Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2047: This Podcast Now Competes in the Big Ten

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

With Ben Lindbergh still in Sweden, FanGraphs’ Michael Baumann takes the co-host chair for a spin. He and Meg Rowley begin (2:10) by delighting in a picture of Lance Lynn and Enrique Hernández from Dodgers photo day, then take advantage of Ben’s absence to discuss (7:30) college baseball and how conference realignment might affect the […]

Autorni, le stat blast, le beatboy, son chouette Les avis pétantes et super, une fête Je pense que c'est effectivement cool Je pense que c'est effectivement wild Effectivement sauvage Effectivement Sauvage. Effectivement Sauvage. Hello and welcome to episode 2047 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Mae Rowley of Fangraphs and Ben is still in, you know, the cold north. I don't know what the temperatures are like in Sweden this time of year, but he is not here to pod. And so I am joined today by Fangraphs' own Ben's former Ringer MLB show co-host, Michael Bauman. Bauman, how are you? I'm the next best thing. You just called me Ben. I did. Before we started. It's okay. That's the next best thing. You just called me Ben before we started. It's okay. I just finished recording an episode of the Ringer F1 show with the other Meg who used to edit me, Meg Schuster. So I'm not going to get your name wrong. all these Ben's floating around and on this pod he tends to be you know like prime Ben but while he's gone he is other Ben and Ben Clemens joined me and so I think I was just on a Ben roll no you

were on a Ben der we're doing puns and we're gonna talk about college baseball in open defiance of my co-host's wishes although ben other ben leans into puns every now and again i guess i should say we're going to talk about a couple of things today we're going to talk about the specter of sports conference realignment and perhaps some some favorite uh remember some guys and also our impressions of guys being bigger and stronger than we think they'll be when we see them in person. But before we do that, we have to do the best thing that radio can offer, analyze a picture and give our thoughts on it. And I am here to say that, you know, Dodgers team photo day seems like it's a really fun time. Everybody seems very happy in these photos. And you discovered a great picture of your one true love and his maybe new one true love

lancelin and kiki hernandez so ben damn it you did it again wow really great i i didn't have to ask shane to change anything in tuesday's episode and i was tired from a wedding and i get i get like good sleep and all of a sudden I'm calling people by the wrong name. Anyway, Bauman. I could just go by Ben for this podcast if it'll make it easier on you. No, I know your name. We are fine. Are you sure? We talked about jambalaya before we started recording and cheese and me being flummoxed

and confused by social media trends even when i'm not away for a wedding and able to observe them anyway do you want to sing a few bars about the the love of your life lance lynn yeah this this picture was tweeted out by chad moriyama from dodgers digest uh and it's lance lynn standing behind kike hernandez sort of embracing him in a way that I think Lance Lynn is on a riser, but he's so much bigger than Kike that I am not 100% sure. And both of them have the most adorable, contented smile on their faces. It's very much in the realm of like, it's almost parent and child. Yes. But there is like just something goo goo eyed about Kike's expression.

I don't know. They're just, Lance Lynn is pretty chill. He's a good hang. Yeah. Every time I see Kike Hernandez now, I think back to earlier this season when he was still in the Red Sox and they were in Philly. And I was in the clubhouse talking to, I think it was Connor Wong I was there to talk to. And Kike comes in dressed in tight clothing that was in every non-matching color you could buy a super soaker in in the 90s.

And I just watched him while and yet i think he still had like the sort of silver dyed hair at this point and as i walked past i was like between the two of us we have the average amount of self-confidence that you would find in two men and uh like like walked him past like this is where all my self-esteem went. He has it. Yeah, he siphoned it away. He is such a charismatic person. I just, I'm overcome with jealousy, and I'm really happy that he and Lance Lynn are getting along. I feel like a lot of Lance Lynn photos, you know, set aside what he looks like on the mound, because every picture has, like like serious mound face most of

the time except when they're looking completely ridiculous he has often been sort of dour looking in his roster photos and it has been consistent right like he is he has been dour looking when he is coming off a great year he's been dour looking when he's coming off an okay year or when he's entering a season like this one where maybe he had a sense that the team he was signed to was not gonna be especially great and so you know he's a serious he's a serious man but i have heard from you like you've talked to him several times in the course of your career something of a of an aficionado of of lancelin and he seems like he's a good hang so it's kind eyes yeah i won't say i know him well

enough to know for sure that he's a good person but sure he has kind looking eyes yeah i do i do enjoy the part of this photo you know apart from lancelin looking like he's just really happy and and kike having a tenderness to him as he is cradled ever so slightly in Lancelin's arm. And then you have J.D. Martinez looking toward the future, presumably. Like Napoleon. Yeah, he's surveying a battlefield or a weapons test or something. So yeah, those Dodgers, I doubted doubted them you know what it finally hit me because i've made the face that lance lynn's making before it's the face you make in your prom photo when you're when your date is way better looking than you are like i crushed it

i'm doing great everything's coming up lance but at the same time, like, oh no, how did this happen? I'm completely outside my element. I am confident that they are on risers. That's the way that these photos always go. But I do like the idea of him being not only this much taller than Hernandez, but half a head taller than

J.D. Martinez, who's not a small man. Yeah, Lance is huge. Yeah, he's a big guy man. Yeah, Lance is huge. Yeah, he's a big guy. He's a strapping dude. Well, that's not what we're going to fill an hour of radio with. We could, but we're choosing not to. Yeah, we're exercising restraint. On behalf of our listeners, because at some point,

Ben will go on vacation or a trip again, and then we'll want to return to this well. We don't want to exhaust it all in one go. That'd be a waste. But you have written recently for Fangraphs.com about the impact that college football really, realignment, division realignment, conference realignment, is going to have on what are lovingly referred to as the non-revenue generating sports, which is basically everything that isn't football and men's basketball. In most conferences, there are obviously some sports that do well for their respective schools, but that's where the big TV money is. And there has been a tremendous amount of change in a very short period of time

in that landscape. So maybe the place that we can start is, can you give the Reader's Digest version of the recent conference realignment, and then maybe we can talk about how it is different or the same from other realignments that we've seen in the past and then its potential impact on college baseball. So what's the current state of affairs? If we're really doing Reader's Digest, I'm going to ask all our listeners to sit on the toilet while I'm giving this little talk. The short version is the Big Ten and the SEC are both taking big chunks out of other conferences. So the school that I referred to as USC in the written version of this, and I'm going to call Southern Cal now because I'm petty, and UCLA are joining the Big Ten. And it had already been announced that Texas and Oklahoma were joining the SEC from the Big

12. And this is sort of a, the latter is sort of a continuation of what the SEC has been doing. It's sort of like a gradual expansion since the 90s. You know, they added Arkansas and South Carolina, and then Texas A&M and Missouri, and everything has sort of been geographically contiguous. They're just sort of bleeding out and getting bigger and bigger schools from neighboring states from that core area, the sort of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee area. What the Big 10 is doing is reaching all the way across the country to a place that it had no historic footprint. That started when they brought in Rutgers and Maryland about 10 years ago to get the Big Ten, basically just to get the Big Ten network on TV in New York and Washington and

increase revenue for the schools in the Midwestern markets. When the early to mid-2010s realignment happened, it sort of killed off the old Big East, and that's split into a couple different conferences and different sports. And what the SEC's poaching Texas and Oklahoma was doing was it was taking the tentpole school out of the Big 12, which is usually like Texas, Great Plains region. And the Big 10 is doing – took the legs out of the Pac-12 by taking away the Los Angeles schools. And the Big 12 had already been planning to bring in a bunch of schools, BYU, Cincinnati, Houston. They had already been on the docket to join and sort of backfill. And some of these schools had formerly been major conference schools and got lost in a previous alignment in the 90s. Now they're bringing them back into major conferences. And what looks like

it's going to happen to the Pac-12 without the LA schools is it's just going to dissolve. So Washington and Oregon are joining the Big Ten. Cal and Stanford are looking for a way out, and if that happens, it'll only be Oregon State and Washington State, which are the leftovers basically because Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado, which is not relevant to baseball because Colorado doesn't have a baseball team, they're joining the Big 12.

So back around the turn of the century to the early 2000s, there were six major conferences. Now we're seeing a consolidation down to four with two very much richer and more powerful than the others. And so what this is leading to is there's basically ongoing – Florida State and Clemson have been playing footsie with the SEC. They're dissatisfied because they're the two big football powerhouses in the ACC, and everybody else is sort of being left behind. They're like, you know, we're really more culturally like this conference that could theoretically pay us more money and we would fit within that geographic footprint. So what I think the smart money is on, this is the orthodoxy, is that maybe not now, but in the next 10 to 15 years, the SEC and the Big Ten are going to eat

off the cream of the crop from the ACC and the Big 12, and we're going to have a de facto college football super league. And because all the money is in football, all the other, like you said, non-revenue sports are getting dragged in with it. Never mind that for a lot of SEC schools, baseball is a revenue sport. For a few SEC schools, women's basketball is a revenue sport as well. And so these are like huge cultural sporting institutions that are sort of being dragged along to places that aren't really fit for them to go. This is less of a problem with the SEC, but in the Big Ten, now they've got schools of varying sizes spread from sea to shining sea and varying commitments to baseball. And the quote-unquote baseball powerhouses that they're bringing in might not actually do what's

expected of them in the Big Ten. So I covered, you know, I say this every time I come on, I used to cover Big Ten Midwestern baseball for D1 baseball in the first year, like the first couple years of the Maryland-Rutgers-Nebraska expansion. And when they brought in Nebraska, they had just been to the College World Series, and everybody expected them to cakewalk the Big Ten, and that just didn't happen. And what happened is schools like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois and Michigan, too, really invested in the product and really grew their baseball program. So now there's strength at the top of the Midwest for college baseball in a way there hasn't been since the

80s. So I think UCLA, I I think is a step above anybody that the Big Ten has. But Southern Cal is the most decorated program in college baseball history. And it's been a non-entity for the entire 21st century. This is where like Tom Seaver and Randy Johnson and Mark McGuire went to school. They won 12 national championships. And they've been, I don't know if they've been like a top 10 most successful college baseball team in California in the past 20 years. So I'm interested to see what happens to them when they run up against in Indiana, Maryland, depending on how Ohio State's been good on and off.

There are some serious players in the Big Ten. It's a legitimate power baseball conference now. So there's this huge uncertainty. The SEC is the less interesting part of this because everybody sort of fits. Like Texas and Oklahoma, they're not that different culturally, geographically from like LSU or Arkansas or a school like that. But with the Big Ten, you've got all these parts that fit together if your only goal is to make a national revenue generating football conference. But you get down the pecking order to baseball, and you've got these pieces that just could not be more different. And so I'm very interested to see how they all fit

together and what happens there. I think it's going to have a big impact on college sports generally, where we might see the dissolution of either big-time football breaking away from the NCAA entirely or the divorce of football from the conference structure that governs everything else. Is it going to be somewhat more taxing for you to now have to travel to Michigan, to Wisconsin? Sure. But you're doing it once a week. You're on, you're generally flying charter. A lot of those schools are flying charter, right? And your season is compressed into many fewer games, not all of which are going to be played so far afield. But if you're a baseball player or softball player or any of these other sports where you have series to play rather than a single game, you do have midweek stuff that you're trying to balance with going to class. There's the architecture piece of this, that is, how do we make these things fit together both culturally and geographically? But then there's the reality that these kids are facing now, which is they're going to be traveling significantly more than they were before. And as you noted when you wrote about this for us, like not every guy who plays Division I percentage of them go to the NFL than college baseball players go on to be drafted and go to Major League Baseball. Like the proportions are just really different.

And the sort of value proposition of going to school on one of those scholarships is really different because the scholarship amounts are much smaller. So it's a weird thing to make fit. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that almost no college baseball players are on full athletic scholarships. These teams have 11.7 scholarships at the Division I level to disperse among up to 32 players. And a lot of major schools don't even use all 11.7. And there's some of them that get around this with academic or need-based aid. Vanderbilt's been very creative. That's the school that always gets brought up. But yeah, they're playing five times a week. And the midweek games are usually home games for major schools. Or if you do go on the road, like I covered a midweek Louisville, Ohio State game, it's a couple hours on the bus. That's not a big deal. You're there and back. It's a pretty easy trip. But particularly in the Midwest, where the Big Ten is now making, you know, by adding UCLA, they're making a big investment in baseball just intrinsically by

adding a school like that. All these schools are on the road for the first six weeks of the season because it's too cold. It's too cold to play up there. So you're already interfering with a more rigorous academic schedule because a lot of the good baseball schools are better schools than the good football schools. And the infrastructure around it is less because the football teams, like you said, a lot of them are getting chartered flights, they're getting better travel arrangements, they have more academic support. A lot of times you have coaches that dictate what these kids can study, and that's less true in baseball, and there's less support for it. And the coach-to-athlete ratio is

a lot higher in baseball than it is in football. So it's going to be bad for the athletes. Right. I just don't see this as being tenable in the long term. I think something is going to have to break. tenable in the long term. I think something is going to have to break. I liked your idea here of just decoupling football from the rest of the, you know, the rest of the sort of conference infrastructure. And there's precedent for this, right? Like there are schools that can, that have certain sports of theirs compete in a conference and, you know, then Notre Dame plays football as an independent or whatever, you know, so it's not like there's no precedent for doing that. There isn't really precedent for doing it quite at this scale. these other sports, do you think that that would be enough to sort of save some of these programs from potentially saying, it's just not worth it for us to have to spend, you know, the money to

send UCLA to Michigan however many times a year? Like, is that going to be enough to keep some of these programs afloat? I think so, because you can break these out into, you know, if you make specialist baseball conference, there are special, you know, I mentioned specialist hockey conferences, but I don't know if this is still the case. But when I was in school writing for the school paper, South Carolina and Kentucky played men's soccer in Conference USA because the SEC didn't sponsor men's soccer. And so but you know, and they were in there with a mix of other schools that were at the time Conference USA schools. And so something like that just seems like too obvious a solution not to happen once everybody just wakes up and gives up the pretense.

And I think giving up the pretense with, you know, the NIL money with all the lawsuits about, you know, control and the transfer portal and the potential legislation and the pretense is, it feels like it's on its last legs. And once that drops, you can say, okay, football is its own thing. Let's let the other sports do what's best for these teams, these athletes, and come up with a different solution. Right. And so in that framework, you have UCLA and USC competing with the other good sort of mid-major programs in California. I mean, there's so much college baseball in California. It's not good right now, but there

is a lot of it. Traditionally, there's a lot of good college baseball in California. Right. That has not been the case lately. Those programs have fallen on hard times or have fallen behind analytically or both things, you know? So it hasn't been quite the power that it has been in prior years. But it does seem like if I'm a college baseball player going to UCLA, I'd much rather drive to Cal State Fullerton than I would get on a charter flight to go to Michigan to play in the cold in May or whatever the hell. It is funny.

We end up seeing all of those teams down in the Valley for the first couple of weeks. That's when you get looks at Michigan and Indiana and Arkansas and whatnot, because they all come through here because it's so freaking cold where they live. Yeah, I mentioned the coldest college baseball game I've ever went to in the article,

but there was another one. One of the first games I went to my first year was to see Ian Happ, and it turns out Ryan Noda too, at Cincinnati, their first home series. And every school out in the Midwest has a turf field because that allows you to squeegee the snow off it. Oh, my gosh. Like, that's a major consideration at schools in Ohio and the Great Lakes.

But what you mentioned about schools, like, not bothering to sponsor baseball, I mentioned Colorado. Syracuse doesn't have a baseball team. Wisconsin doesn't have a baseball team. Iowa State canceled its baseball team after the 2001 season. Big schools will let this sport drop if it becomes inconvenient. And there are weather considerations for all of those schools. But Northwestern's baseball team is in the tank, and they just fire their coach. And how long are they going to keep that pretense up? If they just keep getting their teeth kicked in, it's just not something that I would want to, or,

you know, you look at the turmoil, it's a West Virginia right now, which is a, that's a fairly successful baseball program. And, uh, they're,

you know, the university has basically been run like they're, they're canceling language classes. You know, is, is base is a, is the Is the 10th best team in the Big 12 going to be worth it if you're dealing with Title IX, scholarship equivalency, stuff like that? So it's going to be very easy for a lot of these schools to give up on baseball altogether. And I

would like that not to happen, because even at schools that aren't like traditional powers, there's still a lot of cultural value to having a baseball team well and you know i i worry about the existing teams on you know affiliated with universities that are sort of being left without a chair now that the music stopped like what's going to happen to oregon state recruiting when they don't know where their football team's going to play? Like that isn't exactly, you know, it hasn't been the cream of the Pac-12 crop, not that most of the football in the Pac-12 has been very good of late, but. But Oregon State's been bad at

football even by those standards. Yes, even by those standards, they've been bad. And so what's going to happen there? You know, what is going to happen to Washington State's program when, you know, their, I think, financial situation isn't as dire as, say, West Virginia's. But my understanding is that, like, a lot of the Wrights deal stuff kind of put them in, you know, that have produced Adley Rutchmans and yet are kind of in this weird in between where if you're, you know, a good high school player and you're not going to the draft straight from high school, what do you do when you're approached by Oregon State? I would be nervous about going there, even though they're not decoupled from the Pac-12 just yet. It's not like that stuff starts this year, but it seems like it's going to be a problem for those programs, even the ones that do have a good baseball tradition,

to kind of hold on until the dust settles. So I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. I will say, can I find something funny? Yes. There's a lot about this that is funny. Deeply funny. And one of those things is that Stanford, you know, a school in the middle of Silicon Valley, full of innovation and rabid MBAs did not manage to extricate themselves successfully from the PAC. Well. That's a little funny. Really tells you all you need to know about that type of leadership. But yeah, the two things about the point you just made is,

one of them is something that was in the Teddy Cahill Baseball America article that I linked in my story. And he was talking about the kids out West, the kid from Oregon is not going to commit to Oregon State. They're going to go east. A lot of the good coaches and a lot of the good players are going out of state now. We sort of view baseball as becoming a national sport at the college level. The other thing is the Oregon State example is nobody wants that football team.

That's basically a mid-major football team. But if you're picking the baseball programs out of the Pac-12, the ones that you want to bring in to attract good players and quality competition and a lot of money, that's the first call I'd make if I was trying to pick baseball teams out of the Pac-12. It highlights the awkwardness in a level that I don't think really exists in the SEC outside of Vanderbilt, or it doesn't exist in the ACC, really, where everybody tries it at baseball and football as best they can. A school like Oregon State doesn't really exist in those conferences. I do wonder what it's going to do, and we probably won't have an answer to this for a while, but we have just seen sort of a multi-year stretch where there were schools

that have solidified themselves as being really good player dev programs, basically. Most of those schools are in the SEC, so the realignment isn't going to impact them necessarily. This is part of why college baseball in the West has sort of fallen on hard times, is that they are very well behind those programs in a number of ways, not the least of which is the player depth part of it. But you do kind of wonder what this might do to the trajectory of any growth or improvement on that score because it takes money. It takes resources to build a pitching lab and to be willing to spend the money to hire coaches away from either good college baseball is going to continue to widen

because you know if you're barely hanging on as a program you're not going to spend however many millions of dollars to like build a state-of-the-art pitching facility like you're just not going to do that so I wonder what this will do it seems like it'll just continue to solidify the SEC is the only part of college baseball that like really moves the needle. But yeah, but if more of that football money, you think about,

you know, the four schools that are leaving the PAC 12 for the big 10, if they end up bringing more money from football and that makes its way into baseball, you know, I could see that absolutely happening at those schools or at Penn state, which has been nowhere. They just made a huge, like getting getting Mike Gambino from Boston College is big for that

program. And so all this is sort of tied up in, like, head coach cult of personality. So you sort of have to take these one at a time. But I could see Washington or Oregon trying to become that, you know, become on the West Coast what Florida and Vanderbilt have been in the SEC. Yeah, I mean, you have your own weather considerations up in that part of the country, but it's not snow. No. They can come play down here the way that they already do, right?

I'll say, if you could do what Wake Forest has done at Wake, you could do it at anywhere else in these big four conferences. Yeah. You could do it at anywhere else in these big four conferences. Yeah. Well, I guess we're going to have to see how it all shakes out. But it is – I get that the money is coming from football, but it is too bad that it seems to be the tail wagging the dog when it comes to all of these other sports. And we haven't even talked about the sort of further down ballot sports in terms of the ones that get big attention and what it's going to mean for all of those athletes. Like, I'd hate to be like a gymnast at Stanford. Why is gymnastics always – that was the example I was thinking of, too, and I was like, no, I'm not going to use that because gymnastics is always the example that gets brought up.

I guess that there is like a pretty serious following. I mean, there's a serious following to all of these sports, right? But like I think about, you know, I just made fun of Stanford, so now I'll say some nice things. Like they have an incredible women's basketball program, right? Like they have a great swimming program. Like there are students who are, I don't want to like use the NCAA, they're going pro in something other than sports,

but like their sort of relationship to collegiate athletics is not the same as a football player or basketball player, or even, you know, a baseball player where it is part of this, you know, broader sort of collegiate experience and it has pedagogic value and there's all this stuff. And it's like, you know, they're, they're not bringing money in, but it does sort of, once again, put the light of the NCAA's whole perspective on this. Because if it were really about, you know, the spirit of amateurism and the pedagogic value of sport, then, like, those programs would have the impacts that this will have on them considered much more significantly than they do. But the NCAA doesn't actually care about any of that. I didn't hear anything you said after Stanford women's basketball because I'm still mad about the Hull sisters flopping their way

past South Carolina in the Final Four a couple years ago. Yeah, and I don't mean to suggest that those programs and that those sports don't have their own very dedicated following. I think we've seen that when sports are't have their own very dedicated following. And I think we've seen that like when sports are put on TV, people watch them and they can engage with them and like recognize the quality and the skill and expertise that's there. So, you know, there's a lot worth celebrating in college sports that isn't just football. So, it's too bad when, you know, the money that that brings in

seems to dictate everything else. This is completely far afield, and I guess we can sort of move on after this. I'm running out of stuff to talk about. But the most frustrating thing about this is what is driving the money is all these conference-specific TV channel deals, which are not bad things in and of themselves. I love the SEC network. But too often, these conferences will just build everything

around football. You say, oh, we're showing reruns of football instead of women's basketball or softballers. They're showing this instead of baseball, too, or sometimes even basketball. If you just showed live sports on the SEC, ACC, Big Ten network, people will watch that. And it's to the detriment of the sports that are already being treated as afterthoughts that they can't even get the airtime and the exposure and the reach, the recruiting power, frankly, that comes with that out of these networks that are ostensibly for the entire conference but are really just about football. It's a cry in shame as a fan of somewhat more unpopular sports and just someone who likes watching sports on TV. Like, I would put indoor volleyball on, like, if they put indoor volleyball

on, like, SEC Network or ESPN, it would become the most popular sport in America within 10 years of this, I'm certain. Yeah. Yeah. All you have to do is put it on TV and give it a little time. And people generally will come around to it because, like, sports are great. Watching live sports is great. And, you know, a lot of these athletes, even if they do end up becoming lawyers or, you know, insurance salespeople or whatever. Like, they're incredible athletes in their prime.

So they're going to give you a good show. You know, they tend to be pretty impressive. Even at smaller programs, it's in smaller conferences. So we advocate for that because you're right. Like, how many times do you have to replay, to replay the last bowl game you were in? It seems like you could show other stuff. It would be just as good. So, yeah. a very good change-up artist. Yours just retired. Mine just was inducted into the Mariners Hall of Fame.

And so we want to take a second to talk about Cole Hamels and Felix Hernandez. Because they make us feel feelings. I guess I'll start with Hamels. Since he just retired, I sort of relived he was the most polarizing

member of the Phillies when I was first cutting my teeth as a Phillies-specific blogger. And so I ended up devoting a lot more – I would say like a lot more time and energy to writing about and like familiarizing myself with him than even like Rory Halladay and Cliff Lee and to a certain extent maybe even more so than like Rollins and Utley. And, you know, to a certain extent, maybe like maybe even more so than like Rollins and Utley. He seemed he was just such a such a polished pitcher, even from when he was when he first came up in his early 20s. I expected him to have sort of a hang around phase of his career that just never really happened because he hurt his shoulder a couple of years ago around the pandemic and just wasn't able to come back. And so it's very cool. He's one of the first, I don't want to say the first, I'm old enough that I remember like Rollins and Scott Roland as prospects. But Hamels is one of the first pitchers who, or first Phillies players, who I remember like from the draft all the way to retirement basically, you know, where I wasn't even like just a kid. Like, you know, I was in high school when he got drafted.

I guess it makes you consider your own mortality that you've seen the entirety of this guy's career. But this was, I would say, one of the formative athletes of my developing sports fandom. So he was a really solid public citizen in a way that not a lot of athletes are in Philadelphia. So, you know, I just want to wish him well in retirement. But, yeah, it's a little emotional. I had come to terms, I guess Felix sort of had this too, where like the end had happened three years before the end actually was made official. But, yeah, it's, you know, a lot of complicated feelings. So I hope he's happy in retirement. It's striking how when you put their careers next to one another, at least from a

statistical perspective, how similar they end up being, right? Because there's, gosh, less than 100 innings of difference between the two of them felix's career era is a 3-4-2 and hamels is a 3-4-3 and you know their fips are within striking distance of one another and at least by our version of war you know felix was worth 54 wins in the course of his career and hamels was worth 51.6 like they were very tight to one another in terms of their career achievements. And I think, you know, Felix was the same for me where I was like, well, he'll have his prime. You know, he threw so much as a young pitcher. He threw so many innings for just like terrible Mariners teams. And I was like, but he'll,'ll you know he'll sort of have a a slow decline and he'll

start to tick up in terms of his career war even if the you know the back half of it is a little less smooth than the front half and he's not as dominant and he settles into being like a five and it just you know the the drop when it came was like really dramatic and you know some of this was that he had you know what would have been sort of new starts pulled out from under him because of the pandemic you know he he was sort of done with the mariners and he tried to catch on with the braves and then you know that season happened the way that it did. And he opted out because of COVID. And then he tried to catch on with Baltimore, but he didn't make the big league roster out of camp. And so he opted out of his deal with them.

And then he was just kind of done. But, yeah, I said to you as we were thinking about sort of what these guys mean, like Felix is one of those players. those players and I'm sure we could come up with others where the particular way that he threw his change up and like what that pitch looked like kind of ruined me for other change ups where I was like well it doesn't look like his so like that like what is that did that not like finish the way they did too and you know that's not a reasonable thing to think but that was sort of my experience of him where I was like this is the platonic ideal of a change-up to my mind and if it doesn't look like Felix's like it must be a garbage pitch which is not the way that change-ups work but that was the way I felt about it I was like he's our he's our guy and that pitch when it

was working was so beautiful and now every other one seems less good to me, even though I'm sure many of them are as good or better. Yeah. And Hamels was probably the first pitch. I guess he was, he came up around, no, he came up a little after Brandon Webb. Like the Brandon Webb sinker is the pitch that I keep going on. But like, obviously growing up on the other side of the country, you know, not having access to Diamondbacks games regularly, I didn't see him pitch all that much. But like, you know, Hamels, I watched basically his entire career. And the change up, like, the thing about him was he wasn't spectacular. He like, there was nothing really in your face about it. And he was just so steady and so reliable. And it's different for him

because I think he, and I wrote about this when I wrote about it, or when I did his career a bit, he sort of got ruined by Cliff Lee in the minds of a lot of Phillies fans, because Lee was just so unflappable. And Hamels was not. He was excitable. He was human. He got emotional. He had his ups and downs. We saw him struggle in a way that we never saw, at least Phillies fans never saw Lee struggle. And Lee and Roy Halladay sort of broke the curve. And I think they had a huge positive impact on Hamels as a pitcher. But by the time that happened, they had just completely ruined everybody's expectations. And I think that to a certain extent, Hamels has ruined people's expectations about Aaron Nola, who's not a very popular athlete here, despite being like maybe

the best Phillies player of the, you know, sort of the post-dynasty era. And the athlete who ruins other athletes for you is a, I don't know, that's sort of hand in glove with someone we're going to talk about in a little bit, but I don't know. I just like, I always connected with Hamels because he struggled because like, it felt like you needed to stick up for him in a way that you didn't with, with Chase Utley,

for instance, you know, someone who like, you know, I felt like I could see something in him that, that not everybody could. And, you know, I sort of, I made this sort of my mission when I was like, you know, I felt like I could see something in him that not everybody could. And, you know, I made this sort of my mission when I was like, you know, 22 and writing on a WordPress blog to like try to make people understand how good this guy actually is, even though he's not like in your face about it. So, yeah, I mean, it's a complete you say they're similar.

I think that the big differences are that the knock against Hamels was that he was never like the best pitcher in baseball. I think Felix was at least in that conversation. I mean, he won the Cy Young. So, like, you know, that elevates you. So, Hamels sort of had the Halliday career in miniature where he had like a decade-long career with his original team and then got traded to the Rangers and became a really important player for those teams as well. And so he sort of had that second act in a way that Felix never did. But I always wonder if there's something like, I'm sure you would want Felix to have had that hang around phase, like if he had pitched 10 years in Atlanta or Baltimore and gotten up to 70 ward

and gone to the Hall of Fame, I'm sure you would have been happier than the way it is but like there's something i think something romantic and tragic about him being a one ending ending up being a one club man you know yeah it's it feels very characteristically seattle yeah for a team that hasn't had i consider being mean about this i'm gonna try to be kind you can be a kind. You can be a little bit, you can be a little bit mean about it. It's fine. Cause I'll be, I'll be mushy about Felix on the back end to like soften the blow for Mariners fans. How about that? So a big part of the, the Hamels narrative is that like he was an NC, like he dragged that team to the world series in 2008 and was really good in the playoffs in 2010 and 2011 as well. And Felix never got that chance. And what I was going to say is

for a team that hasn't been that successful, Seattle has had just one after another of really charismatic, really special, unusual superstar players. You know, you go from Edgar Martinez to Griffey to Ichiro to, you Ichiro to A-Rod and Felix. And you could say Julio Rodriguez is like this. I'm sure you'd rather him be like the avatar of a team that wins three pennants or whatever. But he's the answer right now. He's the equivalent on the current Mariners roster. What his big league career ends up looking like in Toto, I hope, is different than Felix's for a lot of reasons.

But yeah, I mean, he's definitely the avatar for that right now. Even when the team is bad, like there's always somebody like that to really latch onto. Yeah. I mean, I think that I would have rather he have the option to pitch again, pitch for another 10 years, have a postseason run, have a postseason, forget start inning. It's funny to think about sort of the gaps in Hamels and Felix's respective resumes, right? Where you're right. Hamels never won a Cy Young. He was an all-star,

I think, what, four times, but never won a Cy Young. But he has a ring, you know. He has pitched extensively in the postseason. He has pitched in some very weird postseason games, in fact. Whereas, like, Felix was, you know, a Cy Young winner and then a runner-up, but doesn't have a single postseason inning to his name. And so I would have liked that for him like they came so close so many times and then you know some of the times when they came the closest like he was already starting to be in sort of the twilight of his of his career but it is a special

thing and I think part of what made him so important to Mariners fans was that there was this stretch where the club was so bad and it kind of felt like we, you know, and this was a time when I used we like to describe my relationship with the team, like we were a farm team for the Yankees. It felt like every, you know, good player ended up getting dealt out of town and then the return wouldn't be good. And like, those guys wouldn't play as well. Not happy about Brett Tomko in his career? I'm just saying that, like, what if Adam Jones had just been a Mariner? You know, like, what if he had just stayed a Mariner?

He would have been a great Mariner. I mean, taking nothing away from him being an absolutely iconic player with the Orioles. Yeah, I don't want to take anything from that fan base, but it would have been nice if he had just been like a Mariner, you know, forever Mariner. But in the midst of all of that, you know, like even Ichiro leaves, right, and goes to New York. Felix stayed, and he signed a long lucrative extension. And I've told this story on the pod before. I definitely,

I think, told it when he had his final game for Seattle. Like, I have a very vivid memory of the day he signed his extension. I was living in New York. I was working in finance. And, you know, I had a guy on my team who I otherwise liked but wanted to murder when he would say this, that, like, he would always joke about how Felix was just going to be a Yankee. And then he signed his extension, and I remember whipping around, and I didn't come up with this phrasing, but I was like, Felix is ours, and you can't have him. And it felt important that that guy was like, no, this is where I belong. And I think that that will always matter to Mariners fans. And, you know, I think the end of his tenure with Seattle, it didn't seem from the outside like the relationship between him

and the club was particularly good. And it does feel like that has been mended in the last couple of years. You know, when he threw out the first pitch in what ended up being that crazy 18 inning game against Houston in the division round last year, the place went nuts. They played the song and he came out of the bullpen and everyone went crazy. And the reception he got this year at the All-Star game was great, and obviously all of the Hall of Fame stuff that happened this past weekend. So it's nice that even though it had something of a sour note

at the very end, it seems like whatever that was has been at least publicly mended, and now it can just be unequivocally enjoyed. Whereas you walk around T-Mobile, and you walk around even their facility down here in Arizona and you know who you don't see really anywhere is A-Rod like they have every major mariner plastered all over the place this is a team that like in the last couple of years has leaned very heavily into this the nostalgia of 95 and boy do you not see a route anywhere at all just don't see that

guy i'm sure i'm sure he's somewhere if only because they have like the the picture of the wind from 95 all over the place but in terms of being highlighted as like a mariner they don't they don't really do that very much yeah it's a very similar to phillies and kurt schilling like you see john crock and darren dalton all over the place. You're at least, like, their jerseys and posters and stuff. Yeah, we're just not gonna talk about the pitchers. Yeah, I mean, well, then you didn't have to take anything down, right?

So, yeah. Our Hall of Very Good change-up guys. We love them. Last thing I want to say about Felix is, you know, I didn't watch a whole lot of him, because, like, he, you know i didn't watch a whole whole lot of them because like he you know i was a national very like very nationally very east coast but like what i all i remember about him is it's not like i don't know i'd have to think to like think about his change uppers or his delivery but the first image that comes to mind is the sea

yellow t-shirts yeah and like he transcended that team in a way that I like, I really had to think, cause I don't know that Felix is more beloved in Seattle than like Chase Utley is in Philadelphia, but Utley was part like remembered as part of a unit. Like you don't remember him without Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard. And to have somebody who stood that far, like head and shoulders above the team,

you know, I think like the only example I could come up with for my own sports fandom is Allen Iverson, where there was just like so little to like about this team, except this one like transcendent, charismatic, special, like you know you're never going to see this again

as you're watching it type of athlete who, you know you're never going to see this again as you're watching it, type of athlete who, you know, was really so much cooler than the team was. Oh, yeah. So much cooler than the team was. And like, you know, a homegrown guy. They just hadn't had, you know, it's kind of funny to think about like Felix and Kyle Seeger's career in conversation with one another like when he when Felix was done like the embrace that he and Seeger had was like oh yeah we are the only guys to come out of this that like were really very good so I think that he was singular and also was just like one of the only ones they had who were really any good at all.

And they've had better success lately and certainly on the pitching side, but they haven't had a core group of guys who have been Mariners since basically the jump really come together until lately. It had been a really long time. It was like Felix and Seeger and that was it. They had all these prospects famously that were going to be so great, carry everybody across the line. It just didn't happen for a long time. But now all their pictures are pretty good, so I don't know. It's weird.

Yeah, everything came good in the end. 1986 birthdays are now nostalgia cases. That's everything came good in the end. 1986 birthdays are now nostalgia cases. That's a fun look in the mirror. Yeah. Well, I always was comforted by the fact that, you know, Felix is a little bit older than I am, right? Like, I'm a June birthday. He's an April birthday. So, like, he's done a literally perfect thing.

And I have not. But he's older than me. So, like, of course he has. You know, that tracks. That makes sense. Like, he's older than me so like of course he has you know I that that tracks that makes sense like he's wiser than I oh boy you know you just keep getting older it only moves in the one direction shocking how that goes yeah it doesn't bother me so much as realizing that like like I'm like uncomfortably older than the players now and like i don't know how to talk to these we were talking about um a couple days ago about davis schneider who is the first first major league player from my high school and it's not even like oh you know south

jersey guys like you know i knew people who played against sean sean do little in high school and like you know people my brother's age would have played against Sean Doolittle in high school. People my brother's age would have played against, Trout and Gallon. I was talking to my brother who's 10 years younger than me, and he's like, I knew David Schneider's – I went to school with David Schneider's older brother. I was like, man, we are so far from the promised land right now. Yeah. I don't mean this as a knock on them i really mean it as a knock on me like i i don't know what to to talk to to young people about like in in particular and so i feel like i end up sounding like i'm talking to like an elementary school kid like did you have a good

day at school what are you into now is yugioGi-Oh big? Yeah, I'm like, I don't even know what platforms they're on, right? It's like, you're not on Twitter. They're all on TikTok, right? Is there a new thing beyond TikTok? I'm sure there is. I'm 37. I'm not actually that advanced in age,

but I feel a real distance. I feel a gap. But maybe that's just because I was at Jordan Schusterman's wedding and when I met him for the first time, he wasn't legally old enough to drink. Yeah. So contemplating one's own mortality. Speaking of wrecking the aging curve, yeah. Oh, yeah. I know.

They grew up good, though. Well, the final thing that we wanted to talk about are the the players where you you see them in person and you're struck by the the the real profound distance between you and them in terms of their their physical prowess like the guys who you see and you're like wow you're really you're really something was that the concept of this uh segment we had to reschedule and so now I lost it. Well, it started as when I was writing about Fernando Tatis Jr., I was like, just looking at him, he looks different than other baseball players. I was sort of thinking about, I remember thinking about Otani, obviously. I remember feeling that about Josh Hamilton, too, that this might be the most talented baseball player I've ever seen. Buster Posey, I think, is a little, have to like sort of know what you're looking for.

He doesn't jump off the field the same way. But, you know, just remembering some exceptional guys was the concept. But then I brought up the first time I met Tatis in person was before his rookie year. And I interviewed him and I was like, this is a child's face. And then he stood up and I was like, i was like this is a child's face and then he stood up and i was like this is this is barely a human being and because you know he was still only like 20 or 21 at the time and he was already huge i was like and he's gonna be 30 pounds heavier you know by the time he right fills out and yeah it's just and then know, this sort of got into, you brought up the first time

you saw your own judge up close. Oh yeah. It's just, we've remarked on this pod before about the propensity that shorter stature by baseball standards, to be clear, but by baseball standards, players have to kind of fudge their heights. You know, there's a lot of like,

I'm six foot, but only in spikes going on but there then there are guys where you see them particularly at field level and you're just really struck by the size of them as people you know it's it's kind of like when I've been watching more like NBA basketball in the last couple of years than I had for the couple of years prior to that. And you look at like, you're like, oh, Steph Curry's short. And you're like, no, he's not. He's just playing next to someone who's seven, literally seven feet tall. And sometimes you get to field level with a guy and you're like, what the hell is this? Like, you're, you look like a monster,

like from, you know, from, from space jam. Is that a reference that young people get? Probably because there's a new one. I don't think Jordan Schusterman was alive when space jam came out. So that's,

Oh God. But yeah, there are guys where you, you know, you marvel at them in a way you don't want it to, to sound or or or be like prurient although there is a long tradition of that in in baseball where your guys can sound a little horny for other guys um but like sometimes you are just struck we talked about

lance lynn earlier in this podcast they know they know what's going on. But it's like where you can have the experience of them where being in proximity helps you to appreciate the sort of physical athleticism. And then I think there's this other category of guy where, and the physical athleticism certainly can help facilitate this, but where the tools play louder in person than they're able to even on TV. And like to, you know, to cite a recent example for me, it's like, I don't think anyone is going to be shocked when I say, did you know that Corbin Carroll is fast? But when you're at a game and you see Corbin Carroll be fast, it translates in a way that it just doesn't when you're watching a somewhat zoomed in angle of him on a broadcast. When you can see that guy fly, you're like, that is what 80 speed looks like. It reads differently when you're in person

and able to see it play that way. And I really love those because I think it makes the case for going to the ballpark in person, really, because there are ones where it really jumps out at you when you're sitting there. The things that really stand out to me, it's different for pitchers. I will say when I was down there for spring training, I tagged along with Eric because Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi were, and Kumar Rocker were all thrown on backfields for the Rangers at the same time.

So, you know, I went with him when I ordinarily wouldn't have. And you could tell, like, the difference between those guys and single-A guys that they were thrown to is just incredible. And turns out we were some of the last people to watch Jacob deGrom and Kumar Rocker throw a pitch.

So, too bad about that. But what I was going to say, the two things that stand out are power and center field defense. That like anything, basically anything where you need a sense of scale and distance. I remember being at a college tournament at Minute Maid

and Lucan Baker, who is, is he still with the Cardinals? I think so. He was a two-way guy at tcu he was a freshman and he hit one the the roof was open at minute made and he hit one out by like 50 feet like you know landed on crawford crawford street like for all i know broke a window across the street it's one of the longest home runs i've ever seen and you don't really get that because everything it just looks like particularly in a, it just looks like, particularly in a

dome, it just looks like it's taking place in this little chocolate box. And I remember around the same time, CN, there was the Astros hosted, I think it was the Reds and Red Sox back-to-back. So I was watching Billy Hamilton and Jackie Bradley Jr. play center field at the same time in the course of a week. And just the amount of ground those guys cover is just unfathomable. Even if you're watching on TV, even if they show you the entire thing, you don't realize how far these guys have to run and how clearly they have to see the ball off the bat. I think spectacular center field defense is the biggest value add

in terms of watching baseball in person from an entertainment perspective. I agree, and I have something more to say about that. But first, I would like to say not only is Lukan Baker still with the Cardinals, but he is on the big league roster as we speak. How did he get called up? I missed that. Yeah, he got called up in June, and then it looks like got sent down, but he is back up with the team. He played yesterday. There you go. He is DH-ing.

Well, I added myself as not watching the Cardinals a whole lot. Yeah, well, they haven't given people much reason to watch them lately. But, yes, I agree with you about center field defense, and it makes me wish. I mean, the first camera angle I wish we could standardize and indeed mandate is like a better and perfect center field camera angle for every broadcast because the variability there is wild. And it is, I think, one of the things that impacts the viewing experience most that people don't notice until they're like, oh, a good one. That's better and different. Why aren't they all like that? You know who has a really good center field camera angle? I'm going down another

cul-de-sac, is Bradenton. Because I was watching Paul Skeens make his debut with Bradenton, and I was like, your camera angle is fantastic. Thank you. Anyway, I think that everyone should have to have the good, perfect centerfield camera angle. But second to that, I wish that there was a feed that you could pivot to that would be like the baseball equivalent of the All-22. Because you're right. When you have an angle and can appreciate the distance and can really see what the routes that these guys are running look like it changes your perception and really makes you appreciate the quality of the defense like our my my dad uh and i we technically still have them but i don't sit in those seats anymore because i

live in arizona but like we had seahawks season tickets and we were way up in the nosebleeds because the wait is long and those tickets are expensive. And we initially hated that because you have to, like, climb a mountain to get to your seats. But when Earl Thomas was still Seahawks and still really good, it was great because you really could just be like, wow, he started there and he got there and it happened so fast. And I think that, you know, I think that center field defense and safety play, it's the same thing.

You want to be able to see up or at least in person. I think it makes a big difference. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my favorite place to sit in the stands at a major league game is like one of the upper levels behind home plate. Yeah. I mean, you can see everything. Unless you're like, you know, unless you're in the corporate robber baron seats, you're not going to be close enough to really get a whole lot of detail. I work for a living, so I can't afford the...

Right. I think it's nice that those seats are bad a lot of the time, though. It feels like a small bit of justice. Are there any other guys who you've seen in person where you're like, wow, this is a different thing getting to see you in person versus on the broadcast does anyone else jump out of you this is like a very haphazard way of remembering guys but you and i had different reactions to seeing aaron judge in person for the first time because my first exposure to him was in was his rookie year and the team that i was spending all my time around was the Astros, which was a very short team at the time. You know, Altuve, Bregman, even the pitchers like

Keichel, Lance McCullers, not big guys. And so the Yankees came to town and I went to the visiting clubhouse and Judge didn't stand out because they were all that big. Oh, sure. Yeah. And so like this, like Judge was like aroldis chapman would be the biggest person in most rooms and he was complete like he was normal size like who'd they have they had jordan montgomery's huge dylan batances who's like basically as big as judge so like stanton like judge like yeah okay like this is six foot seven 280 but 80, but like, it's not as, as impressive when like everybody's six, six, two 40. I remember thinking was, was Lindsay on the, on the Yankees beat at that time?

Maybe, maybe later. So like, I'm smaller than most major league baseball players, but bigger than many, like, I don't have to worry about getting stepped on. And, you know, just imagine like, what if you're like, you know, five, four, and't have to worry about getting stepped on. And, you know, just imagine, like, what if you're, like, you know, 5'4", and you have to make your way through? And the other thing is, like, the Yankees, they travel with, like, just a stupid amount of media. And all the Japanese media were in town, too, because Masi or Tanaka was still on the team. And, like, just outrageous. It's the most claustrophobic I've ever been in a behind-the-scenes area of a major league ballpark. But they're all that big.

That's a memory that I'm not going to forget anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, it is a startling thing. And I wish that every guy on Twitter who's like, I could do this thing that big leaguers do would have the opportunity to sort of appreciate the scale cool is that you're not, it's not like everybody looks like Judge. So it is very neat to get to see the sort of different sorts of folks who are doing baseball in a really professional and good way. But when you are standing next to the Giants, you're like, wow. I mean, not the literal Giants. Some of them are big.

Well, some of them. Madison Baumgartner. Yeah. Well, I guess he hasn't been a giant in a long time. Yeah. I think we'll all be happier if we forget everything that happened after that. Hugh Darvish, underrated, just monster human being in person. Yeah.

Big guy. And Otani in person, you're like, wow, you're a big strapping dude. So anyway, this has been us appreciating the athleticism of big players. I mean, it started as athleticism, and then it just started listing huge guys. Yeah. I feel like we're in a skyscraper era of baseball, and the young guys are sort of continuing the tradition, right? I mean, like, we have

L.A. Dela Cruz, and I know he's still kind of not available right now, but like and O'Neal Cruz, and even like really tall, but like more spindly guys like, you know, like your Perez where you're like, you're a huge skyscraper. We need a better...

The size they tolerate in up thethe-middle guys is like – I mean, O'Neal Cruz, Eli De La Cruz. The fact that Carlos Correa is still playing shortstop. Brandon Marsh is not just tall. He's wide, and he's a very good defensive center fielder. That just makes me – I don't know. I think back to – this sort of goes back to the Felix and Cole Hamels thing. Like, they pitched in a completely different era of baseball where you viewed 200 innings a year as, like, the ante for being a starting pitcher.

And if you could pitch those innings well, then you got to be, you know, make all-star teams and so forth. And now just the level of athletic explosiveness yeah it's changed just in the past 10 to 15 years is mind-blowing to me yeah it's pretty incredible it's it's pretty amazing and you know how long will carlos cruz stay as shortstop i mean we could wonder about that but the fact that teams are not only willing but but eager to try to keep these guys up the middle when their giant is pretty cool. Because, you know, you used to be shorter. You used to be smaller.

Now they're all – I mean, like, Corey Seeger is huge. He's still playing short. Again, for how long? Who knows? But, Bauman, do you have anything else that you want to get off your chest while other Ben is away and unable to stop you? I consider busting out a college baseball player or, but other Ben not being here, my heart really wasn't in it. Right, yeah.

Like, you got to wait until you can spring it on him in person. You let me talk about Lance Lynn, college baseball, and Cole Hamels. I feel like, like, I mentioned this when we were talking about topics, but like I feel like the guy from the worst first date ever. We're just talking about all my interests. All of the things. I mean, we want people to enjoy their time on this Effectively Wild. I think we want people to lean into their to their passions and all of those things are relevant and relatively newsy so i think we i think we did okay i am going

to ask that you stick around while i bring our listeners the future blast which is brought to you as always by rick wilbur rick is an award-winning writer, editor, and college professor and has been described as the dean of science fiction baseball. And in this future blast brought to you from 2047, I'm here to say, with an uneasy peace holding in the Taiwan Strait and Russia back at the negotiating table in Europe, baseball in 2047 returned to something akin to normal.

Early on right-handed pitcher Danny Skeens, fresh up from a solid season at the reborn AAA Sacramento Salons, took advantage of an injury-riddled Texas Rangers pitching staff to get the start on opening day and threw a splendid three-hitter for the win. Skeens, whose uncle Paul Skeens had an excellent career for the Pirates and the Padres back in the 2020s and 30s, went on to win six straight before losing a game to the National Rays, giving up four home runs and an 8-3 loss. He bounced right back, though, to win 21 games with an ERA of 2-6 and a whip of 0-7-3-7 before the Rangers bowed out early in the postseason. The other pitcher who shined in 2047 was Kenton McLeod, who threw an April no-hitter that would have been perfection

had he not walked two, and then went on to win 21 games for the Guardians to take them into the postseason, where they met the powerhouse U-Murray Giants, who were back with a full roster with peace in the Pacific, meaning their soldier players were back in baseball uniforms. The Giants went on to win it all. It was a good year for the game, but at season's end, there was rumblings of yet another scandal, with a number of players and coaches involved in be-there technology that was outside of the game, but invoked MLB's new league-wide morals clause. Dun, dun, dun. The future is like really weird. Bauman, I don't know if you got that from our future podcast.

The present's pretty weird too. Yeah, it's having its moments. We're all hard to shock at this point. I guess that that's true. Bauman, do you have anything that you would like to plug or promote? You work for Fangraph, so I think people probably know what you're writing, but what else you got going?

I mentioned the Ringer F1 show. I was back on that today. You can hear hot wheelie sports takes. That's basically all I'm doing is work. We're going to hopefully have some good stuff on fan graphs in the next week the phillies are hosting some interesting teams so hopefully i'll be able to yeah you know maybe maybe seeing otani pitch in person so yeah it's it's pretty

cool it's pretty cool to see him pitch in person i've seen it before just it's been it might have been like since his rookie year so this is like a completely wow yeah i mean they i don't know i left the ao west now yeah don't see him as often as i'd like to yeah although the balance schedule is is hopefully going to help you out there a little bit in the years to come so will him signing with the mets i was just about to say and who knows how often you might see him come next season. Well, Bauman, I appreciate you filling in for Ben. I'm sorry that I called you

Ben twice. I was going to say, I appreciate you eventually remembering my first name. Thanks very much. That'll do it for today. Thank you for listening, and thank you to Michael Bauman for joining me. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively

wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to help keep the podcast humming along and ad free. Matthew Royer, Brian Hines, Marco Monaco, Ben Roth, and Amy Mantis. Thanks so much. Your Patreon membership comes with a variety of perks, including monthly bonus episodes, access to the Effectively Wild Discord group and our playoff streams, as well as discounts on merchandise and complimentary fan graphs memberships. You might even get to come on an episode with me and Ben.

It all depends on your level of support, but rest assured that any level of support is greatly appreciated. You can check out all the perks and offerings on Patreon.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate, rate review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and ben coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you're a supporter and if you're musically inclined we're still taking theme songs so send those along to us too thanks to shane mckeon for his production and editing assistance. I'll be back with another episode later this week.

Until then, be well and enjoy baseball. Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see? Well, the curveballs bend and the home runs fly. More to the game than meets the eye. To get the stats compiled and the stories filed. Fans on the internet might

get riled, but we can break it down on Effectively Wild. Music