearing belts. He wrote, I don't think anyone else covered this. Baseball players wear belts.

I think this is so great and silly, and I'm pretty sure no other major sports uniforms have belts. Golfers wear them, I guess, and I suppose they have rules and regulations about what kind of clothes they can wear. But these are not standardized uniforms the same way baseball uniforms are. It's always struck me as ridiculous and super great that we ask these guys to run and slide and jump and dive, and then when they pop up, they literally have to pull clumps of dirt and grass out of their belt buckles. Every now and then a player wears a belt other than the standard black, usually their team's primary color. And I think that's great. And that's true. That's in the same category kind of as the managers and coaches wearing the same uniform as the players. The

belts are very silly, although I guess the belts, I mean, that just kind of goes together with the fact that they wear pants at all because wearing pants itself is strange. But Ben, I mean, I'm sorry, are you watching sports where they are like doing a Yogi Bear generally where they are ass out in other sports?

No, but most professional athletes wear shorts, right? Like they're not wearing full-length pants. Even if they're wearing, I mean, like hockey players, they have shorts. Like they have thick hockey socks that almost look like pants, but they don't have full-length pants. And I mean, most players, you know, in most sports, soccer players and rugby players and tennis players, I mean, they're wearing shorts, right? And even football players wear, I don't know, what do you call football pants? They're not shorts. They're not shorts. They're not full length either. They don't go all the way down.

No. there covering your legs, but you're not wearing full length pants. So that in itself is unusual. And I guess that's why they're wearing belts is that they're wearing pants, right? And they're wearing pants because they have to slide a lot, which I guess is not unique to baseball, but you're sliding on dirt and it would hurt. And when the White Sox experimented with baseball shorts, I mean, that's a formula for getting some kind of burn on your knees and your shins, and it looks very strange. But wearing full-length pants, I mean, they're pajama pants, basically, but they're pants. That in itself is unusual. Okay, so first of all, I know that we didn't bring it up in the course of that episode but i feel like i have commented on the belt thing a lot over the course of this podcast so yes i agree it is deeply strange now i will say a couple of things the first of those things is that there are some

football uniforms where they have belts they're lesstrusive. They're not like a big leather belt, like a baseball uniform, but they do have something there to keep the top of the uniform tucked into the pants, which I think that they are understood in football to be pants. They're short pants. Ben, they're shorter pants. But they're not shorts.

And you got the sock that come all the way to the top. Here's why I think that there's less of a distinction than you maybe do, which is that you, and I get that they're rolling them up, but when baseball players do high socks and you still think they're wearing pants. Yeah. You don't say, oh, they're wearing shorts now because they're shorter pants.

They're still pants. Yeah, that's true. Cricketers wear pants. I mean, a lot of the ways in which baseball is unusual is cricket is also unusual in those ways. I saw someone note that in the Facebook group, that a lot of these distinctions can be similarly applied to. Yeah, they're in the same family. When we talk about baseball, we're kind of lumping together.

Baseball adjacent sports as well, usually. And here's another one from Jonathan who says, I don't remember you mentioning this one specifically. Baseball is the only sport that I can think of that places so much emphasis on handedness. A lot of the strategy is derived from the handedness of the batter and pitcher. Left-handers are not able to play certain positions. The only somewhat close example from another sport would be a left-handed quarterback requiring a shuffling of the offensive line to protect his blind spot. Can you think of any other examples? I think there are a lot of sports where being left-handed is an advantage. It's

maybe not something that precludes you from playing or playing a certain position. I think baseball is probably unusual in that respect. But there are a lot of sports like quick reaction sports, it seems like, and sports where basically if you have some sort of one-on-one matchup and if lefties are less common in the population in general, then there's a lower familiarity with lefties. And so you kind of get the element of surprise there. That's part of the thing with baseball. And then, of course, there's also the platoon advantage and everything. So there are a lot of studies about other sports in which being left-handed is an advantage.

But baseball is probably one of the starker ones and also one of the ones that maybe forces you into or out of certain boxes. Yeah, I think that there are sports where handedness is important as a filtering process like there aren't a lot of left-handed quarterbacks in the nfl like most quarterbacks throw with their right hand i think some of the reasoning for that is kind of like a discomfort among coaches that might not be really borne out by by the stat and there are like tua i think is a left-handed quarterback and he's playing right now like steve i'm pretty sure steve young was a a left-handed quarterback so like there are active quarterbacks and like very good quarterbacks that you know steve young was a hall of famer who threw left-handed but it isn't

super common so yes i think that there are sports where it's like a filtering mechanism, but it is not as consistently important to the sort of daily strategy of the sport. I would just like you to know that I'm currently looking at like a social media post from the Seattle Seahawks where they are detailing the uniform combo that the team will be wearing and they refer to it, are you ready? White jersey, blue pants. All right. They think they're wearing pants, Ben. Okay, well, the matter is settled.

They're pants, but they're pants. They're wearing hockey uniforms or pants all the way to the ice? No. It sucks? That's shocking. Yeah. I mean, I'm only very tangentially aware of hockey although i hear that the kraken are good i mean i i watch hockey

but i don't know that i always super understand hockey so you know it's not surprising that i didn't know that they're not pants but it's like they're on the ice it seems like both for being cold and not wanting to get right exactly a burn you know from the ice if you go if you fall yeah which i would be an option but generally i think it's not full length necessarily so well we've got a guest yeah we gotta get we gotta they don't care about pants i mean they might but probably not as much as we probably they they wear them although they don't have to for this interview and we wouldn't know if they weren't. So we don't do this on video. I guess he's not wearing a shirt. He's wearing just the tie.

So in some respects, this is a bad analogy on my part. Well, we're going to talk now to Daniel Eck and Adrian Burgos Jr., who are both professors at the University of Illinois. Illinois, and they, along with some colleagues, have authored some studies on era-adjusting baseball stats, including war and also some traditional stats, basically looking at the talent level, the pool of available players over time and how that's changed, and then looking at the difference between players and trying to figure out what's the actual value if we adjust for era, which is difficult to do in baseball. And we end up thinking, oh, baseball hasn't changed and the stats seem sort of similar. So maybe players today are just as good or bad as players back then.

Not so, they say. And they have the stats to back that up. So we'll be back in just a moment with Daniel and Adrian. that up so we will be back in just a moment with daniel and patreon looks like it's time to lay this burn down stop messing around don't want to run a grave in the ground give a soul a place to rest not to ride on a factor bell All right, we are back and we are joined by two guests now and two professors from the University of Illinois. One is Daniel Eck, who is an assistant professor in the math department. Hello, Daniel. Welcome. Hi. Technically the statistics department, but close enough. Yeah. Ah, yes, it's math. But yes, of course, statistics is the actual name of the department. I'll see if I can get the second one right. Adrian Burgos Jr. has joined us before and he is back again. He is a professor in the history department. Hopefully I've named that one correctly. Adrian, hello again.

Hello again. that one correctly. Adrian, hello again. Hello again. So happy to have you both. And I guess we should clarify that this is not the Daniel Ek, who is technically my boss, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, who I guess is my bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, boss, I think, if I've gotten the org chart right there. This is not that Daniel Ek. This is spelled E-C-K, not E-K. Just clarifying that for anyone who was wondering. Maybe no one was. But you two and a few other colleagues have teamed up on a series of papers and studies and research on era-adjusting baseball stats across time, which is something that I am really fascinated by. And so I've been pretty engrossed in your research here. So I don't know who would be best to kick things off, but if you could give us a sense of what got you interested in this topic and

what the state of the research was prior to your tackling it? What are some of the complications here? And why did you think it was important to take a different look at the performance of baseball players across time and the comparisons that we do from one to another? So I had gotten into this a while ago, or just in graduate school and before, I've always been interested in baseball. And I've always been interested in this exercise of doing these fictitious fantasy drafts where you draft among the all-time players and you kind of argue about who has the best team. And I started looking into ways of which people have compared players across eras and different metrics for, you know, comparing players, you know, whether or not they can be interpreted across eras or not. And then I started noticing that there's this tendency to include a lot of people from the past. And I think it's probably best represented

by batting average. If you go to a career leaderboard, you can see a lot of pre-integration players on it. And then I started diving deeper and found that this kind of existed across a lot of different metrics. And then so I wrote this paper on that. And then I started working on, I finally clicked how to do like an era, you know, adjustment method using these ideas from Stephen Jay Gould, who's this evolutionary biology, biologist, paleontologist. And then I started working on it. And I realized I didn't, didn't really know what the, like the context of what I was doing, like what this all meant when we started playing around with it. And I needed some help to try to balance this, you know, the, the, the method works by balancing

how well you perform against your peers, against how many people there are around at a specific time. And, you know, maybe we would adjust that by like relative interest in playing baseball across time. And I didn't really know how to do that fully. And so I wanted to talk to Adrian and meet Adrian about it and discuss what the context of some of our findings are and how to, you know, do this balancing. So then it became a collaborative endeavor between, you know between the statistics and coming up with this model and this sort of central input, which is this MLB eligible population, and then describing what this all means. Yeah, I can jump in here. Daniel reached out to me

and wanted to have a conversation about how do we think about the different eras. And I was fascinated because I do not have the statistical modeling skills of Daniel, not even close. And I've learned a lot from both Daniel and Shan. But what I do know is about the history of the game in terms of integration, in terms of those players who came before Jackie Robinson in the Negro Leagues, and also those who came after Jackie Robinson, those who came out of the Caribbean. And that's part of what we're trying to get to in this project, in looking at how did those players perform against their contemporaries, but then also modeling about how they might have competed against each other and

statistically developing algorithms, codes to allow us to get what Stephen Jay Gould called that full house model of, well, it's fascinating, right? That even in our contemporary times, there's still this notion that the guys who performed in Major League Baseball during its segregated heyday are better than our contemporaries today. And I'm a bit dubious about that. I think they were way above the norm in Major League Baseball, and that's for sure. But greatest ever? That's what we started tackling. Yeah. I think that maybe the reason why baseball so seems to venerate players from earlier eras, I guess there are a few, right? There's the one that Gould was pointing out, right, that we don't have 400 hitters anymore. And so if you look back, someone might say, oh, wow, they used to hit 400. They must have been

better than the players today. Of course, one reason why people don't hit 400 now, there are multiple reasons, but one reason, as he pointed out and argued, is that it's just harder for the best players to separate themselves from the pack now because the overall caliber of competition has increased. So I think that's part of it. I think also part of it is just that deceptively the stats league-wide can often look the same or similar across dramatically different eras, right? So you might look at league averages that are the same today as they were in some earlier era, and you might assume that the game is sort of the same or that the people playing it are the same, but of course they're not because

people are playing against each other. So it's hard to assess the difference and the progression that way, because maybe better players are playing against better players now. And in the past, it was inferior watch baseball and think, oh, this is mostly the same game. And I guess another reason that comes to mind maybe is that with some other sports that developed or became professionalized or prominent later, you don't look back at those players from the early days and say, oh, they were great because those sports were sort of fledgling endeavors at the time and they weren't as prominent and those players were not superstars and celebrities the way that baseball players of earlier eras were, right? I mean, Babe Ruth was maybe the most famous man in the country, right, at the time. And baseball, if anything, was more popular in the United States then relative to other sports and other entertainment options than it is now. So those players were such outsized figures compared to players from the same eras in other sports that were just sort of getting established. why we look back at that. And then maybe it perpetuates itself across generations too,

where you learn about this certain pantheon of players and then you pass that on to the next generation. And if players were excluded from that pantheon or from those leagues, well, there's been kind of an effort

in recent years to everyone pay attention to these players who were not allowed to play in those leagues, but they were great too. And some generations may just not have known about them. So this is a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you that this is a worthwhile exercise, which is not to say that players weren't good then, but a lot has changed, more has changed, I think, than is immediately

apparent. Yeah, a lot has changed. And integration was one of those biggest changes. But there's also, I think, something rather unique about professional baseball's past and how we embrace nostalgia. As you were noting, people don't say George Mikan is better than LeBron. There's this notion that the game has evolved in a way that there's a lot of guys who were hall of famers then who would be all-stars now but not the greatest ever and now we still have this in baseball this notion that well babe ruth is pretty terrific but there's guys who will say trist Beaker is better than you know Barry Bonds it's like really um you know it's the notion that somehow that those players who played in that era get to

benefit from the from nostalgia and segregation and you know Daniel has helped me kind of see how we can model stuff out and think about well well, the game has evolved, but how would have those guys competed if it was integrated in their own era? So I guess on that note, let's walk through the model. to these kinds of things, but give us the, give us the like elevator pitch version of what your model is doing and how it differs from say other attempts to era adjust, uh, stats like war, um, so that we can do these cross era comparisons. Give us the, the, like, uh, the sophomore of college level analysis here so that folks can understand what you're trying to do. Yeah, I'll try on that. So, and I'll kind of sprinkle in, you know, some other details as well. So, okay. So if you look at wins above replacements, which, you know, allows you to, like within any particular season, have a direct comparison of a person versus their peers. And so

comparison of a person versus their peers. And so as, you know, talk about what we've talked about so far, that that sort of distribution of that statistic has changed over time. Now, people haven't really studied wins above replacement from an error adjusted framework, but they've studied it. They've studied batting average or home runs. And it's kind of the same idea that that distribution has changed and you can model those changes. So what we, and that's fine, but in the past, I've looked at that. And if you account for those changes, if you say like, well, Tony Gwynn was 3.5 standard deviations above the mean, so was Ted Williams, they're the same. Well, there's something missing there. And that's this who is feeding into the league, the eligible population at any given set time. So what our model does is it links the players

within the league to an innate type talent score under some assumptions. And then it can estimate those talent scores for every single like season. So then it becomes this balance between at the top end, how well you stand or how far you stand from your peers balanced with how many people there are. And this is, you know, comparing best to the, you know, the best person. There's some assumptions here, like the best achiever in a particular season is granted the best latent talent score in the population, second best, second talent score, which is an assumption. But so, so then how far you stand from your peers is balanced against how many people there are in this eligible population, where if the eligible population is larger, you would expect to see more talented people. If you stood

above your peers to a great degree, you would expect to see that person be better. So it kind of is trying to place those things into balance where previous techniques haven't considered this underlying MLB eligible population and how it interacts with the league. be an eligible population and how it interacts with the league. Yeah. And maybe Adrian, you could weigh in on this. I wonder if you could say how much or by how much the eligible population has increased over the past century plus or what the periods of the most rapid growth in the potential player pool were. Obviously, something like integration, that's big, and other baseball markets being opened up. I wonder whether there was a certain period that led to the largest leaps. And then either of you, I guess, how you tried to account or whether you

can account for just the popularity of baseball in various places, especially in the U.S., you know, as other sports arise and other entertainment options arise, even if the population is growing, how do you determine, I guess, what portion of that population is likely to pursue baseball? Yeah. One of the things that we gauge into this is called interest level. And as you were asking, thinking about what was the gauge for the interest level, US News and World Report had this survey about how interested were male adults in baseball during a certain time period. And yes, that kind of ebbs down after the 60s, 70s, because there was competing sports that NFL begins to come on the scene, NBA. So we do gauge that into our algorithm

that we put together. But interest level also in the Caribbean among African Americans during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, baseball, the Negro Leagues was really the sporting aspiration, athletic African American men. Jackie Robinson was an all-American football player, but the NFL was not really an option for him. And so he ends up playing what was probably his fourth best competitive sport, and that's baseball. And he's a Hall of Famer. So one could there think about how when we have so many athletic, achieving African-American men, and their primary aspiration for professional sports is baseball, how high the talent level is and also the interest level.

Similarly, after the start of integration, the incorporation of players from the Negro Leagues into MLB, we see a greater interest between MLB and players from Latin America they were already in the Negro League so opening up the Negro Leagues allowed talented players like mini Munoz to become part of the MLB talent pool but then we also see players coming out of directly out of Puerto Rico Cuba Dominican Republic there were no Dominicans in MLB before Ozzy Virgil in 1958. But they were there since the 1920s, 1926 in the Negro Leagues.

So what we've done is kind of used these different population sizes. But the interest level is a nice barometer. If you're thinking about a place like Curacao today, interest level is like 100%. Baseball is the sport that the guys want to play. In the Dominican Republic, it's very high. In Cuba, it was very high, but there's a barrier. There's a political economic barrier to that. So this is how we get at eligible populations, the shifting talent pool, but also the interest level is a way of thinking about how those athletes within the African-American population, the Latin American populations, how they would have sought to become part of MLB or professional baseball. Yeah, yeah. So we are tracking in the interest level. And so I should

say that this is still a work in progress. What we've sent is a preprint and we've actually gotten referees reports back since the time we scheduled this podcast and are doing it now. And so there is a debate about how this MLB population can be calculated. And what we're doing right now, since we're focused in kind of the top end of achievement, you take a guy like Shohei Otani. And if you look at, you know, Japanese players in, you know, the major, so there aren't, you know, for a country like Japan, that you could argue is that you could argue has a higher interest in baseball relative to other sports than maybe has ever existed in America, but they have their own competitive league, which keeps a lot of their players from filtering into the MLB, which Adrian

can expand on even more. But if you look at Shohei Otani, what we say is representative of Shohei Otani's ability is that he's the best person in that source population. And that all of this, you know, Japan's population, Japan's interest level feed into that. And that's more representative of, you know, at the top end, you know, talent than say, you know, Japan's five or, you know, however many players are in baseball right now. So, but there is, you know, a's five or, you know, however many players are in baseball right now. So, but there is, you know, a debate or a balance between how that MLB eligible population is counted, especially at the top end, because if you go by the demographic data, then we have

included a lot, maybe more than more people from the global population than what should exist. But if you're looking at, you know, top end talent,end talent, Shohei Otani, he's arguably the best player in the world. And so it's kind of a decision that we have made at this present moment about how Shohei Otani gets to the league and where he came from. Can you give people a sense of the magnitude of the changes that you find here? Are there certain stats that change more? And just, I guess, the disparity, you know, you on your site, which we will link to all of the materials that we're referencing here, but you have an adjusted leaderboard where you can look at either fan graphs or baseball reference. So just to give people a sense, maybe one example, Albert Pujols, for example, is 29th on the baseball reference all-time war leaderboard, which is quite good. But on your adjusted, you have him at eighth, right? So he is benefiting

quite a bit just from playing at this point in time, being a modern player playing against the best competition and a bigger pool of potential players. So that's one example. It's not that his actual war value is so different. It's maybe 10 more war than he has, according to baseball reference currently. But when you're looking at just the elite players of all time here, that vaults him quite a bit toward the top of the leaderboard. But it's not as if you're saying that the great players who dominated the league in their era were actually not that good or not that valuable. It's just that you're bumping them down the list, I guess, relative to the more recent players. the more recent players? Yeah, that's a good mechanical description about what is going on here. Yes. Right. So, you know, I've seen a lot of debates on, you know, like Reddit or something about these kinds of like comparisons and, you know, before there is a set number, which tries to put everything into balance, which we're trying to do here. It's really hard to imagine what these

changes ought to be. And people will sometimes say, I'm just not looking at anybody before 1947 or before baseball attempted to become integrated. And right, that's, well, you're then disregarding a large percentage of all of the people who have played baseball. And that's not really the correct thing to do. So yeah, it's not about saying that these people are bad because they're not. But yeah, the method is just this balancing act between these different distributions and how far you stand from your peers versus how many people there are in this eligible population, which it was far lower when Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb or whoever played back in the day.

But yeah, those players aren't trash. They're still really good. Babe Ruth is at five on this list. And if you wanted to look at Babe Ruth and say, if he were to play and start his career in the 70s where we kind of compare everybody, maybe he would be a little higher if he didn't pitch. He wasn't as good of a pitcher as he was a hitter. So you can start asking those kind of compare everybody, you know, maybe he would be a little higher if he didn't pitch. He wasn't as good of a pitcher as he was a hitter. So, you know, you can start asking those kinds of questions as well, which we haven't, but you know, you could start doing something like that. I don't think that he's going to leap above Mays or Bonds, but I mean, fifth best of all time. That's pretty good. You know, there's other, I think Stan Musial is pretty close to the top, and Ty Cobb is in there, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams. There's a lot of people, I'm sorry,

I should, I know that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays are contemporaries. But, you know, as Adrian has, you know, pointed out that the AL and the NL have integrated at different rates, and we account for that as well. Yeah, I wonder if you can, you know, as you're thinking through the population question, you sort of landed on, I believe, 1977 as your sort of starting year. Can you talk about the rationale there a bit, please? So what we did was we looked at projecting into either like just a common season for every single player or a career that started at some set time. And then we looked at, you know, how stable it is to pick a common season or a career. And, you know, 77 is an arbitrary choice.

But what we did was when you look at all of the different careers that you could start from, say, baseball is integrated to, I don't know, we considered 50 different starting points. And if you construct a range of rankings for all of those different starting points that incorporates all of them, then 77 at least has a top 25 grouping where everybody falls within that range. And it's a relatively recent season, and that's why we chose it. But the year, if you just project into a common season for every single player's year, chose it. But the year, if you just project into a common season for every single player's year, their rookie year goes into 77, and their second year goes into 77, so forth and so on,

then projecting into years is incredibly unstable. What we did, we actually started with doing that with 2019, because that's when we started. That's when we had our data up to. And it was bonkers. It was fun, but it was bonkers because you would have, you know, Hank Aaron with almost 900 home runs. And, you know, there's like Mike Schmidt had a pretty funny career. It was like, you know, a 230 or something batting average with close to 700 home runs. And it's like,

I mean, yeah, that's kind of, you know, Matt Chapman with John Carlos Stanton power. And I guess that makes sense, but it varies a lot. One thing that I've gained a lot of appreciation for is how different all of these seasons are from like a statistic, you know, statistical or distributional perspective. I think a good example is just comparing 2019 to 2014. It's only a five-year difference. But if you look at the leaderboards for a variety of statistics, they're insanely different. I think Nelson Cruz led baseball with 40 home runs

and he was the only person to hit 40 home runs. And if you look at 2019, it's just dramatically different. So, I mean, we chose, we tried to make a principled choice for what we did to compare all of these players. And, you. And starting career from a common year seemed more stable than individual seasons. And the one that we chose

had a ranking list that was within the range of rankings when you considered all of the different starting points that you could consider. And in terms of application of this kind of research, do you see this as something that you would just want to be incorporated into standard war models, or do you see it as more of a supplement to what we have, a different way of looking at things? Because it seems to me that it's a really interesting and useful and valuable question, but maybe also a slightly different question than the standard war models are trying to answer, right? If you just want to know who was the most valuable relative to their peers in the league that they played in in that year, then that's one question. And if you want to know how they stack up to today's players or players from an earlier or later era, that's really interesting too,

and might make you think about the game in a different way, but also might be a different purpose, I suppose, for the stats. So do you see this as something that is sort of separate and useful, or do you see it as this is just the default way that we should be looking at player value? In my case, I'm a historian. And what I see as useful here is, how do we think about the power of nostalgia in baseball history? And we often point to, well, look at the stats. They tell us how much better these guys are. And we have developed all kinds of tools that have allowed us to reassess what is performance, how is it valuable, what should we really be looking at. You know, batting average is not

what it used to be in terms of the barometer for greatness. We're more sophisticated than that. And so what I think this model does is gives us a sophisticated approach to thinking about all-time greats in baseball, the high-end performers, and how they might compare to one another playing in a setting where they're all adapting to a common set of rules, a common set of competition, and how would they stack up? I think this model really helps us think through that. And for me, challenged that notion that somehow in baseball history that the greatest players of all time came from a period where there was actually the smallest population in MLB, like in terms of eligible population. I was like, that just doesn't make sense to me in the world of competition, of athletic competition. And even following up on that, thinking about after Jackie Robinson breaks in, when we look at Rookie of the Year, MVP votes,

and Cy Youngs, and we begin to see the names of Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Bob Gibson and Don Newcomb. We see how dramatically integration changed top end performance in the league. So there was something really big that happened and that we can't just say, oh, shucks, it's too bad they didn't get to compete. Let's come up with a model that might help us think through these things. Yeah, I guess if you were hoping that this would resolve the question of who's the justified, the deserving, the true all-time home run king, I guess this doesn't quite help because in your era-adjusted home runs leaderboard, you now have Barry Bonds and Henry Aaron tied at 7-14.

leaderboard you now have barry bonds and henry are in tide 714 so right so in this and this kind of opens up a different um so i your question was should this just overhaul wins above replacement and be right the way to think about it maybe it could get there but the thing is like we still we still have you know a pre-print we have we have you know like real referee reports to address with criticisms and how this uh mlb population has been tabulated if you change it a little bit the fact that you just pointed out will change you know and so so there's there's you know a level of you know broadly speaking this is a completely different ranking list and you know and if if these debate. And if these sort of tweaking of this population isn't going to necessarily change Willie Mays being above Babe Ruth,

for instance, which we have right now, but you could see shifts of the composition of the lower half of that top 25 list changing dramatically. And, you know, fan graphs has a list and baseball reference has a list. Usually those lists are pretty close on a lot of the players. I know players like Nolan Ryan have a big difference between the two. Those are now exacerbated by this model, those big differences as well. And so, you know, I think that it could get there, but there's always going to be this, it depends on the MLB eligible population and people have different approaches, maybe potentially to what that ought to be. And so what this model is,

and, you know, first strengths and, you know, some of the things I'm talking about now, it allows you to have this methodological framework where there's this central input that can be so readily, you know, debated and inputted into the model to yield different results. And so it can give you like an output based on an input to allow, you know, you to compare how I think about what the history of the game is, but that would need to be, you know, like ironed out before this can be a list that overhauls wins above replacement completely. I think personally, this is a less wrong version. It's probably not, you know, it's one of these things where it's, I don't want to say that this is the truth, but it's, in my view, it's the least wrong approach that exists right now,

is probably a way to say it. As Ben mentioned, we'll link to your site and the leaderboard so our listeners can see themselves. But I'm curious if there were any players who moved really dramatically one way or another who stood out to you as potentially surprising, who you didn't imagine would shift quite as much as they did. Yeah, I'll name a few. And then I'd be interested in hearing what Adrian has to say. You've already mentioned one was Albert Pujols. Ricky Henderson above Ty Cobb right now, I thought was very interesting. They're kind of a similar type of archetype. And then for me, Christy Mathewson moving down pretty far was interesting. Adrian, were there any that jumped out to you?

Yes. Adrian Beltre. Not to pick on the same name and initials, but yeah. You know, and again, Adrian Beltre is a player that many of us have thought about like, well, yeah, it was a nice ball player. a player that many of us have thought about like, well, yeah, it was a nice ball player, but his performance is actually pretty interesting to come out so high as he did. So to me, that was kind of profound. I liked him a lot as a player and a person. Pujols comes up and I think last year's performance, kind of the revival of albert pujos in this era

take it for what you may as a 2022 season in a different world but still seeing seeing him at number eight is pretty significant ted williams slides down a bit uh and really neat thing here this was not the model's intention, but seeing Roberto Clemente at 21 in anything is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we will link to all this, and I think people will bear in mind that there may be tweaks. Of course, there are often tweaks to the war we know, too, that's kind of a feature of war. I guess at the very least, this is another way to appreciate the greatness of Mike Trout, who moves up from, I think, 60th on the all-time baseball reference leaderboard to closer to 40th by one of your method and model or anything about specific eras that we should point out or things that you would want people to know or keep in mind as they make these kinds of comparisons across eras?

Well, I will add one funny thing. I've shared this website with some of my family members and friends, and some of them are some diehard Red Sox fans. And we build off of wins above replacement. We see it as a very you know valuable statistic and so i have my you know my cousins yelling at me saying how do you have edgar martinez ahead of david ortiz just like just like you get look man you have to take that up with war we're basing this off of wins above replacement the model doesn't talk about postseason success

and stuff like that so i thought that was kind of funny. There's all of those things like John Olerud is good on our model. If you're looking at what an alternative Hall of Fame should be based on the top performers of all time. But again, that's a finding revealed by Wins Above Replacement, which is cool, I think. cool, I think. I think one of the things that this reminds us is that we have actually witnessed a very high level of performance in baseball during our own lifetimes, even outside of the PED era. You have guys, well, I'm older than probably everybody else here, but going back to the days of Lou Whitaker, and there are ballplayers that we have witnessed that we're like, oh, this should have an impact, I guess is what I'm ultimately saying, on how we think about who's worthy of the Hall of Fame. There's such a high standard to get in and still

less than 1% of all the players who play in, you know, play professional baseball in the major leagues make it to the hall. And yet, you know, we have these big debates. And this is one that even Daniel and I have talked about. It's like Mark Burley versus Andy Pettit, as if like both shouldn't get better consideration. Johan Santana, like did we miss on his greatness? And this is another tool in that sense of thinking about all-time greats, but just kind of performance against their peers in a bigger eligible population and interest level, kind of bringing all these factors into play. And yeah, come back to that last point of we've actually witnessed a lot of high level play and it's not just in that deep pass of you know eddie plank saw hall of famer so he must be better than justin

verlander no yeah yeah there are also some some interesting things you you bring up here like in one of your uh bits about babe ruth you note that part of the fact that he was just head and shoulders above the rest of the league for a while there is that he was just adopting a different style of play prior to everyone else, right? That there hadn't been many players who had swung for the fences before Babe Ruth. And so he sort of showed that that was possible. And then the league caught up to an extent during the course of his career to the point where he was not lapping the league. He was not out homering and maybe so in a sense that that distorts maybe the difference in talent. Although I guess you could also give him credit for recognizing just how optimal that approach was. Right. And so if he was quicker to realize that and he set the example that everyone else followed, then maybe that is a type of talent or it's a different type of talent.

So it's a complicated question, but it's interesting to mull that over. I guess it's almost how do you define talent, right? Yeah, it is really hard. Yeah, that one is fascinating how that works. I think it's great that he was able to have the talent. I mean, he was great. And the competitive advantage. And so that does bias up his contributions in war. And then of course,

in era adjusted war, where standing above your peers is rewarded so much by this method. But yeah, he's not, even with that, he still, he doesn't linger at one, which I think is, you know, fascinating. But yeah, it's, it's hard to say what, um, going down the line that you're, you're describing, but the, if he's, you know, a genius revolutionary of baseball and you project him into the sixties, assuming that somebody else figured out to hit home runs in between that time, what is he going to do to figure out baseball at that point? Or if you project them into the nineties, what is it? What, like what, what thing can you do in baseball to stand above your peers?

Because you're doing that and nobody else is. Yeah. And then there's always the question, whenever you do cross-era comparisons, it's like, are we talking about if we're in a time travel scenario where they're just plopped down from that era into this era? Or are we talking about a scenario

where they're just born later and they get the same training advantages and they get to know that sliders exist or whatever, right? And so that's kind of a different question that is also tough to account for. So that's almost like you have to figure out how you're framing it exactly. Yeah. Ours is framed pretty close to the, if you grew up with the modern advantages type thing. You're compared to the distribution of your time which should you

know capture that and then how well you stand above your peers within that distribution versus how many people there were and the idea i guess i guess the the hidden assumption in this is that that kind of person would be able to take that same talent score and have it mean the same thing in a different context so so like and i think it's probably best described with pitchers you know like so walter johnson who is really good on this method still but takes quite a hit it would be like if he grew up today he'd send you know his talent score would would would carry over and he wouldn't be throwing you know low 90s or i don't know what he threw but he didn't throw a slider right because i don't think the pitch existed when he was playing so you know you

could imagine walter johnson that player in 77 throwing mid to high 90s with a slider it would be i mean you know you'd have to but that would be you know the imagination but that's what we're in a sense doing is you're you're taking that person's talent, which is this balance relative to the peers versus how many people there were, and you get that score and then you reverse engineer the process and then you can get their value for wins above replacement

or ERA for strikeouts. And it's actually kind of fascinating with Walter Johnson. He's a good example of this. He gets a massive penalty from his time period for, say, his strikeouts. But nobody struck out people back then relative to the degree that they do now. So he's getting this massive penalty. But relative to his peers, he was dominant. So his case per nine improves quite a bit when you plug him into this different context, even though he's being penalized rather

harshly based on his eligible population being so low. So I think it goes from whatever it is, whatever was observed to like 7.2, which in the 70s, it's a lot lower than it is today. So it's like a pretty big increase. Right. Well, this is fascinating and I look forward to your further research and refinements to the model, but I think there's a lot to dig into as it is. So grateful that you've taken on this task. And again, we have been speaking to Daniel Eck, who is an assistant professor in the statistics department at the University of Illinois, and Adrian Burgos, who is a professor of history at the same school, I guess. What with you guys

and Alan Nathan, the physics expert, it's a real hotbed of baseball analysis, the University of Illinois. It's cutting edge. It is. And I would like to say that I am teaching a baseball analytics class, which functions as a data science class. And Adrian is a speaker in the class. And so is Alan Nathan. So yeah, this is a place to study baseball. All right. University of Illinois. Well, now our young listeners know where to go, I guess, to get a good education in baseball and history and statistics, I'm sure. All right. Thank you very much, guys. This was fun. Thanks for having us on.

Yeah, thank you. It occurs to me that one more reason why we talk so much about players in earlier eras and perhaps equate them to modern players is that maybe the baseball body types haven't changed quite as much as they have in some other sports. Players are certainly taller So you could look at players from earlier eras and they might look like they could fit in on a roster today, though they would be more willowy than the typical player of 2023. There were a couple of semi-interesting signings after we finished recording. The A's added Shintaro Fujinami, the Padres brought back old man Nelson Cruz for one more go-around, and the Dodgers acquired, or I suppose eight plus years later, reacquired shortstop Miguel Rojas from the Marlins. As we covered recently, Rojas was the sole Marlin to qualify for the batting title in 2022. Maybe we will touch on those signings next time.

I do have a few follow-ups for you, though. Last time we talked about the Atlanta Braves and their front office's reputation for not leaking, no loose lips, no sinking ships. There was a column about how that could be a competitive advantage for them, and we talked about why it would be and how they might make this happen. Well, this seems to mostly be a product of Alex Anthopoulos, who runs the Braves front office, more so than, say, the Braves being a publicly traded company or anything like that. Anthopolis has had a reputation for this going back a bit, and a listener shared an article with us from the Toronto Star 10 years ago by Brendan Kennedy headlined, Alex Anthopolis, the ninja of baseball GMs. It notes that at the winter meetings,

Anthopolis requests that other GMs come alone or with one other person to the suite for meetings, Anthopolis requests that other GMs come alone or with one other person to the suite for meetings, whereas other GMs and executives will travel with entourages, but Anthopolis wants to keep it small. At that point, he said people are a little more open, less guarded. It's also easier to control information, Brendan Kennedy writes, and protect against leaks, something for which Anthopolis has built a reputation in his three years at the Jays' helm. One agent said, Alex runs a very good cone of silence, shall we say. Anthopolis also quoted in that piece as saying, if you hear about us involved in a deal before it's done, it's probably not true. Jeff Lunau, haha, is quoted in this piece and said he does have a reputation for keeping information confidential. The Astros and the Jays had made a trade prior to this,

and Lunau said for us to be able to pull off that deal and essentially have the press release from the organization be where people find out about it, that's highly unusual, and I think it speaks to how Alex is controlling the information flow. Lunau speaking somewhat admiringly, it sounds like, if only he had been able to keep sign-stealing behind the cone of secrecy. No one would have known about code breaking. Lunau also in that article said it makes other teams more likely to want to trade or have discussions, at least with Toronto, knowing that the information is not going to get out. Anthopolis says he goes to great lengths to limit leaks for a multitude of reasons to eliminate distractions for players and gender trust with

fellow GMs, even to treat the media fairly. But he stopped short of calling it a competitive advantage. If it was a clear competitive advantage, everybody would do it, he said. It's what works for me and what works for my personality. And evidently, it still does. Anthopolis was with the Jays when they got burned by a couple of earlier deals during the J.P. Ricciardi era that leaked, apparently. Like an Alex Rios for Tim Lincecum trade that never came to fruition. Another agent says that one of the ways that he is able to keep the lid on things

is that he does a lot of the deals himself, as opposed to having some other executive or group of executives conduct trade talks. Anyway, not new for Anthopolis. He's just with a different team now. As is Steven Vogt. We talked late last year about Steven Vogt's storybook ending to his career,

his home run in his last at bat for the A's, and how he's just generally a good guy and people like him and he's probably a good manager prospect. And he is already back in a big league uniform of the Mariners. He has been hired as the quality control coach and bullpen coach for the Seattle Mariners. So no minor league apprenticeship for Steven Vogt. He's on the fast track. Congrats to him. One other follow-up is about the pedantic email we got about why hitter performance hits in at bats is not usually displayed with slashes, but with dashes instead. So a one for four is a one dash or hyphen four

instead of a one slash four, even though it seems like it should be a fraction. I speculated that maybe it had something to do with 19th century typesetting, that maybe they just hadn't developed slash technology or that it was more difficult in some way. And so they just defaulted to dashes. And we got some support for that hypothesis from listener Greg, who writes, I wanted to lend some support for a theory that Ben had about dashes or hyphens instead of slashes in written baseball statistics. Yes, in newspapers of the late 1800s, presumably when the conventions developed, hyphens were common and slashes were not. Here are some historical examples of the relative number of each character sold in handset foundry type.

He includes a link, which I will put on the show page. Some makers of metal type would not even have included the slash, or oblique stroke, as it was called, as a standard character. In contrast, there would have been plenty of hyphens available to printers. Common fractions represented on single pieces of type, as in one-fourth, might seem like a reasonable option, but they were in relatively short supply, and I don't think fractions representing an ophir, or a perfect game at the plate, were available. A page printed with multiple game stories and box scores ran the risk of running out of special characters during typesetting.

So it makes sense to use common characters in punctuation, even if the printer had some slashes. Why would a font include fractions separated by a stroke, but not have that symbol on its own? Maybe it was mostly used in fractions at the time. Maybe I'm just reading that website incorrectly, or maybe it has something to do with kerning. Hopefully a true expert can weigh in. But thank you, Greg and Queens, for weighing in in the meantime. And after

that blast from the past, I've got to give you the official past blast, which comes from 1954 and, as always, from Jacob Pomranki, Sabre's Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. Jacob writes, 1954, Wrigley's Rants. Baseball was at a crossroads in 1954. Attendance was dropping in most major league cities, minor leagues were folding left and right, and professional football was rapidly gaining in popularity. The Braves also shook up baseball's landscape by moving to Milwaukee in 1953. The Browns followed in 1954 by moving to Baltimore, while the A's would soon move to Kansas City in 1955. After the winter meetings concluded, Chicago Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley decried baseball's passive response to all of the changes happening around the game.

In an interview with the Sporting News on December 8, 1954, he warned that baseball would continue to fall further behind unless it started paying attention to the demographics of its fan base. it started paying attention to the demographics of its fan base. Until the three franchise shifts by the Braves, Browns, and A's, there wasn't a single change in the Major League map for more than a half century, Wrigley said. The Majors stubbornly carried on with the same 16 teams in the same old places while great waves of our people were moving west. Wrigley continued, the shift of the city population to the suburbs isn't to be taken lightly. Perhaps baseball should take a cue from this. It could be that the way to increase patronage is to build the ballparks in the suburbs. Our parks are all antiquated. The only new ones built in the last 25 years are Milwaukee's County Stadium and Baltimore's

Memorial Stadium. The Milwaukee Park has been a lesson to us in the ample provision for parking space. Progressive industries are fully aware of the increase of people in the overage 60 group, even though baseball hasn't taken cognizance of it. In the 11 years before 1952, the overage 60 group increased by 10%. Older people have more leisure and they potentially are good fans, but we've never made a pitch for them. If we were realistic, we could. And we also have a big crop of potential kid fans within the next few years from the big post-war baby crop.

These are things that should be targets for our sales programs. In other words, baseball would be okay with boomers, which I guess kind of turned out to be the case. Jacob concludes Wrigley's crystal ball wasn't clear on every issue, but he did correctly predict the rise in suburban ballparks throughout the 1950s and 60s, and also the great number of potential fans in the baby boom generation. His Cubs, of course, were one of the few teams that did not replace their classic urban ballpark, and they remain in Wrigley Field today. And while we know baseball wasn't dying in 1954 any more than it is now or in any other era, it's interesting to note that Wrigley was concerned about baseball not reaching out to older fans when the opposite so often seems true today.

And that is true. There are just generally more old people. People are living longer. There's an aging of the population. So you would think that that would position baseball well if baseball actually does appeal to older fans. Well, there are more of them than ever. It's usually not portrayed that way.

But in 1954, at least, that was looked on as a potential plus, not a negative. However young or old you are, you can, of course, support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad-free and get themselves access to some perks. Christopher Buran, Owen Sandor,

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plus access to playoff live streams and discounts on merch and software and ad-free Fangraphs memberships and autographed books and much more. You can also message us through the Patreon site if you are a supporter. And if you're not, you can email us at podcastfangraphs.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can 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 before the end of the week. Talk to you then. You would have come to me first

So whatever they say And say what they may Still it isn't a thing you would do So I won't believe in rumors Darling, I want it straight from you