Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2253: Show Me the Money (Eventually)

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the A’s signing Luis Severino and year-end podcast-listening stats, follow up on the golden at-bat and Hall of Fame plaques, and (1:07:46) discuss the history of deferred payments in sports contracts. Audio intro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to FG post on […]

More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed And at each new one we still collectively smile That's Effectively Wild That's Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2253 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanCrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of FanCrafts. Hello Meg.

Hello. So we started our last episode by talking about the fact that spending seemed to be up, that the market was robust, that people were paying a pretty penny for pictures. I hope my pop filter was working on that sentence, but we should have waited an episode because now we have the best evidence yet. Conveniently for us, a signing announced just before we started recording for once. The A's, the Sacramento A's, who wish not to be known that way, have signed Luis Severino to a three year, $67 million deal.

10 of those millions are in the form of a signing bonus. He got a qualifying offer, so he'll cost the A's a draft pick. There is an opt out after the second year of the contract. I guess just in case Severino really wants to play in Sacramento, but doesn't under any circumstances want to play in Las Vegas, if the A's actually end up there. I was gonna say, that's so optimistic of you that they'll have a working open ballpark

in Las Vegas by then. $67 million. Now this is a blow to my free agent contracts over under draft portions because I took the under on MLB Trade Rumors' prediction of I think $51 million for Severino. So now I'm almost as deep in the hole as you are from the Blake Snell under that you took. So basically we should have just taken more overs seemingly based on the early returns here. And this is on the early returns here.

And this is maybe the best evidence yet. Some of the other deals that we discussed in those signings, they were maybe big market teams or teams that had sort of solid situations with TV deals and maybe it wasn't really reflective of the overall mood and attitude toward confidence in broadcast revenue. Now here we have the A's who can't really afford to be confident about anything at this point about the future of that franchise, and they are signing Luis Severino to a $67 million deal. Meg, spending, it's out there. The dollar's there to be had. So, okay, I think that you can definitely tell a story about the Oakland death. Excuse me, how many times am I going to do that? I know. I'm going to do it so many. Leave it in, you know, I should live with shame every now and again.

I think you can paint a story of sort of legalized spending being up across the board because even the A's, right? Even the A's, the lowly A's are inclined to spend. I also think that it's useful to keep in mind that like, yes, but they have to spend over and above what the market might otherwise bear for these guys if they like them. Now, their willingness to do that, I think, is a positive sign, but there is something sort of idiosyncratic to the ACE situation that I think limits our ability to paint with too broad a brush about sort of what the state of spending across the majors is.

Having said that, they, you know, I think would be not forgiven, but there's a story that they could tell about not being in a position to spend this off season because they don't know what their gate is gonna look like next year. The situation in Vegas isn't settled. They don't have like a new ballpark to open

and, you know, to draw and to help them sort of buoy their spirits and also their spending, right? They could tell that story. We would poke holes in it and be like, Hey, are you serious about being a baseball team or aren't you? But that's a story they could tell them opting not to tell that story is good, you know? And I wanna, before I do what I'm about to do, I wanna make clear that I still find John Fisher to be an embarrassment. I think the way that they exited Oakland is shameful. I hope that it's sort of above the fold

in a lot of different people's obituaries when the time comes, especially his, but not limited to John Fisher's, right? But here's the thing, Ben. I really like the signing. And not just because they're spending money and not just because they're closer to looking like a team that is giving their fans something to be excited about. I like Luis Severino. I think that he's a good pitcher. I understand that there was a bit of a gap between his ERA and his FIP. He's definitely not the ace he looked like he was going to be in the early days with

New York. But I think that he is a good pitcher. I think that the fact that he was able to throw almost 200 innings last year after Injury stuff and ineffectiveness very encouraging, you know, he's 30 and he's gonna be 31 by the time the season starts But like I think that when you look at what the A's are gonna put on the field next season Their lineup is like pretty close to being interesting. I think that a lot of their young guys are either good right now or kind of rounding into form. You know, they

have a lot of dudes who were given run at the big league level and kind of worked through issues early in their prospectum, early, you know, sort of major league career time. I don't think that the A's are like, obviously a wild card contender. I'm not being ridiculous, right? My takes aren't that hot. But like this team is- I think- Save it for the bold predictions pod. Right. But I don't think that they're like, so, so, so far off- Oh no, not at all.

From being like an interesting club. They were a 500-ish team, like right at 500 for a pretty big chunk of the season. If they were not the A's, if their ownership were not an embarrassment, then I think we would be talking more about them as an up and coming team. I think we talked about that a little when we did our elegy for the A's leaving Oakland, that this is actually

a pretty interesting team with some pretty that this is actually a pretty interesting team with some pretty interesting players. So a pretty interesting team with some pretty interesting players and I think the place where they obviously need, needed and still need reinforcement is in the rotation. And I think that Severino is like a good addition and I like that they went over what he was likely going to get, especially with a qualifying offer attached, you know, if you were signing with another club and Ben, I like it, you know, I do. I'm not trying to-

Let's not get carried away with Fisher's spending either because not that you are, but if you look at the Fangrafts payroll page right now, which has already been updated to reflect this announced signing, the A's are dead last in payroll. So it's not as if, and Fisher or I guess, front office people have said that they will be raising payroll and keeping their coaches around and we'll see if they continue to do this,

but they have a ways to go before they're not just bringing up the rear here. So yeah, they have as of this moment, two guaranteed contracts on their major league roster. And you know, they have guys who are eligible for arbitration and they have notable young players who aren't yet are eligible. They're all making the league minimum or they're just going to wrap. Yeah, they only have, Arba eligible players right now and then a bunch of like important guys who are still making the league minimum. This is a club that at this moment has a projected payroll under 60 million and a projected luxury tax payroll under 80 million. Like this is not like the big spending A's. I'm not, we're not raining, like, you know, this is not a dawning of a new era for them. And we don't know if that

era will ever come because at the end of the day, John Fisher is still their owner. But in terms of like putting a team on the field that is going to look pretty serviceable and that has some young guys who are, I think, pretty exciting. Like, you know, it's not, it's not a terrible situation. There are plenty of clubs just, and again, I am talking about the pure on-field roster piece of this. Like, John Fisher should still be ashamed of himself. I'm not trying to excuse anything at the ownership level.

As a franchise, they are still in this really bad place. But as a team on the field, there are definitely clubs that I would expect are like, man, it wouldn't be the worst to be the A's. I'd rather be the A's than the White Sox. I'd rather be the A's than the White Sox. I'd rather be the A's than the Rockies. Sure. I'd rather be the A's than maybe the Angels. I don't know. You can't hold me to that one. I'm still noodling over that question, but I like this.

Yeah. Well, I think there's certainly a Sacramento surcharge here, as you were suggesting. Totally. We talked about this last time with Mark Katze claiming that Walker Bueller said that he didn't want to sign there. Other free agents have expressed or other big leaguers have said, we want to be big leaguers. We don't want to be Bush leaguers. We don't want to play in Sacramento.

So there is going to be a Bush league boost here that has to, you know, just a ballpark premium that's going to be imposed. If you're going to sign there, you're probably going to have to pay more. But yeah, just the fact that they were like, well, we can pay more, at least in this particular instance, I guess is maybe more than I was expecting from them as opposed to just conceding. Well, we've gotten ourselves into this situation and there's no way to get ourselves out of it.

So it does continue to amaze me though that the market for pitchers is so strong and not just elite pitchers, but kind of mid rotation, even toward the back of the rotation type pitchers that we've seen signed so far this off season. Cause I keep thinking, well, individual pitchers, they're throwing fewer innings than ever, and thus they're less valuable than ever in theory.

And you look at the leading pitchers and their war totals are lower than the leading pitchers war totals were in earlier eras. And you would think that at some point that would mean that teams just wouldn't really be that interested in springing for these sorts of salaries. But that's not the case. Even though individual starting pitchers contribute less, starting pitching itself hasn't really been deprioritized. There's kind of a strange dynamic where people are less interested in bulk than they are

in per-inning efficiency, and yet teams are still interested in signing starters at the end of the day. And maybe it's just because, well, if the workloads have decreased across the board, so yeah, the hardest working starters don't work as hard as they used to, but then the next tier down, they don't work as hard as the next tier down used to. And so it's all relative in a sense.

And even compared to relievers, relievers don't really work as much as they used to either. They get more days off between outings, just as starters tend to get more days off between starts these days. And teams are just reluctant to ride individual relievers as hard as they used to during the regular season at least. And so there's just been this proportional drop off in innings totals.

And maybe that means that ultimately you just still make more or less the same amount of money, even though ultimately the pitching staff collectively has to throw roughly as many innings as it used to, it's just distributed over many more pitchers and you'd think that would suppress salaries. And I think maybe it has to some extent, Rob Means has done some research that has shown that. And yet teams are still very much in the market for a mid rotation starter. Even if you have teams showing we can win a world series

with bullpen games every now and then, teams still want a Severino and the Mets may not have made the playoffs without Severino and the rest of their cobbled together rotation of kind of mid-rotation back end guys who came up big for them. So ultimately you do still need starters even in this era of the the fallen starting pitcher. It speaks to sort of the limitations of being able to cobble together bullpen games over the course of an entire season, right?

It suggests an upper bound on that. And I know that there are teams that are probably exploring just where that upper bound is, right? We saw this with Detroit last season where they were like, starters, we're going, we don't need starters. We got one guy, he's really good. And the rest, I don't know, figure it out. And that's how your relievers get MVP votes.

I do think that there is an upper bound on how many times over the course of the season, a really competitive club, one that has division aspirations rather than just wild card ones can deploy sort of that plan. And so I think there is just always going to be something of a premium, even setting aside like the West Sacramento of it all for starters, even sort of mid-tier guys, right? And so I don't know if that dynamic will remain the same. And we kind of have to see how teams understanding of how often they can throw relievers shakes out. You know, do we start to see more guys who really are occupying that long man role going forward?

Cause that's a place where I could see the dynamic shifting again. It's like, okay, you can't do bullpen games forever, but like, what if you have a guy who like routinely can go three, you know, if you have a couple of those dudes and maybe things are different. And then you have a couple of really sterling backend guys for, you know, the, the big moments at the end of games. So I don't know, we'll see how it goes. But yeah, it's encouraging so far. I don't want to be caught on a wares.

I always worry about being caught on a wares and being surprised. Like, oh no, the bottom fell out of some of these contracts later on and what are we going to do? But so far it's like, all right, well, good. It's funny. The A's announced that their season tickets are going on sale. They announced that today and then the season tickets go on sale December 9th. So seemingly they are just capitalizing on the wave of enthusiasm in Sacramento about Luis Severino being in town. You know, I guess if you're going to sign someone, you might as well try to turn that

into ticket sales. That is the point of signing someone. So I guess we can't say it's the largest ever contract in Oakland A's franchise history because it's, we can just say it's the largest ever contract in A's franchise history, which encompasses quite a few cities actually. So I think the highest spending teams now in the off season, Jeff Passon recapped the Dodgers up at $182 million committed,

followed by the Angels, the A's and the Royals, and then the Mets and Cubs. So I'm sure there will be many more millions committed in the coming week, certainly, and maybe coming days even, what was the winter meetings looming? I'm going to make you, you don't have to predict, okay? You just have to like indicate a feeling as of this moment, okay? So it's not a prediction and you're not going to be held to it because

your feeling can change, you know, predictions can change too, but feelings feel squishier to people. So like it's like, ah, it could be anywhere by the end of the day. What is your feeling right now of where Wonsodo is going to sign? Oh, I thought you were going to say when, which seems soonish, but who knows? I know exactly when he's going to sign because I have a dinner reservation tomorrow night. So that's when he's going to sign. It's going to be during dinner. I know exactly when he's going to sign because I have a dinner reservation tomorrow night. So that's when he's going to sign. It's going to be during dinner. I know.

Okay? Okay? My sense of when is just sort of aggregated second and third and 15th hand from various other people sort of summing up their sense of the vibes of when he will sign, which is either on the eve of the winter meetings or during perhaps. We shall see. Where coming into the off season, I thought Yankees were the leaders in the clubhouse because he was in their clubhouse last season, basically, and because he was so important

to them and because they're the Yankees and because they'd be in deep doo-doo if they didn't have one Soto and it would reflect poorly on them And I guess I have not really shifted from that prior Even though if I were going based purely on just buzz Maybe I'd say Mets, you know, like there's been a lot of Blue Jays buzz too But I guess until I actually see that I tend to think that the odds are somewhat stacked against them for various reasons. So I guess I would just stick with my Yankees prediction because I don't have any actual information now that I didn't have a month ago.

But New York, can I say New York? I think New York. That's cheating. No. Yes, it is. It is very much cheating. And maybe that's an unfair thing to put on feelings, although there is precedent for that, not with you, but in the world. I think he'll be a Met. I think I've decided that I think he'll be a Met. That's what I feel right now. I feel that he'll be a man. And then that, you know, 34 million spent numbers can go way, way up,

go very high. But yeah, I don't know. This is just based on again on like, and some of these reports, who knows, who knows, Ben, you know, maybe, maybe the Yankees are like looking at Corbin Burns and Juan Soto and being like, we want both and we're going to have both. But when you start hearing that the Yankees are meeting with Corbin Burns and also Willie Thomas, feels like they're securing backups in the event that they don't get Soto. Or maybe that's just what they want him to think.

Maybe it's all mind games, maybe it's all leverage. So I wanted to put a blanket thanks out to everyone as I do always at this time of year for sharing your year-end podcast listening summary stats with us. Your Spotify wrapped, your Pocket Casts year-end review, your Apple replay, whatever your choice of podcatcher. We always get flooded with these things at the end of the year and for me at least it's always nice to know that people are out there listening. And I do think that we have kind of engineered our way

to the top of those rankings by being as prolific as we are just because, you know, it goes by minutes listened and we put up a lot of minutes, a lot of episodes. And therefore I think we have kind of hacked the Spotify wrapped in its ilk. Just because if you listen to every episode of a certain podcast, well, we're probably going to end up higher than a lot of those podcasts because there's just more, we're making more of this than many other podcasts are. But still, thanks to everyone for actually making that investment in time. And I know that there are probably people who are sick of this season and are like,

I don't care what you listen to. Good for you. Why do I have to be subjected to this? I've seen that sentiment. It's sort of like in the early days of Wordle, when everyone would tweet out their Wordle whatevers and everyone was like, leave me alone with your Wordle. I don't need to know how well you did today. I find this to be a little more interesting or useful just because it tells you a little something about that person and their tastes and podcast preferences.

And it might be useful for discovery sometimes. You might see something on one of those and think, oh, what's that? Oh, that's interesting. Or this person listens to a lot of shows I like, and also this one I've never heard of. Maybe this is something that I could get into. So I think there is a little more utility there,

at least if you're not a wordal person or if you weren't, then you were getting really nothing out of those graphics. Whereas if you're a podcast person at all, you might get something out of these. I have three things to say. Allow me to start with this, because it's the most important one to express, which is my gratitude for people hanging out with us.

It does mean a lot. It helps the show keep going. We are deeply thankful. And I wanna express that sentiment so that it precedes this sentiment, which is the we are putting up big numbers. Ben, you know, I'm doing air quotes around the we. I'm just saying some of the episodes could be shorter

and it would be fine. People keep saying that we need a Joe Rogan of the left and I would offer our shows already very long. Yeah, look to us, we're here. The third thing is actually a question, which is were you a word old guy? Are you a word game guy? I'm not, I never was. I'm not really either.

I'm not bothered by the word old thing that never, I was like, look, I've gotten through everyone posting about wrestling. So this is, you know, surely going to be shorter lived. Prove to be. You're still, you're still out there, you're wrestling heads. You know it's not real, right? Am I being helpful? Probably not. But yeah, I don't think we're gaming the system. I think we're putting in the work, you know, that's the way to think about it. We are putting in the work to be on the top

of some of these charts. To be clear, we're not reverse engineering our way to the top of the charts. We're not thinking how can we end up at the top of people's Spotify raps at the end of the year. That is just a byproduct of the approach to this podcast. Although my one quibble with this practice is that I really do think that these stats

should be surfaced at the start of the following year because it bothers me that we're essentially pretending that December doesn't exist. And we're having year-end stats when a significant percentage of the year remains. And I guess I have this complaint about a lot of year-end lists and best-of lists, and I get why we do it. I'm in the media, people aren't really reading stuff during Christmas and New Year's, and probably people aren't really writing stuff either. People like to take that time off, and it's okay,

in some cases at least, because maybe there are fewer releases around those times, although not always. Sometimes there's some big things that come out right around then, because people have time on their hands. But you could say, well, if it comes out at the tail end of the year, maybe it's not really reflective of the year anyway, or how much time you spent watching that thing,

thinking about that thing, holding space for that thing. But in this particular case, I do think that podcast listening, it persists through the very end of the year, and may even tick up, who knows? Right. So I think- You got travel, you got time that you need to occupy at home, you know?

Right. Although maybe a little less commuting and hours at the office that you're trying to fill. But even so, I want a completionist approach to these. But am I right to understand? And look, I will never reveal, I'm an Apple music user, but I will never reveal my Apple music, I don't even remember what they call it, because it's totally skewed by the fact

that I listen to music while I edit, but it is, you know, I have to listen to like lyric-less music or music in a language other than English because if it's English, I get distracted. I can't like dual process in the way that I need to. So it's like that it's not reflective of my taste in the way that I think this exercise is meant to be. So I will never share mine, but it's not like the month of December disappears, right? Isn't it a December to through November exercise or does December just not exist for the

purpose of that? I don't think I work for the parent company Spotify. I was gonna say. But I think it is or has been the case that it's sort of like a January 1st through whenever it's Pencils Down, Podcast Down, I feel like December just doesn't exist. It's like a Bermuda Triangle of podcasts listening for these purposes. I don't know if that's consistently the case or the case for all of these services, but I think that's true. Right, yeah. It might vary. Yeah, so. Interesting, yeah. Well, regardless, we appreciate you listening to us for 11 or

12 months out of the year, whichever these stats reflect, and we hope that everyone has had a good time. And you know what? We hope that even if we are not among your top most listened to podcasts, whatever amount of time you choose to spend with Effectively Wild, we hope you find to be time well spent and we appreciate it. So. Yes, and I will say that some of you are absolute sickos. Oh, yeah.

I don't mean that purely in terms of how much Effectively Wild you listen to, though certainly that. And some people, it's not just the current year's output of this podcast, but the previous years as well. They're catching up, they're going deep into the archives. It's several hundred episodes, not just the 150 or so that we put out per year, but also there's a commonality

here where people generally are not listening to Effectively Wild and then no other baseball podcasts in these graphics that I see. Often the top five is all baseball podcasts. It's like the more the merrier and support the entire baseball podcasting industry. Sure. And a lot of those people are friends of ours and there's cross pollination of various podcasts. Yes.

But my goodness, that is a lot of baseball podcast listening and apologies for any repetition that occurs. Yeah. But I figure if you're someone where your top podcasts are like us, and like Rates and Barrels, and Five and Dive, and all the... You know what you're getting, which is each of those crews reacting to news and events and what have you. And you're probably game for it. Yeah. I heard what Eno and Derek and Craig and Patrick, I heard what they said, but what will Meg and Ben say?

They're a unique spin on these books. Yeah. They're like, look, we need the hornier version of this and so we're going. Yes, the hornier and more pedantic take on the news that I've already heard discussed elsewhere. We're here. It's good that Effectively Wild doesn't have to date. I don't know if we'd do well. Like, not you and I. I mean, that's good for us as individuals too, but you know, just like if the podcast were on the apps, how would it do?

I don't know. I don't know if it would do so well. There's someone for everyone. We're doing well on the podcast apps at least. Although I don't know that all of these, do they reflect minutes listened in real time? If you have your, you know, two times, three times super sicko extra speed listening set up?

Or is it a... That's a good question. I think maybe Pocket Cast at least breaks it down multiple ways, like actual podcast minutes and then minutes you spent personally, but that might vary by service. Can I offer a thought on this, which is, I don't know that I care to know. I've never been like, I gotta do a deep dive on my podcast listening.

I don't know, I listen to some pods, I like them. That's why I listen. I feel satisfied with that amount of insight into the process. Yes, give me all the baseball stats, but not necessarily that depth of stats about everything I do. We talked about the golden at bat last time.

Now in the outro, this thought occurred to me after we finished recording, I pointed out that in addition to all of our other objections to the golden at bat, I'm now bothered by the term as well, because it really should be golden plate appearance if we're gonna go, because we can't count on it being an at bat before it happens. Or we could just call it what the bananas do,

which is golden batter. And then we sidestep that issue. And I think that's a perfectly fine approach. But golden plate appearance, if we got to go with one of these, I don't think that's gonna catch on, but that's my preferred term. So that's just another little gripe I have with this thing.

But we got a lot of feedback, most of it conforming to our disquiet about this proposal. And I got to say, again, I don't know that Rob Manfred, you know, this is a galaxy brain 40 chess thing that Manfred actually wanted this to be shot down or he's not really behind it, you know, he's just putting it out there so that the response would be negative and then whoever's pushing for this maybe inside the owner cabal would be cowed by the public condemnation of this. Probably not, but maybe. But good job by Manfred for putting baseball in the news in a very slow spot in the calendar. Nothing was really going on,

which was why I think we were all suddenly obsessed by the Golden at Bat slash plate appearance proposal for a few days there. So hey, he got hand lines for his sport, and he's not someone we typically give credit for being the greatest spokesperson for the sport, or hype man for baseball, but he did it for a few days, inadvertently or not. And he also prompted people to defend baseball instead of lambasting baseball.

This is what happened here because so often it's, oh, baseball's dying and here's what we have to fix and here's what's gone wrong. And often Manfred has contributed to that by pointing out fairly some shortcomings about the sport, but sometimes doing it in a way where people reach the conclusion that he just doesn't like baseball and his sole purpose is to nitpick the problems about the sport.

Well, here he has put out a proposal that so many people found distasteful that they actually came to the defense of baseball and said, you know what, baseball is good the way it is. And we don't wanna make it more like other sports in this very gimmicky, artificial way. We like that baseball has this rigidity in the lineup, that there's this artificial scarcity

of these exciting showdowns. He actually snookered us all into talking about how great baseball is. So again, not sure if that was his goal here, but I think he managed it. I think that you're right. I thought you were going to raise objections to the fact that the name sounds a little bit dirty, which I want to say my pure brain did not even contemplate until several people noted it on various social media platforms. So sicko's in a lot of different ways. No, we're not here to shame, just to know. Little weird. What I was going to say is, yeah, I guess good on him. You're right that so often people are obsessed with, you know,

I think we spend a lot more time than we should wondering like how much love in his heart Rob Manfred has for the sport. I just don't think it's a useful like unit of analysis. Whatever the answer is, these are the rules he's proposing. So like, does it matter to you if they're coming from a place of affection or not? I don't know. You can just assess them on their merits, I think. But you're right that so often people look at his reaction to the sport and view it as an indication of the sport's decline.

But in this instance, we're like, no, the sport is good the way that it is. Stop it. Stop it, stop it. I also think that there is, it's sort of a surprising reaction because as we noted at the end of our conversation last time, like part of my response to this was like, don't be so desperate, you know,

like don't have self-respect, you know, have respect for the sport, like it's doing fine. And people didn't really go in that direction. They were just like, no, it is doing fine. Like, how dare you? Yeah. And we got some follow-up sort of piggyback hypotheticals that maybe we can tackle on an email episode,

but there were a few responses I wanted to share. For one thing, we mentioned one drawback to this idea is just that it wouldn't actually occur as often in as exciting a way as people are thinking. That the platonic ideal of this idea that you're engineering more Otani trout matchups, it wouldn't actually work out that way that often. Because often, as I think maybe you said on that podcast,

it would be early in the game would be the big situation and you'd have someone golden it batting in the second inning and it just, it wouldn't be super exciting. Russell Carlton wrote an article to this effect for baseball prospectus and he broke down the numbers a little bit and came to the same conclusion that this just in practice would not be actually achieving

the effect of making this so much more exciting than it currently is. And so I think that is worth pointing out here that just wouldn't work as well as people are thinking of it working. He looked at data from 2019 to 23. He looked for plate appearances where there were at least two runners on base, at

least one out, and a batter from the bottom third of the order was due up. In 35.6% of team games that didn't happen, in another 24.8% it happened once, teams would probably do well to grab the first such opportunity that they had and use their golden ticket. If such a situation never came around, You'd probably see teams desperately using it in whatever situation they could in the night then and whether it made sense or not So you'd have a lot of early usages of this strategy or it just wouldn't happen at all And maybe that's not a problem Depending on how often you think this should actually occur if you well, once a game is too much and that it should be limited and that it should actually only be in the seventh inning or later or the ninth inning or later or the

team that is trailing or something like that, maybe it's actually a good thing that these really exciting situations wouldn't arise all that often because it would be a little less of a deviation from what we're used to. But that's just putting out there that if, you know, these visions are dancing in your head of Otani Trout showdowns happening on the regular, it's just, it's not gonna be the case. It's gonna be either those situations won't arise at all or they'll arise pretty early in the game when the leverage will be high but it just won't be as exciting as it would in that kind of, you know, prototypical, archetypical sort of exciting situation. I think that this is a phenomena across baseball that we are prone to overestimating the like

per game occurrence rate of given things, right? I think we saw this a lot when we were all bringing our hands and it's fine to bring your hands over this. It's, it's troubling, but when we were all bringing our hands over the rise of the strikeout rate across the league, and then when you break it down on like a per game basis, you're seeing like maybe one or two more strikeouts per game than you used to, which isn't nothing. And I think it's fine to say in the aggregate that we wish that strikeouts would decrease just from an aesthetic perspective.

But I do think we're, we're prone to sort of overstating these things to ourselves and being like, well, we'd see a golden app at like, and a really good one every single game. It also just assumes that like, I wonder if it assumes both too many instances of like that potential matchup coming up and like way more really good relievers than they're necessarily are. I have to contemplate that. I don't know if I actually believe that, but it's like in order for the trout Otani plate appearance to happen at bat to happen, like you need Trout and that's the focus of the Golden at bat. But you also need Otani on the other end of it, which isn't to say that there wouldn't

be game states that would, if a team could, where they'd pull the ripcord and be like, oh yeah, get our best guy up there against their best reliever. But I wonder if we're overestimating how often not only it would come up and be useful, but also how many times is Emmanuel Classe on the other end of that? I don't know. I don often not only it would come up and be useful, but also like how many times is like Emmanuel Classe on the other end of that? I don't know. I don't know that it would, you know what I mean? There's only so many of that guy. So anyway. Yeah. And we got an email from listener Adam, who said he would be out on the golden at bat in part because it would be disproportionately unfair to late game relievers. I don't know

if I would count that among my top reasons why I don't like this. Is Adam a code name for Emmanuel Classic? Maybe. Emmanuel, I think if you can hear us. It would be, yeah, they'd be disproportionately affected by this maybe unless what Russell just found is true. And actually it would be pretty well distributed over all the relievers just, or pitchers in general,

just whoever happens to be in there in high leverage spots. I don't know that I mind that so much. I do think you'd have to take into account the quality of competition maybe more than we currently do. And so yeah, if you were a late game reliever and you were facing more of these as well, then it would just affect late game relievers disproportionately and it would affect all late game relievers. I don't know if it would affect your earnings or anything. Teams would probably take into account the fact that you're facing better batters,

but maybe the public facing stats, that would have to be more of a priority. But also, I do think it would be very demoralizing if you're a pitcher and you're looking ahead and you're saying, okay, this, I can kind of take a little off maybe in this plate appearance. There's a limit to that, I guess, if it's a high leverage spot, even if it's a bad batter.

But especially if you say, got this good batter out and then suddenly he's up again. And it's like, what? I just ran this gauntlet and now I have to run this gauntlet again? This is like a serial killer slasher villain. He's come back from the dead and I have to face him consecutive times. So that's a whole problem. And I guess, yeah, you could say, does this mean even more max effort pitching and pitchers hurting themselves because now they have to deal with the best

batters coming up even more often in these most important moments. So I guess I would sympathize, but I don't know if that's just a rule. If that's the way the sport works, then it comes with the territory. And also you could say maybe it's extra fair because teams have had the ability to put in their best pitcher in those high leverage spots. If that pitcher is available at least and hasn't been used and is rested enough, well, you can summon your high leverage guy if that pitcher is available at least and hasn't been used and is rested enough well you can summon your high leverage guy for that plate appearances whereas the batting team had no recourse other than maybe if they had a pinch hitter but they couldn't just put their best guy out there necessarily maybe this is evening the playing field in a sense relievers they've had two two great advantages or the defensive team.

It would probably be fine. I bet a lot of really relievers would view it, I don't know if they'd mean this, but I think the way they would talk about it is as like a galvanizing thing. Like, yeah, I'm going to do a big swear so everyone take a moment. But it's like if, you know, where they might be like, I'm I'm the you guy at the end of this bullpen So yeah, I'll deal with your your best hitter, you know come at me I don't know if they all talk like that But I think that would be the mentality that they would project even if internally they were you know Seized by doubt because they're the late inning guy. You're the closer like yeah, give me Mike trout

I'm gonna take care of him for you You know, I think that they thrive on that stuff. So I think it would be an opportunity to thrive and be galvanized, but also it wouldn't happen that often for the reasons that we've explained. I think the real answer is just get some better bench bats. Let's go. If this is an important thing, if the quality of your potential pinch hitters matters to you, well then do it.

Get you some better bets. I know that's kind of hard to do because it's hard to go out in the world and be like, you're not going to play that much, but when you do, it's really going to matter to people. I bet players are like, nah, but still, invest in your bench and then it'll be fine. Have better bench, guys. Where have you gone? Matt Stairs, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. To be fair, I suppose the dedicated pinch hitter,

the Stairs or the Vanderwall or the Harris, it's not quite the same in terms of star power or excitement, yes, in terms of maybe having a competent batter up there, but if the idea is to have a really exciting matchup where it's star versus star, well, your dedicated pinch hitter wasn't necessarily that guy, even if he was a pretty effective hitter. But here's a question for you in response to that question. How big of a gap do you think there is for a fan emotionally between a home run in a late, close, exciting situation

and I'm just going to keep using Trout because, you know, and a Mike Trout home run. You're in the, you're an angels fan, you're in the ballpark and you know, whoever the bench bat you'd bring in is, uh, comes up and is facing a good closer and hits a home run. Does it feel different to you really than it being trout that does that? I'd submit that there's a gap, but it's not that appreciable in the moment, which isn't to say that like it wasn't awesome to have trout and otani squaring off. Like it is cool when you get the stars doing it, but if the result ends up being good, I think you just don't even care a little bit.

I think you're just like... Oh yeah. If you get the outcome you wanted, then I think you're happy either way. You're happy either way. In fact, you might be happier if it was more surprising because it was a bad batter up there. Right. It's more the anticipation of the matchup and then maybe during the matchup you're more

excited just because there's a greater expectation of success. Yeah, I get it. I get it, but I also think that it can be good a lot of different ways and we shouldn't do the golden at bat or plate appearance. We shouldn't do it no matter what it's called. I think it's bad. Well, other people have pointed out that Rob Manfred

was more or less of the same mind when this idea was first mo at bat and it was, I think, like four to five magic at bats for each manager. It was, you know, just like more. What about it made it magic? It's the same idea, golden magic, whatever you want to call it. It was just a name. There wasn't like sorcery involved.

No, it just defies the rules. So I guess in that sense, it breaks the natural laws of the sports as we have known them. And so this was an even less scarce kind of commodity that he was pitching to Manfred, but Manfred's initial reaction to this was, you're wasting my time.

That's a crazy idea. Wow. And you know, again, he said, when you make those changes, I think it's always important to ask yourself the question as to whether you were interfering with the history and traditions of the game. And I think the suggestion that you just floated would fall squarely in the category of would interfere

with the history and traditions of the game. I guess we can say, well, only once a game as opposed to four to five times a game. But no, I think it's sort of once. Once you do it once, you have broken that fundamental law and broken with history and tradition. So to be fair, I guess it's sort of, you know, if he was ambushed with this on a podcast, maybe further deliberation, he's had almost a decade since then to think about this.

And this was early in his tenure. Maybe he's come around, maybe it's one of those, you know, that quote often attributed to Gandhi, though it was not actually said by Gandhi or not first said by him. The first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Maybe Rob Manfred has had that evolution on his own. Perhaps, evidently, Nicholas Klein, a trade union activist, said something very similar to that in 1918. So if you're gonna attribute it to anyone,

it should be Nicholas Klein. But maybe it's that, you know? It just seems wild off the dome, and then you have another decade to think about it. And situations change, and we see certain trends in the game and batting average falls and on base percentage falls and maybe suddenly it seems more palatable than it used to.

But his initial gut reaction was similar to what many other people's was. Yeah, I mean, you're allowed to change your mind and I don't wanna deny him that, right? But I also suspect that this won't go anywhere. Maybe the frequency was part of the problem. Maybe it was that he was ambushed with it. But maybe it was just something in his heart

to tell him it's wrong. But here I am speculating about what's in his heart and I just said we shouldn't do that, you know? So. Well, at least you've given him credit for having one, which not everyone has. But when I searched Golden in our inbox, our collective podcast inbox, just to find all the Golden at Bat emails, I found also I was confronted with one from earlier this year

where someone emailed us about Jason Giambi's lucky golden thong that he used to wear back in- I just don't need to know about these things. It doesn't feel like my business. Yeah, he often wore a golden thong under his uniform pants when he was trying to snap out of a slump and teammates acknowledged at the time that they had tried wearing it too,

including Johnny Damon, which okay, I can see that, but Derek Jeter, evidently, cops to having worn the golden thong. And now of course I wanna know, was it the same thong? Was it just the same model? Was it washed? Let's hope. Yeah, I don't, yeah.

I hope so. They really get up in there, you know, thongs. Yes. I'm just saying, they do. I don't really know, but I guess some Yankees did and Jason Giambi certainly did. We were asked about this by Isaac back in May because he was wondering whether if that sort of underwear wearing was common, whether that would have quickly caused MLB to pivot away from the transparent pants if we could all see the golden thongs under there?

Yeah, I was just about to say, you're putting a lot of faith in pinstripes to, you know, keep things under wraps. Again, like wear whatever kind of underwear is comfortable for you. If you want to imbue the underwear with special powers, like that's a time-honored tradition in baseball. It's not always a golden thong, but you know, we have, we have, we need to come to terms with the fact that at any given moment after really opening day, but I would imagine it's more common from like mid-season on at any given moment, you have in a clubhouse, some truly dirty drawers, you know, and they are being worn and I don't think we need to be comfortable with it, but we should acknowledge the reality of it, you know.

Drawers, socks. Well, this was not about comfort. This was about breaking a slump. So a few other bits of feedback here. Listener, Patreon supporter Jay wrote in to say, it seemed to be taken as a given in your conversation that experiences akin to the Trout-O-Tonny matchup are a more common state in other sports. I don't see it that way. At least not as a matter of degree.

I mean, sure, the quarterback has the ball and maybe a favorite target and maybe has the opportunity to run himself and maybe the opposing team has a special defensive talent who happens to be covering the quarterback's favorite target But as a matter of degree of best on best person on person I don't think other sports have anything like Otani trout for the win in the ordinary course of play I'm ignoring hockey soccer penalty moments or tiebreakers Even in basketball there are occasional moments of a best player facing off against an opposing best player in a key play, but those are much more mediated by the teams than an at bat is.

It's not like the other four players are just eating popcorn and watching to see if the defender gets crossed up. So I guess I'm saying I can see baseball wanting more Trapp vs. Otani for the win, but not because it would make baseball more like other sports necessarily. I don't think of that sort of moment as something that other sports can really achieve as well as baseball already does. So I think that's true, right? I think Jay is right to, as they say,

pump breaks a little bit on what seems to be an assumption about qualities of other sports as opposed to baseball. I think there is truth to the idea of you're getting the ball or whatever implement you're using in the hands of your best player in that moment. But it's more about that as opposed to the one-on-one confrontation because baseball has that more than other sports do. Well, I think it kind of depends on the sport. And I think it, you know, you're right to point out that the team has a lot to do with it. I think that there are

instances like in football, you might have your best cornerback assigned to one side of the field and he just plays there and whatever receiver happens to be lined up is the guy he's covering. But teams will move their best corner around and put that guy on the other team's best receiver. We've seen that.

So I think there are maybe more of those moments than is being given credit for, but I also agree that it is overstated either because those matchups don't exist or because the game state doesn't necessarily allow it or because injuries intervene or whatever. I think the degree to which it happens in other sports is exaggerated, but I think we can give credit where it's due. Like it depends on, it depends on the personnel and it depends on how they're schemed and you know, it's not always a thing, but sometimes it is. You know, there will be instances where like, and part of this is like, I have a specific perspective on this as a Seahawks fan. Like I got to see this with prior iterations of the Seahawks. You can't tell me that like Richard Sherman versus Crabtree wasn't this,

right? That the tip wasn't this. You wouldn't tell me that because you don't know what I'm talking about, but other people do. And they listened to this podcast and they remember that play and I had a heart attack. I felt like I did when it happened and then they got to go win the Super Bowl by blowing out the Broncos and apparently guys were getting in fights. It's a really exciting story. Yeah, I think when it does happen in baseball, it is better maybe partly because of the rarity,

but also partly because baseball is more of a one-on-one showdown sport than these other team sports. It's a team sport. It's more of a one-on-one sport. Masquerading is a team sport. Obviously it's not a one-on-one sport, masquerading as a team sport. Obviously it's not really one-on-one pitcher versus batter. There's a catcher, there's an umpire, there are other people who are affecting the outcome there, but it's closer to one-on-one where you have more people

directly involved in the play and they're just, you know, it's continuous action and all of that. So yeah, when it works, it is exquisite. Also, we got one, I meant to mention this because Raymond Chen, effectively wild wiki keeper had brought it up to me before we recorded, but Eli pointed out, I've been taking in all the recent Golden Abat discourse

and it reminded me vaguely about something I'd heard about Pesopalo, also known as Finnish baseball a while back. So I looked into it further and I think this offers a version of the same idea that is a bit more palatable than the implementation possibilities I've heard for MLB. In finished baseball there's a nine batter lineup that are in a set order in addition to three jokers that can be inserted anywhere in the order once per half inning. In this game it isn't uncommon to bat through the lineup in a single half inning so the jokers aren't disproportionately used as compared to regular batters in the order. Since the jokers aren't a part of the lineup there's no issue of a golden at

bat leading the selected batter needing to bat again while on base or any other cascading lineup issues. It allows for a lot of strategic managerial decisions. You should save your best hitters when they're runners on base, but there are also jokers that are particularly fast when speed is needed. So that might be something that would be a little bit better, I think, and continues, this made me think that a similar implementation in MLB would be less jarring. Let's say that you can create an eight-matter lineup, but the designated hitter can slot in anywhere each time through the lineup

As long as they don't bat twice in the same inning Records wouldn't be impacted because the moving batter would still get a similar number of plate appearances But they would be moved around based on the situation each inning. So yeah, that might be a little more palatable still not necessarily something I want but disturbs me a little less and You can hear more about Pesopalo on Effectively Wild, episode 1302 was the one where Jeff and I talked about that and had a guest on to explain it to us. I have, wait, can I pause?

I am so relieved to hear that that was a Jeff episode because I have no memory of that conversation. And I joke about not remembering exactly what we say, but I was like, I would remember that because there's a lot about that that sounds fantastic. Now I'm gonna go back and listen to that episode, but thank God that was a Jeff episode. Oh God, I'm so relieved. Yeah, and of course, there are similar proposals about, well, maybe you can choose to reset the lineup

or it's extra innings. You could start at the top of the order again. Various ideas like that that are a little less intrusive and heavy handed than the golden at bat slash plate appearance. But yeah, the Finnish baseball precedent. It's interesting. It's something to consider. And finally, for now at least, Harlan notes, like you, I'm not particularly

fond of any of the potential Golden-at-bat proposals, however, if MLB adopts the Golden-at-bat rule, it may help right a wrong when it comes to baseball nomenclature, or perhaps it may require altogether new terminology. As you've discussed at length, many in the baseball community have unfortunately taken to referring to the automatic runner placed at second base at the start of each half of an extra inning as a ghost runner. And as you have discussed at length, this terminology is wrong. A true ghost runner is the imaginary runner used

in an informal game when there aren't enough players. If the Goldenet Bat rule is implemented, there may be a need to have something that more closely resembles a traditional ghost runner in MLB. If a team elects to use their Goldenet Bat to substitute their number nine hitter for the player who traditionally hits leadoff in the lineup, and that player reaches base, bringing

up the leadoff batter once again, this time in his traditional lineup spot, then a placeholder runner would be necessary. What should we call this runner? In this situation, might the term ghost runner be appropriate? Or is the absence of a physical person the whole point of a ghost runner? After some reflection, I think I've come to the conclusion that if the golden bat rule were adopted, we would need a brand new term,

a substitute runner or a golden runner. What do you all think? Yeah, this is one of the many sticking points here. How do you handle this? How do you handle it? And the terminology is probably not the most important part of that for most people, but it's always pretty important to us. Yeah, I was gonna say, let's be clear about who things are important to because to this audience, arguably the source of an unlimited number of emails,

potentially, you know? I wouldn't call this a ghost runner either. It's closer to a ghost runner than the zombie runner is. I don't know. Maybe we could bring back the term courtesy runner, which already exists and was a thing in baseball. Just that would basically be it. And that still exists in Little League, I think. They have courtesy runners. It was a thing in MLB for years, just a player who replaces a base runner after a batter reaches base. And sometimes it was because, you know, someone got hurt or something and, and you weren't like, you could come back into the game as a courtesy runner in, in

major league games originally until that was outlawed. So I could see courtesy runner just, just you know we could exhume that term for this probably maybe I like courtesy runner because it always reminds me of like well I guess they probably still do this but like the oldie days where they would call for you over the inner comet airports and you'd have to go use a courtesy phone yeah yeah I guess they're probably still our courtesy phones but I haven't heard that announcement in a while. Maybe they're rude phones to reflect a rougher era.

I don't know. I like Courtesy Runner. It sounds so polite, you know? It's just like doing a little solid for your teammate. It's like, oh, I'm doing a little courtesy for you. One other non-Golden-related follow-up, I guess this would be more of a bronze one, but listener and Patreon supporter Ben wrote in to note that Ted Williams evidently disliked his Hall of Fame bust likeness, his plaque likeness so much that he demanded it be replaced.

That's great. Yeah, yeah, because we had talked about this, you know, this will be relevant again soon when new players are elected to the Hall of Fame and they have to start cranking out those plaques and we have complained a little bit about some of the likenesses there and not just us, also people in attendance and also the players themselves in some cases. And this is not purely a Hall of Fame problem or a baseball problem. Obviously, as we recently learned with the Dwyane Wade debacle, this is a problem kind of consistently across sports.

It's just, I guess it's a difficult medium to work in. So I don't wanna pick on anyone in particular, but yes, Ted, who could be ornery at times and certainly wasn't someone who was not gonna get his way if he wanted it. And to his credit, he used his Hall of Fame speech to advocate for Negro-leaguers getting into the hall at a time when many people weren't saying that.

And he wielded his influence there and it made a difference. And also he wanted his plaque to look like him. So, you know, that's not too much to ask, but there have apparently been quite a few changes to plaques over the years and these have been collected. And I found a good post by Ted Chastain at the blog for the Sabre Baseball Cards Research Committee who compiled various plaque variations over the years.

And some of them are just howlers. Some of them just had errata on them. Not erratica, but errata. They had errors on them. And Babe Ruth's original plaque, for instance, had his wrong debut year. Interesting. It said that he had debuted in 1915 as opposed to 1914. original plaque, for instance, had his wrong debut year. It said that he had debuted in 1915 as opposed to 1914.

And this was corrected at some point in 2005 or 2006. So for decades and decades, it had the wrong debut year for Babe Ruth. And they fixed that eventually. Now, Jackie Robinson's plaque originally had no reference to the fact that he broke the color barrier. It was purely, yeah, it was purely just about his play. And this was apparently not purely a case of the hall being squeamish about wanting to acknowledge that very important part

of Jackie Robinson's legacy. Apparently, it was also somewhat his wish to just be considered as a player purely like, like anyone else and not, you know, get a boost for, for being this groundbreaking trailblazing civil rights icon. And so his, his original plaque just made no mention of that. It just kind of had his stats as if he was any other player. And not until 2008 was his plaque updated to say, displayed tremendous courage and poise in 1947 when he integrated the modern major leagues in the face of intense adversity. So that was to some extent his wish. He told baseball writers that when considering his candidacy,

they should only consider his playing ability, what his impact was on the playing field. And evidently the plaque reflected his wishes more or less at the time. And you know, totally legitimate Hall of Fame player purely based on the stats, obviously. So would have been a new way. But for a museum, not to mention that on the stats, obviously. So, would have been a new way. But for a museum,

not to mention that on the plaque, you know, maybe it mentioned it elsewhere in the museum, but even so, it's pretty wild. Yeah. I was just going to say that it perhaps, in addition to his own wishes, maybe reflects sort of our changing understanding of what that institution is meant to be. And there are times, I mean, and this is still true today, and I don't mean it as a knock on the hall and I don't even really mean it as a knock on voters, but you know, I think we're still kind of navigating that relationship of like how much of this is about the history and trying to preserve it and how much of this is the fame piece, you know, and I don't know that that

relationship is either settled or, you know? And I don't know that that relationship is either settled or, you know, even especially comfortable some of the time. So that doesn't surprise me as a potential issue, but like also why, why wild, wild, that's wild, you know? But I, to state an extremely obvious thing, obviously don't know what it would have felt like to be him in that moment and kind of interacting with your own legacy. That's a complicated thing for people to sort out when they have legacies that are a lot less profound in their impact than Jackie's was. So I don't know. I don't know where I'd land on that if I were him, but I'm glad that the record has been corrected. I don't even know if you call it a correction really, because it's

like such an obvious fact of his career and legacy within the game. But yeah, it does seem like a notable omission. BFF's plaque, speaking of ornery fellers, his plaque apparently changed at least three times. Oh my God. Yeah, partly to change his likeness, partly to correct some issues with the years and winning percentage and formatting on there. And, but Ted Williams, it was reported by Tom Boswell

in the Washington Post in 1977, Ted Williams was so incensed by his non-likeness that he demanded a new plaque. So if true, yeah, he, it is a better like this, I would say the original likeness, not great, not flattering. And I think the current one a bit better. So yeah, there were just, you know, ones that were changed

like the wording or to add various accomplishments, Stan Musial's plaque was changed, Roberto Clemente's was changed, Warren Spahn's was changed, was just like to correct his career strikeout total. You know, you'd think if you were gonna set something in bronze, you would really wanna copy edit the heck out of that thing.

I mean, yes, but have you looked at those faces? Well, yeah, but I get why that might be difficult to render an accurate likeness. It's not hard to get a strikeout total unless it's a case of, you know, they understated an extra strikeout and they discovered that the numbers were wrong. If it was just a misprint, you know, if the careers were wrong, that's not something that changed. Like Bob Lemmon's plaque changed to reflect different years. Robin Roberts's changed, like just a wholesale change in text, not necessarily to correct anything.

And then Juan Marichal's and like Clemente's, they kind of changed the presentation of their names and the way that they would be represented traditionally by a Latin American player. And so that sort of stuff is good. George Davis, again, lots of errors, that number of games, Carlton Fisk's 2000 plaque was replaced to change the number of games caught

from 2229 to 2226. I wonder what the threshold is for, is this worth just like recasting an entire plaque here? Just about to ask that like three more games or three fewer. Yeah, actually they took a few games away from him. Pete Hill, a pre Negro leagues player, his plaque was changed to correct his first name. Joseph

was changed to John. Well, that seems pretty important. And Bruce Souter, the word lead was misspelled. It was L-E-A-D instead of L-E-D. So they changed that. Again, Roberto Alomar had a likeness change as well. I guess, you know, they didn't kick him out of the hall, but they actually changed the likeness to be a little bit better. Same for Ron Santo. So actually they've changed quite a few plaques

just to look more like the player. I do wonder in addition to like, what is the threshold at which they say like, no, you just gotta live with that. What is the process by which these errors are discovered? Is it just someone walking around the hall being like, wait a minute, what does that say? That's not his name. Like, is it a, cause like, I would hate for it to be like a family member, you know, they make a pilgrimage to Cooperstown. They're going to see their great,

great grandfather's Hall of Fame plaque. Listeners won't have heard me goof that three times, but I'm going to admit that I did. And they get there and they go in the hall and they find it and they look up and they go, that's not how you spell our name. Like that would be terrible. It would be a terrible thing for a family member to discover. So I hope that it's like some random museum goer staffer or something, but I wonder. Yeah. Well, I will volunteer my services. I haven't been a Hall of Fame voter despite being eligible, but I would contribute in my own way by providing some gratis copy editing services. If you need another pair of eyeballs on those plaques

before you cast them and put them up on the wall. I would not offer that. The stakes are way too high. Well, I wouldn't want to be the sole, the only line of defense, but clearly some errors are- You'll be a line of defense? Yes, I will be one of the last lines and I will perhaps catch a typo

because this really does seem like a case where not just double check or triple check but octuple check just many many checks here. I will note that many of the names that you have mentioned as being subject to error are ones that are further back in the record and so perhaps there has been a process improved. Yeah, maybe there's a more systematic check that goes on now. Perhaps they were relying before on the makers of the plaques and you know, they're artists, they're not necessarily copy editors. It's a different skill.

So who knows? And stats weren't as easily accessible back then, although if anyone was going to have them, it would be the hall of fame. easily accessible back then, although if anyone was gonna have them, it would be the Hall of Fame. You think it would be them. Yeah. You'd think so. Okay.

I mentioned last time that I wanted to give a bit of background about deferred contracts. Can I share what I have learned about the history of deferrals in contracts? And so this has been something that has come up constantly. If we're not talking about golden at bats, we're talking about Dodgers deferrals, particularly the Dodgers. And I do think the Dodgers have gotten a bit of a bad rap here, but it was reported by the AP that their deferred payment obligations

have now topped $1 billion, $1 billion, that is owed to seven players over the years 2028 through 2046, which is a very long time from now, but. Who knows what we will even be by then, you know? Yes, and Andrew Friedman at the Blake Snell press conference, he was defending the Dodgers fairly, I think. I'm not employed by the Dodgers and have no incentive

to defend the Dodgers like Andrew Friedman does, but I think I would side with him here. He said, it's just how you account for it. You have to fund a lot of it right now. And this goes to why they're doing it. Having that money go to work for you, we have, a lot of our ownership group are from financial background, and we can have that money going to work right now and just making it not something that sneaks up on us, we're not going to wake up in 2035 and say, oh my God, that's right, we have this money due. We'll plan for it along the way. And I think that is a big part of why the Dodgers are doing this.

It's not so that they can skirt competitive balance tax stuff as much as it is that I think they think that they can just make more money. They can invest that money, even if it's set aside in an account, they can have that generating interest. These are professional money makers. This is what Andrew Friedman did. He was a Wall Street guy before he was a baseball guy. And obviously in their ownership group, they have professional rich people who think like, if we set this money aside, we can essentially make money, even with the inflation and everything, we can just out earn the interest rate.

Our rate of return will be better just because we know how to invest this and we have various investment opportunities available to us. So they think in the long run, this will work for us. And Friedman went on to say that one of the other advantages is that just by finessing these terms, it's just helped get deals done. He said, I think a little bit with having a number of our star players with deferrals, I think has made it something that guys have no

issue with and in some cases may even desire, at times where we've gotten to a little bit of an impasse on a deal and either their sides brought it up or us, at times it's really helped provide, help close that last mile. So I guess if there's some last sticking point and then one side or the other is like, ah, let's just solve this by moving some money around. You know,

a little bonus here, a little deferral there, you know, maybe that'll help us cross the T's dot the I's. And Friedman said something to the effect of what I was saying last time, which is that the reasons the Dodgers are the poster people for this currently, I think has to do largely with the Otani deal and people making maybe invalid conclusions based on that or extrapolating from that because what Friedman said is, I think the Shohei one was just very extreme. But if you set the Shohei contract aside, the rest are all within the norm and standard operating procedure that a lot of teams have done. But I think the Shohei one is just jarring to people

because it's so different. And I think that the others just unfairly get lumped into that, but I think it's kind of a lazy narrative. And he has a motivation to say that, but I think he's kind of right. I think Otani was unique. Otani had offered that arrangement to other teams too. He just ultimately preferred the Dodgers.

And I think one of these things is not like the other kind of case. And so because of Otani, each subsequent deal that the Dodgers have done that had deferrals, it's kind of confirmation bias. It's like, oh, the Dodgers are doing something poorly here. They're up to that whatever it is again, right? They're at it again. Whatever it is. Yeah, right. So I think that's a lot of it. The Nationals used to do this routinely too, right? They deferred. And the point is what I have learned is that deferrals have been pretty routine now for years and years and years. There is nothing new under the sun, really just in

general in baseball or sports but especially when it comes to contract deferrals. Otani was extreme and drastic but any of these other deals, Snell or Edmund that we're talking about, the run-of-the-mill deferrals, there's precedent for this stuff going back decades and decades. So what I have learned is that it seems like a big moment for deferrals in sports contracts. Actually came not from baseball, but from the ABA, the American Basketball Association, which was the- Interesting.

Yeah, the rival league to the NBA in the late 60s and early 70s before they finally merged in the mid 70s. The ABA was the upstart and was trying to compete. And one way they competed was to offer these massive surface level deals that in fact were heavily, heavily deferred. And they actually, there was a name for it. It was called the Dolgoth Plan,

which was named after this guy named Ralph Dolgoth. The Dolgoth Plan sounds like a test that Kirk had to do at the Academy, right? Like the Dolgoth, or his answer to a test scenario. It's like, oh, we'll implement the Dolgoth Plan. You're confronted with a Kobayashi Maru, we'll implement the Dolgoff plan. You're confronted with the Kobayashi-Maru, you respond with the Dolgoff plan. So Ralph Dolgoff he was a basketball player in the 1930s at St. John's and he briefly played professional basketball, but then he became an accountant. And that's where he made his major contribution

to basketball because he helped engineer the rise of the ABA as a legitimate league by inventing the Dolgoff Plan. And in Terry Pluto's book about the ABA titled Loose Balls, which sounds like something we would probably, yeah. But the sports agent Ron Grinker explained, the ABA was the first to start throwing around the big money, but the money wasn't really that big. It was paper money, annuities, the Dolgoff Plan. So, for example, Jim Ard was a forward out of the University of Cincinnati.

He went to the ABA, there was a bidding war, they landed Jim Ard by signing him to a $1.4 million contract, and that was a lot in 1970 or so. And Grinker said, the actual cash was 250,000 over four years. The New York Nets, ABA team at the time, put 8,000 a year for 10 years in a Dolgoff plan, an annuity that Aard would collect from the age of 41 until 65.

Despite the fact that this was a long payout, the ABA paid Ard more in real cash than Seattle offered, so we took it. So the Dolgoff plan was important because the surface number generated headlines and attracted eyeballs, 1.4 million. And the NBA saw those surface numbers and then began to give players those actual amounts. They would give players those numbers in upfront. Yeah, like with present value. With deferrals. Right, not deferred payments.

Interesting. And then that ended up being a problem for both leagues because suddenly they were handing out money hand over fist, but it allowed the ABA to gain ground on the NBA at the time. And so a lot of players, prominent players were signed to Dolgoff Plan deals and Jim Ard, Spencer Heywood, Billy Cunningham, Dan Issel. Heywood is an interesting one. I was reading a piece about him by David Friedman and he noted in the 1970s, the average player salary rose from $35,000 in 1970 to $180,000 a decade later.

Franchise values went up more than 600 percent and the cause of the skyrocketing salaries was that NBA-ABA competition and the ABA opened a new front in that war with the signing of Haywood who was the 19 year old star of the 1968 US Olympic gold medalists. He had played only one year of junior college ball and one year at the University of Detroit before he joined the ABA's Denver Rockets for the 1969-70 season. His contract was announced as a 6-year, $1.9 million deal, but the vast majority of it, $1.5 million, would be paid to him at the rate of $75,000 a year for 20 years after he turned 40. The Dolgoff Plan. Put a portion of his salary into a mutual fund or some other growth fund for 10 years, then wait an additional 10 years, then pay out over the following 20 years. But it wasn't clear what would happen to his deal if he didn't play the full six

seasons for the Rockets or the ABA folded, and so he jumped leagues, signed a six-year $1.5 million deal with the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA, who gave him $100,000 a year for 15 years, all cash, no deferrals, no Dolgoth plan. This is why Grinker said that this paper money vs real money battle nearly bankrupted both leagues. And then Heywood went on to be at the center of an antitrust case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which he won. That was about the NBA's four-year rule, which said that a player couldn't be drafted or signed to an NBA contract until his college class graduated.

But the point is, he didn't stick in the ABA after signing that seemingly big money deal. And for people who stayed in the ABA The Dolgoff plan evidently tended not to work out too. Well, I found this interview with Jim Ard many years later at Celtic Nation and Jim Ard said first I'll tell you about the lore of the Dolgoff plan and then I'll tell you about the reality of that arrangement The lore was that it made the value of the ABA contract far larger than what the NBA was offering. The face value of the contract with the Nets was 1.4 million, and that's what was reported in the news,

but the actual dollar value was nowhere near that dollar amount. It worked out to be 250,000 over four years. And yes, the Nets agreed to put 8,000 a year for 10 years in a Dole-Goff plan, which was an annuity that I would collect starting at age 41. That sounded all well and good given the financial forecast at the time of my signing.

But the stock market took a horrible turn almost immediately after the ink had dried. The money was locked into some really bad investments, so bad that the plan was worthless by the time I was old enough to begin collecting. I went to court over the way the plan was constructed and eventually received a small settlement. It was nowhere near the $1.4 million face value of the contract. So it was valuable to the ABA, but it was on paper. It just didn't pay out for those particular players,

but it was potentially influential because other people saw this happening. And I think this helped cement this tactic. Now it's hard to pin down the first player who ever had deferred money in their deal. And I would guess if you could go back to the dawn of professional sports, you would probably find

something akin to this even back then. I did find one allusion to Ted Williams, again, there's that man. No way. Yeah, potentially being the first in baseball. So according to AP writer Will Grimsley writing in 1974, Ted Williams was the first in baseball to get such a contract in the 1950s with $100,000 straight salary from the bus and red socks and $50,000 to be paid over a period of years. Since then in almost every big time pro sport, such contracts have escalated and become routine. Most big time athletes now have attorneys or managers negotiating their contracts with clauses to soften the income tax bite." And that's not always in the case of a deferred payment. I couldn't immediately confirm that Ted

Williams had such an arrangement. There was a lot of reporting at the time about how much money he was making, but I didn't see anything immediately about a deferred payment like that, but it wouldn't surprise me. Of course, contract totals and details were far less known publicly back then, so it's hard to establish exactly when this really started. But if Ted Williams was the first, who knows? You could go back and maybe Babe Ruth had some similar arrangement, who knows?

However, I think a real landmark moment, you might wonder like, okay, when did free agents start getting these sort of deals in baseball? Well, there never was a free agency without these sorts of deals. In fact, the very first modern free agent in Major League Baseball became a free agent because of a deferred payment arrangement. So 50 years ago this month, just in a couple of weeks away, the 50th anniversary of this decision, a pretty landmark one, December 16th, 1974, here's the headline, AP, catfish free, bid war near.

So the AP said, catfish Hunter, baseball's leading pitcher, was declared a free agent today and the Oakland A's were ordered to fulfill his contract and pay deferred compensation, including interest. The Major League Baseball Players Association made the announcement in a three and a half page statement, which said that the pitcher's case against Charles Finley, owner of the A's, had been upheld in arbitration. The historic arbitration ruling apparently was granted to Hunter in recognition of his claim that Finley failed to meet the 28-year-old right-hander's contract, which called for $100,000 a year over two seasons.

The contract called for $50,000 in regular salary each season for Hunter and another $50,000 to be given in deferred payments to an insurance company. This is a fairly common method, it says, used by high-salaried athletes to avoid paying high taxes, and it was this deferred payment part of the contract which Hunter claimed Finley reneged on. So he had this deferred part of the deal and Finley didn't pay it, and thus Catfish Hunter got to become a free agent because of that. And in arbitration, it was ruled and this was not the Peter Seitz decision,

but a Peter Seitz decision. This preceded by a couple of years the really landmark decisions that instituted free agency across the board. But this was sort of a prelude to that. And it was because of a deferred deal. So if not for that deferred structure of Catfish Hunter's free agent, he would not have become a free agent at all. And he did. And it was the first time something like this

had happened in modern baseball history. And people were saying, oh, he might get a million dollar deal. He ended up getting a five year deal from the Yankees worth 3.35 million, which was a sign of things to come. Hey, if a great player is suddenly available to the highest bidder and anyone can have him as opposed to the reserve clause situation where you're bound to one team for basically as long as they want to keep you, then you stand to make a lot of money, as a lot of players soon learned. But yeah, it was a deferred deal that made that happen,

this landmark case. So there really never was free agency without this sort of arrangement. And based on the language in the report there, Catfish was not the only player who had that kind of deal. He was just the one who had a big deal and didn't get what was due to him and thus was able to wangle a free agency out of it. Wangle. Wangle. Eventually, he was compensated by Finley. Two years later, it was ruled after appeals that Finley was actually on the hook for that deferred payment that he had agreed to give Hunter. So in addition to the millions he got from the Yankees, seemingly he also collected from Catfish Hunter eventually. But that's, I mean, 50 years ago. If anyone who thinks this is new,

like the Dodgers have invented some new form of compensation here. Not at all. This has been going on for a very long time. And it all comes back to the A's. Yeah, I guess it does, who had cheap owners a long time ago too. And the other thing is that this then became common once free agency

was really instituted in earnest and a lot of players, a lot of prominent players at the time because salaries took off and escalated so quickly, that escalated quickly, not just an anchorman quote, but in free agency too. And suddenly teams were looking for ways to hand out these giant contracts to free agency and not be on the hook for it immediately. And so a lot of player prominent players from that period had these deals. We have talked about the Bruce Souter contract, the Bruce Souter deal with the Braves that went on for decades and decades and decades and everything people say about the Bobby Bonilla deal

and Bobby Bonilla Day with the Mets, that applies even more to Souter. Like it predated the Bonilla deal, it lasted longer, and we've talked about that. It is funny, by the way, side note, that people often used Bonilla Day to dunk on the Mets. Right? Like it was always, you know, for people who didn't really understand that,

they would laugh at the Mets for still being on the hook to Bobby Bo for all this money, years after he had stopped playing for them. Right. So people treated that as if it was stupid by the team. And yet now, it seems like people are treating these deferred payments as if it's the team doing something that benefits them in an untoward way. Right? Like hasn't that almost flipped? Like if you think it's super clever for the team to be doing it now, unless this is like a reaping, sowing situation, it's like when that player is getting those payouts, people say,

oh, wasn't the team dumb to do this? But when those payouts are still decades away, people are saying, oh, aren't these teams smart or skirting the rules or something? I think that our general financial literacy is low as a people, but also I think people enjoy dunking on the Mets. So, you know, who could say which of those phenomenons is more at play here? Yeah, the Wilpons and the Madoff situation and all that came into play there. So maybe that was part of it.

It was just a LOL Mets thing as much as anything. I think that played a part, yeah, for sure. You didn't get quite as much about the Braves and Souter Day, really, even though you should have probably. But I suppose. Yeah, I found that club owners were not pleased about that suitor arrangement at the time. Oh, really? And here's some reporting by Murray Chass, New York Times. Originally, this is December 1984. So this is the 40th anniversary of this happening, headline club owners censure Turner for suitor offer.

This is Ted Turner, who was at the time like very high publicity, would do all sorts of stunts, you know, use the superstation money and threw it around, right? And here's this story from Chess. Nationally club owners voted at their meeting in Houston last week to censure Ted Turner for his contract offer to Bruce Souter. The owner's action, instigated primarily by the St. Louis Cardinals, Souter's former team, prompted the Atlanta owner to restructure the offer to the free agent relief pitcher, a move that actually raised the value of the contract from $9 million for six years to

$10 million. The censure motion, which some owners believed was the first of its kind, was passed last Thursday by a vote of 11 to one, with the Braves the only dissenting club, unsurprisingly. Most owners contacted about the censure declined to discuss the action, citing its highly sensitive nature. However, some owners confirmed it with the understanding that they'd not be identified.

Turner did not return telephone calls, blah, blah blah blah. According to one owner, the suitor matter epitomized the general feeling the owners have about Turner. They think he's made millions of dollars by televasing Braves games on his national Superstation and has spent some of those millions on signing players such as suitor who make the Braves attractive entertainment on the cable station. In this particular instance, another owner said the Cardinals were most upset. That was because they thought they were about to lose their premier relief pitcher to the Braves. At the core of the owner's concern was the deferred money that makes up such a heavy part of the suitor contract.

There is substantial deferred money that didn't look like it would be funded, one owner said. We wondered about the long-term liability. Would the league or other teams be liable if something happened with Turner and the Braves? However, other baseball officials acknowledged that the owners had discussed the censure matter and voted on it without knowing all of the facts involved in the funding of the 30 years worth of Souter's deferred payment. One person familiar with Turner's original offer said Turner planned to put $4.5 million into an insurance-type plan at the start of the contract and that the plan would have created the deferred payouts until the year 2021. Eventually the source said Turner would have received tax breaks on his initial investment

so that the real cost of the investment to him would have amounted to only $1.7 million. Souter, meanwhile, would have received another $4.5 million in salary at $750,000 a year. And there was disagreement over whether Turner was forced to alter the offer because of the censure, but he did. So it was a 10 million thing where four and a half million went to suitor over the six years of the contract and the remaining five and a half went into this deferred payment plan. So, and this had a signing bonus too.

There was a signing bonus and a deferral just like the Dodgers are doing these days. So there was a censure, I guess, partly because owners just didn't like Ted Turner, but also because, yeah, that seems to have been the bulk of it. You know, just envy, he's getting the Superstation cash, but also like, hey, he's manipulating things. He's getting a guy by throwing this money around, but it's this weird structure and will they actually be able to pay this down the road? Because it was sort of extreme at the time. So the other owners were complaining about it the way that, I don't know, maybe some owners are kind of miffed about the Dodgers doing this, but I hear it mostly from fans and even media members these days. Yeah, well, and it's interesting, because I don't want to say that the continued financial success

of the league and the potential financial ramifications of one wild owner didn't matter to the other owners, because I'm sure it did to some extent. I think they mostly just didn't like Ted Turner. But it is sort of remarkable. We spend a lot of time on the podcast talking about like, oh my God, the training methods of these athletes are so much better and like the nutrition and they have cryo chambers and, you know, traject machines and all of this. But

like, you also saw the continued professionalization of the rest of baseball. And a lot of it came in this realm, right? Both on the part of players getting better and more sophisticated advice from agents and financial planners about how they should structure these deals and owners either trying to circumvent salary cap stuff or get creative with their financing. And then the league in theory putting rules around like how much of it you have to pre-fund and all of this stuff. It's just like, things used to be a lot more wild than they are now. Effectively? Couldn't say.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess at some point the accountants got better in addition to the players and they were, this was sort of a Wild West situation at the time. The Hunter deal, it was a 2-1 decision on the arbitration panel in his favor. The way it worked, I guess, was that the decision ordered the A's to pay Hunter the $50,000 it owes him from 1974 and to pay 6% interest on that amount from August 1st until the money is paid. His two-year contract, as I said, provided 50,000 a year in salary, another 50,000 in any way he wanted it. And so I guess the deferral was maybe his idea. He said, seeking to avoid high taxes and also to provide himself an investment, Hunter asked Finley to deposit the second 50,000 in a deferred payment with a North Carolina insurance company. Finley

offered to pay the money but reneged on with a North Carolina insurance company. Finley offered to pay the money but reneged on giving it to the insurance company claiming he could not write off such a payment on the team's tax returns." And so then that failure to pay up was what led to Hunter becoming a free agent. So it was partly Hunter, again, like his suggestion at the time that he wanted things set up that way because it would benefit him long-term. And some athletes, they like it because it essentially forces them to be financially responsible or gives them a backstop in the event that they're not because there have been a lot of sad stories about players who they squander all of their cash and young men, they suddenly get super wealthy and they're not financially responsible and

they don't set things up to benefit them long-term and suddenly they're flat broke by the time they're done playing. Hopefully, these days players have money managers and agents and people who are looking out for them, but not in all cases. If they have some sort of problem with spending, but even if they're just kind of casual about it. And so if you do have these deferrals built in, then they do kind of guarantee, I guess, if you don't go too deep into debt, that you're sort of set for life.

Because even if you're not making your money quote unquote work for you, you are still getting large payments for years after you're not actually earning actively income. Make your money work for you. Yeah, I mean, I think that like, it's a complicated question. There's the personal, I don't wanna say personal responsibility,

that's like so much more moralistic than I mean it, but like this ability to sort of be responsible with your money and plan for the longterm, even though it's fun to like be a young person who can go buy whatever you want. You know, I'm sure that financial planners also take into account what do they think the tax regime is gonna be now versus later?

Like how do they do the time value of money stuff? Like, you know, I think that there's a lot that goes into it, but it's the sort of thing that you want a financial person to help guide you through because that's its own, you know, area of expertise and it tends to be a distinct one from like hitting a baseball. So, right. And I found this AP piece from 1976 that notes, super salaries receive super headlines, but the fact is much of the money is deferred for tax purposes asked if he was financially secure

hunter said he wasn't and this was again after he signed that deal with the Yankees now he might just have a different definition of secure than some other people but he said quote I haven't gotten the money that was promised me yet I can't guarantee I'm gonna get it either I had to borrow $50,000 to pay my taxes last year. Oh, God. Which his attorney confirmed in the story because, the attorney said, it just means most of his money is tied up for the future. So I guess that's the potential downside. You just, it's earmarked, right? So you kind of have long-term security, but in the short term, maybe you're not quite living

as large as people might assume. I also wonder, I mean, these days the numbers are so large that it's probably not gonna make a material difference to you, even if you're not Shohei Otani and you're getting extraordinary amounts of endorsement dollars, even if you're Blake Snell or Tommy Edmond for that matter, you're making enough that probably you won't really feel the hit of not getting that money immediately, I would imagine, right? So that probably makes it even

more palatable to players, I guess, because at this point, it's almost like funny money, sort of. It's like these are almost imaginary dollars, you know, I couldn't possibly spend this much money. So get it if you can, you know, the owners have even more of it, but also you might be more amenable to these arrangements than you might have in the past. Yep, that strikes me as right. And just a couple other things to note. I found this 1981 look at this, that it's a New York Times piece, in swinging a deal in pro sports,

baseball has the oddest contracts. And it notes this kind of thing was more common in baseball, even though it was sort of a basketball thing before it became a big baseball thing maybe. A lot of the machinations that were going on with contracts at the time were in baseball. So the Times obtained some documents on salary figures and it says they show that some highly publicized salaries have been erroneously reported or are not quite so high because they are deferred to the 21st century when inflation could cut

their spending value considerably. And there's a quote here that says, in baseball, deferred income is fairly common, says Peter Rose, associate counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association. No way. Yeah. No way. Different, different Peter Rose, but yeah.

But in basketball and hockey, this goes on to say, most money is paid the year it is earned. No one has the same confidence in hockey teams as they do in baseball teams. That's so funny. Explains Art Kaminsky, the lawyer who with associates around the country handles about a third of the NHL's players.

The newest thing now in basketball is tax-deferred annuities, but these are paid through an insurance company instead of through a team. Contracts run the gamut in the NBA. There are lots of different perks, but not so many deferrals. And I guess there was just like,

baseball had been around forever and it was seen as maybe a more solid business than basketball and hockey at the time, which were not quite as big as they subsequently got. And so that's maybe part of the reason why this was and even is now still more common in baseball. And I guess, you know, other sports, they have limitations on this. Currently MLB has just no restrictions on this in the CBA, like the amount or the percentage that you can defer.

Whereas the NFL has, I think it's 50% of the salary, that's like the max you can defer. And in basketball, I think it's 25%. So a little more stringent where, yeah. How much of that I wonder is about those sports having salary caps, though. Yes, that's a big part of it too. Yeah.

And also like, you know, they have like max deal designations, right? Where like, if you get one of those, what's your incentive to take deferred dollars, I guess? Cause it's just kind of, it's built in basically, right? So this has been a more common thing in baseball and I guess there are various reasons for that. That 1981 piece also mentioned some other players at the time, some stars in baseball, not just Souter, but Dave Parker of the Pirates has a base salary of $300,000 a year on a five-year deal ending in 1983.

He also received a $625,000 signing bonus, but in addition to incentive bonuses he will be getting more income, $5,625,000 deferred payable from 1990 to 2010. Although some people might add that deferred money to his annual income as part of the five-year package, which would bring his income to $1.5 million a year, it is not accurate to do that when talking about how much those dollars will be worth decades from now. Irving Marks, a certified public accountant from Port Chester, New York, who is a player agent for several New York Jets, was presented with the figures from the Parker contract. If I were the owner and took $1 million when the contract began in 1979 and put it away

conservatively at 10%—again, this is sort of what the Dodgers owners are thinking to themselves. I could pay him the 5.6 million for 20 years. That's an average of $281,250 a year. And after the 20 years, I would have $1,340,811 left over. So basically it's not $5.6 million deferred said Marx. The whole contract is only costing about $1,825,000. Similarly, the Phillies Gary Matthews signed in 1977 a five-year deal with the Braves that must have looked pretty good to him. $100,000 a year plus $125,000 bonus to sign an investment fund

and an investment fund that started at $30,000 and went up to $10,000 annually to $70,000 this season. He also received $7,500 a month for 60 months deferred plus off-season employment at $250 a week plus a payment directly to Matthew's agent. Marx estimates that though the value of Matthew's contract might have looked as if it were worth $1.172 million, it was actually worth 167,000 less. And he had to pay a commission to his agent.

So again, this was when people were kind of getting used to the idea that, oh, these dollar figures aren't actually what they sound like. The sticker shock here isn't quite as shocking as what it's supposed to be. And same thing, Red Sox signed Jim Rice to a record contract early 1985, and people's minds boggled at the terms involved here, but it was not quite the same. The agreement includes a signing bonus that was said to be about three and a half million, with about two million of that deferred. So there was a signing bonus and part of the signing bonus was deferred. So it's just wild. Yeah all these things have been as complicated as

they currently are more or less for about 50 years now. So yeah it's just not new. And then finally came across this article when I was talking to my buddy Zach Cramm at The Ringer. this was sort of a survey of how things stood, where things stood and how they had evolved from the LA Times in 2013, headlined, by deferring some earnings, athletes can help themselves and their teams. Again, like, it seems like we need to keep rediscovering this every decade or so. It ebbs and flows, it goes in waves and then it seems like a new trend, and there's a bunch of hand-wringing, and then people remember, oh, actually, this used to happen all the time, and this isn't actually new. And this article, it alludes to this. These deferrals occasionally

arise as a point of contention in contract negotiations. Fans seem to love deferrals when an expensive player takes one to help a team buy a quality player or two in the short term, but fans quickly change their tune when they realize a guy long gone is still cutting into their favorite team's payroll. It's just, you can't have it both ways. I mean, you can and you do, I guess, but it's very much the famous reaping sewing tweet, you know? The me sewing, haha, f*** yeah, yes, me reaping, well this fucking sucks, what the fuck? It is basically that, but in contracts.

And in 2013, when this was written, only one current NHL player had a deferral as part of his deal, according to the Players Association. About 10 current major league baseball players have deferral clauses in their contracts down from 50 a decade ago, according to the Baseball Players Union. A few NFL contracts have deferrals,

but the Players Association could not provide an exact number. In the NBA, less than 5% of free agent signings in the last four years, including deferred compensation. Football agent Kenny Zuckerman said, "'You're dealing with young people "'who typically want that money in their possession.'" So yeah, you know, a lot of young people,

retirement's a long ways away, right? I'm rich, give me the lump sum. And you know, a lot of times the lump sum is better, I guess, if you're investing wisely, but a young player might not necessarily be. But that's interesting, right? That in 2013, there were 10 MLB players with deferrals, and a decade before that, there had been 50. And I don't know what the number is now, but it's certainly a heck of a lot higher than 10. You can probably just about get to 10 with

the Dodgers alone almost. So I don't know if that's because of, you know, just shifting market forces, how good you think your return on investment is going to be, like what's the confidence in the economy as a whole, the CBA, team finances, you know, it's driven by players and teams, of course. So I don't know exactly what causes like this to be a boom time for deferrals. And then there are valleys and nadirs at other times too. But it's a pretty time-honored tactic. And one thing that this 2013 story notes

is the example of Mario Lemieux, right? Which is a famous one. So, you know, this guy, Mark Edelman, who teaches sports law, he said, in some ways, it's not much different than a team taking out a loan to sign a star. Let's spend now and deal with paying later. And in baseball, advent of free agency led to a flood of contracts with deferred money as teams searched for ways to absorb larger and longer deals. Acceptance of the deferrals began to wane when teams wouldn't offer interest on the

later payments. However, the financial stability of teams also came into question. The Pittsburgh Penguins owed Mario Lemieux about $30 million when the team filed for bankruptcy in 1998. Deferred salaries are an unsecured form of credit, meaning they are not legally guaranteed if a team runs out of money. This worked out for Lemieux because he converted the outstanding balance into a stake in the team, and only after he became the team's owner did he pull out some of what he had been owed. So he rolled the dice and it worked for him, and you know, maybe it didn't work for Jim Ard and these other guys, but Lemieux, I think it worked out for him long term. But there is a risk, I guess, of the team

or the league or something going belly up or the economy collapsing or whatever it is. So, you know, I guess what I'm saying is that this is the way that Shohei Otani ultimately ends up owning the Dodgers is that somehow, you know, the Dodgers go broke and Otani's do hundreds of millions of dollars and he converts it into an ownership stake and suddenly Shohei Otani owns the team. Maybe that happens down the road. But I guess if you're a player and you're looking at the broadcast landscape and saying, will these teams be quite so solvent? Do I have to worry if this team will be doing business in 2046?

What will the landscape look like? Then I guess you might be a little reluctant based on that. But generally, it's been a good time to be in the sports business for most of the last 50 years and certainly of late. Yeah, but deferrals don't get you anything in the water wars. Right. That'll do it for today. Thanks as always for listening.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild as have the following five listeners who have signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Harlan Petoyan, Ellis Brucksfort, Susan Shamgar, Jules Redding, and Tri Solaris, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes,

playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, autographed books, discounts on merch and ad-free fan-grossed memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. memberships and so much more, check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site.

If not, never fear, you can contact us via email. Send your questions or comments or intro and outro themes to podcast at bandgraphs.com. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild sub-reddit at r slash Effectively Wild. You can sign up for Effectively Wild's Secret Santa until December 10th, and you can find the link to do that

on the show page at FanGraphs, or in the episode description in your podcast app, where we also link to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then.

They'll still be speaking statistically, assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Just a couple of baseball nerds