Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2083: Analytics Retentive

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s experience covering the GM meetings and broadcasting an AFL game, with an emphasis on Brian Cashman’s testy exchanges with reporters, Meg’s interaction with Jerry Dipoto, and Scott Boras’s wordplay, plus listener emails (1:01:04) about “electing” free agency, whether the pitch clock has lowered the average age of […]

Well, it's moments like these that make you ask, how can you not be pedantic about baseball? If baseball were different, how different would it be? On the case with light ripping, all analytically. Cross-check and compile, find a new understanding. Not effectively, why can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Hello and welcome to episode 2083 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented

by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Van Graffs. Meg, do you have any shoe leather left after all of your on-the-ground reporting? You make it sound like I'm doing, you know, just like so much. Yeah, you're beating the streets. You've got your fedora with your press pass

stuck in the hat band. And you're just roving around with your notebook, just furiously scribbling. Well, I'm mostly hitting record on the iPhone Otter app. Yeah. So the winter meetings are in town. GM meetings. GM. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Don't get ahead of yourself. You got some winter meetings to attend as well, but not until winter. Or I guess technically, will it be winter? Yeah, it'll be winter by the time the winter meetings start. But it's not winter yet. It's a beautiful fall weather out there, at least where I am. It's lovely fall weather here, too.

Still a little warm, you know. But anyway. But it's the meetings before the meetings. It's the GMs. They flock to Arizona to meet with one another before they flock to wherever the winter meetings are. Nashville again this year. Yeah. So they will meet there.

But these are the meetings before the meetings. Just lay down the groundwork for the future meetings. Yeah. meetings before the meetings just uh lay down the groundwork for the the future meetings yeah so these these gm meetings are taking place at a ritzy resort up in scottsdale i think it's technically paradise valley just for you valley geography heads out there you know wondering uh where stuff's going on it gets broken up with the between um betwixt in between the the AL and the NL in terms of at least formal media availabilities. I, along with Eric Longnagin and David Lorla, trekked up that way yesterday for the AL side of things and got to hear Brian Cashman have some feelings in public. Oh my goodness, yes.

Might be one way of talking about it. We can get into the ins and outs of that. I did not ask any questions in the Cashman Scrum because it was very densely populated and, you know, he was on a bit of a roll. He sure was. As it were. But then I spent a bit of time

listening to Jerry DiPoto. I asked him a couple of questions. He was a brave little reporter such as it is and now i am talking to you um scott boris is um talking to many of our colleagues across the industry and apparently has already mentioned uh taylor swift and travis kelsey and here we are you know yeah as as the the Boris puns and analogies and metaphors and similes leak out over the course of this podcast, I can share them with you and get your live reactions. But yeah, the baseball world is really catering to you lately.

They're just coming to your doorstep. Yeah, it's just the World Series, the GM meetings, the AFL. It's a baseball hotbed. I guess that's part of the reason why you're there. But with the World Series, it's really come to you a lot lately. And you omitted mention of the fact that you were on the mic at an Arizona Fall League game. Yeah. You go right from the GM, you go from the World Series to the GM meetings. Yeah. And then from the GM meetings to Mike Farron's broadcast booth. Yeah.

In the AFL where you're calling an AFL game. And then you're on the mic at the podcast. And then you're doing the top 50 at Fangraphs. Yeah. Just an extremely busy managing editor, executive editor, whatever your official title is these days. managing editor, executive editor, whatever your official title is these days. I do like chatting with Mike, you know, just all the time, but particularly in a work context, because he always calls me the executive editor of Fangraphs. That's what I heard him say that. And I was like, is that her title? I don't think so.

No, but you know what? Can I tell you something? I was too tired to correct him. And then you get to a point where it's like, it's awkward. I can't be like, oh, by the way, I'm actually the managing editor. And, you know, I took it as a mark of Mike's esteem for me, which is so generous. Yeah. He's promoting you to pobo, basically. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I am the fangrass pobo. I guess Appleman is the fangrass pobo.

He's the pobo. I guess. Yeah. Since you said I was sort of the pobo of the podcast. Yeah. Since you said I was sort of the Popo of the podcast on yesterday's episode, we had a listener write in to say that really this was Lucas who said that it really should be Popo, president of podcast operations. Popo, which I like, except that Popo has other connotations. So I don't know if we could do a rebrand at this point. Anyway, I don't think, I don't know that you're going to reclaim that one, Ben, you know, I don't think you're taking

that back. The point is, you've been busy. You've been a baseball gadabout. You've been on the mic. You've been with the digital recorder. So, so set the scene. Tell us what the GM meeting, I've never attended GM meetings. So what's that like? It's interesting, you know, the way that they did it, this was the first time I had gone, so I don't have a great point of comparison. But I've heard tell that typically they get everyone together like in a ballroom. But this was, everyone was sort of clustered around folks in the courtyard of this, of the Omni. So it was really kind of lovely, actually. It was very nice out there. Again, this was the AL side of things. You know, you just got reporters going

here and there and everywhere trying to chat with GMs. And, you know, it's a mix of beats and national folks in terms of their coverage. So that was interesting to observe in terms of the kinds of questions that were coming from sort of one camp versus the other, the specificity of the questions that you might see when you have someone who kind of covers the team every day. They're more likely to get into the nitty gritty of the roster than I think the national folks are, which isn't a knock on the national folks. They have their own set of questions that I think are pretty useful for these guys to have to answer. Otani was a big topic of conversation, as you might expect. No one wanted to say anything

specific about the way that they are approaching his free agency or sort of the arguments that they are making, the lessons that might have been learned from um the last round of these that was a question that was put to depoto a couple of times he was asked what he was going to do about otani uh in a variety of forms and let me tell you he did not answer a single one of them with any kind of specificity so that's probably unsurprising which might have been why uh he seemed excited to answer my question about what the loss of Max Wiener, their pitching coordinator to Texas A&M, meant to the institutional memory of the Seattle Bears. I don't know if he was expecting that question, but had some interesting things to say there. I think the big headlines came from Cashman, and we can talk about that in a moment. But yeah, it's like a bunch of people come in, going here and there and trying to grab guys and get a sense of what their plans are for the offseason, sort of what their reflections are on the state of their organizations as they currently stand.

pretty well on this score because you know i i pay attention but you know we have talked about the might we say uh monochromatic nature of many of the gms um and you know like chris young's pretty tall so he really stands out in a crowd but they are putting just like a a lot of confidence in your ability to differentiate you know pretty uh similar looking white guys yeah that's funny and you know like i i i did fine um but i'm like yeah you know you you guys all kind of look alike um so they don't have name tags or anything no no they don't and you know it's funny because like if you go to i i bring this up mostly because i was amused when you go to like the all-star game for instance or even the world series and they do the the big media availability with all the players they put a little placard up that says like this is cory seger and i'm like does anyone actually need that instruction and i'm sure that

they're doing it because there are guys on every big league roster who are a little more anonymous even to baseball reporters and they don't want to just like put a name tag a name plate up for like the fifth reliever right that you don't know um while you can probably safely assume that you know people know who marcus semien is um and so like i'm sure that that's the rationale but it is funny because i'm like arguably all of these guys more recognizable to the general public than the the pobos would be and i would argue probably even more so than um with the with the reporters particularly the beats weren't necessarily interacting with the gms for every team so i just found that funny like the contrast

was um you know sort of this assumed familiarity was a little bit different in a way that i gotta chuckle out yeah well let's talk about Cashman for a moment because he was the one making the biggest headlines. There were a lot of non-revelatory rumors arising, emerging from these meetings about so-and-so talked to so-and-so's agent. Okay. What does that mean? You know, no one's untouchable. Oh, okay. You know, that kind of headline. But Cashman was on one. So were you in the gaggle here? Are you still flecked with spittle from Brian Cashman's comments? I was far enough back.

You know, a thing to note, I think his scrum would have been large regardless because, you know, it's Brian Cashman of the Yankees. You know, of the New York Yankees, you know. But it was interesting because everybody kind of came out in waves. You know, it wasn't like all 30 clubs had their GMs. Are they going to have to rename them? Are they going to have to be the po-bo meetings? Yeah. Like GM meeting.

But there's still quite a few teams that don't have po-pos. So now we're in this middle territory where not everyone has fully gone to the po-po model. So it's just got to be your baseball operations executive meetings. I don't know. Your head of baseball operations meetings doesn't have the same ring to it. Not everyone came out at once. Not everyone came out at once. And so the scrum, which would have likely been quite large to begin with, I think was even larger because, you know, at the time Cashman. It's like when you have a music festival where there are two or three different stages

and you can't see all the acts at once. So when some headliner's on one stage, then no one's watching the other guys. That's what must have happened once Cashman really revved up. And I will say, I know that there are plenty of Yankees fans who are eager for a change, who would not be sorry to see a different person running baseball operations for the Yankees just to have a second Yankees GM in their lifetimes. Right. But I will be sorry and I will be sad the day that he steps down or is dismissed or whenever, however that happens, because no one speaks like Cashman anymore.

And I've sort of celebrated that quality of his before. happens because no one speaks like Cashman anymore. And I've sort of celebrated that quality of his before. He has been in that job so long, longer, literally, I think, than anyone has ever been in that job with one team in an uninterrupted stint. And because of that, I don't want to say he has, like, don't give a f*** energy, but there is a little bit of that, I don't want to say he has like, don't give a f*** energy. But there is a little bit of that, right? It's just like, look, I've been doing this job for most of my life. I've been in this front office since the mid 80s. You can't get rid of me, seemingly. Like, he's got great job security, maybe not quite as secure as it once was, but he is obviously in good with the Steinbrenners and has been forever. And so as much as any GM, when they speak, it's like they all sort of went to the same media training, right? Like they all speak in kind of roundabout sentences.

Like they avoid saying anything interesting or getting pinned down about anything, as you were saying with Topodo being asked about Otani. Like you don't expect them to divulge exactly what their offseason plans are or anything. But they're always just so careful. And they're hedging. And it's word salad. And they don't want to offend anyone. And they don't want to be too confrontational. Not Cashman.

No. He will just let loose. He will say what he thinks and what he feels. And so few other GMs do that. And I'm sure a lot of them would love to, you know, I bet that they look at him delivering that press conference and they're like, yeah, go get him, Brian. Like, I wish I could have this energy in my press conferences. He's like the id of the general managers and the po-bos, but he's the only one who can actually let the bile out. The things that they say behind closed doors about the players and the media.

He will, you know, not burn bridges, I guess, but he'll cinch them at least. And it's always entertaining to hear him when he really gets on a roll. So he had some grudges that he was getting out there. He was settling some scores. He was pushing back against some narratives. Whether it made him look good or not, I don't know. I guess we could discuss. But it's just refreshing to hear someone speak plainly in that position.

Well, and it's interesting because there is a plainness in terms of it's not veiled. I don't know that it was necessarily completely forthcoming. Right. And so that's maybe a distinction that we should draw here. Because when he says we have the smallest analytics group in the American League, I was like, that doesn't seem true to me. Yeah. Or the AL East, I guess he said. Yeah. I was like, that seems like it's probably not true, Brian. Yeah. As of a few years ago, at least it was, I think, up there with the largest. I mean, it was like them and the Dodgers had the largest and the Rays always have a large one too. So yeah, it depends how you categorize people, right? Like what counts as analytics these days? And also, like, is it full-time people?

Is it interns and associates? Is it consultants? Yeah, right. But it's also a weird thing that it's 2023 and he felt the need to brag about how small the analytics department is. It's like we've gone full circle. It's like, you know, initially, I mean, back in the early Moneyball days, you might get backlash to having an R&D department or something, and you might want to minimize that or downplay how analytically driven you are. And then that became the thing where everyone wanted to be that way and be on board. And yeah, we're bolstering our analytics are. And then that became the thing where everyone wanted to be that way

and be on board. And yeah, we're bolstering our analytics capabilities. And now, at least in New York, with the New York media and the slings and arrows that they've been subject to lately, now it's like he wants to establish

that, no, no, we're not that analytically driven, right? Which it's just a weird sort of full circle, kind of like what teams are trying to pitch themselves as. Well, and it's interesting to me because and, you know, like I'm not I don't live in the New York media market. Right. And so I I have even less exposure than is typical to like the sports talk radio of that region. to like the sports talk radio of that region. And when I hear, when I heard him saying that,

you know, he's contrasting how their analytics group is so small and their pro scouting staff is so big. And I believe the part about the pro scouting staff being large. And I think that that can be, you know, there's a way for him to position this that I think would have read a bit better to people by saying like, you know, we have a very strong analytics group and we also have, you know, a really robust and

well-incorporated pro scouting group. And all of these things come together to inform the decisions that we make. You know, we view all of that as important data when we're thinking through player acquisition or when we're trying to understand, you know, how we might improve a guy who's already on our roster, whether it's in the majors or the minors. You know, like there's a way to talk about that that sounds coordinated and cohesive, which I think has been one of the criticisms of that org in the last year or so that like there it's kind of scattershot right and that the internal processes are not good and comprehensive but as i was standing there i'm like who is the audience for this set of for this set of comments like who is the constituency that he's trying to satisfy here because people in the game on the media side aren't going to look at someone first of all they're gonna they're gonna look at the assertion that it's the smallest group whether whether it's in the East or just in the American League, and be like, that seems incredibly unlikely to be true. And it's always a challenge to reporters, right? It's like, okay, go do some accounting. Let's see if that's real. And who are you counting? And in what capacity? are we in that you're that you're trying to make this about how actually like we don't stupid analytics we don't look at that at all and that's not what he said and i'm not saying that's direct

quote but it's just a very odd way of you know looking at the last year and trying to provide some sort of vision moving forward you know if i were a yankees fan and i had heard what he said in that moment i would be like well that seems bad. You know, because you didn't, stuff didn't work out last year. Maybe having this, if we take you at your word, maybe having the smallest analytics group in the AL East is a problem. Maybe you need to hire, like maybe you need to bring people in because clearly what you were doing last year didn't work. And not all of that was like a strategic error. Can't all be attributable to that. all of that was like a strategic error can't all be attributable to that but to assert a lack of resource as a defense against a season that went really badly for you know in yankees adjusted

terms is it's a weird it's a weird flex it is yeah yeah i don't know how much of it was about trying to appeal to some portion of the audience and how much of it was just sort of venting his spleen which is why i enjoyed it again i don't know if it was wise but it was just such a change right i guess that was maybe some pandering to a portion of the fan base that that has kind of a knee-jerk just response to, oh, they're too analytics-oriented, right? And, you know, egged on by the tabloids who have been saying that about the Yankees for some time now. Which is weird when the Yankees lose to the Astros or the Rays. So you're saying the Yankees lost to the Astros or Rays because they're too analytically oriented,

as opposed to those old school traditionalists in Houston and Tampa. I get critiquing their roster construction based on the fact that, hey, shouldn't you have more lefty sluggers? You're the Yankees. But it's pretty tough to find a team, let alone a successful team, that's not guided by analytics, to use Cashman's phrase. And I'm sure that it is frustrating probably to be in his position like,

look, he's been doing this forever and I think he understands the ups and downs. And when the team isn't doing well relative to its usual standards, then there's going to be criticism and he expects that. But, you know, some of the defenses that he had of moves that haven't worked out, like he was very much defending their process and acknowledging that certain moves have not had the outcome that they wanted. But basically saying, well, how could we have seen that coming? Right. Like Joey Gallo. Right. Or Frankie Montas.

Or Frankie Montas, like these trades that they gave up guys to get guys and then those guys either got hurt or just didn't perform well in New York or Sonny Gray is another one. Right. And he was saying, you know, he finds it funny that people criticize the Yankees for getting guys like that because, hey, what happened since they left New York, you know, you had the Dodgers and the Twins went and got Gallo subsequently. Or Sonny Gray is a Cy Young candidate this year. Right. So he's suggesting that that was just unforeseeable circumstances, that that's baseball, that things went wrong, that they couldn't have anticipated. You know, like with Frankie Montas, they did all the medicals and there was nothing there. And then he broke and that just happens to pitchers. And certainly there's some of that that is true. Yeah, right. And what happened to Gallo in New York was weird.

I mean, we talked about it. Like, I think the whole can he play in New York narrative is kind of overrated. But in his case, like he was pretty open about the fact that he just like was not suited to playing in New York. Like it just didn't go great for him. Not that he's done so great since then either, but other teams have given him a chance. Now, something like the Sonny Gray point, you could say, yeah, OK, that was the right target in mind. He was good before. He's been good since. So maybe it wasn't a bad person to go after. But is the fact that he didn't do well with the Yankees? Well, is that just you can't play in New York and there's no way to predict that? Or was it some kind of coaching issue? Right. Like Gray talked about how they wanted him to throw a ton of sliders, I think, in New York, and it just wasn't working out so well for him. I think he did really well on the road when he was with the Yankees and did horribly in Yankee Stadium for whatever that's worth.

So if there is, I mean, you'd have to do some sort of study to figure out, like, is there some New York factor? Like, do otherwise seemingly good players just have out of nowhere terrible seasons more often for the Yankees because they can't play in New York. There are certainly many examples of just out of nowhere successful seasons for the Yankees that have frustrated Yankees haters in recent years. So it's unclear whether it was a bad process in the sense that they shouldn't have gone after those guys or is it bad implementation are you not doing a good job of incorporating those players and helping them improve and communicating to them what you want them to do and that was maybe the response to how he talked about Aaron Judge's comment right at the end of the, Aaron Judge said something vague about how the Yankees maybe don't value certain metrics, right? Or they overemphasize other metrics and there are others

that they don't really value. And so Cashman came out again in, you know, another example of unusual just transparency, I suppose, at least in this specific case, and said, almost threw Judge under the bus a little bit, and said, I asked him what he meant by that. What metrics are we not looking at? And he said, batting average and RBI, right? So, yeah, like there's something to that. Okay, if Aaron Judge is saying they don't pay enough attention to batting average and RBI, that's probably not a case where I would say maybe the Yankees should do what Aaron Judge says and evaluate players based on batting average and RBI. I don't think that's the solution here.

But there is the question of why does he think that or why is he saying that? Have they not done a good enough job of explaining to him why they emphasize the metrics that they emphasize not done a good enough job of communicating to him why the more advanced metrics that they look at are better or maybe they actually lead to good batting averages and RBI or whatever, right? Though they haven't in the Yankees' case, to be fair. They really could have used some more RBI last season. Their offense, other than Like, though they haven't in the Yankees case, to be fair, they really could have used some more RBI last season. Their offense other than judge was awful. But is there a failure to get everyone on the same page internally, I guess, is the question that that comment prompts.

Right. Yeah. I don't think that it was as sort of resounding a refutation of some of the issues that have sort of been thought to be percolating under the surface there you're right it speaks to not having good potentially good process internally to communicate with your dudes and impress upon them like here are the things that we care about and here's why and i think that if you're to your point if you're aaron judge like To your point, if you're Aaron Judge, like, you're a freak, you know? You're just like, you're a freak. And what applies to other people in terms of process might not really be necessary for you. But I do think that if, you know, you have players, particularly ones who are like, you know, he's their captain, famously.

And I have to care about that, apparently. captain famously and i have to care about that apparently if he's gonna be in a position where he's like a face of the franchise player presumably being looked to as a clubhouse leader even if the the stuff that you might say to a role player guy aren't necessarily what you're bringing to judge it's important that he understand why that stuff matters and is there to help kind of be a conduit within the clubhouse to say like, hey, you know, we, this is how we're going to all pull in the same direction. Here are the things that they're looking at and here's why, here's how that can be helpful to you. You know, it might not apply to his particular circumstance, but arguably of all the people, at least on the position player side, who are the most important to have sort of squared away and on the same page as the front office.

Like, I can't think of a guy who's more important. Like, you know, the only other name that comes to mind is Cole on the pitching side. Right. So it doesn't seem great. Yeah. Right. So it doesn't seem great. Yeah. And and I get why it's frustrating because they had they haven't had a single losing season in his entire tenure. And I know everyone's like, well, they're the Yankees. They shouldn't ever. But but it's hard never to be bad, like not even to have a losing season.

They've had some seasons where they've been outscored, but they have not had a losing season. had some seasons where they've been outscored, but they have not had a losing season. And that is impressive. Even if you're the Yankees and you should, in theory, be able to spend your way out of mistakes, still to sustain being competitive or at least a winning team for three decades is pretty impressive. And it's probably frustrating that everyone was treating 2023 as like a catastrophe in the apocalypse when it's an 82 win team. I mean, if that's worked for him many years ago, I guess I should disclose and worked when I was an intern for the Yankees with some other people in the front office who were still there, who I found to be generally smart and competent and good at their jobs. So maybe that's coloring my perception. But it is a unique situation where 182 win season is like, that's people calling for your head. And I know it's not just that. There's frustration that they haven't built a perennial powerhouse. Like,

they've been good, typically, but they're not the Astros. They're not the Dodgers. Maybe they're not even the Rays in some ways, but they do have a lot of disadvantages in the sense that they're always fairly good, so they're not going to get high draft picks. So that's kind of always something that makes it a little harder for them to renew their talent. And then because they're always expected to be competitive and it's just a crisis if they're not in the playoffs, then they're always expected to go out and make the moves and upgrade on the trade market, right, and to trade prospects for veterans. But they are also expected to spend at the top of the market. And they haven't done that really

reliably lately, or at least the way that they did at one time. And so part of the responsibility can probably be laid at Hal Steinbrenner's feet for saying that he doesn't think the Yankees have to blow everyone out of the water payroll-wise to compete. And maybe he's right about that, but Yankees fans are accustomed to his dad being completely comfortable with blowing everyone out of the water payroll-wise. So they're like, well, wait, why can't you do that you're the Yankees they probably could if they decided to so I'm sure it's frustrating and I'm sure that a lot of the critiques in the media and by other people and players are probably sometimes a little bit off base or not fully informed because how can anyone else know what the internal processes are? But still, I think there's some reasonable frustration that the Yankees have not done even better or done as well as some other organizations have over the same span.

I would imagine. I mean, obviously, my experience of all of this, even just from a fan perspective, is so wildly different. But I would imagine if you're a Yankee fan, you know, the team gets so much sort of marketing and PR purchase out of like the Yankees way, right? We're going to do things differently. We have different standards. You can't have a beard because it's like offensive or something right and we don't put names on the back of our jerseys and they're not the only team that does that but like you know like they they lean into the idea that to be affiliated with the yankees in some capacity is rarefied air right that you That you are a part of a baseball tradition that is meaningful beyond just what happens in the Bronx, but as part of baseball stories sort of more broadly. And I think they get, you know, they make money on that idea. And they like to sell that to their fans and their fans, to be clear, are very happy to buy that. So, you know, like, you guys could relax a little bit if you wanted to. But if I were a Yankees fan, and I'd been told that my whole life, right, that like, to be, you know, a part of this organization is to be a part of something, to be, you know, special.

I want that to be met with equal conviction on ownership's end, right? It's like, okay, does it mean something special? Well, get your checkbook. And particularly when you're that team in that media market, to not utilize that resource to the fullest extent possible just seems silly. It's like you're, I was talking about this kind of idea earlier today with someone after seeing some of David Stearns' comments on MLB Network about, you know, kind of having to be creative when he was with the Brewers because of resourcing issues and, you know, learning to look around corners that other people aren't. And, you know, he said that his challenge with the Mets is going to be to continue to look around those corners, not just take the easiest path because we have resources. And we don't know what his roster construction approach is going to be. So I don't want to say that like he won't avail himself of the free agent market or, you know, Steve Cohen's money as a way to supplement the Mets. But, you know, my initial

reaction to that was just like, you know, you don't get like an extra prize at the end if you do roster building on hard mode, right? Like it's perfectly fine to just say, hey, we have this thing. We have this thing that the Brewers don't. Or if you're the Yankees that literally your division rival Rays don't have, why not, you know, kind of like use that? That's a that's an edge. That's a step up that you have over a team that is like a constant thorn in your side. Go go spend the money you know like you don't again you don't get like i i'm i'm looking for like a video game analogy here ben but

i don't know video games well enough it to say like i want to be like you know it's not like in zelda but i have no idea what happens in zelda they're gonna look really pretty when people stream it on twitch so So, I don't know if that part of it will track, but, you know, money's a resource. And when you have it and other people in your division don't, which isn't to say, you know, the Red Sox have plenty of money, the Blue Jays have plenty of money. Everybody has enough money to be spending more money than they do. But like, particularly when you're up against the Rays, don't you want to just be like, you know, we're in step on their neck mode. And one of the ways we can do that is to flex the financial might that we have.

Like, what are we doing? Yeah, that's right. That's one way you're at a great advantage if you use it. There are ways in which you're at a disadvantage. Like he got especially fiery and combative when he was being asked about the Yankees player development and some young players maybe not establishing themselves and hitting well right away. And in that sense, like he was being compared to the Orioles. Right. And Michael Ias just won executive of the year.

Well, the Yankees can't do what the Orioles did, like what the Orioles did, it's impressive that they scouted and drafted and developed as well as they did. But they did that partly by tanking so much that they were completely terrible for years. And they got a bunch of number one picks. And you have to hit on those picks. But still, you get them. The Yankees never have a shot at those talents in the draft, at least the consensus top talents. And then they were terrible for years and years, and they traded all their veterans, and they got a bunch of prospects, right? So, yeah, it's impressive what the Orioles did, but the avenue to acquiring talent in the way that the Orioles did it is just – that's roped off to the Yankees because you just can't do that.

I mean, you see how Yankees fans respond to an 82-win season. So how would they respond to a 52-win season, right? And I think it's to, in this instance, like it is to their credit that it is roped off from them, right? Like that suggests a commitment to consistent, consistently competitive rosters that I think is very admirable. I think that the Yankees have good player dev, particularly on the pitching side. And so I think he's right to be defensive of what they have done and are able to do in that particular regard.

Like that part, I didn't have any issue with. And like, look, yes, good job, orioles there is something about being like oh i'm so wow you went out on a limb and thought adley rutschman was gonna be good like oh my god i can't believe the bold stance coming out of baltimore you know there is some there is always some of that with these teams that are like drafting really high particularly in years where there is like very good and very obviously good talent. And you do have to develop those guys, right? Like you have to sort of shepherd them through the process. And it isn't as if they come into the organization and when they get to the big

leagues, they are, you know, sort of untouched by improvement from the dev group. So I don't want to, you know, unnecessarily ding Baltimore in defense of the Yankees. But like, it's like, yeah, you know, it turns out like, Bradley's pretty good. You know, it's this weird thing about Gunnar Henderson, like, he's pretty good at baseball. You know, it's like, next you're going to tell me that the Holiday Boys have some skills and I'm going to get, I'm just going to have to lay down on the floor. You know, so there's that piece of it. Yeah, there are that piece of it.

Yeah. There are Yankees fans who are kind of frustrated about the way the team has been built and sort of slow and plotting and injury prone players, which I think is something you could potentially fault them for. Like they have had a lot of injuries. And, yeah, some of that's bad fortune, but also maybe some of it is old. Yeah. Old and the players that they've acquired in their injury histories histories because the Yankees, more often than not, they're going to be pretty old unless they have some period where they're bad like they did when Stidebrenner was barred from baseball for a while and the Yankees were bad and this was when Cashman was around but not yet GM.

I mean the Yankees were not good in the early 90s and they held on to some prospects and then those prospects turned into a dynasty. But they had to go through a fallow period to hit those peaks. So it's going to be tough for them to compete with like a young cost-controlled core because of just the realities of the Yankees situation and the imperatives of that. So it makes it harder in some respects, but you make it harder for yourself if you don't just lean into that and embrace that and say, yeah, we're the big bad Yankees. Like we're going to spend everyone else under the table. Sorry, you know, that's the way it goes.

And I know that there's revenue sharing and there are all sorts of measures that are supposed to discourage the Yankees from doing that and luxury tax and all the rest. And that seems to be having the intended effect for the rest of the week. But it's frustrating for fans. Anyway, I think the Yankees have made some missteps, certainly. I think maybe some of them are overblown and, you know, the constant refrain about like they're too reliant on homers and it's going to hurt them in the playoffs. You know, Yankees people have been pushing back on that for years, like going back to Joe Girardi. And, you know, the things that they're doing this offseason where

they have contracted with an outside third party analytics providers, Ellis Analytics, right, which is made of former front office people running the show. And now it's kind of this independent group that consults for teams. And so they have brought this group in essentially to check out their process or measure their process against that group's process to see if there are some shortcomings there. It's an unusual sort of situation. I don't know if it's more of a cover your ass thing or whether it's like a wholehearted attempt to figure out what they could be doing better. But I think a lot of people just would not be satisfied with anything short of some heads rolling. And so to have Hal Steinbrenner be like, yeah, Aaron Boone wants to bunt more next year. So that's what we're doing differently. Like that's not going to appease anyone. Right. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think whether they win will be dependent on whether they spend and that will be the thing that either diffuses people's anger or does ultimately end the Boone and or Cashman tenures.

But for the moment, at least, I enjoy the sparring, you know, the verbal back and forth that we just don't really get with other non-confrontational executives these days. I'm not suggesting anyone should ape Cashman's approach here or that this would suit other longer, shorter tenured executives or less secure executives well. executives well. But yeah, I'm glad there's one fairly free speaker, at least, who's not afraid to get a little heated because it's entertaining for us in November to have someone fire back like that. Yeah, I think your point is well taken. It's like, okay, we agree you're not going to pick at the top of the draft. Well, then you have to pursue other successful means of roster construction in order to be a competitive team. And so I guess that means you're either going to trade your way out of it or you're going to spend your way out of it. And one of those things allows you to retain players you like and just get other players for a very fungible asset that is money. So, you know, you got that going for you if you want to use it. Yeah, it's a, I don't think that you can look at what they have been able to do from a wins perspective and say like, oh, this is a disastrous organization. We know what disaster organizations look like.

It's not the Yankees. But, you know, it's like I said, if you're going to tout your, you know, being the most special boys, then people are going to expect you to be the most special boys. You know, I want to be clear that Brian Cashman did not call anyone a special boy. No, he called someone a bitter boy. He did call someone a bitter boy. Part of it too is I'm just like, I don't know. You know, it's hard for me. It's hard for me to relate to pro athletes in ways that are obvious, but it's even hard for me at times to relate to executives because it does come with a like a baseline level of even if it's not as obvious in their comments as it is with cashman i do think it comes with a baseline level of excuse me i'm going to do a swear like don't give a f**kness um that as a person who is just like perennially and perpetually terrified of people not liking me is i cannot i

could not possibly relate to that you know even in moments where i'm like i want to be antagonistic and am worried i'm going to be disliked and kicked out so you know i don't it's like i don't i don't relate i don't get it i i mean i do but i and part of me envies it. But then part of me is like, you know, do I need to call anyone a bitter boy? I don't know if I do. who had some thoughts on Yankees drills and caring too much about contact quality and that results in that sort of thing. So, yeah, called him a bitter boy. Bitter boy. I don't know that I like the GM like, you know, ragging on a former minor leaguer. That feels like punching down. A little bit.

Yeah. Anything else that you saw or heard at the GM meetings or anything Jerry told you that you want to share? Let's see. I asked if, you know, he had in the course of his availability talked about, you know, trades and loving to do trades and trades and how they love prospects and young players. And I, I did ask, I was like, you know, you've, you've talked about trades and how you love prospects, but I'm curious what the presence of a team like the Rangers in your division who

are obviously willing to spend not only in the off season, but to take on money at the deadline in an effort to get better. Like, does that change the way you think about roster construction and he said no in more words than that but basically that you know no and he did i think take issue with the idea that the rangers might spend like this forever so fair enough i guess we will find out if they continue to increase payroll and then i asked him if it changes the conversations that he has with ownership. And he said that he would keep his conversations with ownership to himself. And that was the end of that. I didn't come away from the afternoon. This is not specific to the Mariners. I think that this is like, if you read people's quotes from kind of the rest of the

afternoon in scrums i wasn't in it wasn't like anyone was wholeheartedly yeah we're gonna just go spend some money and get a bunch of guys and be spending money guys and not bitter boys no it's hard to know what what of that is the state of the market and sort of the average quality of the free agents who are available and how much of that is a broader trend in the industry. So we're going to have to wait and see there. I saw Matt Chapman walking around because he's in town. I guess he lives here. I didn't know that. He was at the GM meetings talking to teams.

So, you know, I think we're starting to see his market emerge, even if we don't get a resolution on that anytime soon. So, yeah. And then I went to Sloan Park and tried not to embarrass myself or my family in the broadcast booth. newly promoted head of the baseball operations department for the White Sox. I saw a tweet by Scott Merkin, who covers the White Sox for MLB.com. And it says, quote, Per Getz, many White Sox players working diligently this offseason to get stronger, more athletic, more powerful. Which I was just picturing them like mutating. Like what is happening? Like aren't all teams probably doing that?

I mean, you would hope that most players for most teams are working to get stronger, more athletic, more powerful, or at least not less so. But like what are they, you know, are they like in the lab? Like what is happening here? I'm just imagining some kind of like muscle growth scenario here. Like, this sounds almost nefarious. It's like, are they on something? Like, I guess they're just in the gym. I mean, that sounds pretty typical, but more powerful.

We're getting more powerful. If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Like, what is happening here with the White Sox exactly? I guess, like, if you're a White Sox fan, I mean, injuries have been a persistent problem for them. And, you know, at times, like a very, a problem that has limited their ambition, right, within a pretty winnable division. And so I can imagine that being sort of a general nod toward the issues they've had keeping their best guys on the field and, you know, some of them more obviously than others, I guess. But yeah, it does sound a bit like, you know, they're shipping the White Sox off to

Professor X's mansion and then seeing what he can make of them. Yeah. Harder, better, faster, stronger. What is happening here? Yeah. There is another Getz comment. Maybe he's like the cashman in training because he was fairly frank too. He said, I don't like our team. That's something you usually hear GM say, even if it's not a good team. I don't like our team. Of course he elaborated. He said, when I say I don't like our team, we've got pieces that are talented and attractive and can be part of a winning club. But obviously, we haven't gone out there and performed. It's not a well-rounded club right now. We have to find players to come in here and help get us in the right direction. But that's a little soundbite. That's a headline for you. Chris, I don't like our team. Probably a lot of White Sox fans are like, yeah, me neither.

Yeah. It's an interesting quote, even with the context. First of all, there is a bravery to putting that quote out into the world, knowing that it will quite often be stripped of any context. But it is an interesting comment from a person who was in the org. Yes, right. You know, when you have internal promotions, you know, in some ways, I think the folks who move around and go to a new team, they have an easier time in a sense because they're just, you know, inherently at a remove from whatever prior mistakes were made. And when you're a guy who was in, you know, a senior position with the org prior to being promoted into a GM or POBO role, like you cannot make that claim. You are not out of remove. You were in the, you were in it, you know? And so it's like, okay,

well, did that thought just occur to you? And that's being a little ungenerous, but, you know, it is always a, I don't know. I find that one interesting when people are like, yeah, things aren't good. And it's like, okay, well, you know, why should we think that you're doing something different about that now than you were before? And clearly being a player dev person, it's a different project than being the GM. But it is a really tightly linked one to the quality of the club. So, yeah. So, yeah. What was it like to be on

Mike at that game? Had you done any commentary on a live baseball broadcast before? Yeah. How much of it did you do? How much of the game? Yeah. Oh, I was in there all nine innings. Oh, wow. The whole game. The Mesa Solar Sox were playing the Salt River Rafters. We should ask Farron what he thought, but it went, I felt like it went pretty well. I think that it got, I got more comfortable and had a better kind of sense of the cadence of the thing as the innings went on. It was an interesting challenge from a prep perspective because like, I have arguably seen the least fall league I've seen in a couple of years this year just because of the those dumb diamond bags series and so I haven't been doing as much falling as I normally do and while I like to think I have something to say about prospects I'm not like our prospect analyst obviously so I wonder like if I would have felt more immediate comfort if I was doing a game focused on big leaguers

just because I have like a I have a more ready sort of off the cuff response to a lot of big league guys as opposed to prospects but it was very fun like uh you know Mike makes it so easy like he can talk to anybody and he's been doing this for so long that um he was able to uh fill in moments where i was you know like frantically trying to get my leaderboard to load and whatnot but um it was it was cool i ben i gotta tell you i almost died twice there were some very fast very close foul balls that came right back including one that hit the window like mere feet from me and like the edge of it almost came into the booth and would have been a very uh bad ricochet if it had and then another

that hit uh quite close but not as close uh and there were no casualties either people or laptops but um i was i did receive a text from someone in the ballpark being like, are you OK up there? Did you get you? Because, boy, it came it came back real fast. But I don't know, like I would like to do it again because I can already anticipate ways that I might be able to do better. So that was fun. Yeah, it's tough. Did it give you some sympathy? I mean, I already have sympathy for broadcasters because it's a lot of time to fill.

It's a lot of time to fill. Yeah. Now, we fill plenty of time, too, on this podcast. But it's a little bit different to have to commentate during a game and have something intelligent to say about the stuff that's happening in front of your face. It's tough. I did a little bit in Sonoma, just calling some Sonoma Stompers games. And that was, you know, very few people listening, probably.

Yeah. Not maybe an enormous audience for the AFL broadcast, but probably a little bit bigger than the Pacific Association broadcast. And I didn't do an entire game. So yeah, that's pretty taxing. They played nine whole innings. It was great fun, though. And I didn't do an entire game. So, yeah, that's pretty taxing. They played nine whole innings.

It was great fun, though. And you really, I don't know, like Mike's such a pro. So, it was also cool to get to watch him work kind of up close and personal. But, yeah, there were, I don't know, there were the dramatic foul balls. And then you can see from Sloloan you can like see down the broadcast row into the press box and they're all looking like oh my god um so but yeah it's like there's a lot going on and then there will be nothing because the fall league ends on saturday the championship is is saturday so it feels like it was very short to me, but that's primarily a DBAX related problem. Yeah. Well, Scott Boris has been addressing the media, I think, for the entire time we've been

recording. The quotes are still coming out, so he must still be talking. He set up his traditional Boris Corp background that lets you know he's about to preside. And he has been dropping some puns. I've seen some I'll share with you. Maybe you've seen him too. It seems like maybe not his best work, but he's probably saving some material for the winter meetings because he's got to do this again next month. And that's probably an even bigger gaggle. So he can't use all of his A stuff right now. There are various tweets referring to his references to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, but no one I've seen has specified exactly what the reference was. The Swifties want to know what Scott Boris said exactly about Taylor, but I have not seen an actual quote. Apparently it was just some indirect illusion,

but here's what else he's said. He has called Halloween one of America's greatest holidays, which I know you agree. Genius, visionary, you know, no notes. Yeah. Probably don't even need the qualifiers for you. One of, it's probably top of the list. Now Now, he had one about one of his clients, of course, is Cody Bellinger. So he had a line, Chicago got the comforts of a full belly. We'll have to loosen their belts to keep him. What? You know, they filled themselves up with a good bounce back Bellinger season. And now they got to loosen their belts if they want to resign him.

Right. I guess. But that's not the expression. You can't overthink these things, Meg. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He's on a roll.

What am I, new? He said about Pete Alonzo, he met with David Stearns and he let him know that when it comes to the polar bear, we're not in contract hibernation. Okay. I feel like that's pretty good. It's not bad. It's not bad. Sometimes it's good for him to just

land the easy ones, you know? Yeah. I love when there's video. Sometimes there's footage of him saying it and he's always got this little like sh**. Yeah, he's so pleased with himself. Yeah, it's great. You know that he rehearsed it. Of course, he's a former Effectively Wild guest. And we asked him about his process here for coming up with these little zingers. And clearly he will just take a really roundabout route to sort of introduce the line, the canned line that he has. Like even if someone doesn't ask him about a certain client, he will somehow spin another question and answer into this prepared line that he has. Yeah. So I guess he represents Jung-Hoo Lee, the KBO top player in Free Agent. So he said, I think Jung-Hoo is going to bring K-pop to MLB. Oh, boy.

I mean, you know, I guess that's not bad. It's pretty easy, though, you know? It is. It is. It's low-hanging fruit. It's right there. Yeah. Okay.

Here's one that I would not have come up with probably. Scott Boris on Blake Snell. In the pitching Autobobahn it's pretty much mock snell oh man wow okay wow yeah that might be my favorite so far oh man oh boy that's kind of rough i mean yeah all of them are pretty we're grading on a curve here that's kind of rough. I mean, yeah, all of them are pretty rough. We're grading on a curve here. That's the shtick here. He's like a Catskills comedian in the form of a high-powered super agent who's somehow one of the most important figures in the sport. But also does this.

Does this. Yeah. I mean, like, to be clear, if I were one of the most important figures in the sport, I would also do this. If I were one of the most important figures in the sport, I would also do this. I would be like, you know how when you get to a certain level of famous, you can kind of throw your weight around a little bit. This would be one of the ways I would do it. I'd be like, OK. Yeah.

Apparently, he was giving his opening remarks, his little monologue, and someone tried to stop him and interrupt and ask a question. And he said he wasn't ready to stop yet. He joked, I'm like Trump in court. And then he said, no, I'm not. Not at all. There is like a kind of a benign Trumpiness to his his shtick. Yeah, I get what you mean. You know, I get what you mean. It's not trying to, like, take down democracy or anything.

But like the way that that, you know, he commands the mic up there, his, his approach to humor, I guess there perhaps are some similarities. Her moment is so strange. She's not, you know, trying to like undermine democracy fundamentally. So those are the highlights, if you could call them that, that I have seen thus far. I'll, uh, let you know if anything else trickles out here. But again, I'm guessing we're going to get the real command performance next month in Nashville, probably. He'll be workshopping some stuff.

This is probably just the opening act, right? Yeah. For his headlining act later in the offseason. I do wonder if he, and like, does he have those written yet? You know, like, is he, did he do a bunch of prep and go, you know, that was too good. I gotta save that for Nashville.

That's a Nashville pun, you know? Those are Opryland analogies, you know? Yeah, this is the A material. I've seen some pushback, some backlash of people suggesting that he's jumped the shark, that he's trying too hard now. And I would say, when was he ever not trying too hard? I mean, that's the gimmick here. That's his bit.

Oh, yeah. He's always trying too hard. I don't know that he's gotten worse. I mean, yeah, like clearly there's been an evolution in how big an event the Boris addresses are and just how hyped people get for it. But I'm not sure his actual material has changed all that much. This has been the M.O. for him for quite a while now. much. This has been the M.O. for him for quite a while now. Yeah. I you know, I don't want to be like defensive of the notice that we have paid to this for a very long time. Yeah. But I think that it's not that the quality of the material is different. It's that you weren't paying attention before. And that's you know, that's on you. Yeah. Yeah. From the first time that we started paying attention to this, which was probably in the Jeff Sullivan era.

Yeah. Jeff was always flabbergasted by the Boris lines. So there was never a period when it was like, oh, that's like a legitimately well-crafted. Right. That's a genuinely funny joke. I mean, every now and then there's one that makes me legitimately chuckle and not just groan in kind of an amused way. But I wouldn't say that the ratio of like, that's a legitimately clever bit of wordplay to like, oh man, he went there. That hasn't changed all that much in the

time I've been following this. And some of them are like like, legitimately clever. And, you know, they all provide their own insight into, like, things that he thinks about when he's not thinking about getting his clients money. Like, we know that he is a motorized vehicle enthusiast. Like, I think we can say that with confidence. We know that this man thinks a lot about boats, you know. Boats are his Roman Empire and also cars, you know, cars are his Roman Empire, fast cars generally. Mach-Snell, yeah. Mach-Snell, boo, Scott. Oh, boy. Okay. I have a couple email answers here that are timely, I think. So we got this one question from Patreon supporter Now I Only Want to Triumph, who says, With the start of free agency upon us once again, I have a question about baseball wording, not Scott Boris wording, but MLB's transaction listings indicate that players elected free agency rather than it being automatic. So, for instance, right-handed pitcher Shohei Otani elected free agency. What other elections could a player make? Is free agency a choice that a player has to affirmatively opt into? Or could he stay under the reserve clause if he so wanted?

So I asked a couple front office folks about this. And my understanding, what I was told, is that there's really no reason for most standard free agents to be described as electing it. There's no mechanism in the CBA by which free agency is a voluntary process for those folks. Because I was thinking maybe there's some formal process. Maybe you have to submit some paperwork or something, even if it's a formality. But that would suggest that if you didn't postmark your free agency election in time, then yeah, the reserve clause would still be in effect. And it's like, oh, well, I guess I'm just stuck on this team forever now. But I don't think that's the way it works. And I was told that's not the way it works. However, the longer, more complicated answer

is that free agency is governed by three sections of the CBA. So there's XIXA, there's XXB, and there's XXD. I guess maybe this is some Roman numeral action here. It's a long document. So XIXA deals with the assignment of contracts. So any player with five or more years of service time has to consent to being assigned to another club or else they may choose to elect to become a free agent. So sometimes you'll hear a veteran player will get demoted to the minors and then has the choice to accept that assignment or to reject it and become a free agent. And in that case, you are actually electing. It's not an automatic thing.

You have to make a decision. XXD in the CBA deals with outright assignments to a minor league club and says any player with three or more years of service or who is a Super Two player can elect free agency rather than being outright assigned to a minor league club. That's again, that's sort of the same as what I was just saying. And given the same elect free agency right to any player when they get outrighted for a second time. So if you have some status and they try to send you back down, then you can say, no, I elect to become a free agent. XXB is the most familiar form of free agency, and it reads, following the completion

of the term of his uniform players contract, any player with six or more years of major league service time who has not executed a contract for the next succeeding season shall become a free agent subject to and in accordance with the provisions of this section B. So there's a lot of the word shall in that section. So I don't think there's any way that you could not become a free agent. If you complete the term of your uniform players contract, you get your six or more years of service time, then of free agency, it said shall. So I think that was always part of Marvin Miller's plan that it wasn't like you had to send in the paperwork on time or else, oops, I miss out on free agency. So they didn't want that to be part of the agreement. So yeah, you just become a free agent. I heard from another front office person from

another team pointed out that in Otani's case, which was the one that the questioner asked about, he was declining the qualifying offer first. I don't know what the sequence of events was. But in that case, I guess maybe you could say he was electing free agency if he was not accepting a qualifying offer. But mostly it's just an optics thing if you are in one of the cases, one of the forms of free agency where you do have a choice about refusing an outright assignment as opposed to electing free agency. But for your typical free agent that we're typically talking about at this time of year, you just become a free agent. You don't have to opt into it and you can't really opt out of it, I guess, unless you retire. Right. You could you could opt out of it, but that doesn't mean that you get to keep playing for the team that you were already playing for. Right. Yes. Tricky. All right. Well, hopefully that cleared some things up for people. John also says, I'm a UK listener who got into baseball in Boston in 1986.

So nice these days to be able to put Boston in 1986 into the same sentence without then needing a lie down. I was at Fenway last season for the first time in 10 years. without then needing a lie down. I was at Fenway last season for the first time in 10 years. From everything I'd heard about baseball's aging demographic, I was expecting the Fenway crowd to be mainly my age. I was looking forward to discussing with my fellow ancients the comparative merits of UK, USA Zimmer frames. However, at all four games on this last trip,

I thought the fans were in the main pretty youthful. I was wondering if the new rules have restored a more balanced demographic or my already minuscule sample size was particularly skewed by being taken from a college town in September or my judgment is off because these days everyone looks young to me. Hopefully there's some evidence around for A, Eddie Assistance, you can give me with this humdrum conundrum would be greatly appreciated. Humdrum conundrum is fun to say. I like that. Yeah. So I sent John back a story that I had seen this summer when MLB was actually

bragging about having younger fans these days, which it was attributing to the pitch clock. And according to MLB's announcement about this, this was back in mid-July, and MLB said TV ratings are up, attendance is up, game times are down, etc. But also that the median age of ticket buyers through that point this season was 43 years old, down from 46 last season and 49 in 2019. So if that's the case, then that is some evidence that what John was seeing is true at ballparks across the league. And Rob Manfred had said years ago that he thought pace of game was a key to attracting a younger audience. And, you know, you're going to have parents bringing kids. Now, I guess, I guess, median ticket buyer, if we're talking ticket buyers, then that's probably not going to account for more kids going to games, right? Unless

they're buying the tickets. Like if parents are just more likely to bring kids to games, right? Unless they're buying the tickets. Like if parents are just more likely to bring kids to games, then it would still be the parents buying the tickets, I would assume. Yeah. So I don't know if this is based on the StubHub data or something else from resellers or whether it's survey-based data. I don't know. MLB didn't really divulge a whole lot of detail here, but they at least sang the praises of the pitch clock by suggesting that, yeah, younger audience, which I would buy. I mean, I'd buy that you'd be more likely to bring kids to the game because like school nights, right? Get them in bed at a reasonable hour. And also if their attention span concerns, then if the game is over more quickly, then you might be more willing to bring a kid to a shorter game.

So it holds water for me. I don't know how even 43 would compare to some other sports. But any aging trend that is not an increase in ages is, I guess, a good thing for baseball. an increase in ages is i guess a good thing for baseball yeah anytime you're not going up is probably um gonna be viewed as a triumph because for a long time that was all that we were seeing was like this sad upward trend and like you know you want all kinds of people to want to like baseball like there's nothing inherently wrong with there being a lot of older folks who like baseball. That's good. Like, that's cool. It's just that if that's the totality or even the majority of your fan base, you might end up with some problems later on.

Right. Yeah. Because you do often hear, well, maybe baseball is just a sport for older people, right? Because it's a little bit slower paced and there are so many games and it's a little less intense from moment to moment than the NFL where you have a lot fewer games. So even if the games are roughly the same length, their stakes are so much higher with each one. Maybe like people will grow into baseball when your life perhaps gets a little slower paced, you'll have room in your life for baseball. And that might be true, but also I think it helps to get into baseball when you're young.

And then maybe you'll grow away from it and then you'll come back to it at some point when your life allows it. But if you didn't have that connection when you're young, and I think Manfred and MLB, they've said as much that their data, their surveys, whatever, have shown that the biggest predictor of being a baseball fan is being introduced to the game early, like going to games when you're young, playing games when you're young.

So even if you might say that it caters to an older crowd in some ways, if that older crowd didn't at least have some basis for being a baseball fan when they were younger, then I don't know how many people are going to be picking it up at advanced stages. First of all, we demand justice for the relatively young who like chill time. Why does everything have to be such a trash? You know, it's so nice to sit and be amongst your fellows and watch a fun game. And it should be fun and exciting and zippy. And we want all of those things to be true. But also, you don't have to be a retiree to want to be able to enjoy sport where you can sit down. Look, sometimes it's fun to go to Seahawks games, but sometimes you're like, it is the

third quarter I've been standing. Most of the time, I am very tired and my throat is sore from having to scream. So maybe I just want to be able to chill. You know, what if I just wanted to be able to chill, Ben? Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't always have to be Mach Snell or Mach Snell. We could just take our time sometimes. You don't have to, you don't have to like concede this to him. You know, you can, you can resist, you can resist Mach Snell. Like that's, I think that's pretty bad. You know, I really do. I think that we should, I think that we should logic complaint because I don't know about that one. I think that one's rough.

Okay. Here's a question from Kevin, Patreon supporter. I'm in the process of listening to episode 2069 and your discussion of trading one team for another. I started to think if that happened now, you're right. There'd be a riot. The entire fan base would be wearing laundry in the stands of players who are no longer on the team, with the exception of the retired players. In 1961, I'm assuming we were still somewhat in the fedora and suit wearing mode and there might have been close to zero fans donning the jerseys of the home team. Do we have a feel for when that evolved to what we are seeing now?

It must have been gradual. But what year did we start to see fans wearing the home team laundry? Which, great question, because when you look at footage and photos of old baseball games or any sporting event, everyone's dressed in what we would now consider formal attire. Yeah, they're all so fancy. Yeah, they're all suited up. They got hats. They got ties, right? No one's got jerseys. And yet now, everyone wears jerseys. Not everyone, but it's an extremely common sight. And I hadn't really thought about, like, when did that happen?

I kind of took it for granted. Like, for our entire lives, that has been a common sight, jerseys, right? I never really knew a time of going to games and not seeing or wearing jerseys. But at some point, we went from zero jerseys to pervasive jerseys. How and when did that happen? I didn't know exactly. I guess I cut a ballpark, no pun intended, but I didn't really know how that evolved. And after doing some searching, I found an article written by Tim Layden for Sports Illustrated in 2016 that explained this very thing, how sports jerseys became ubiquitous in the U.S.

And quoting from one of his early paragraphs here, over the last four decades, American sports fans have transformed themselves from a populace that dresses almost exclusively in civilian clothing and pays to watch athletes perform in uniform to one that dresses in significant numbers exactly like those athletes. This weekend's Super Bowl will be overrun by fans in XXL Broncos and Panthers jerseys, just like last weekend's NHL All-Star Game was a wash in sweaters from teams around the league. Theirs has been a multi-billion dollar metamorphosis that radically altered the appearance of stadiums and arenas across the nation. It is anecdotally most pervasive in the NFL and the NHL, marginally less so in Major League Baseball and the NBA, the latter at least in part because of

the less utilitarian nature of the basketball top. Oh, sure. Jersey wearing by fans is such normative behavior in the modern sports culture that its absurdity, dressing like players really, I was going to get the academic quote in there to legitimize the subject. Yeah. academic quote in there to legitimize the subject. But he traces the evolution here and he finds that there were some scattered examples of single establishments selling things that were kind of the precursors of the jerseys that we know today going back as far as the 50s even he identifies a place that opened up near yankee stadium as maybe like the original or at least the the forerunner of these places but it was all very like ad hoc and and yeahpoke and it was just kind of, you know, not a mass produced situation, just, you know, ironing on stuff or sewing on things to pre-existing things.

I kind of like that. Yeah, I like that too. It's nice when you have to do a little crafting, you know. Right. Yeah. Not that I would be any good at that. But yes, there was this guy, Manny Konigsberg, who opened up this place in 1951 called Manny's Baseball Land on River Street adjacent to Yankee Stadium. And he offered some things like that, T-shirts and jackets with logos and that kind of thing. And they had a mail order business. But basically throughout the 70s, so he went back and he looked at like wide angle shots of sporting places and big crowds and tried to see like, when did people start wearing jerseys? And basically like the early to mid 70s was when he first spotted any jerseys, like in the whole sea of the mass of humanity,

you might see one jersey or something in like 73 or 75. But it wasn't really till the mid 80s or so that it became kind of commoditized, that the leagues really got in on it because the leagues like in the late 60s, they started protecting their stuff. Like NFL properties was formed in 1963, MLB properties in 1966. And they started marketing and selling things or collecting royalties from licensed products.

But even then, they didn't really do jerseys. And so throughout the 70s and part of the 80s, it was kind of like an unregulated free-for-all is what Bladen calls it. And, you know, you might have this outlet doing it here and maybe they would order a bunch of things and then they would repurpose it and sell it to people that was originally intended for teams. You know, like if you were a local team, maybe you would wear the jersey of some big pro team, but people didn't necessarily wear them around. And some places it was there, but only for kids. They didn't think adults would want to wear the uniforms of other adult athletes. this and there was a desire for it that the market was not filling. I don't know whether if you time traveled back to the 20s or whatever and you developed a jersey business, whether the world would have been ready for it at that point or whether you would have made a killing and people just would have been wearing that stuff in the 30s and 40s and 50s if it had been available. But yeah, it wasn't seemingly until like the mid 80s

that it became the mass movement and the mass profit center that we know today. So relatively recent, you know, just like the last 40 years or so that it has become commonplace as opposed to this would be a strange sight to see every now and then. It's just so hard to imagine wanting to wear like a tie or heels to go to a game.

I know. Anywhere, right? Yes. That's been society-wide, not just a sporting event. I mean, people used to dress up to go on airplanes to travel, right? It was special. It was fancy. go on airplanes to travel, right? It was special. It was fancy. And then in the 60s and 70s, people kind of got more casual, less formal about these things. And that is reflected in sports. And then there's a paragraph in here. Why do we wear jerseys to watch others play games in jerseys? There's a complex answer first validated in a 1976 Arizona State study. And it says it coined the acronym B.I.R.G.

Basking in Reflected Glory by establishing that college students showed a greater tendency to wear school apparel and use the pronoun we after ASU's football team had won than after it had lost. This concept goes further. People have a need to belong and we want others to know that we belong, says Dan Wan, a Murray State professor of psychology who has studied fan behavior. Studying fan behavior seems like a big academic sideline, evidently.

But we also have the need for distinction so you personalize your Royals jersey. I guess that makes sense that it's, I mean, it's kind of a tribal thing, right? It's like almost regressive. It's like going back to the origins of humanity when we're traveling in small bands and you're afraid of all the outgroup people, the stranger danger. It's like when you wear your team's jersey, you're identifying yourself as part of the same tribe as everyone else who's wearing that jersey. But you might also want to have your name on it so that you are both in the crowd, but you also stand out from the crowd. Yeah, it is a really interesting psychological

phenomenon because you I do think that part of it, too, is that you just want to be comfy. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of it. Are you or were you a jersey wearer? Yeah, that's part of it. Are you or were you a jersey wearer? Yeah, I have some jerseys. I'm not opposed to jerseys. I often will opt for T-shirts if I'm going to do team stuff, both because there are more options. You can find something kind of cool. And also because I live in Arizona now and sometimes the jerseys are warm.

You know, it gets too hot. Yeah. Yeah, I'd feel weird about wearing a jersey to a baseball game now, even if I weren't covering it, maybe I would wear my, my Samurai Japan Otani jersey, but I did wear when I was a kid and I was a Yankees fan. I had my, my Bernie Williams jersey. He was my guy. So I wore my 51 out there. Yeah. All right. And then maybe one more here. So here's a question that is relevant to what we've been talking about today, I suppose. Andrew says, I'm not an extremely online person and generally issue social media, but Twitter

or the artist formerly known as has been an important part of my baseball watching experience. It's been a great way to keep up on the vibes and see it bat by bat analysis and reaction, not to mention blow by blow, Boris pun by Boris pun reaction, right? Ever since I canceled my athletic subscription, it's also been an important way to keep up on news around the league and from my favorite authors. With respect, Van Graffs is great, but doesn't substitute for all the beat reporting around the country. This year, that's obviously been thrown into turmoil. Twitter has become more hellscapey than usual, and I've been trying to quit it.

The only thing left on Twitter that I can't walk away from is baseball Twitter. I imagine that you are also feeling ambivalent about using Twitter, even as a lurker, and would love to hear your thoughts about what the future of baseball Twitter is. Do baseball writers talk about this? Is everyone still waiting for a viable alternative? How long can the center hold? Oh, boy. What a good question.

Yeah, we did our baseball Twitter draft more than a year ago at this point, I guess, which was like, we didn't know whether Twitter would still exist. So we were like, let's memorialize all the nice things about baseball Twitter before it all crashes and burns. And it's still there. It's smoking even more than it was at the time, but it is not completely crashed and collapsed. But it is heading in a way where you're not enthusiastic and optimistic about the trajectory. Right. So I don't know what the last straw would be, I guess, if it just plain stopped working, which, you know, from time to time it does, but still mostly functions. discharging everyone at some point, that might be the real death knell. Because even people who are willing to keep using it and not pay for a blue checkmark, I don't know how many of them would be willing to pay even a nominal fee to stay on there. Because that would involve giving Elon Musk your credit card information for one thing, in addition to just supporting him as a

person generally, but also like, are you really going to trust them with your financial information? information for one thing. Yeah, definitely not. In addition to just supporting him as a person generally, but also like, are you really going to trust them with your financial information? So, yeah. Absolutely not. So, that might be a deal breaker or a bridge too far. Anyway, I don't know where it will go. But if baseball Twitter does die at some point, are you confident that it could be replicated in any form? I guess I'm skeptical that any of the alternatives are going to capture quite the same market share. And, you know, I might be wrong about that. Like, I do think I've enjoyed Blue Sky so far, even though they're, you know, we are starting to get reply guys over there. So that part's annoying. But, you know they're you know we are starting to get reply guys over there so that part's

annoying but you know my main my main takeaway from blue sky and i think i said this even the first day i was on there and i don't think my opinion has changed all that dramatically like passin and ken aren't breaking news on blue sky that place is feral, you know, and deeply horny a lot of the time. So I don't know that that's going to be the place that like news breaking happens in any meaningful way, which isn't to say that there aren't folks on there that don't do a little news breaking on their own. But, you know, I think that Ken and Jeff, I don't see migrating that direction. Yeah, there'd have to be a critical mask because there was that brief window where Passon started tweeting or breaking news on Instagram.

Or like, yeah, it didn't last long, but it was like, I forget what what prompted it. What was the impetus for that? But maybe it was just like Twitter wasn't working or whatever. And he was like, all right, I'm going to start posting stuff on Instagram. But it's just most social networks, I mean, Instagram and Facebook, like they're just not curated in a place to get instant reactions to things. And granted, if you don't have a chronological feed, it can be confusing and maybe you're getting tweets from people you don't follow and everything. So it's gotten less curated and more cluttered and harder to use as a news source in addition to the lack of verification and just not being able to trust sources and all of that. So it's not what it was. And yet it's still probably more effective than anything else out there because of the size of the audience. And something like Blue Sky hasn't had that critical mass yet, at least where everyone has migrated over there and made that the

new social media of record for news breaking and then many of the other things and threads and whatever else it's not set up for that it's it's set up for ads and influencers and feel good stuff and not for quick reactive news so twitter is kind of perfectly calibrated for, well, for many kinds of news breaking and covering, but baseball especially. Yeah. And I think that part of it, I mean, like I'm trying to be on Twitter less and less because it's gotten even worse than it already was. And a lot of the stuff that its current owner seems to be enthusiastic about, I find pretty repugnant. So, there's that piece of it. But yeah, I don't think that, you know, you're not going to get the same experience when you have a non-chronological timeline, which makes the Instagram option not work. Plus, that's like a visual medium. It's not the same thing. I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I think you'll be able to replicate some of it. I think that if what you're looking for isn't so much the news breaking piece of it, but like the vibes and everyone watching the same sort of thing, like you'll be able to get a version of that. But I don't know if we're ever going to get the same degree of saturation that we had previously.

I don't know if we're ever going to get the same degree of saturation that we had previously. So, yeah, people are nostalgic for early Twitter when it was even weirder Twitter and had that kind of community that has been lost to some extent. But I would miss it. My personal Twitter experience honestly hasn't changed all that much post D1 because I was not a power tweeter. that much post D1 because I was not a power tweeter. I had already really just tapered off my usage to the point where mostly I just retweet the ringer tweeting my work or whatever. Or, you know, I will answer people occasionally who ask me a question or respond to something I wrote or podcasted about. I might reply to them, but very rarely do I send original tweets anymore. I might reply to them, but very rarely do I send original tweets anymore. And that's been the case for quite a while.

And so because I'm just using it for news and baseball gossip and occasionally for reporting purposes, that's what I would miss. Just like being able to follow someone and maybe they follow you back or being able to DM someone or they DM you and being able to connect with people, sources that way has been helpful to me over the years. That's not a use case for everyone, but I would miss that. But at this point, I feel like I can't start over. I'm going to go down with the ship probably. And if it does go down, I'm probably just done. I have a blue sky account. I have, I have not done whatever one calls sending a tweet there.

A post. Yeah. Just, it's posting. Yeah. Cause like it's been so long since I was a regular poster that I, I'm not going to build up an audience. So whatever audience I have on Twitter, I'm not going to be able to replicate somewhere else because I'm just, I'm not going to be using it. Like I'm just not going to have that investment

of time and effort into it. And so the platform would pale in comparison. And then at that point, what am I getting out of it other than being able to lurk and monitor people, which I might still do, but as opposed to being an active participant to the degree that I still am on Twitter that I was, I think if Twitter goes down, like, I think that's it for me. I don't know. It's like, I'm too old, too old for this. I don't know. I'm not too old for it, but I guess I've lost my, my appetite for it to some extent. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't say I blame you. There's a lot about it. That's like really unsavory. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't say I blame you. There's a lot about it that's like really unsavory. Yeah. I mean, baseball existed before baseball Twitter and it would exist after baseball Twitter. So we would survive, you know, there would be some other outlet that would

arrive to give you that fix if you really want it. And if you want to be on Blue Sky, you could be on Blue Sky and you probably get some semblance of it. Or you can just use Reddit. I mean, the Baseball Subreddit is quite good. I enjoy the Baseball Subreddit. So that's a place where there's some kind of community and you can stay apprised of various developments. I see stuff there all the time

that I wouldn't see otherwise. So yeah, I think if you, if you really have a hankering for that, there are probably ways to get it, but maybe we wouldn't be worse off. It would just, I wouldn't miss like the beat writers tweeting play by play. You know, there are certain things that I think we could do without, but I would miss just being able to see the Boris puns in real time and then have people groaning about the Boris puns in real time. Like that's still a nice little kind of community experience that I'm glad that baseball in a social setting they could simply become patrons of the podcast and join the effectively wild discord group because seems like a pretty good vibe over there i don't yeah i'm not

in there a lot which isn't a statement it's just i'm i got so many well you know i'm i'm a broadcaster now i don't know if you heard this but no i'm kidding but you know i I'm a broadcaster now. I don't know if you've heard this one, but no, I'm kidding. But, you know, I'm not in there a ton, but every time I am, I'm like, you know It won't be the public square as Twitter was supposed to be. And there are upsides and downsides to that. I mean, like our Facebook group is pretty gigantic at this point. It's not just people who listen to the podcast and view the game the way we do. A shocking number. Yeah. A shocking number of people who do not listen to the podcast.

Yeah, they just found a baseball discussion group, which is a pretty good baseball discussion group. But yeah, something like our Patreon Discord group or other podcasts have their own Discord groups or Slacks or whatever it is. And those are great, but it's a little more insular. You know, it's something where you find your people and your little clan and then you talk to those people. And it's great. The quality of the discourse in the community is it's very wholesome and well-informed and everything. But you lose a little bit of just the this is open to everyone and anyone can stumble across it and see things that change their mind maybe or introduce us to their thoughts, which is something you've pointed out before. We're fairly established media types if we were up and coming and trying to

get our work seen. Not that Twitter's ever been great for funneling traffic to things. It's weirdly still a pretty bad, even at its height, was not a good referral source in a way that I think often surprises people. Right. But you can still become Twitter famous, at least like you could become a name on Twitter. You know, someone other reputable people follow. And then that leads. I got work that way. One thing leads to another and you make connections and people know I know you from Twitter.

Right. I mean, there are a lot of people who made great real life friends or romantic relationships, you know, life partners that they met on Twitter that happened to plenty of people. So I'd be sorry for some people to miss out on that possibility. But yeah, a lot would be lost. It has been a special place or was at at one time i think there is a lot about it that is like actively bad but i acknowledge that like there is also a lot there that has meant a lot to a great many people and that's it's too bad that those folks who had like i think real kind of care for the place don't have any say in what's happening to it you know it's so reflective of our broader moment we're just like being buffeted about by

loser billionaires a lot of the time and uh twitter's no exception to that so that sucks you know it's not a great it's not a great, it's not a great feeling. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we have our happy little Effectively Wild communities where we find our people and our people find us. So, yeah, we can try to convince Passin to break news on Blue Sky. I'd like you to be more active on Blue Sky. I thought you were going to say the Effectively Wild Discord group. Oh, yeah. I mean, that would work, too. But I would like it because you know what I very regularly forget to do on Blue Sky, Ben? What? Post our episodes. Oh, yeah. I mean, that would work, too. But I would like it because you know what I very regularly forget to do on Blue Sky,

Ben? What? Post our episodes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's an effectively wild Blue Sky account. There is. There is. And people are like, is Meg dead?

Who could say? All right. Well, next time we will talk about free agents. It's a thin class, but there are still some interesting aspects to it. There sure are. Some pretty appealing players. Maybe some hidden gems. Yeah.

Can I read you one last Boris analogy? Oh, please. Yeah. This one. I should have saved my boo. I'm reading this from Alden Gonzalez's Twitter. Okay. An early crowd pleaser part of a near 10-minute opening monologue while talking about how the Rangers showed you need two tracks to become a championship contender.

Development slash trades, but also free agency. And here is the Boris of it all. This is kind of like the commercial airlines. We don't fly around on planes with one engine. We have two. The FAA requires it. Well, for competitiveness in our game we need an faa and that is free agent acquisition oh scott buddy that was a long

walk to get to that one yeah yeah yeah there were a couple you know he took a couple laps around the block to you know at some point scott hey plane. Well, yeah. It's another vehicular analogy. He's obsessed. Trains, planes, and automobiles with this guy. And boats. And boats, yeah. I think we've learned a lot about his preferred modes of transit. And the answer is most of them, you know.

Well, after we recorded, we got the announcement of the Angels' new manager. It's not Buckshaw Walter, but another aged veteran, Ron Washington. He certainly waited a while for another shot. Glad he got one. But you know the Moneyball jokes are inevitable. Managing the Angels successfully,

tell them, Wash, it's incredibly hard. It's easy to support this podcast on Patreon. All you have to do is go to patreon.com slash effectively wild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay almost ad free and get yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners have already done so. Matt Fronduto, Cody Robertson, Andrew Simonsky, Martha Coons, and Adam Wood. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the aforementioned Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts memberships,

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Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode this week. Talk to you soon. How can you not be pedantic? A stab blast will keep you distracted. It's a long slog to death, but the short will make you smile. This is Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild.