Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1969: Winning Ugly

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the temperature in Phoenix, writers taking photos of bases, and Meg taking photos of the writers, then discuss Meg’s takeaways from MLB’s presentation to media members about this season’s new rules, MLB.TV adding minor league games, the Padres signing Michael Wacha (and changing their revenue-sharing classification), and early […]

My time is long, but not forever. My moods are the changing wind and weather. I'm starting to see a bigger picture. I'm beginning to color it in. I'm starting to see a bigger picture. I'm beginning to color it in. I'm beginning to color it in. Hello and welcome to episode 1969 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you doing in frigid Arizona? Okay, look. I need people to understand something. I'm not saying it's good that Jacob deGrom is already experiencing some kind of something or other with his something or other right we're not we're not gonna pretend that

that's good we aren't gonna pretend it's particularly surprising but we're not gonna we're not gonna say that that's a good thing but i have seen ben i have seen some some insinuations on twitter.com the jacob de grom or the rangers depending are being uh are being fragile about the temperatures and uh i appreciated having a friend of the show levi weaver stand up yes for arizona and i i'm here to tell you it was chilly chilly today, you know? And not just in a, I live in Arizona, and so now when it's below 70, I'm like, should I wear a puffy coat? Like, is that what's necessary? Like, it was chilly this morning. We have a freeze advisory tonight, you know? Yeah.

Now it's 54 degrees as we speak, according to Google in Phoenix. It's 63 where I am in New York, so it's colder where you are than where I am. Right. And when that determination was made, it was earlier in the day. It was colder. It's colder than it is now, you know, because it gets warmer generally as the day goes on. So look, again, it's not good, but just everybody relax. This isn't them being precious or anything. It was a little chilly today. rotation. And then day one, Jacob deGrom felt some tightness in his left side, you know,

and immediately it's, if it were the regular season, he would be pitching and it's an abundance of caution and all of that. How many times have we heard that with Jacob deGrom in the best? I think that's what it is. It just, it makes people flash back to, he's fine. And if he had to be out there, he'd be out there and then you don't see him for two months. So, I mean, there are all kinds of tweaks and aches and pains and things once you start to ramp up your activity and spring training. It's not abnormal. It's just the fact that it's Jacob deGrom. So everyone is going to panic and say, oh, here we go again. Which, you know, given that it's deGrom is not an unreasonable inference, perhaps, but with anyone else, you really wouldn't worry about it so it's not necessarily something significant it's just like groundhog day yeah yeah i i yeah yeah i get it i get it

but just like we had a big storm last night you know yeah i was at the fields yesterday it was it was cold ben it's chilly it's gloomy? So everybody relax. I wanted to talk to you about being at the field because I have to commend you on your photography skills because you and you alone, I think, delivered what I wanted, which was not a picture of the bigger base, right? So anyone who was on Twitter on Tuesday knows that they were bombarded by every baseball writer who was in Arizona tweeting pictures of the slightly bigger base because there was a demonstration of the new rules, right, put on by MLB for media members. And so a lot of media members congregated and they got to see the bigger base and everyone tweeted out a photo of the bigger base, which is

understandable. Like, could we somehow delegate only, you know, a couple people have to take pictures of the base? Yeah, but if you're a reporter, you feel like you can't miss out. If everyone else has a bigger base picture, then you've got to have a bigger base picture. So everyone was just crowded around taking this picture of a base, you know, pretty identical, depending on whose feed it was, except for the initial Nightingale tweet of it, which was just the bigger base. Just the bigger base with no context? No frame of reference. The whole point was to show the bigger base in comparison to the smaller base, which eventually he got the hang of it and he did do that. But initially he just showed the bigger base, which on its own kind of looks like the old base more or less you can't tell that it's bigger anyway there were many many almost identical copies of this photo of of the

base being displayed but then you tweeted a photo or multiple photos of the writers taking the photos of the base yeah which was exactly what i wanted because you had to figure that it was amusing to see everyone just like crouched over. Some people were like, you know, on their bellies, like trying to get a different angle of the pace. And you caught the absurdity, you know, the necessary absurdity of the situation, I think. In fact, when I went to the baseball subreddit last night, the highest post, the most popular upvoted post on there, I believe was your photo, except no one attributed it to you. So it's basically just stolen and put on Reddit, but it did really well once it was there.

Well, I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. But that was great. What inspired you to take that picture? It looked funny, Ben. I was inspired by the fact that it you know it looked funny to have a bunch of and i i you're right like i get it there are a lot there are a lot of folks there they all for the most part right for different publications and they have to satisfy their their editors i understand you know lesser things have turned people into pageant moms, but that was kind of the energy. And so I thought it was funny.

And I hope people took it in a good-natured way because that was how I meant it, but it was pretty funny. I'm like, oh, it is bigger. Yeah. I saw some people suggest that there's some meme potential to particularly your second one. Like if we get some replay review on a base sliding play at some point during the season, then you can just reuse that old photo. Just everyone clustered around the base, just inspecting it microscopically. I love it.

Everyone clustered around the base, just inspecting it microscopically. I love it. You know, I didn't expect to learn that I was big on Reddit, but I'm glad to know that that is true. Yeah. No one else knows because no one said it was you, but I recognized your photo, so I'm giving you credit at least. Thank you. How was the rest of that demonstration?

It was illuminating in some ways. I think that one of the things that i was struck by you know and it started with sort of a state of baseball here's where the game is and that was a little less interesting but but then we got into the rule changes and kind of how how mlb went about its process for identifying the things that fans you know say about in terms of improving their viewing experience of the game. And some of the stuff we've talked about before and has been written about pretty extensively in terms of its impact in the minor leagues,

like the clock, I think the big, maybe not revelation, but thing we probably should have thought of is that because of how the clock operators and the umpire need to interact with the pitch clock and the pitcher, that there will be a renewed emphasis on box and preventing them, and that there are some guys whose deliveries might have to change in order to comply. Yeah, won't be a problem at all, because we all recognize clearly when a box has occurred and what type of box it is, And we all agree on that.

So no problems there. Right, exactly. And so that was sort of an area that I at least had not considered and then felt kind of silly that I hadn't been like, well, yeah, of course, that makes sense. And then, you know, I was not surprised, but like pleased with the candor that the league has about the places where the shift ban might be undone and circumvented.

It sounds like they talked with a lot of clubs after the rules were announced in September and did so with the idea of being like, okay, so how are they going to try to weasel out of this? How are they going to try to undo the intent of this rule which is you know to have two guys relatively stationary on either side of second base and you know i asked morgan sword who's the executive vice president of baseball operations for the league you know in the q a session basically sort of how they're going to gauge the efficacy of that rule, right?

Like, do they have offensive benchmarks in mind? How are they going to assess the impact that it's had on the offensive environment? And more importantly, kind of what are their expectations in terms of that? And I appreciated that he was not overly confident in his answer. You know, he's like, we do have some benchmarks in mind. didn't share those but you know he said a lot of this is going to depend on how the hitters adjust their approach at the plate with the new rules and you know they've seen some of that at play in the minors i guess but you know being able to know how big leaguers are going to react to that and how teams are going to think about the incentives of you know trying to get base hits versus still hit for home runs you know it's hard to know until it's in in play so but yeah they they have tried to think about how teams will be shifty about the

whole thing and soon in their run you see the little joke that i made i don't know that they will have identified all of the ways in which they might have, but there is sort of broad authority granted to umpires in the rule that if they determine that teams are trying to sort of circumvent the intent of the rule that they will be able to say to assess a violation to the team. And so what are some other things? Shift positioning will be a reviewable play next year. So in theory, a team, a hitting team could challenge if they determine that the defenders are in violation of the shift rule. the shift rule infielders will be able to ask the umpire if they are sort of in compliance with the rule in terms of their positioning so folks who are familiar with football might know that like you know receivers will ask like am i on the line in a way that i need to be and the side judge is supposed to tell them and umpires will fulfill the same rule here so they're supposed to give guidance to fielders if they're asked uh what else i got to hold the pitch timer device

that is gonna buzz on umpires to let them know that the thing has expired because this is i mean like this is one of those things that of course they had to come up with this but you're gonna have the two clocks that are visible on either side of the batter's eye to the home plate umpire, who is going to be primarily responsible for enforcing the pitch clock in the course of the game. But the umpire is going to have to get down and get ready to call the pitch at a certain point. And so they don't want the home plate umpire trying to watch the pitch as it's coming in so that he can call it a ball or a

strike and also trying to keep an eye on those clocks. And so they have a little device that the umpire can wear like on a band on their wrist or on their ankle or somewhere else on their body that is being manufactured by the same folks who do the pitch comm system. And it'll have a haptic alert. Like, you know, if you have an Apple watch, you know and it'll have a haptic alert. Like, you know, if you have an Apple Watch, you might have that or your phone. And Ben, it is a forceful buzz. It will not be missed.

I was like, you know, I miss my phone buzzing a lot of the time. Well, I turned off the haptics on my Apple Watch because that was too annoying. But no way that they will miss this. It is like, I mean, it's not like, I want to be clear, it's not a shock, but it's a buzz. And like, I mean, it's not like, I want to be clear. It's not a shock, but it's a buzz and it is like a, it's a big buzz. It's not, you know,

one of those things they give you at a restaurant when your table is ready or your order is ready or whatever. And it's not like one of those. No, it's not that big. Like, you know, it's not,

you're not getting seated at the cheesecake factory, Ben, but, but here I will, I'll send you a picture right now. And you can figure out a way to link to it in the show notes if you want to. Did you take a picture of other writers taking a picture of it? No, I just took, I took one. But see, I put it in my hand for some kind of scale.

Now, I don't know how big your hand is i have like normal normal as a judgment i have average hands okay my height i don't know man uh so fraught to say but like you know it's like that it's like that size it's that size okay so yeah there's that yeah they really did rip off my photo without giving me credit on Reddit. That's so rude. Yeah. Gosh. I don't know how it's all going to work.

I mean, I think that we know how the pitch clock stuff will work. I think that will have both the biggest impact be the thing that folks adjust to the most quickly, apart from guys who might have to change their whole delivery. But in theory, those guys have been communicated with before now. And, you know, they kind of tracked the frequency of violations in the minors for the clock and a lot in the early going and then decreasing over time as you know teams and players got used to that so they indicated that their hope is that the spring training period you know you

might see a lot of violations but in theory it should taper as the spring goes on uh and hopefully by the time we get to opening day guys will be comfortable and of course there are players who are going to be on you know big league rosters who have played with a pitch clock before this isn't going to be entirely new most of them at some point at some level yeah so yeah let's see joe martinez wore a t-shirt i mean it was like a polo but like a short sleeve shirt and cold weather so oh so he's fine with the weather yeah good hair on that guy but yeah it you know, kind of took us through everything. What other things?

What other things did I ask? We know that the shift alignment will require, you know, two on each side of second base and that they will, within the course of an inning, have to sort of stay consistent in who is where right so they can't flip their best defender from one side to the other to try to gain an advantage if they bring in an outfielder to serve as a fifth infielder which they are allowed to do that outfielder is not restricted in terms of where he can stand i asked that because i wasn't sure if there were going to be restrictions there they're not so got it there's that piece of it they don't want you to get a running start this is one of our

things right we were like are they just gonna start running um and they are like no you can't do that you can't be you can't be like running as the as the pitch is being delivered you can't be running i wonder if clubs are going to look back and be like, we should have been less transparent with the league when we talked about how we were going to do this. But it's going to be fun because I'm sure that there will be clubs that try to push the envelope in some way, but it's not going to last very long

because you're going to see it every night on the field. If you are trying to see it every night on the field right this is if you are trying to press any kind of advantage and the league deems it to be one that is in violation of sort of the spirit of the rule it's not like you can conceal it because your guy has to be in a place that he shouldn't be right so yeah yeah we got a question from listener patreon supporter reggie who said the rule says the clock will begin when the pitcher receives the ball from the catcher. So what's to stop the catcher from holding onto the ball for an extra two or three or five seconds? Because you can't start the clock until the catcher throws

the ball back, right? They can be assessed with a violation as well. Yeah, right. So I haven't heard about that being a big issue in the minors. And I think it would be pretty glaring, right? I mean, if the catcher is just sitting or standing there not doing anything for several seconds, right, without throwing the ball back, like a pitcher in the old days, at least, you could, you know, occupy yourself, right? You could stalk around, you could shake off some pitch signs, you could go check out the rosin bag, whatever it was. A catcher only has so much to do back there. So I think it would be pretty obvious if that were happening. And it's up to the umpires, of course, to move things along.

You know, might there be some catchers who ask for an extra ball more often than they used to or stand up and squat again or pretend they got hit by a foul tip or something? I don't know. That might happen more often than it did. But I doubt it'll be dramatic and umpires will probably catch on to that. Although if umpires were great at legislating these things themselves and monitoring pace of game and enforcing that, then we wouldn't actually need the pitch clock. But that was never the case and they were never really backed up for that to be the case. But now there's just so much scrutiny, so much emphasis on all of this that I'm sure that

people will be keeping a close eye on these things. So I'm glad the demonstration was productive, that it wasn't just a bunch of baseball writers gathered around bases like the monolith from 2001. I mean, there were some is probably going to be the one that has a bigger impact than we have given it credit for maybe just because that's really going to change the balance of power between the pitcher and the runner. And there's a good piece. There's a substack called the Advanced Scout, which is written by Noah Woodward, who's a former front office member and used to write for Baseball Perspectives and the Hardball Times. And he went through pickoffs and how they helped pitchers and how they won't be able to help them anymore. And he noted that most of the time, even in a case where a pitcher threw over, 70% of

the time that they threw over, they threw over only one time. So it wasn't all that often. It was like an additional 20% of the time that they were actually doing two pickoffs over there. So you might conclude from that, well, it won't be that big a deal because pitchers rarely threw over more than twice anyway. But now you're functionally down to one almost because once you throw your second one, then you're out of pickoffs, right?

Unless you get the guy out the third time you try. And so now it's almost like you won't even want to use your second one over there. So you're really restricted in what you can do to suppress the running game because you are limited in terms of how many times you can step off and all of that too. And you can't hold the ball and delay for a long time. So I do think that's going to have a pretty big impact. And Russell Carlton has found in the past that when you do throw a pickoff attempt, it suppresses the caught stealing attempt rate and then also the success rate by like 12 percentage points or something when you've already thrown over there. So you take that away. I think that might actually have a pretty big

impact. So it's a reason to watch spring training games. I'm more motivated to watch spring training than I usually am because often I'll tune in for the first games and then I'll be like, yeah, this is not actually that interesting. The results don't count and I don't know who some of these players are. But this spring, as they're trying to work out the kinks and learn how all of these new rules work, it might actually be kind of entertaining, right? Probably a lot of gift potential and also actually getting some insight into how these things will play out over the course of the season yeah and we should be clear like the way that the rules work around their disengagement is what

we're calling it that's the word disengagement it's not just what happens when you have an annoying twitter presence so you get the the two without penalty and then if you successfully pick off the the runner on the third one fine if you don't it's a buck and everyone advances but then your disengagements reset following the advance of the base runner so like if you throw over the third time and it's like, sorry, no luck. And everybody moves up a base because of a balk, you then get to step off two times again. Right. Yes.

Just in case everyone's like, never in an inning. Yeah. It is kind of complicated. Like the early regular season games, there's going to be a lot of broadcasters laying out these new rules and explaining them very clearly and slowly, which is good. You got to make sure everyone watching understands how they play the game these days. But yeah, we're going to get many explanations, I'm sure. So we'll all be on the same page, hopefully by the time the season starts. Okay. A couple other things. MLB TV is now going to include minor league games, which I think is pretty great, right? I mean, Ben, Ben.

It's pretty wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I interrupted you. Ben. I was like, yeah, Ben, wonderful. Yeah.

Sorry, I was looking at the Reddit that's not crediting my tweet and getting increasingly annoyed about it. Yeah, because the service before, you could subscribe to MILB TV. And they were putting more minor league games on MLB TV last year. Like they would, you know, there was sort of a trickle of them. But you couldn't, there wasn't an app native to my Apple TV for MILB TV.

And so I'd have to cast things. And then I'd complain about this on Twitter. And then people would explain stuff to me in a way that was irritating. But now I can just dial it up there it's gonna be great yeah it's really good yeah and you know it's uh there are fewer minor league teams and leagues out there these days but at least I guess we're making the ones that are out there a little more accessible via this package and they did raise the price of course as, as well. Maybe they would have anyway, what with inflation. At least they're giving us something else for it. And you and I, I mean, we would be subscribing to MLB TV or watching MLB TV regardless. But it is a nice perk to actually get some real value added there. I'm excited about being able to watch those things. I'm sure a good portion of the subscribers will not really be that interested in watching my new league games, but for those who are, it's great. And maybe some people will

discover that they're more interested than they thought they were. So happy about that. And I guess there've been some injury announcements and signings and so forth, but again, we will cover those as we roll around the team previews. For instance, Again, we will cover those as we roll around the team previews. For instance, the Padres signing Michael Wacca. Did they mention anything at the rules announcement about the Padres 40 men being expanded to, what is it, 47 men? They're allowed now, I think, is the latest. Yeah, 59, 67, 84. Might have been in one of the footnotes or one of the slides, and I missed it.

I don't need to talk about Michael Wacca specifically, but i do want to say one thing that i find funny and that was a point of discussion in in my slack dms today which is that it is deeply amusing we don't have the exact terms of waka's deal at this point um i know that it's like 24 million over four years and they're a bunch of team and it's a chad green style why is it these guys who have the crazy complicated options like i don't i don't understand i get it when you know i i think there were parts of it that i wasn't a fan of but like i understand that if you're committing hot you know potentially hundreds of millions of dollars like julio rodriguez like that might be there might be something to that contract right like it might be

kind of complicated but like it's michael walk yeah i understood with green because of the uncertainty about when he'll be back and and how good he'll be and all of that and i guess with waka there's always a little bit of uncertainty about health, but not in as acute a way as there was with green. So I don't know. Suddenly, it's just these modest contracts are incredibly complicated, it seems. Anyway, Padres somehow squeezing another player onto their ever-expanding roster. And it also came out that they are now, it seems like, going to be switching over from a revenue-sharing recipient to a revenue-sharing payee. So because their revenue has increased so much and because they expect it to increase so much more with more ticket sales and sponsorships, etc. So it does turn out that you do have to spend money to make money, or at least that is one way you can do it. So I don't know whether that pays for the spending that they've done on the free agent market and on the trade market and everything if you're doing just an annual budget. modest media market. If you invest in your team and everyone gets super excited about it, granted,

there aren't as many alternative pro teams in San Diego for people to get excited about. But still, Padres fans are excited about the Padres. And I would be too if my team were allowed to roster 49 players. Yep. As Stephanie Epstein said, small market is a state of mind. Exactly. Yeah. And I hope, by the way, that we'll get some news at some point about fewer blackouts in MLB TV, speaking of MLB TV, because it does sound like that's a priority now. Rob Manfred made some statements about how that is a priority for the league, and we'll see. Their hands are tied to some extent. But as we discussed recently with all the Bally's possible bankruptcy situation, perhaps they'll be able to claw back some rights and show us more games because that'd be really nice too if we could pay for MLB TV and also watch all the games on there. That would be great too.

At least the ones that are not split up into seven other streaming services. Yeah. I mean, I have so many streaming services now. And because I like Poker Face, I have another. I have another I didn't used to have, Ben. And so I like Poker Face, I have another. I have another I didn't used to have, Ben. And so I feel overwhelmed by them. Yeah. Well, people tend to churn them now. They just want to watch one show. They signed up for a month and then they binge that and then they let their subscription lapse. So there's a lot of turnover these days as people are trying to

juggle several streaming services. So there's something that happens when spring training starts, which is it's very exciting and everyone shows up and then you start getting injury news pour in. So whether it's DeGrom feeling some soreness or it's Frankie Montas of the Yankees possibly going to miss the entire season or it's Steven Strasburg having another setback. It's like there's this Schrodinger's injury thing that happens like before pitchers report, before players show up and start to do things that sometimes injure them or you find out about pre-existing injuries, you can just sort of dream and fantasize about the season and look at who you got. And then reality sets in when spring training starts and this guy's shoulder hurts and that

guy's elbow hurts. And often these things, as you're ramping up for the regular season workload, that is when things tend to break or you realize that something you hoped would have healed over the offseason didn't. And that's why we see so many Tommy John surgeries or injuries that lead to Tommy John surgeries tend to crop up in spring training. So it's a combination of the optimism of renewal of spring and it's a fresh start. then almost immediately there's just an onslaught of sad depressing news too so you can't have one without the other i suppose yeah it is a bummer but you know it's like the the 60 day aisle opens up and you got to tell people when people are hurt so you can start moving guys over there not that jacob de grom is going on the 68 aisle i'm

not not saying that that isn't what i'm saying but part of it is that there is this you know option available to teams now that they can move guys there who are injured in more substantial ways than jacob degrom who was it sounds like just sore and cold you know and uh who hasn't been sore and cold or sore because of cold. So there's that piece of it too, where it's like, well, we get to add, you know, put a guy on the 60 day and that opens up a roster spot for us. And now we can go sign, you know, a veteran to an overly complicated deal for no reason. Right. Yeah. I mean, with the Padres specifically, they don't have to worry about the roster spots as much as everyone else does. Right. Because they have like 90 is what we've established. Yeah. I mean, with the Padres specifically, they don't have to worry about the roster spots as much as everyone else does.

Right, because they have like 90 is what we've established. Exactly. They got a special exemption. So we've got a guest today and it's a recurring guest, a favorite of ours, a pal, Evan Drellick, who is a newly published author of a very fine book about baseball called Winning Fixes Everything, How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess. It's about the Houston Astros. It's about sign stealing, but it's about much more than that and the league as a whole and how a front office operates and functions or dysfunctions, as the case may be. Evan's been working on this one for a while, so we will have him on to talk about this in just a moment. I'm going to

give you a related stat blast, this week's stat length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystablast. So one follow-up from last week's Stat Blast about the retired numbers we talked about prompted by Fernando Valenzuela's number being retired by the Dodgers. We talked about the numbers that statistically speaking deserve to be retired league-wide across the league. We talked about every team and the best candidates. talked about every team and the best candidates. There was one oversight during that conversation, which was that somehow Atlanta and Milwaukee got lumped together in the data in the spreadsheet. And so we did not specifically call out the Milwaukee Brewers, who most deserve to have their numbers retired by this war-based method. So I will tell you now that the leading brewer candidate is Ryan Braun, which is, I guess, kind of complicated.

You know, he remains popular in Milwaukee, I believe. He would get booed in the latter stages of his career when he went on the road. But in Milwaukee, they like him. So whether the issues with PDs and lying about PDs and all the rest of it, whether that prevents him from getting his number retired, I don't know. But he would be the leading candidate. After that, it's Jonathan Lucroy. I'm not sure that appreciation of framing has advanced to the point where Jonathan Lucroy would be a strong candidate to get his number retired. But statistically speaking, fan graphs were wise.

He should be Ben Sheets after that. And then Cecil Cooper, I think would be after that as well. And Teddy Higuera. So I'll link to that spreadsheet. And if you are a Brewers fan and you want to see, you can just select Atlanta and you will see some Milwaukee players lumped in there as well.

And one other question we got, because we noted that Randy Johnson and Ichiro both show up as leading candidates for the Mariners to retire their numbers. And as you noted, Ichiro will be retired sometime soon. Presumably, he's going to get into the Hall of Fame not long from now. And so some people asked how they should handle that because Randy Johnson and Ichiro had the same number. They both were 51 and they have not retired the big units number. And I assume that they will not, if they retire Ichiro, that it will just be specifically for Ichiro. I think that that is correct.

Yeah. It's kind of awkward. I think Randy Johnson had a statement at some point about how he was told that if it was retired, it would just be for each row. And I don't know if that is because he wasn't there long enough or because he was with the Diamondbacks during years when he won a championship and Cy Young Awards. I guess he went into the hall as a Diamondback, right? So there's sometimes some lingering bitterness, right, which came up when we were talking about the Orioles not retiring Mike Messina's number. And a lot of it seems to be, well, because he left and he went to the Yankees and he went into the Hall of Fame with neither cap. But sometimes it's like if a player leaves and it's not always that they sign a free agent contract somewhere else, sometimes they get traded. I mean, Johnson got traded from the Mariners, right? So it seems odd to me to hold it against someone. Like maybe while they're still active and they're still playing for the other team, okay.

But once the dust settles, can't you just let bygones be bygones and say we had a great time with you on our franchise? And what happened after that is none of our concern? I don't know. You would think that, wouldn't you? Yeah. Yeah. I would think that. But, you? Yeah. Yeah. I would think that. But, you know, sometimes feelings are complicated, Ben.

Yeah, I guess so. All right. So the stop-loss question today, this was prompted by a baseball subreddit post that was not a ripoff of Meg Raleigh's photography work, but it was posted by listener Monty211. And the thread said, during 2005, the Brewers had nine future all-stars at the same time who either played in their minor leagues that year, eight of them, or was a rookie. One of them was a rookie. So J.J. Hardy was a rookie and he became a two-time all-star. And then Ricky Weeks was in the system and graduated as their number one prospect. Prince Fielder, Corey Hart, Nelson Cruz, Giovanni Gallardo, Ryan Braun, as we mentioned, Michael Brantley, Lorenzo Cain. And this person wanted to know if

that was historic, if that was a lot of future all-stars to have bouncing around in your system at the same time. So Ryan Nelson, frequent StatBlast consultant, answered this one, rsnelson23 on Twitter, and he wrote on Reddit, if we compare that to baseball history, this is nothing. If we compare it to more recent history, it's a lot, but not quite historic. So in earlier baseball, there were fewer MLB teams and more minor league teams. This was also a time before free agency or the Rule 5 draft, so teams could stock absolutely wild amounts of talent in the minors. The elite teams in this regard were the 1930s to 40s Cardinals, the 1930s to 40s Yankees, and the 1940s to 50s Dodgers. The below table represents the number of pre-MLB debut future All-Stars each franchise had by year.

of pre-MLB debut future All-Stars each franchise had by year. For the sake of clarity, these counts include players who played with the franchise's minor league system in a given season and had entered that season having not debuted with an MLB team. So by that count, the 2005 Brewers only had six since Hardy did not play in the minors in 2005 and Weeks debuted very briefly in 2003, so they would not qualify. So by that measurement, it's the 1938 Cardinals had 16 future All-Stars in their system at the time. And this was Branch Rickey and codified the farm system and had so many affiliates, formal or informal, and just had control of hundreds and hundreds of players and would either promote them from within or use them to acquire other more established players. So the 38, 39 Cardinals had 16 and 14 future All-Stars, and then the 34 and 37 Cardinals had 13,

as did the 37 and 38 Yankees, and it's all of those teams from that period of time. And Ryan continues, those systems were stacked. So, for example, the 1938 Cardinals system, these players, they had Elmer Riddle, Johnny Hopp, Ken Raffensperger, Marty Marion, Max Lanier, Oscar Judd, Walker Cooper, Emile Verbon, Harry Brasheen, Lou Bedreau, Mort Cooper, Murray Dixon, Red Munger, Nick Etten, Whitey Kurowski, Johnny Sane, and Ryan included comps of more modern players for those old-timey players just to give a sense of how much war one might expect from those guys. And it's a lot. So he comped it to basically having a rotation of Bumgarner, Sale, Strasburg, Wainwright, and Kane with Anibal Sanchez and

Jeff Samarja and company waiting in the wings with a Hall of Famer and a couple of very good players in the infield. So that's how much the late 30s Cardinals were controlling. But since 1990, so more modern times, the Brewers' six is pretty competitive. So the 2005 Dodgers had eight in their system. The 2007 and 2010 Reds also had eight future All-Stars in their system. And then with seven, we have the 99 Blue Jays, the 2006 Dodgers, the 2008 Reds, the 2011 Diamondbacks, and the 2014 and 15 Cubs. And I will include this post in the full list if anyone wants to check that out. So for example, the 2005 Dodgers had Carl Santana, Chad Billingsley, Hong-Chi Kuo, Joel Hanrahan, Jonathan Broxton, Kenley Jansen, Matt Kemp, and Russell Martin all in their system

at the same time. 2007 Reds had Devin Masarocco, Jay Bruce, Joey Votto, Johnny Cueto, Josh Hamilton, Justin Turner, Todd Frazier, and Zach Cozart. That's a lot. The most recent team with six is the 2017 Braves, and they still have a chance at more. So there's six. Austin Riley, Max Fried, Mike Soroka, who is now Michael Soroka, I read. Ozzie Albies, Ronald Acuna, and William Contreras. And there are still players with all-star potential who could be added to the list, Ian Anderson, Kyle Wright, Joey Manessis, our man, and AJ Minter. So this kind of got me curious about what the average

expectation should be, because these are the high points when your system is super stacked with future all-stars, but that could lead to unreasonable expectations, right? And I think at this time of year, when we're looking at prospect rankings and farm rankings, it's good to keep some sense of perspective here. You know, you don't want to be like Bob Nightingale just taking a picture of the bigger base and not knowing how much bigger the base is

than the smaller base, right? So you want a sense of the baseline. The baseline. Yeah of the baseline the base why yeah the baseline we should start measuring things in bigger bases like we do with l2 vase you know it's like it should be its own unit of measure exactly you know so so the all-Star Game hasn't been around forever, obviously, but since 1945, or if we go 1945 to 2010, since more recent years may not have had a chance to have all their All-Stars hit yet, it's 2.6 future All-Stars is the average number of All-Stars to be playing in a team's system in any given year. So 2.6 all-stars somewhere lurking in your system. And that could be anywhere in affiliated ball. It could be down to your Dominican summer league teams, your rookie league teams. These numbers may change now that there are fewer minor league teams and affiliates perhaps, although I guess there are just as many all-stars as ever, if not more. So 2.6, that's sort of your baseline for how many

all-stars the average system in any given year will produce at some point in the future. And no guarantee that there'll be all-stars for you and your organization just at any point in their career. There's actually an interesting study Bill James published this week where he found that historically exactly 50% of team value has come from players who had never played before for any previous major league team and 50% from players who had played for some previous team. So it's 50-50 for players as well. Throughout major league history, the average player has had 50% of his career value while playing for his first team and 50% while playing for some other team. So to say that your system might produce two all-stars, well, they may not be all-stars until after they go somewhere else.

So from 1961 to 2010, so that's since the beginning of expansion, 2.45 is the average. From 1998 to 2010, the 30-team era, it's 2.36. So more recently, it's really about 2.4 all-stars. So it's not a lot, I guess. If we all dream on, you know, you look at your system's top 10 and you think, oh, this guy's got an all-star ceiling and that guy's got an all-star ceiling. You know, it varies, I'm sure, based on how highly your system is ranked. But on the whole, the average system, you're only going to get about two and a half all-stars out of that system in the entirety of their careers. So I think you kind of have to keep your expectations in check a little bit about the amount of high-ceiling talent that is going to come out of that system at any point. It's hard to develop players. Yeah, it turns out that baseball is hard, Ben. Yeah, and I also asked him to look at this another way. So not just with all-stars, but number of future major leaguers, period, and then number of long-lasting major leaguers. So he did two minimums. He did like 600-plus plate

appearances or batters faced, and 3,000-plus plate appearances are batters faced. And the numbers, you know, they get pretty small. So he did this on a league-wide level year by year going back almost a century. And then he did it per team average. So if we look at like 2008, I guess was the peak, at least the recent peak of the number of players in minor league systems in affiliated ball, it was like 7,000 players were in affiliated ball in 2008. And of those 7,000 in 2008, barring, I guess, anyone who still hasn't shown up, although that would be tough at this point. The number of future major leaguers is 950, which is a lot of future major leaguers, but that's out of 7,000. So that's like 13.6% of all the players in affiliated ball will be big leaguers at some point, which matches up exactly with a stat that I had in the MVP machine about that too. So again, most players, they're not going to make it, which is probably

not a huge surprise to anyone, including those players. But 13.6%, that's roughly the percentage that will be big leaguers of any kind. And then if you limit it to big leaguers who get 600 plate appearances or batters faced, then in 2008, you're down to 387. So that's about 5.5%. So about 5.5% will have like even a season's worth essentially of playing time. And then if you want 3,000 plus plate appearance or batters faced careers, then we're down to 86 guys that year. And that as a percentage is about 1.2%. So if you're talking about players who will actually become established, long tenured big leaguers, it's really like 1% of all the players in affiliated ball. So if you're doing that on a per team, per system basis, then the 950 for all 30 teams, that goes down to about 31.7.

So in any given team system in any given year, you're looking at roughly 31, 32 future big leaguers for any team, not just for your organization, but any. And then about 13 will last for a season or so in the majors. And then about three, two to three maybe, will become long-lasting big leaguers, which tracks roughly with the number of future all-stars. So you're at about like 30 future big leaguers, maybe a little more than that. And then maybe like a dozen players who will last for a season or so in the majors. And then really, it's like two to three players will have long careers in the big leagues or become all-stars. So it's just not a lot. And so if you're a team that's done a

great job of developing players, either scouting them, drafting them, developing them, whatever it is, then you're way ahead of the game because most systems, it's not that fertile. You're only going to produce two to three stars or long lasting players and that may or may not be with your organization. Yeah. But see, the thing about it is, Ben, when you find those things, it doesn't mean that the lists get shorter. You're making an argument for long lists. And that's fine. But I'm just saying that's the argument you're making. I mean, you could share these stats with

Eric Langenhagen and say, hey, look, you're only going to get a couple long-lasting big leaguers out of the system, so do we have to rank 40 guys? You don't know which two or three they'll be. And a lot of them are going to be a big leaguer somewhere. Yes, that's right. Yeah, right.

I mean, that's the case, I guess. Yes, you're right. So if you can expect 30 plus future major leaguers in the system at any given time, then that is an argument for ranking 30 plus guys per system, I suppose. Yeah. And, you know, it's satisfying when the deadline rolls around and there's a 19-year-old no one's heard of.

And I'm like, yeah, we have a report on that guy already. Right. Exactly. All right. Well, that segues into our topic of conversation today because the Houston Astros, they have done a pretty good job of developing and promoting players. But at what cost? At what cost? We will talk to Evan Drellick about that in just a moment.

Back in the dressing room, the other side is a screaming. All right. we are back, and we are joined now by Evan Drellick, who is a senior writer for The Athletic and also the author of a brand-new book. It's called Winning Fixes Everything, How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess. Evan, welcome and congratulations. This is refreshing after speaking to radio stations and Albuquerque and some other lovely cities, and they're all lovely interviews, but this is refreshing. Yes, I know the feeling. I mean, look, it's nice to have anyone want to talk to you about anything you did, generally,

if it's for a good reason, like you wrote a book. But sometimes your publisher will set up a whole line of interviews with people who don't know who you are and haven't cracked the book and just got a press release or something and very clearly have not read a page, which, hey, any publicity is good publicity, I guess. But I can assure you that we have read not just a page, but all of the pages. All the pages. And we've very much enjoyed the book. Thank you, guys. I'm glad you made it through. Yeah, it was easy to make it through.

And I wanted to ask, I don't know whether you decided on the title and the subtitle or not, because sometimes authors don't have final say on that. But there's no Astros in the title or the subtitle. Now, the cover is Astros Colors, right? It's blue and orange. So it's Astros themed in that sense. is Astros colors, right? It's blue and orange. So it's Astros themed in that sense. But you didn't say how the Astros brightest minds created sports biggest mess or winning fixes everything for the Astros. That doesn't really roll off the tongue. But you know what I mean? I was kind of curious

whether the thinking for that was either you wanted it to be more money ballish in the sense that this is a broader, bigger book. It's not limited to a single team because that team tells us something about the league as a whole. Or maybe you thought there'd be Astros fatigue at this point after years of talking about the Astros and you didn't necessarily want to have Astros front and center. So what went into that if this was even a conversation? Yeah, I chose the title. The editor, who did a fine job at one point, thought that maybe the main title

should have quote marks around it, thinking that, well, are people going to understand Winning Fixes Everything? And I was pretty adamant, no, we're leaving that. So early on, I knew the title. There was a placeholder subtitle at one point that went up on Amazon. Nobody told me it was going up.

It just appeared up there in the listings, which I was disappointed by, but it was never supposed to be the final one. And then to your question about not mentioning the Astros, I was concerned about it. It was deliberate in the, as you say, or point to keeping it broader, right? Because some of this is owed to the league. And I do think there are some bright people at the league. And we know that there's some other teams that were involved in some behavior. And the Astros alone aren't the only team that's operated in kind of a cutthroat way. But yeah, I was a little concerned from a marketing standpoint of just like, are people going to know this is a book about the Astros? And my editor was not worried about that. He was quite sure that anybody who picked it up was going to be aware or very quickly become aware of what it was about.

So I don't know if that was the right decision, but that's how it went. Well, I imagine that people will have some idea because the initial reporting that you and Ken did, I think, is probably some of the most impactful baseball reporting of our lifetime anyway. But that obviously wasn't all of the reporting that you did for the book. So I'm curious what your process was like once you had decided this is going to get book length treatment. There are themes and questions here that you were interested in exploring that went beyond simply the sign stealing, how you went about doing that additional work to fill out the rest of the book. Yeah, painfully. What was my methodology of reaching out to people? I knew generally the events to go through. Certainly, there were things that came up in the reporting process that I hadn't previously thought about. But the book largely, in kind of the overall structure, more or less looks as I kind of thought it would. And I think really what I did was I made a list of people I wanted to reach out to,

and I just started making calls. As opposed to it being, okay, today I'm only doing X. It kind of moved between different things. I think probably it was the case if I was doing a specific topic, like I'm trying to think, when did I talk to Cardinals people? It might have all been in the same kind of time. You talk to one person, maybe somebody else suggests another. So it wasn't totally rigid, but it was making a list and going through it. Yeah. I think we had you on episode 1769, which was like November of 2021. And we asked you then about the sign stealing and how you broke the story and all of that. And you told us, wait for the book. So we've been waiting very patiently. It's been a while. You've been waiting

too. It was worth the wait, I think. And I'm sure it was frustrating that it took as long as it did. I mean, not that it's that long by book writing standards, but I'm sure you were impatient with people writing other things about the Astros and other books and podcasts and worried that maybe the world would move on. I feel like it worked out well in terms of timing it, at least from my perspective, because A, the Astros are still as relevant as ever, right? They're the reigning World Series champions. So it's not like they suddenly fell out of the spotlight. And B, I would imagine that the passage of time must have made some elements of the reporting process easier for you because people move on. There's just this exodus, this diaspora from the Astros front office, which when I was working on a chapter about the Astros and the MVP machine, which was in 2018, that was just as people were starting to spread out from the organization. And when they did, they became much more willing to open up about what went on there. That was

back when Luno was still around. And I have petulant emails in my inbox from Jeff Luno, just like, we're not going to talk to you. I'm not going to talk to you. Stop trying to talk to people. But a few years on, even Luno's not there anymore. And I would think that just because there was so much backbiting and so many squabbles and factions in the Astros front office that probably people were motivated to get their side of the story out there, right? So it seems like there were probably a lot of people who were willing to talk who might not have been if you were writing about this, you know, trying to get this published, like, you know, if the lockout

hadn't intervened and everything else that you've reported on since then. Yeah. So the first year, I agreed to do the book in March of 2020, February, March, right? Spring, right before the pandemic. And that first year was really all reporting. I didn't start writing until 21. And so because, and the reporting continued. There was still reporting going on in 21. Trying to think, was there any, there might have even been a little bit this year.

The bulk of it was 20 and then some into 21. Because it was so fresh off of the scandal, I don't know that it totally worked that way. I do think that people, because something wild and crazy had happened here and because people felt that in some cases there was a record of things that needed to be corrected or a fuller story to be told. I do think that that helped. If you have – there was a large triggering event, you know, and that leaves people in a position of – And you pulled the trigger, so that definitely helps too, I guess.

Yeah. So, you know, they – I think that was more it than the timing timing. I was I never thought that the story was going to fade. I did want it out sooner. I was confident the material I had would still be relevant. I wasn't sure how to look at is it good or bad for the book if the Astros were to win a World Series in 21 or 22, but both years. And then once it happened in 22, it was interesting that the responses I kept getting from people was like, oh, this is good because it's going to be renewed interest or even further interest in the team. I think the earliest the book could have possibly come out would have been, I don't know, September of last year, like just in terms of if we'd really had our act together and moved quickly, both me on the making edits front and the publisher on the back end, if, you know, given a choice between having the book come out now and September, I actually think now is probably a better time. So it worked

out, but yeah, it was really hard for three years or two and a half years, seeing other people talk about it, speculate on it, report on it, podcast about whatever. And knowing I had this wealth of material and I think a vantage in a reporting history that nobody else had on it and sitting on my hands. I mean, even the stuff about how Ken and I got the story, people made a lot of assumptions about that. And we said nothing. And that was our choice. But that doesn't mean it was necessarily easy. It wasn't. Yeah. I guess you were used to sort of sitting on a story that you were working on because you've worked on the sign stealing story for more than a year, right? You and then you and Ken. And I wonder during that protracted process where you were trying to get that story in publishable form and get people on the record,

did you ever come close to abandoning that? Like, we'll just never know. I can't crack this one. And can you say anything about how you were initially tipped to that without outing anyone? Because your book starts with you kind of catching wind of this in October of 2018,

right? And from people you say who were involved directly and had catching wind of this in October of 2018, right? And from people, you say, who were involved directly and had firsthand knowledge of this. And I just wonder what motivation people had to talk about it, right? Because, you know, you cite other people who were involved either warning their teammates, as Mike Fiers did after they left the Astros, or Alex Cora possibly imbibing too much and bragging about it, right? So there could be guilt.

There could be people giving people intel. There can be just braggadocio. Like what initially led to you getting some wind that this is happening, if you can say? Yeah, the question of motives for whistleblowers, they would really have to answer that themselves. And, you know, it would be tough to speculate. I mean, we obviously had one of the four on the record in Mike Fiers, and he talked about his discomfort with it. I do think that sometimes that general displeasure or discomfort that people have with wrongdoing is overlooked in this discussion, right? As far as the potential of any other motives, other people would have to answer on it.

I couldn't, it wouldn't be fair of me to speculate on it. And if I tried to, you know, I wouldn't want to be giving away any sort of identifiable information. So it's a fair question. I think we shouldn't overlook that some people just don't like it when bad things are going on. And I just, I can't go further. It's not a bad question, but I can't go further. I think one of the things that I both enjoyed the most and found the most impressive as the book goes on is this balance that you struck between sort of situating the Astros within a broader baseball culture, one that prioritizes gaining small edges and, you know, overtime has become more and more sort of ruthless and efficient in trying to eke out

marginal value while also acknowledging that, you know, while other teams were engaged in some illegal sign stealing activity, that like there was something unique to what was going on in Houston and that they, at least in terms of what we know to be true and can say with confidence publicly, like that they were sort of in a class all their own. And I wondered how you thought about sort of balancing those things, because you don't want to let the individuals who were involved in Houston off the hook for behavior that it sounds like at various points, they themselves were aware was, you know, transgressing a line. But we also don't want to let the industry off the hook more broadly because that seems like a really good way to get whatever the next version of the banging scheme

is, right? So how did you think about sort of situating them within a broader baseball culture? My mind is taking me here. I don't know if it should be taking me here. But Ben and I, My mind is taking me here. I don't know if it should be taking me here. But, you know, Ben and I, and Meg, I don't know if you've watched it, but Ben and I both liked Andor a lot. And, you know, I think one of the idea of presenting and reporting what's actually going on. And, you know, I think this is a human instinct to kind of want tidy, simple, cleaner narratives. The Astros, the science stealing, the relationship MLB has to both. It's a mess. It's messy. It's shades of gray. I think some are darker gray than others. You know, I think there are some pretty clear conclusions you can take

away within it. But yeah, I mean, the Astros have personal accountability or should for cheating, right? At the end of the day, it's their action. Yet there was an environment created or fostered by the organization and Major League Baseball that made it easier or provided incentive to do so. And you can extend this to some of the stuff that even the front office was doing. Well, some of it, you can tie it back to the CBA. And who negotiates the CBA? It's the owners and the players union. So it's not tidy. I don't know if I'm giving you quite the answer to the question, but that's where my head goes. I was thinking of alternate scenarios where the sign stealing could have come out sooner

or later. There's the infamous Danny Farquhar incident, right, where he was aware that the Astros were banging something and he was sitting there in the clubhouse hoping a reporter would ask him about it. So if only someone had asked, maybe we would have known even before that postseason, right? And then there's another scenario where maybe you don't get tipped off. Maybe no one does. I mean, I'm sure during that time when you were trying to nail down that story, you're thinking, oh, Passon is going to chase this one down or someone else is. But is there any scenario where they actually do keep it so close to the vest that we still don't know about it, where it's more of a 1951 giant sort of situation, where it doesn't

become widespread knowledge for 50 years after the fact? Or were there just too many people involved in this conspiracy for the secret to be kept for that long? You know, I'm very glad Danny Farquhar participated in our story. So this is not meant to be critical. But, you know, he also would have the ability to tap a reporter on the shoulder or pick up the phone and call. I always thought that was funny about his comment. But I'm glad he spoke to us for that original story. It was an important account to have. You know, in the time that I had the story in the notebook before pairing up with Ken, I'm trying to remember, I don't think I ever really thought anybody else was close to it.

I had some strong sourcing. And for me, there's a bit of sliding doors concern sometimes. Look at that. Ken Rosenthal is literally calling me. I will have to call you know, I just for me, there's a bit of sliding doors concerned sometimes. Well, look at that. Ken Rosenthal is literally calling me. I will have to call you later. Wow. Look at that. Look at us. Like, what if I don't have the guy who's calling me right now?

Do I break the story? Does it come out when it does? Or honestly, does it come out at all? And I think I think your point's a good one, Ben, that it was a team wide cheating scheme. And therefore, the numbers of people who would have knowledge of this are higher than probably. Well, I don't know. Individual PED use or more individual forms of cheating. And so just on a numbers game and we're talking about the after. So we like numbers.

Yeah, it probably has a higher percentage chance of coming out at some point than not. But look, there's been a lot of finger pointing of teams. I think the Astros, a lot of crossfire, right? Go back to that 18, 19 period. But nobody had anything firsthand. And as I remember it, I mean, I wish I could, you know, talk. I don't know if I want to talk to myself from back then, but, you know, I wish I could ask myself,

did I really feel like anybody else was on it? And I was, you know, the separator for what Ken and I did with the Astros and the Red Sox was firsthand sourcing. It was on the inside. And, you know, I looked around and nobody else had that at that point. Maybe it would have gotten there. I don't know. I looked around and nobody else had that at that point. Maybe it would have gotten there. I don't know. I don't know how to predict it. I'm glad I'm not in a

spot where I had to find out. I mean, I do remember a conversation with a couple other national writers, actually not long before the story came out. And there was this perception that, you know, the Astros, they're dirty. And there are other teams that people were talking about that same way. But we were standing around, one of us, one of them said, I don't know who's going to get it, but I hope it's one of us, you know? And so I think there was a sense that there was something there, but I don't know that anybody else really had the way in, you know, it's a hard thing to get to. players were not suspended as part of the league's punishment for what happened in 17. And some of that, you know, no doubt was them being concerned that it would lead to a protracted

disagreement with the union. But some of that was a lot of that was that Manfred had said, this is going to be on general managers and field managers to tell their people, here's what the rules are, don't do this, and that there was a failure of communication at the top of the organization. And so he was sort of in a weird position when it came to potentially punishing the players. Now we're in an era where there's a lot of rule change on field rule change happening. I think you were at the presentation in Florida, which was, you know, the Florida version of what I saw in Arizona, where, you know, they're talking about

the shift restrictions and having spoken to clubs about how they might try to circumvent those rules and then trying to design around that in their rule structure. This is a very long way of me asking, like, do you think that MLB is better positioned now to prevent whatever the next version of electronic sign stealing is? Yeah, when you started to ask the question, I mean, I was going to point to the circumvention discussion too. You know, that's kind of evidence that they're actively thinking about it, at least in one regard. You know, rule breakers are typically always going to be ahead of the rule enforcers or rule makers. I don't think that's going to change. You would have thought coming off of PEDs that MLB would have been wiser about technology. And, you know, you can say that's a little easy to say in hindsight but

i mean even when it started to get loud mlb was still lagging behind you know they they were letting teams move their video rooms closer to the dugout well i mean some of it's kind of astonishing in hindsight frankly you know but so i mean in my head i I'm thinking, well, what if somebody hacked into Pitchcom? Or what if somebody hacks into, if we ever get the ABS, not anti-lock brakes, the automated ball strike system? You know, what kind of requirement? Like, is hacking something that Manfred would have to specifically give notice to? I mean, yeah, maybe that's breaking a federal law. I don't know.

Like, to some degree, it's a question of imagination. You know, what lengths will somebody go to, and does it fall into kind of a bucket of behavior that doesn't really exist yet? But, I mean, if it's about electronically stealing signs, they now have that on the books, right? The union and the league did work out that, yes, this will be punishable going forward. So I guess if you were to hack into Pitchcom, it would fall under that and maybe federal law. I also wondered, there's the question of whether the Astros have learned anything. And I guess that comes down to whether Jim Crane has learned anything because most of the old Astros leadership has moved on. And I'm kind of curious what you think of the comments that, say, Jeff Bagwell made last year, which a lot of people dunked on at the time.

You know, when Bagwell was saying we need to balance things better, the game is played by humans. It's not played by computers. You know, we've gone too far in one direction. I think a lot of people were looking at that thinking, oh, this is just an old school, old fashioned guy. Hasn't he been paying attention? The Astros are super successful and they're all in on analytics and everything. But you read Winning Fixes Everything, and it sounds like maybe there should have been more Bagwells in the room having some say when it came to treating people like people, right? So I wonder whether you think that and the hiring of Dana

Brown, who's kind of from a different baseball background, certainly, as Jeff Lutow or even James Click, for that matter. I know you're not covering the Astros on a day-to-day basis anymore, but does that represent a pivot that you think is significant in light of everything you've reported here? I mean, it certainly has the appearance of a pivot, as though Crane has decided he wants a different, at least an outward image than he had before. You know, Click was still in that analytics mold. You know, the question, and you guys can tell me if you agree with this. whose background is more traditional, have people in place and then subsequently listen to and

incorporate those people in place who are masters of R&D, who know the analytics space? Does he have people do that for him and continue to foster its growth? You know, you yourself, I don't think at the very top of an organization necessarily have to have been a McKinsey consultant to put your organization in a position to be forward thinking. You know, he's walking in to a franchise that already has a ton of valuable IP and systems built, right? But you still have to keep innovating. So I think it's more of a long term. Do they fall from, I don't know, top two, three in analytics, if that's what we want, or number one, whatever, wherever they sit. Do they fall from there? Do they still stay toward the top?

And what is the decision making process? Does it revert back to I'm going with my gut or do they kind of maintain some sort of you know objective subjective way to do it right like the astros way of uh sig's big thing was combining you take the subjective information you take the objective information and then you objectively meld them except even in deciding how you meld them isn't that kind of inherently subjective anyway yeah so i i it is certainly visually a pivot and you know kind of in sticking with the theme of the book. The question is really what's going to go on behind the scenes. Outwardly, yes, it's different. How are they going to function internally? not just in Houston, but in other front offices, right? Because even before Yerenken's initial reporting, there was a lot of industry resistance to Houston, their culture, the way that they seem to treat other orgs, Lunau having this reputation of being smug and difficult to deal with. We saw

public manifestations of that culture and its pressure and then the damage it can do with the Taubman incident in the post-season. But do you get the sense that Klub said, well, that's a problem over there? Or did it cause anyone to say, huh, maybe we should think about what is the culture that we are actively constructing within our own organization because i think there's this sense that like good culture just happens if you have like nice people but that doesn't seem sufficient especially in an industry as sort of winning win oriented and competitive as baseball so do you think that this caused any GMs of other clubs to sit up at night and say, huh, am I like Jeff Lue now? You know, honestly, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

Or if I have something that I'm trying to think of, I've had a conversation along these lines with, you know, outside people, people outside of Houston. I think the general tenor in the last couple years, I don't know, maybe even three, four years, people's eyes started to open a little wider to everything that was going along with the big data revolution, the outgrowth of Moneyball, right? The negatives that came with it, along with the many positives and the many innovations and the many smart things that were brought into the game. I mean, that's my general feeling. I mean, I see, look, there are media people who were prominent and remain prominent who couldn't stand to hear a bad word about the Astros 10 years ago, right? Back when I was at the Chronicle and reporting about questions of their culture and the way they were being run. It was,

oh, how did, you know, it was in so many words, how dare you question our darling Astros? They represent what is smart and where this industry is going. Right. And it was a very oversimplified, I think, argument. You know, people just didn't want to hear anything bad about a team that they perceived to be smart and was smart, right? But there was other stuff going on. I think now people are catching up a bit and I'm very proud of breaking the Astro story, the cheating scandal. I am almost potentially more proud of having been willing to report on questions of management culture there nine years ago and really being in front with that at the exact same time that people were writing the exact

opposite. And I think in general, people are paying a little bit more attention, but I don't know. I don't know if any GM is reading. I hope a GM reads Winning Fixes Everything and tells all his or her friends about it, if it's Kim. But I don't know. I'd be curious to hear, frankly, if outside people feel that way. Yeah, I think one of the enduring questions of the story and the book is really, can you innovate without being a total dick? right? I mean, can you push the envelope without being Jeff Luna-like, who just comes off as so extremely unlikable in the book, I mean, for good reason. And you detail how being unlikable in many cases hurt the Astro's efforts to implement things because there was such secrecy and a lack of trust and just a personal dislike,

and people pitted against each other, and that in many ways that was counterproductive. And yet they continue to win. They've been the most successful or second most successful organization over the past several years. And the other one that has a case as the most successful, the Dodgers, they're sort of in a similar boat, not exactly the same transgressions and not the same kind of confirmations, but there's certainly smoke around them as you detail in the book and other things that we know about that are sort of unsavory too. So that's kind of the enduring question, like, does it have to be moving fast and break things? You know, can you do that

in a more humane way? Is there a better way? Does it have to be either you're the Astros and everyone dislikes you for good reason, but you are actually kind of on the cutting edge and you're successful, or you're the Rockies, let's say, where it's all kind of like, oh, we have a good group of guys here, or the Royals, or we take care of our employees and they appreciate that, but we're also not winning a lot of games here. So is there a middle ground where you can innovate and win a bunch of games and also go about it in a better way? Very reflexively, my answer is yes. And I think what the Astros did was more or less write a blank check for themselves to behave as they wanted.

more or less write a blank check for themselves to behave as they wanted. The notion that you cannot be innovative, an industry leader, without doing the extreme things that the afters should, like simply the treatment of people. Jeff Luno absolutely could have handed out titles. He could have paid people better, 100%, right? There are very clear ways. But I think for a long time as well, look, we came to an organization that had no analytics. We want to move very quickly. And there's a cost to the speed of adoption and to being on the bleeding edge. I think it is true that, yes, if you are an innovator, a disruptor, you are always going to ruffle some feathers. There will be some inherent pushback. That is true. But I think that can be leveraged as a narrative, frankly. And I think it was in Houston. It was used as cover to do

things that simply were not necessary. You did not have to treat employees quite the way you did in Houston. And I think if we were to kind of pick through different examples, did that have to happen? Could you have let the scouts go? Oh, I don't know. A year later, could you have spent some money on a training program for them and seen if any of them could have passed the training program rather than firing them? Go down the list, right? The idea that it had to be this way or they wouldn't be innovative, I think that's who we. So there's a lot of Astros DNA across the league now, right? Both just in terms of folks who have at the lower levels who have left Houston and work in other front offices, and then in the senior leadership of several organizations. And I know I just asked you if anyone looks in the mirror and says, am I Jeff Liu now? But for those clubs in particular, do you think that there is important and meaningful deviation from some of the least humane and most egregious people practices? Or is this something that we are going to have to continue to see manifest as that DNA proliferates and proliferates.

What's Kevin Goldstein's final quote in the book? Baseball is an industry that treats people like shit. It's not like the Astros were sole proprietors or anything like that. I think I'm pretty close to verbatim there. But it is true generally. The workplace issues that exist in baseball, even beyond kind of extreme ruthlessness on behalf of one particular team, still exists. There's a line of people out the door to work in this industry. Teams know that, and they can subsequently treat people very disposably. And now that owners' eyes are open to Moneyball and Moneyball 3.0 or whatever point we're on now, if someone can save them money, Moneyball 3.0 or whatever point we're on now, if someone can save them money, they will want that.

Jeff did so many things to demonstrate to Crane his own worthiness based on, look how much money I'm saving you. Look how much more efficient I'm being with resources. I mean, one of the anecdotes in the book that is a little more striking to me was Luno going to these meetings with Astros owners and showing them, look where we rank compared to other teams. And so if I took the question to be, is the Astros way sticking around? Yeah, yeah, it is. was listening to a Fresh Air interview with the author of a biography of Jack Welch the other day, and the parallels were striking, right? Because he had very similar tactics and practiced secrecy and fired tons of people and laid people off, and it was super cutthroat. And GE grew and turned great profits, and he was extremely celebrated. And then after he left, it kind of fell apart, right? And all of this came out about how they were doing this and what they were hiding and what the human costs were. And in that case, I mean, that has had financial costs. In the

Asteros case, it has reputational costs, but they are still winning. They are still successful and people do tend to copy successful teams. So I guess it's a question of whether the fact that their reputation is so tarnished now outweighs the fact that the team continues to be very successful with for former Astros people, one of a few. But you look at how they didn't spend this offseason, right? I mean, they're following the Astros blueprint very closely with the tanking and building up a great crop of prospects. And now it's starting to pay off in an Astros style way. But when you have stories in the book about Sig didn't want to spend any money on free agents. He just wanted to promote players from within. And that was the only way he was interested in winning. And when you have Sig and Elias and others who kind of came up at Luno's side, you start to wonder, are they just going to continue to follow the blueprint or having followed it to this point and experienced some success, will they then deviate having seen what happened here and what some of the fallout has been? So you'd like to think that they've kind of appropriated the parts of the Astros model that worked, but maybe we'll learn from the parts that didn't or have come back to haunt

them subsequently. Fans have been so conditioned. I mean, it's like the greatest marketing trick baseball ever pulled was convincing people that what is good for them is to watch terrible baseball that costs the owner no money, that the owner should spend nothing on it. And the CBA certainly was a part of that, the CBA that the owners agree to and help design. The marketing power of a baseball team, right? Like, there is no group of consumers. At least I can't think of one. I mean, I'm sure it exists somewhere or there's a brand that has more loyalty, right? But like, you know, you're in this system where people are committed to your product for life.

It's like this ultimate in brand loyalty. If you walk outside of baseball terms and just look at it in marketing, and it gives these teams a lot of power to shove tanking down people's throats and to convince them that it's somehow good for them. I do believe tanking is a grift. I'll go on the record with that. Yeah. I worry that this question will sound Pollyanna-ish, but I wonder if you think there's an opportunity for a team to zig where others have zagged and to make treating people well the centerpiece of a winning strategy where other teams are trying to, you know, cut costs as much as they can, keep payrolls low, keep, you know, scouts in front office, personnel salaries low. We've seen, Ben mentioned a couple of clubs that at various points in the last couple of years have sort of bucked the trend and tried to treat their people well. But is there a version of that that is more successful than the Royals?

I guess that's what I'm trying to ask. Yeah, I think some GMs, whether they would be assessing themselves properly or not, would say that they do prize it more. Early in the book, there's a quote from a Cubs executive who's saying, like, yeah, we tanked, but we were not doing what they were doing. Right. We did. We did.

We hired. We did value, you know, human equity more. We just ruthlessly exploited Chris Bryant's service time while we were doing that. Yeah, right. Right. That's a totally fair point. There could be a lot of people can talk a big game in this sport. You know, kind of piggybacking off that, I wanted to make this

point in the last question when Ben mentioned Jack Welch, kind of the irony of the whole thing is that you have corporate America entering baseball and everybody treating these like outside businesses and that's what the Astros are doing, right? We're going to run this like an outside business would be run. This is not an example or really a comparable to the outside business world. It's a closed circuit of 30 teams, 30 investments that only appreciate in value, you know, historically. And I don't see unless the R-SEN situation got so bad, that's not going to change anytime soon. You know, they're dependent on one another, right? You're not actually trying to put another team out of business. And there's a lot of flow of people between organizations. And knowing that, it's almost a requirement that you treat people

maybe a little better than general corporate America. Because if you don't, when it is such a closed circuit, it is going to come back to bite you. I would and do hope that, you know, whether you look at it as like, we're gaining an edge here by doing it. Yeah, you can assign that to it. But I think even in just more simple terms, this is good for our business. It is good for our brand. It is good for our long-term health if we are not angering people left and right and taking care of our people. I think that people should read this book even if they think that they've heard enough about sign stealing, right?

Even if they have sign stealing fatigue after all this time, because you and Ken have done such a great job with that story. In a sense, I'm even more interested in the other aspects of the story, although they're all interrelated. I mean, some of it is just, you know, the sign stealing is just, it's sensational and you do have more revelations and details in here. science doing is just, it's sensational and you do have more revelations and details in here. I tend to think the actual effect of it is probably a bit overblown as some studies have shown and that it's almost more interesting as a symptom of what was going on there than it is

from a competitive standpoint. Although I know some people will never be convinced of that, but I think there's sometimes some dodgy analysis that goes on about the numbers that the side's doing. There's an executive who's quoted in the book saying, look at the Astros' 2017 numbers with runners in scoring position, and they had the highest batting average in baseball. And that's true. They also had the highest batting average when there were no runners on. I mean, it was just a good hitting team. They've had a lot of good hitting teams. I think they were just good regardless. But a lot of it will come down to the sides doing them. And the Astros' reputation is tied to that forever. And so I do wonder whether you're surprised by any aspect of how the stigma surrounding that either has lingered or has not lingered. Because in some sense, like the team as this sort of nebulous entity will forever be stained by this and certain people still are. But then other people have been forgiven and welcomed back with open arms into the game.

And, you know, like Carlos Correa, who seems to have been one of the primary embracers of the sign stealing scheme, if not one of the architects of it. I mean, how much did we all talk about Carlos Correa this offseason and where he was going to sign and is this signing going to stick? But it was all about his ankle, right? No one cared about sign stealing for him. That was not really seen as a factor that was going to affect his contract anymore. So it's kind of blown over and yet not blown over at all at the same time. So I wonder whether that's how you thought things would shake out when you were on the verge of breaking this thing. there's a little bit too much of the fallout that just couldn't be predicted. I didn't know people would be fired. I knew it was possible.

I don't think I thought it necessarily was likely. In hindsight, I think I should have realized that. Not that it would have changed the reporting. The reporting was the reporting, right? But I'm trying to bring myself back to how I looked at it. I mean, in terms of how it sticks with people now, it is very much still part of a narrative in a lot of ways but functionally you know is it hindering well players are are dealing with booze a lot you know it's it's it's kind of the elephant in the room it's just you know just kind of sitting there and you can

go over and pet it if you want i mean it's it's it's not i don't think the elephant's leaving anytime soon right i think as far as conversationally, it will always be attached. If you go a level beyond that, is it a hindrance? Well, maybe a little bit mentally for guys who are getting booed constantly. It certainly still provokes a lot of fan discussion. Believe me, I see plenty of it in my mentions. Yes. Yeah. fan discussion you know believe me i see plenty of it in my mentions but yes yeah no i i don't i don't know that i knew whether it was going to totally go away or not i i don't think i had

that conversation with myself but i would be surprised if if at some point like it's never talked about i mean black socks are still talked about people will still invoke the 51 john i mean major cheating scandals are remembered it It's just the way it is. Yeah. And there's at least a temporary penance. It's like, you know, Carl Spelltron loses his job as Mets manager, but then bit by bit, you know, oh, he's back in the broadcast booth. Oh, now he's back in the Mets front office. Oh, maybe he has to suffer some penalty in his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, but maybe it's just a one year slap on the the wrist. So it kind of peters out,

and yet, in a sense, that will always be associated with him. And I know from seeing your mentions, I mean, there are people who think you have it out for the Astros, right, and probably have thought that for a decade since, as you noted, you were really the first one who was reporting on a lot of these issues before the full scope of them came into view. And on the one hand, I understand how if this kind of culture of science dealing was semi-pervasive, at least among the leading teams at the time, which you do acknowledge in the book, that fans of other teams might feel like, or fans of the Astros might feel like, well, it wasn't just us. But as you note, they're the only ones that got caught for doing something as elaborate as what they were caught doing. So I feel like you kind of got to just accept that, just swallow it. It's not like a conspiracy.

Evan's out to get the Astros. If you were tipped off to some other team doing something the same, then you would have reported that too. So I think there is sort of some motivated reasoning, you know, biased, they're attacking our team, our tribe, so we have to circle the wagons and pretend that everyone was doing exactly the same thing when that perhaps wasn't the case. Yeah, there's certainly the kind of irrational fan devotion that becomes a part of it. But kind of the way you were just talking, you can go in circles with this. It's what I was talking about earlier. The whole thing is a mess, right? And so it is therefore kind of unsatisfying. Wherever you sit, it's not really

clear cut, shut, slammed. And I think that with the combination of just kind of the shock value of a World Series winning team cheated, it melds together to make it this topic that can just keep rolling. And I think that's pretty unique. I mean, I can't, what's a comparable? I mean, PEDs are kind of the closest comparable, but it's different because it's individual. It's on its own little island in a weird way. Maybe it's a big island. Yeah. Well, that's why it deserved a book-length explanation. And I'm glad it got one and a great one here. So I don't know if this is the last word on the Astros or the sign stealing scandal, but if it is, it's a great last word. I think some people will probably decide they don't need

to read any more words about the Astros ever after this. But I think this is kind of the definitive statement. And might someone with some other team make a deathbed confession in 40 years about some other sidestealing scandal? And then we'll know about that one too. Yeah, maybe. Who knows? Decades down the road, maybe more details will come out. But this is just a really thorough and perceptive

and adeptly reported account of everything that was going on and how everything led to the scandal that you brought to the surface. So it's just great. It's really great. And I hope people will check it out and pick it up. It's out now everywhere you can find books. Winning Fixes Everything, How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess. Congrats again, Evan, and thank you. Thanks. I have one thought. Can I offer one more thought?

Sure. Of course. If the sign stealing doesn't happen, the culture stuff is still there. In a weird way, I wonder who believes it. If you don't have the science stealing blow up, and maybe even if you remove the Taubman stuff, because we're so fixed on the result being the thing. And I remember, this isn't in the book,

but I remember right after the Astros won in 17, I talked to somebody and they were telling me how screwed up the invites to the parade were. Like the team was being stingy with certain people, little nickel and diming stuff. Right. And it was representative to them of like, you know, even in the moment you win, there's just still stuff behind the scenes that people don't see and aren't aware of. And that's it's kind of a it's a little existential for me. And it's a little existential for me. It's there. There's all this stuff that goes on behind the scenes and very often doesn't make the narrative. And yeah, that's where my head is at. Yeah.

Yeah. You can be efficient and still be dysfunctional, right? to know more about A.J. Hinch breaking the monitors, though. That's my main fascination from the entire saga, is A.J. Hinch sabotaging the monitors multiple times, but then never actually saying stop. That's just the weirdest part of the entire thing to me, which you do address in the book. Yeah, yeah. He did not go to the level of the team-wide demonstration. He broke the monitors, but it was never this definitive exclamation point that he should have made. Yeah. All right. Well, I hope Ken was not calling you to break some other massive story while we were interviewing you here. I love that you mentioned in the book that it's like a reporting superpower is like when your colleague is Ken Rosenthal and you know that you're only going to get someone on the phone one time potentially, then you have Ken make that call, you know,

just because he has the cachet of Ken Rosenthal. So why not have him be the one making the request? So I hope it was nothing pressing. And I guess we can sidebar about which Astro's front office members are the cast from Andor because I've been thinking about that the entire time. That's good. I haven't the entire time. That's good.

I haven't laughed all day. That's good. Which of them are in The Last of Us? Because that's a show I'm actually up to date on. Yes. Well, you got to catch up on Andor, too. Oh, man. The Last of Us is good, but it's scary.

It is scary. It's really scary. Yeah. Yeah. Big scaredy cat. All right. Let's wrap scary. Yeah. Yeah. Big scaredy cat. All right. Let's wrap up with the Pass Blast, which comes to us from 1969 and also from David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston.

Now, before we get to David's Pass Blast, I have one that caught my eye because Sal Bando passed away recently, a longtime, really excellent third baseman, and also after he stopped playing, a pretty successful baseball executive, too. And Bando, like, you could make a Hall of Fame case for him. He's not the leading third base snub. There are many, but he's 16th all time on the third base Jaws list. He's right between Buddy Bell and Dick Allen on there, though Dick Allen was not a third baseman as regularly as Sal Bando was. He's just above Evan Longoria and just above current Nolan Arnauto, who's still adding to his case, of course. But that's the kind of player Sal Bando was really good, like around the Buddy Bell, Ken Boyer range a little bit below Greg Nettles, just a really

solid, very good, at the very least type player. And when he passed away recently, what caught my eye is that his obituaries mentioned that Joe DiMaggio had played a part in his breakout. So the New York Times obit says Bando was initially touted as a defensive talent and he struggled early on trying to hit big league pitching. He credited Joe DiMaggio, then an executive and occasional hitting coach for the athletics, with getting him to close up his stance and keep his head down to hit for more power. The Sporting News reported in 1969. I would guess that that obit was pulling from his Sabre bio because his Sabre bio also mentions that Bando said that and that it came from that 1969 Sporting News article. And I was fascinated by that because

I love stories of players reinventing themselves at the major league level, especially when it comes from a former superstar giving them a tip and giving them the one weird trick that they need to unlock some latent potential. So I was intrigued by this story, and I looked up the 1969 Sporting News article, and I am much less convinced now than I was that Joe DiMaggio played an important role in Sal Bando's breakout, though I suppose it is possible. A lot of people don't know that Joe DiMaggio was with the A's in the late 60s. He kind of came out of retirement to get a fully vested MLB pension, or at least that was part of his motivation. And he was a uniformed coach for those seasons and

also a front office executive. And so he did do some working with players. And the 1969 article does say those who watched the A's last year noted at the start of this season that Bando was standing closer to the plate with his right foot nearly in back of it. This worked well for However, it continues, This, of course, refers to Joe DiMaggio, coach and executive vice president of the A's. He dropped his little hint to Bando in Cleveland, and Sal accepted the advice a few days later in New York on May 20th. He lined out and doubled twice. The next day, he was three for five. So I think if this tip had happened prior to the 1969 season, I'd be more convinced. But as it was, if you look at his splits just for that 1969 season when his big offensive breakout happened because he was kind of a light hitter prior to that. But if you divide it before and after the DiMaggio tip in May that he integrated,

then it's not as convincing because entering the game when he incorporated this tip, his season to date OPS was 882. His rest of season OPS was 885. He homered in 5.6% of his plate appearances that season prior to the tip and 3.6% of his plate appearances that season prior to the tip and 3.9% of his plate appearances after the tip. So it didn't seem like he actually did better. His power breakout had happened early that season before he got this tip from DiMaggio. So sadly, that makes it a little less compelling to me. So I don't know if we can credit Joe D for the Sal Bando breakout, but I'd like to think so. It's possible, of course, that DiMaggio could have given Bando a tip at some other time. Maybe he

worked with him in spring training, who knows, or that early season power surge might not have lasted and the hitters might have caught up to him because he did face a bunch of expansion teams early in that 69 season and he'd hit some of his eight homers to that point off of those expansion teams, although you'd figure that the weather his eight homers to that point off of those expansion teams, although you'd figure that the weather would probably be colder at that point. As we discussed, it's cold even in Arizona right now, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking. Yeah. The 69 article doesn't actually say that this change was made to increase his power or

that there was anything about lowering his head. So I don't know where the saber pile got that. And it also notes that Bando had become more patient, that he had decided that he wasn't going to swing at everything anymore and he was going to take more pitches. And I think that might be as responsible as anything for his power surge because sometimes when you're more selective, you put yourself in better counts and then you can take advantage of that with power. So I would guess that it was that selectivity that had more to do with it. He also notes that he had taken a lovely, beautiful bride early that year, I guess.

And getting married has helped me, he said. I was always clean and neat around my apartment when I was single. Every day I'd clean up my apartment and then do errands. By the time I got to the ballpark, I was tired. So his new wife at the time was, I guess, doing more of his errands. And so he was not tiring himself out by doing the errands. That was one of his explanations for why he was doing better. And also he was getting lots of Italian home cooking from his new bride as well. So he attributed it to that. So who knows?

Could have been a mix of those things. The power of pasta. Yeah, exactly. It's actually cold. It's not just relatively cold. It's actually cold. For real cold. Yes. Freeze warning. Anyway, Sal Bando was carbo-loading, so that was why he broke out. Who knows? Supposedly, Joe Damascio did help Reggie Jackson cut down on his strikeout somewhat. I'm not saying he didn't help players. Just not sure that Bando going from nine dingers to 31 was a case of Italian-American athletic legends passing the torch.

Anyway, the pass blast from David, also from 1969. He writes, baseball has a popularity problem. What else is new? 1969 was commemorated as the 100th anniversary of professional baseball in the United States. While some writers chose to celebrate the game's storied history, others saw the centennial as an opportunity to lament its uncertain future. In an April 1969 column titled, Is Baseball Doomed?, newspaper enterprise Association sports editor Ira Burkow suggested that the grand old game is on its last legs. As baseball struggled to sustain its popularity, especially when compared to other sports,

Burkow laid out what he believed to be the reasons why baseball was declining in popularity, including too much dead time during a game. Watching a relief pitcher stroll in from the bullpen, for example, is as dramatic as viewing as a man sleeping for eight hours. Much of baseball's drama and excitement comes from slugging from the home run with the bases loaded from the slide for a triple. Now the game has nearly evolved to a game of catch between the pitcher and catcher with the batter there only for decoration. with fewer and fewer stars for fans to identify with. Talent is thinning because of the lore of gigantic bonuses available in other sports. The shifting of franchises brought into focus the fact that baseball was really a business instead of a sport. Quoting social philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Burkow echoed, baseball is doomed.

It is a dying sport. And David concludes, 55 years later, baseball is still very much alive. However, we continue to find ourselves strategizing ways to shorten the length of the game and boost offensive numbers in hopes of matching the popularity of other sports. So I guess it was true that it was declining in popularity. Almost everything has, except for football. But you could go back a century earlier than 1969 and find people saying baseball is doomed. So we're here still saying it sometimes and still trying to do something about it. I mean, it can not be dead and still be dying. You know, that's their concern. It's just a long, slow, protracted death just circling the drain for centuries.

All right. Just so we don't leave you with the idea of baseball being doomed, a few final notes. One quick correction on our last episode. I think I misstated the terms of the new position player pitcher limitation. So just to clarify, under the new proposed rule, position players will only be allowed to pitch in extra innings or in the ninth inning for a leading team that is up by 10 or more runs or any time for a trailing team that is down by eight runs or more. Also some news about an effectively wild legend, John Jaso, our guest on episode 1225. We got fascinated by Jaso's life philosophies and laid back, kind of un-baseball-like attitude. We talked to him about his love of sailing in retirement. Well, he was the subject of a New York Times profile this week, which documented his ongoing itinerant

existence. And it sounds like he's absolutely living his best life, sailing all around the world, tropical paradise. Perhaps we should all strive to live like John Jaso sounds like he's absolutely living his best life sailing all around the world tropical paradise Perhaps we should all strive to live like john jay. So happy He's happy and one more follow-up about the mlb and mlbpa logo from listener and patreon supporter zach Remember we're looking for a logo that doesn't exclude pitchers by focusing only on the batter now that we're in the universal dh era So zach says I think a great mlBPA logo, which would also celebrate the heated and intense sexuality underlying baseball,

would be the celebratory butt slap. Probably the most unifying icon of all the players. I counter-propose the high five, though. What could be better than two baseball players high-fiving since the first documented high five ever was between baseball players?

Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker. That would be the perfect MLBPA logo. We'll be back with another preview pod next time. It'll be the Mariners and the White Sox. For now, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Jan Venema, Kyron Zavodny, Joseph Rosso, Benny,

and Joseph Burnick. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, which is going to hit 1,000 members one of these days. You could be the one to do it. All of our Patreon supporters are eligible to join that group. We also offer monthly bonus episodes, and playoff live streams, and discounts on ad-free Fangraphs memberships,

and merch, and books, cameo-style recordings. Many more extras await patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Patreon supporters can also contact us via the Patreon website, although anyone can email us via podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild.

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'll be back with that next preview pod before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. Around the changing landscape Talk to you soon. What you have when it's too late to see the bigger picture, the smaller frame.