Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2301: Organing Day

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and FanGraphs writer Dan Szymborski banter about how much spring training stats matter, which players improved their projections the most this spring, whether prospects really have a harder time making the transition to MLB from Triple-A today, their spring training award winners, the five-ish biggest questions/storylines for each of them this MLB season, […]

Hey everyone, just making sure you know that there's a fun conversation with Josh Cantor, Fenway Park organist for the Red Sox later on this episode. I don't actually mention that until it's time to tee him up and bring him in. So now you know and it's worth sticking around for. Also, if you're listening to this before first pitch on opening day, go to ewstats.com and assess the likelihood of our bold predictions. actions. Fais super Une fête La la la, la la la La la la, factivement saurage

La la la, la la la La la la, factivement saurage Hello and welcome to episode 2301 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg Rally of FanGraphs because she has succumbed to the positional power rankings. She has fought the good fight, but ultimately she needed a day to vanquish them once and for all.

And so filling in for her here at the start is one of the positional power rankers, Dan Zinborski of FanGraphs. Hello, Dan. I bet I'm one of the causes of her exhaustion, I'm sure. Yes, I think that's not inaccurate, but it's really not your fault. It's more just the fault of the positional power rankings

as an entity, but she's been working round the clock. And then I just said, do you need a day? And she said, yeah, I could use a day. So she will be back next time. Just after she wraps up everything and gets to enjoy opening day and a baseball nap on opening day, hopefully a well-deserved baseball nap. And we'll be back to talk about that on Friday. You have also been busy as we have been talking about off air, cause you've got a lot of projections to run

before the season starts. You have to get all of your dance simulations in here so that you can pass judgment on what exactly will happen. And you can look prescient in retrospect and you can run all the Sims so that the season doesn't actually need to be played because you have already pronounced what will happen.

Yeah, you see, my feeling is that wrong projections are errors in reality, not the projections themselves. I made the decision to finally start implementing post spring training projections, and since as is my want, I had the good idea before considering what a hassle or headache it would cause. Because there's only one day between spring training games and the start of the season, which means I need to get 4,000 players projected during that day.

And the problem is, even using two computers, it takes Zip's slightly more than a day to do projections. So I've had four computers splitting up the projections and running today and I'm just finishing it now. And now I'm double checking and I still have 22 guys who need projections. So I'm frantically getting this all done. Because the problem with projecting the season

is you kind of have to have it done before the season. Yeah, I know, that is a problem. Because yeah, if you produce the projections before the season. Yeah, I know that is a problem, because yeah, if you produce the projections after the season starts, granted there have already been two games played as we speak, but that doesn't count, I guess. But yes, you have to get it in before they actually start, or yeah, it's a pencils down sort of situation.

I think you'll get there, and your work on post spring training projections is actually something I wanted to ask you about because it's the eternal debate of all times. Does spring training matter? Is there some signal amid the noise? And you have found that there is. Cubs Pobo Jed Hoyer told the Athletic earlier this month, spring is meaningless. I assume whoever looks good will have a 520 OPS in April.

Not so, according to Dan Simborski. How have you studied this and how have you incorporated spring training performance into projections? Well, I was a skeptic for a very long time about spring training statistics. If you go back 20 years, you can probably find me snarking about the overuse of spring training stats. And they're still overused probably.

But a fellow by the name of Dan Rosenheck about a decade ago reached out to me and he said, Dan, can you give me your database of projections you've done? Because I want to see how spring training stats would affect them. So I gave him to him and he found that spring training stats obviously aren't as meaningful

as regular season stats, but they mean something. So really since then I've been kind of researching and figuring out how to implement it in a way which I could actually have things done before the season and have it be logical. A random spring training plate appearance is less meaningful than a regular season plate appearance, don't get me wrong, but it does mean something and it means that a special something for players that we don't have a lot

of information on, especially when we're talking about recent draftees who haven't played much professional ball. This is actually real information. It's not perfect, but it's baseball that they're playing and it means something. And it slightly improves projections to include them. I mean like a sliver because we've gotten all the low hanging fruit out of the way unfortunately. There are no bananas left. They're all like these weird cultivated berries

that are at the top of the tree that nobody could get and they have to be boiled or they're poisonous. So I hope that they make the projections a little more interesting for people. So you have a percentage of how much they matter compared to a quote unquote real regular season plate appearance and you've derived that based on what several spring trainings worth of data that you've looked to see how they have

affected things? Yeah I got 73% I basically I ran a computer a couple years ago for about three months all it was doing during this time was reprojecting the season with different weights for the spring training stats. In the end, about 73% as meaningful is kind of the number it came up with. I did a lot of cross-validation to kind of project subsets to make sure I wasn't overfitting or just coincidental that all that data, that was the best fit, But 73% about is what I would go with. Obviously for some players, it's gonna be different

because the spring training stats are a larger part of their resume, so to speak. I guess a good example of a player who is, and I'm probably gonna pronounce his name, Jack Caglionone. Did I pronounce that right? Caglion? Seems like it should be pronounced differently because there are just more letters than that in there, but I think that's how it's said. Or is the G silent? I can't remember

listening because I know I've heard his name be said, but there's so many names. And I'm very careful with Italian names because I don't want to sound like I'm imitating Mario from Super Mario Brothers. Then people will be very mad at me. But anyway, he was one of the players that got the biggest boost because what it came down to is that he only played a month in the Midwest league last year and some Arizona fall league stats, which I'm not at the point where I'm using those yet. So actual meaningful spring training stats, which he hit really well in spring training,

and that's information. And the idea is to weigh what information means, not throw out information unless you absolutely have to. Yeah, I remember Dan's article that was in The Economist that was, yeah, a full 10 years ago. And as I recall, he pointed out that because samples are small, it's like if there's a dramatic difference, if you have some big power outburst or what qualifies as a breakout in spring training, then that

could actually sway things. So yeah, I guess because it's just inherently small samples, the greater the percentage of your total projectable playing time it accounts for, and then also just how dramatic a difference it is that sways the projections just slightly again. So who shows up then, according to your projections, as someone who this spring training has made a meaningful

difference for. Well, Kelly and Kelly and owner Kelly and owner. See, it's going to bother me now. Yeah. He shows up as extremely meaningful. Victor Scott, the second shows up. Trace Thompson shows up. He had a really weird spring training. Another player that helped was Zebi Matthews. So there are some interesting names in there. Of course, Zebi Matthews was sent down, I believe, the other day. But we'll have more up on fan graphs.

But after opening day, I'm not gonna propose another one to do tonight before all this. Well, speaking of articles from a decade ago, you helped me with one that was published that same spring, I guess, probably just a week or so before that Dan Rosenheck economist piece that we're talking about here. And we basically ran it back. I more or less rewrote the same article for the 10th anniversary because the topic was

relevant again. And it was about whether, I guess, gosh, how could I phrase it? I guess whether it's harder to be a baseball prospect than ever, whether the transition from the minor leagues to the majors, from AAA to the majors, is just a bigger gap than it's ever been before. And whether that can just throw you for a loop, even if you're a very promising prospect, because the gap is just so big, the quality of pitching, it's like a chasm,

and you've never seen anything like this sort of stuff. And then you slump. And even though you're a highly rated prospect and your Zips projections are strong, the reality falls short of that somewhere. Jackson Holliday would have been the poster boy for this last year of your Baltimore Orioles, I suppose, where he's the number one draft pick overall, number one prospect overall, hits well in AAA, hits well in the minors. And then he comes up and he looks like he has never held a bat before for about,

oh, 36 plate appearances. I think it was in his initial cup of coffee and it was scalding for him. He did not put the lid on. There was no warning about how hot the cup of coffee would be. And it spilled all over him. And he struck out in half of his plate appearances with, I think, two singles and two walks, and then they sent him back down again to work on some things. And then he came back and looked a little less overmatched, but definitely not a match exactly either. So he ended up being

one of the worst hitters in baseball over the course of the full season He came back at the end of July and played out the string and it was better It couldn't have been worse, but it certainly wasn't what anyone expected from Jackson holiday And so there was a wave of think pieces Written last year at the athletic at the score at defector all about how? athletic, at the score, at defector, all about how the gap between the minors and the majors is bigger than ever. And this is something that I wrote about for Grantland, RIP, the late lamented defunct Grantland, in February of 2015 with help from you. And I guess you were probably at ESPN at the time. we were both at ESPN in some capacity

that may have been the first time we emailed or corresponded or interacted and I asked you for some data which you supplied and then 10 years later I had to say, hey, this spreadsheet that you sent me in 2015, could you refresh that for me? And we'll just do exactly the same thing again, because I guess we were both somewhat skeptical about this hypothesis or at least whether it was a bit overblown. So what was your thinking on how to even approach the answer to this question or why it can be kind of

confounding or how you even evaluate the respective strengths of the different leagues and levels? Well, one of the, I kind of thought going in that there might be an effect, but that it was probably pretty small. I know we talked briefly about this a few times last summer and we added this to my massive to-do list. I think that on one level, you have, right now,

there's been a pretty big difference in offensive levels between the minors and the majors. So I think on some level, when people see hitters have such a kind of a collapse in OPS, larger than you would expect, compared to a decade ago, where the majors had significantly more offense than the minors. I think there's kind of that feeling

that it's a wider gap between them. And also I think the reality when we talk about players like Jackson Holliday is that a few of the players that didn't hit last year were very well regarded in prospects. Holliday and for a while, Wyatt Langford, he kind of came around pretty well in the second half. But then you look at like, okay,

let's just say that the minors majors gaps is so large that a player like Holliday would struggle. Then you have to say, you know, Tyler Fitzgerald had a 132 WRC+, Spencer Horwitz had a 127, Michael Bush had a 119, Jackson Merrill skipped some of the minors and had a 130. So we were still seeing a lot of successes.

And learned a new position on the fly in spring trading. On the center fielder now. Like if you set up a boundary of 300 plate appearances, there were 14 rookies that had a 100 WRC plus in 2024. You go back a decade to 2014 and there were seven. So there have always been struggles from rookies because there's a difference between the minors and the majors.

So one thing I did for you is I took players who had 200 plate appearances in the majors, the minors in consecutive years or in the same year and solved just how they fared once you looked at part-neutral data. And we had slight differences, very, very noisy ones, but nothing that I would call earth-shattering. Nothing that would explain why Holliday struggled. It was the kind of thing where like, oh, maybe they're one OPS, one point of OPS plus difference, but not anything massive. Teams are probably more aggressive

at pushing their top players through the minors. But I think that's kind of a different issue than the difference between AAA and the majors. Yeah, I think this came to the fore early last season and there were all these articles written because yeah, Holiday struggled the way that he struggled. And then some other guys who were just highly rated rookies and prospects got off to slow starts.

So even Merrill had a little slump right out of the gate and Jackson Churio and Langford and Colt Keith. Some of these guys had sort of rough April's, but then you look up at the end of the season and with the exception of holiday, all those guys were either great or fine. Yeah, kind of, you know, what you would have expected. Ultimately, they righted the ship. And I guess you could have said the same about Gunnar Henderson, the preceding season where he started slow and then he came on

and he hit like Gunnar Henderson and he won the rookie of the year award. But there were those little hiccups. And I guess you could say that those hiccups prove the point that, okay, it took them a little time to acclimate to the majors. Or you could say, well, it's a small sample. And also some established stars struggle at the start of every season too. Remember how Francisco Lendor started last season, super cold, and then was hot the rest of the season. And also it's always been hard to make the majors and to go from AAA to the majors. And there are many famous examples of players, Willie Mays, Cal Ripken, Mike Trout, on down, who struggled in their first exposure to that level. And then yeah, as you said,

the rookies in many cases who were successful last year were guys who weren't even really on most people's radar coming into the season the way that some of the players I just named, so Fitzgerald or Austin Wells or Willier Abreu. There were guys having good years. It just wasn't always the guys that you expected to have had the biggest years. And so I think there was a little bit of a narrative that formed there. And I wrote that first take at this a decade ago because some of the same things were happening back then because that was when offense in the majors bottomed out

prior to the ball getting super lively and home run rates spiking and approaching unprecedented levels. And so that was a little bit of like a year of the pitcher type thing. And everyone fretting about, oh, no one can hit anymore. And pitchers have gotten too good. And it's like whenever there's a mismatch

between offense at AAA or in the minors in general, and MLB to the point where if you're not acutely aware of that, you don't do the mental adjustment that you need to do because you're looking at some prospect stats in AAA and you're just mentally saying, okay, he will just continue to do that when he gets to the majors. And you're maybe not accounting for the fact that,

actually MLB is just a much lower offense league right now, not just compared to the Pacific Coast League, which it usually is, but the international league too. It's just, it's a big gap. It's like, you know, 70 points of OPS comparing MLB last season to AAA combined and more if you're talking about the PCL. So you kind of have to factor that in where, forget about the gap between levels and the difficulty difference.

Just if you were to continue playing the way that you were playing and all else were equal, then you would still expect to see a significant haircut there when it came to the actual surface stats. Yeah. One thing I like to remind people is people went, went nuts for, uh, Devis and De Los Santos, uh, because he hit, he had, he slugged like five 88 and triple a. And I say, guys, it's a, it's a one 22 WRC plus in triple a that's because he plays

at the Pacific coast league. Right. Uh, that's not that great. One 22 in the minors is like a 102 in the majors. He's not like a beast of a prospect. Yeah, he was good in AA, but let's remember the difference between the leagues. And I think on the same level, we've seen a lot of pictures also adjust to the majors very quickly. When you say there's a larger gap for hitters

based on the differences in league offense, in some hitters parks, the translated ERA for the AAA picture is kind of just their ERA down there. Yeah, that's the thing. When people say there's a growing gap, that is true in a sense. It is true just if you look at the difference in OPS across levels, but I think when people say that they mean something a little different than just that superficial, you know, like park and league effects basically, like, you know, if someone goes from Coors Field to T-Mobile or something, we know that their stats are going to decline, the surface stats,

but the adjusted ones probably won't. And we don't say, oh, they suddenly forgot how to hit or they had some weakness that was exposed. If anything, if they're going from the Rockies to some other team, probably their weakness was closed at that point. It's less likely for them to have a weakness. But I think we're comfortable with that and we're familiar with that, but you might not necessarily know, oh, wow, there's just this disparity right now

between AAA and the majors and the offensive level, which I guess you could say confirms what people are saying about, oh yeah, there's this growing gap, but I don't think that's what people mean really, because we're talking about sort of relative to the league. Yeah, it's harder to hit in the majors than it is in AAA right now, but it's harder to hit for everyone, not just for the prospects.

And so the prospect performance relative to their league, to their competitors and their peers at that level, that's what you're going to be comparing them to in the majors too. You're going to be comparing them to the players there. And it's hard for everyone to hit there. And so if you look at the overall rookie performance, just WRC plus by rookie hitters by year, it has barely budged basically, you know, it's, it's always somewhere around, you know, 80 to 90%, 85 ish percent of the MLB average hitter is if you just lump all of the rookie hitters together. And that's where it still is. Basically, it was 88% last year and you know, the rookie classes and the composition of them will vary from year to year, but that's been pretty consistent. And the thing about this is just all this fretting about is the gap growing? Is it harder to do this? This is coming at a time

Is the gap growing? Is it harder to do this? This is coming at a time when we know that it's harder than ever to be an old player. And the aging curves have changed and not just compared to the PD era when some funny business was going on, but even the decade after testing was instituted. It's just, you know, guys are tailing off more quickly. And we've seen teams approach players in free agency accordingly. If you're in your mid thirties, there's just sort of a skepticism, even if you've been productive lately. And meanwhile, we've seen young players perform well.

So it's kind of hard to hold those two ideas in your head that, oh, it's like tough times for old players, golden age for young guys, but also it's really hard to adjust from the minors to the majors and that can just completely knock you out for a season. It's just, you know, are young hitters better than ever or not?

Like is it harder to do than ever or are they more prepared than ever? Are they more advanced than ever because they're getting such good toolage in amateur ball and then coming up through the minors and often getting promoted earlier? It's useful to look when you look just at the pictures that if the difference between AAA and the majors is growing, then we should be seeing fewer good pictures in the majors too.

We saw a lot of guys go through the system. If mean, if you do a minimum of 30 innings, there were 38 pictures that were rookies last year with an ERA below four. There were 15 with an ERA below three. If AAA is getting weaker, then you can say, okay, so is Hunter Gaddis just the best picture who ever existed? Rhett Lauder had a, I mean, it was,

his FIP was only three, but Rhett Lauder had a, I mean, it was, it was, there was, his fit was only three, but Rhett Lauder had a 1.17 ERA and six starts. The aging changes are actually more significant when you mention some of the older players. I found that I have been guessing high more often when I review those 10 year playing time projections, that I've been guessing high more often lately for 10 year projections for those older players,

not so much qualitatively as quantitatively, you're just seeing teams walk away from players so much quicker than they used to. Logically speaking, baseball's talent has increased enough that there should be an expansion, probably several teams. I'm not really crazy about that because I fear that the 32 team expansion will end up in eight four team divisions, which frightens me and destroys my soul a little bit. Yeah, I know. I think it's been long enough since the last round of expansion that for the health of the game when, you know, we're still trying to figure out the A's and the Rays and are the markets there and will the interest be there? That's sort of a separate question, I think, from just the talent level and the

depth of the league, which it's been a while. And it's not just that it's been a while and players are just kind of constantly getting better, but also the pool of potential players internationally is growing. Russell Carlton keeps writing about this. So I'm with you there. And, and there are reasons think, why you might say, yeah, it's harder to go from the minors to the majors now,

or this explains why offense is higher in the minors than the majors. Because you could say, well, okay, for one thing, teams just know so much at the major league level, and they know more than they've ever known before. And they also know more than they've ever known before at the minor league level but there's probably a little less effort that goes into advanced scouting at that level and a little less information and so you might have some some hole in your swing exploited even more so when you show up like

Jackson Holliday seemed to maybe with high fastballs and he kind of retooled his swing a little bit because it seemed as if they had perhaps probed and found a weakness there. So maybe the data-driven advanced scouting with complete stat-cast coverage and everything is just more comprehensive in the majors. There's also the fact that minor league teams play six game series now, twice as long as the standard series. And we've talked a lot about the familiarity effect and how hitters get the upper hand when they see the same pitchers over and over again. And, you know, they just know their opponents better perhaps.

And so that probably has some sort of effect going from six game series standard to three games series standard. And then I think teams do tend to promote promising pitchers more quickly now, because it's just easier to evaluate and develop pitchers with fewer reps. Like you don't have to leave them out there and say, oh, they just have to see a ton of triple A hitters and we'll find out what works. You can now just go to your pitching lab and do a bullpen session and just find out the characteristics of the pitch and see if that's going to play or not. I'm not saying there's no value to being in

games too, but you can tell pretty quickly whether a guy's got major league stuff and then you can advance him. And so I think teams have promoted pitchers even more quickly and thus because of that and because you're always kind of worried about when is his elbow going to explode. We might as well. That's one thing I was thinking because I think there's a fear of like the odometer in a way with pictures because hitters you can generally treat like a Toyota.

A good hitter you could expect will be around forever. You're not really worried. Yeah, hitters have severe injury, some career changing, but you have a 23 year old star. You kind of expect them to be a 33 year old star. Like no one's saying, I hope blonde soda doesn't fall apart at 31 and just goes out of the league. But with pictures, they're kind of like these really fragile Italian sports cars.

And you're like, oh, I don't want to use, I don't want to put miles on my Ferrari to pick up groceries. I want to put miles on my Ferrari to pick up groceries. Uh, I want to be cruising on a nice sunny day. If I'm only going to get, you know, 20,000 miles before I have to rebuild the clutch for $40,000 or something, I'm a good, that's where I want my mileage. I'm not going to spend it doing errands. And I think it's like, let's get the pictures up here when we're confident with them. Uh speaking The tools in the miners have improved to you has a lot more data available teams have a lot there The ways of coaching in the majors will always usually filter down to the miners eventually Yeah, one of the things I noted when I was giving you the data for the last 10 years is that?

Players who draw walks in the minersors, that has translated much better to the majors than in previous years. It was actually the most stark difference when I looked at the update versus the original data I sent you that the walks were translating better, which kind of suggests that the major league coaching style, that's pretty similar team to team has filtered down. No one is coaching a player anymore by saying, well, he's country strong. Just let him rip. Yeah, right.

But because you're advancing pitchers so quickly, you're not seeing Paul Skeens for very long in the minors. And so I think there might be something to the idea of you just, you're not going to get as many reps against that sort of high level pitching because it's all going to just get to the majors as quickly as possible. And that was kind of the old school idea of there is no such thing as a pitching prospect. The Gary Huck Bay idea from rec sport baseball and then baseball prospectus. It was partly that, yeah. Tint step. Yeah, tint step.

You can't count on a pitcher because they're hard to project or they were at the time and they'll get hurt. But it was also use them while you got them. It was, you know, don't treat them as a prospect that you're going to bring along carefully and slowly, but use them, you know, if there is sort of a finite number of pitches that they can throw. And I don't know that that's quite true. It kind of depends on their arm and their training and everything, but

if they are likelier to get hurt eventually, then might as well bring them along quickly and get the use of those pitches where it's really going to benefit you as opposed to quote unquote wasting them in the minor. So I think there's something to that. And then there's also probably something to the idea of there's been contraction with minor league teams. There are fewer roster spots. There are just fewer players under team control in affiliated ball. And so that has probably driven some veteran guys who were kind of, you know, maybe on the way down,

but close to major league quality, but on the downside of their careers. And they could have been hanging around and giving you a look at, you know, not just prospects, but veterans, guys who'd been in the big leagues or were kind of quadruple leg quality at least, those guys may be pushed out of the sport or pushed to the Atlantic league or the Mexican league or overseas or something, right? So I think there's probably something to that.

And also just over the past couple of years, at least there's been ABS tests going on in AAA. So challenge system, full ABS, and that has been something that has inflated walk rates and scoring. And also you can imagine it's probably tough in season. You know, some of these guys, like they had challenge system and then they had full ABS or the other way around, and then they get called up and suddenly they're back to human UMPs again. You know, some of these guys like they had challenge system and then they had full ABS or the other way around and then they get called up and suddenly they're back to human-umps again, you know, that's probably pretty jarring. It's probably hard to have a handle on the zone in those circumstances. So I'm not saying it's easy. It's never been easy to go from AAA to the majors. And if anything, it's probably harder than before, but I don't think that's responsible for the bulk of what people are picking up on here.

So if you're saying, gosh, should teams continue to push these prospects along and call them up for the opening day roster, even with the prospect promotion incentives, or are they asking for trouble here because they're not ready? Or if I'm doing a fantasy draft, should I bump these guys down my draft board

because what happened to Jackson Holiday is gonna happen to them? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think teams are worried about that. By the way, I really hate saying ABS. It sounds, well, first it means like anti-lock braking system. It also sounds like some sort of illness.

I can see the commercial for, do you ask your daughter, your doctor, about your moderate to severe ABS. Yes, well it does. I guess, argumentative battle syndrome or something. Right, it sounds like IBS sort of, yeah. If and when we get full ABS, I think it needs a rebrand. We need to dub it something else that just rolls off

the tongue a little bit better than that. But, you know, I have shown, and probably others have too, that there's just less minor league seasoning going on these days. Teams are calling up players, particularly pitchers faster. And we've seen that even this week with the Red Sox saying Christian Campbell, come on down. You've made the opening day roster. He's 22.

He was drafted in 2023. He has 137 games of minor league experience, basically a full season, which is a lot compared to Cam Smith, one of the darlings of spring, the Astros outfielder 22 also they got as part of the Kyle Tucker trade return and he was drafted 14th overall last year and he's played 32 minor league games and he has made the major league roster. And then of course, the angels are angels thing. And this is not new for them, but they've taken it to a new extreme now where they've had like the quickest guy from each draft class to make the majors for what four or five years running at this point.

But now it's like you can just skip the minors entirely because Ryan Johnson, 22 year old pitcher second round draftee last year, who has yet to pitch in a professional game, his first one will be in the majors. Well, I guess unless you count spring training, those are, I suppose, professional games, but you know what I mean. I'm trying to figure out the whole angels thing

because it's like, what's the hurry now? I mean, so you can win 76 instead of 75 games. Yeah. Where was this urgency when you had Houtani and Trout both helping each other? I mean, I guess they were doing it then too, with Chenowel and Chase Silceth and Neto and everyone else. But I don't know that it's always the best idea.

It's very aggressive, but he's gonna be the first player to just bypass the Miners entirely and just debut in the big leagues since Garrett Crochet. And that doesn't even really count because that was 2020. And so there were no minor leagues being played in 2020. So you have to go all the way back to Mike Leake in 2010 to see someone who's done this before. So it doesn't seem to me that teams are showing any sign that they are wary that they're like, we need to pump the brakes a bit because we're throwing these prospects into the fire. So I think there's just a little lack

of adjusting for context. And when you sent me the stats, just comparing players to themselves, neutralizing the stats, so we're taking the league and the park and everything out of the equation and just looking at these guys who went from AAA to the majors,

how much of their production did they retain stripping out all of these other ancillary factors. And it's very slight difference from how it has been, you know, according to your numbers, it's like since the 70s, basically for 50 years now, AAA has been somewhere between about 76% and 86% the quality of MLB. So that's sort of how much you would apply as sort of a discount rate when you're looking at a stat and saying how much worse is this guy going to be when he goes to MLB? And now it's definitely at the low end of that range and it's about as low as it's been, but not so much that you would notice if you took everything else out of the equation and you're saying, oh, it's now 76% the strength of MLB compared to the average of 80%.

Or, you know, we're talking a few percentage points. It wouldn't really make that noticeable a difference if not for this big mismatch in the offense at those levels. So that's my takeaway here. It's the same as my takeaway in 2015, but here I am again. And I already said, save that query because we'll be back with another sequel potentially in 2035 when this crops up again and everyone

starts writing about it. But yeah, I would say the kids are all right. Like it's going to be okay. These guys are, are good and I wouldn't really discount. There will certainly be young hitters and promising prospects who struggle this season. And on an individual level, I can't say who that will or won't be. But this transition tax to to borrow a Bill James term, which was a little bit different, but sort of the same idea.

I don't think it's really much more exorbitant than it has been historically. So, yeah, don't don't worry about your highly ranked prospects. They are still worth throwing into the fire and seeing what happens. But the plus side, we have a few more decades to review this piece. Because if you ask any writer, the best kind of piece is the one that you can write

multiple times and get paid for each time. I guess so, yeah. Multiple different jobs and websites I've written the same article for, so yeah, that's nice. I mean, not nice for you, because it means I have to keep bugging you to rerun these stats every now and then. Well, I said it out so that it'll give me that data

a little more quickly this time, because I tend to have to, I don't always have my various things set up so that I can easily get what I want without a nightmare. But I figure I could do this for three more decades. I guess you could ask 76 year old Dan, I don't know about 86 year old Dan, I might not be around or want to,

or just everyone's talking about robot players or something then and I'm just an old out of touch guy. By that point, hopefully Zips will be running so fast though that you won't need four different computers. You won't need to just force one computer to do nothing but apply different weights to spring training projections for months at a time, which sounds like some sort of severance style, just hellish existence

for that poor computer. But I guess its sacrifice was worthwhile because it slightly improved the accuracy of Zip's forecasts. That's its lot in life. Speaking of spring training, I joked recently, I think it was on episode 2288, about how we should award championships for spring training, like Grapefruit League versus Cactus League. There should be some sort of world series of spring training and we should crown the champion. And I did see some tweets and people sending congratulations to the respective champions of the leagues.

The San Francisco Giants went 21 and six this spring. And so they are far and away the champions of the Cactus League. They beat out the Royals who went 20 and 12 this spring. And then the Toronto Blue Jays were the champions of the Grapefruit League because they went 18 and 10. So congrats to the Giants and the Blue Jays, two teams that have fairly mediocre

regular season projections, but they are the champions of spring training. And again, I'd like to see them match up. I think I said it would be for none of the marbles would be the spring training championship. And I also suggested that there should be individual awards too, that we should hand out some hardware for spring training MVP, Spring Training Young Award

Winner, Spring Training Rookie of the Year, and some listener, I forget who, apologies, but wrote in or commented somewhere to say, you should do this. Be the change you want to see. Just, you know, if you want people to award awards for Spring Training, well, what's stopping you from being those people? So maybe quickly, we could just say, who's, who's your MVP of spring training this season, which I guess is a little bit different from who affected their projections the most, which might be another way of assessing that. But yeah, who's the most valuable player of 2025 spring training? I was, I was actually thinking Vinny Capra because he hit six home runs after

hitting like eight in the minors last year. But see, while you were doing that, I was just thinking of maybe MLB should sell like a mezcal and like a grapefruit liquor and the teams that win the league get all the revenues from those liquors for the next season. Yeah, I like that. Okay. And they, and like the Blue Jays won the Grapefruit League. And so they would get the thing and they could design the bottle with Blue

Jays logos and stuff. And you'd get MLBs, Pumplemousse liqueur and you drink it. And you know, mezcal and grapefruit juice actually go together pretty nicely in a nice drink that you can slam and drink a punch of. That might be nice, yeah, because breaking out the champagne for the Grapefruit or Cactus League Championship,

that might feel like overdoing it just a bit, but. No champagne, you can't do champagne for that. No. Because then you need to do, see, if you gave them champagne, then for the World Series, you'd have to get one of those ridiculously large champagne bottles. Because I don't know how familiar you

are with champagne bottling. But there are a lot of sizes of champagne bottle that are like official and they're all kind of like biblical names. Like there's like a 30 liter champagne bottle, which would actually be fun to see that go into clubhouse. Like I don't know how to say it, but I think it's called like a Melchizedek of champagne.

That's 30 liters. You can have like a Solomon of champagne or a Balthek of champagne, that's 30 liters. You can have like a Solomon of champagne or a Balthazar of champagne. But it'd be fun to see someone just take the 30 liters of champagne right on them during the celebration. I don't know why I'm thinking of that. Because we were talking about champagne celebrations for spring training, but might as well just

go all in if you're going to do that. We don't have spring training war, which seems probably like a frivolous exercise, but we do have the handy dandy fan crafts, spring training leaderboards, which have been a big advance in spring training stat availability. And so we can look at say the WRC Plus leader, who was Pete Crow Armstrong, whom I mentioned yesterday, he's moved back in the batter's box and he has kept up his torrid pace from late last season, 249 WRC Plus this spring. Now he qualified, but for the spring training batting title, which isn't really a thing. I guess if it were a thing, Curtis Mead would have won it. So he'd be another strong candidate

from the race here to be your spring training MVP. Cause Pete Cromer Strong, he had the highest WRC plus, but he also, he played, he had 35 plate appearances and there are guys with considerably more than that. So, you know, small sample of small samples. So I don't know if I can give him MVP. Like if we're looking for more of a cumulative stat, we could go with weighted runs above average on the FanGraphs leaderboards. Which again is just offense, not the holistic contribution. But if we

go with that, then Elie De La Cruz, he led all spring training hitters with 9.4 weighted runs above average and a 230 WRC plus. And he had 54 plate appearances. Now the leaders in plate appearances, Jordan Beck, Zach Vien, they had more than 70. So there's a big range here when it comes to qualifying. But being on this leaderboard, some guys have more than twice as much playing time. So that's why it's tough. And I was wondering, like if we awarded this and we could even do it retroactively, I think some of our listeners have compiled who would have been previous years, spring training

MVPs. How often would it have just been some random who maybe you remember that they had some hot spring training and then never panned out after that? Or how often would it be just one of the best players in baseball? So if it's Ellie, well, yeah, you kind of expect. It was almost Ellie last year.

He was actually second in weighted runs created last year behind Wyatt Langford. So he's good at the spring ball. The year before it was Michael Toglia of the Rockies, who actually had a pretty good 2024, not a 2023. And the year before, you have Jonathan India, 2022. Yeah, so this year, your leaders in weighted runs created, if we want to go with that,

Ellie Delacruz, Curtis Mead, Cody Ballinger, Hunter Goodman of the Rockies, Brett Beatty of the Mets, Jackson Churio, Curtis Mead, Cody Ballinger, Hunter Goodman of the Rockies, Brett Beatty of the Mets, Jackson Churio, Matt Chapman, Josh Lowe, Ty France, Jonathan India, Joey Ortiz. So there's a mix here of, yeah, these are great players and these are also some spring training, small sample stars maybe. So why not give it to Ellie? That's fun. I mean, I kind of want to give

it to someone who's kind of out of nowhere because Ellie will get his flowers in the regular season. He doesn't need the spring training MVP for his trophy case. He'll have other things, but I don't know what to do for a pitcher. The Cy Young of spring training, could we give it to, see, we don't have like a cumulative stat here so much that we can use. So we could say Garrett Crochet, who led spring training in FIP, at least among the 81 qualifiers on the leaderboard here, or Christopher Sanchez or Spencer Schwellenbach. Maybe we can give spring training Cy to Spencer Schwellenbach. He was, he was quite good.

And he also pitched more than 20 innings. Like your league leader was Will Warren with 23 spring innings and suddenly thrust into a pretty pivotal role for the Yankees. So I'd say maybe combination of workload and effectiveness, Spencer Schwellenbach of the Braves might be my spring sigh. I would actually give it to Schwalbeck because he's the established picture that got the largest boost in the projections

for post spring training. Zip's already liked him. His ERA was down I believe 363 before the spring and now it's down to 343. He's projected now for 2.9 war, so he's certainly helped himself. I'm scanning this leaderboard for rookies. Do we have a spring training rookie of the year? Someone who still has rookie eligibility?

See, I kinda wanna get Pete Crowe Armstrong kinda award because of his mother's career, he's kind of part of the little big league extended universe. And I think we can kind of like bring in Billy Haywood somehow, make that canon and all of a sudden the twins had better owners than the Polads. I guess maybe we should give a spring training rookie of the

year to Cam Smith. I mean, why not? Right. He 43 played appearances, 186 WRC plus earned himself a job that no one thought he was going to have heading out of spring training, breaking camp with the big club. Why not Cam Smith spring rookie of the year? Now the worst, I think the worst spring training player,

we have to say is Joey Gallo, not because of this year, but last year, he actually had negative runs created, I don't know how that happens. And his season was so bad that he changed professions to become a pitcher this spring. So I think that he's had the hardest. Probably, although Mason Winn is actually your leader or laggard in the clubhouse when it comes to worst spring training stats.

Negative 42 WRC plus, negative three weighted runs created. He hit 80, 080, 145, 80. So I love what advanced stats break because you can't really, that would be amusing if someone could be so bad that they actually take runs back off the scoreboard when they're up at the plate. Yeah. I love a negative FIP. We always get some of those early in the season. It just sort of breaks the scale. I like Mason Wynn by the way.

He's fine, but he's fine. But he's not, he did not have a good spring. It just sort of breaks the scale. I like Mason Wynn, by the way. He's fine. Yeah, he's fine, but he's not, he did not have a good spring. No, he did not. Okay, so those are our Spring Training Award winners. Before I let you go here, I just wanted to kind of get your top five storylines for this season or questions you have about this season

because other Ben Clemens, he did this in the form of a fan graph post on Wednesday and his big questions about the season were, are the Rays still the Rays? How many All-Star middle infielders play in Cincinnati? Who is the real Corbin Burns? Which version of the Braves will we get? Is the AL central for real?

And these are things that he's personally curious about, but also things that might sort of help determine how this season shakes out. So if you have a handful of things that you are personally most interested in or think will define the 2025 season in some way, I would be happy to hear them. I think one, I think that the MLB, MLBPA, slowly expiring collective bargaining agreement is going to get more and more attention. It's already getting a lot of notice. And I think we're going to see a lot of that simmer up

during the course of the season. See, I almost hope you're wrong about that. I know you won't be. I do too. But look, it's coming and I don't want to stick my head in the sand, but also I sort of do. It gets nice and warm and sandy down there and it's not scary at all. And this is kind of one of my questions about the season is just like, will this be a normal

baseball season? And what I mean by that is we've had a whole lot of abnormal baseball seasons lately, whether it was the pandemic, which was abnormal for all sorts of non baseball related reasons, but also certainly abnormal baseball wise, 60 game season, no fans in the stands or fewer fans in the stands, even when we had a regular schedule and short and spring trainings. And then of course we had the lockout and short and spring training after that, and a weird off season heading into 22 and then 23, we had a whole bunch of rules changes,

which I think on the whole, we're pretty positive, but still that was like, wow, this is a new era in baseball. We can actually tinker with significant stuff. Like we can change the meta, we can put out patch notes, like this will be a whole new baseball. And that was exciting. And I think it was overdue and welcome, but that was kind of the I think it was overdue and welcome, but that was kind of the dominant narrative. It was just, oh, things are different and there's a pitch clock and disengagement rule and this and that.

And then finally things sort of settled down and we had kind of a consolidation year last year. And then this year feels like our last chance to have just sort of a, yeah, normal, sleepy season, just like a calm before the storm, maybe in multiple ways, because yes, you're right. The potential for work stoppage and potentially a shortened or even canceled 2027 season

is already looming in the back of our minds and the storm clouds are gathering, but this feels like it could be the calm before the storm, whereas next season will certainly be played against the backdrop of like, is this gonna be the last baseball we have for a while? And there will be constant sparring in the press and the public and wars of words.

And it feels like for this year, yeah, it's bubbling up and it's going to be the closer we get to the CPA expiring next December, but maybe we could kind of tune that out and put that aside. It's hard. It is hard. But because kids, if you want to become a baseball writer, you might need to get used to an atmosphere in which every six years your job might not exist for a while.

Yeah, that is certainly true. Man, I can't even imagine just like full lockout season of Effectively Wild, how weird things would get here. I mean, it got weird enough just during the lockout, but... Yeah, and Kevin of course was weird because there was that constant situation like, are you still a baseball writer if what you're covering doesn't exist? Yes. Oh!

Will fan graphs survive the lack of baseball? I'm sure that was a very fun time for you and Meg and everyone else on the staff. Yeah, and that one's sunnier things, storylines that aren't about the labor. But that is what I'm onto, just because I need a distraction, a little bit from the world,

not that I'm tuning out what is happening with the world, not that I could if I wanted to, and I think it's important not to. And there will be more and more instances of real world events crossing over with baseball as they have lately. And as we have discussed on this podcast and as we will discuss again. But there is something to be said for baseball's back. I can at least have my constant soothing companion

that will be just, it will keep me company throughout the year and I can forget my cares and forget my troubles every now and then for a few hours at a time because Paul Skeens is pitching or Shohei Otani is playing or whatever it is, right? So I hope that there is an aspect to that where we can actually enjoy the season on that level from time to time in between the five alarm fires. The other thing is that not only will next year potentially be the last season prior to a work stoppage, but also we will probably get the challenge system in the majors, it seems like all signs are pointing to potentially as soon as the 2026 regular season.

And so there will be, again, more upheaval and significant change. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that that will be the thing that everyone's talking about and buzzing about. And this year, there isn't that thing so much. It's just kind of a quiet, calm year. So what else you got?

The Nationals are a team that just fascinates me because they have such a good young offensive core that there's upside there I don't really think they're pitching is is good at all The projections certainly don't but I keep thinking like if they accidentally put together a decent pitching staff This could be a team that surprises people I'm not projecting that but you look at you look at a team with James Wood, Dylan Cruz, and the CJ Abrams, and Luis Garcia, and they added Nate Lowe, or Lowe, I forget which one is Lowe and who's Lowe.

He's Lowe, Brandon's Lowe. That still bothers me. And Josh is Lowe. So the Nationals are a team that interests me. I kind of want to, I'm looking to see what the White Sox do this year, how they react. Because one of the things that, that just amuses me, I guess there's amusement, bum-usement, is that the White Sox, most, most teams that are that bad, they kind of have an idea that they're that bad going into this season.

I don't actually think that the White Sox expected to be anywhere near that bad in 2024. And I'm just curious because they still had this old team. I mean, they're still starting, you know, Ben and Tendi and they picked up Josh Rojas and Mike Tachman. Like, do you guys think you're going to win 75 games or something? Yeah. I'm kind of curious what they do there with Luis Robert Jr. How that... Yeah. I'm kind of curious what they do there with Luis Robert Jr. How that... Yeah. I don't know. I guess monumental woe intrigues me as an analyst.

Yeah. Because there's the sunny, cheerful, upbeat baseball writers. Like there's the Gryffindor baseball writers. But you see, I'm one of the Slytherin baseball writers. My job is to ruin everybody's happiness. Yeah. Yeah, that would'm one of the Slytherin baseball writers. My job is to ruin everybody's happiness. Yeah. Yeah, that would be one of mine also. The extremes, we can't help rubbernecking

at the teams that are truly terrible. And it's like the Darren Revelle. Like, this is a disaster, but it's tremendous content. And it's sad for the league and sad for these teams and their fans. But also it's history, potentially. We were all paying attention to whether the White Sox were winning or more often losing late last season because they were chasing history or, I guess, trying to avoid catching up to history,

which they kind of did on some levels. But there's, I guess, the extremes at either end. So to be basic and normie about it, yeah, I'm interested in the Dodgers. They've put together this incredible collection of talent and whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for baseball, it is hard not to want to watch this team that they've put together and see, can the starting rotation stay healthy? And what part will Otani play in it? And how good will Sasaki be?

And how good will Yamamoto be the second time around? And will this be like a truly historic run that they're on here? Or will they just be a run of the mill fantastic team? Or will this be like chasing all time single season wins record kind of great team? Like if they only win 97 games, will people call them disappointing? Probably, right?

I mean, the thing about the team is the team was already really good and they only have so much ability to put these players on the field. Like, yeah, you have you have 10 major league starting pictures, but you can't actually use them all at the same time. It's physics and geometry don't allow you to stuff as many guys into the same space. My belief, and I don't think anyone's actually agreed with me or believe me in any way, is that the Dodgers haven't so

much increased their average projection or their high end projection the last year. I think that they just have no low end remaining, and I think it's kind of a reaction to last year when they saw, I mean they did win the World Series but they saw kind of their entire rotation and their entire backup rotation mostly fade away from injury.

And had to, I think that it's almost impossible for this team to say go 84 and 78 or something just because of the depth. But I think that's kind of the biggest consequence of their moves is this is not a team that you should project as a projection to win 108 games. Yeah, they could, but I don't think that's the midpoint. Yeah, and will they have the incentive

to really go for it if they're running away with that division and they're resting guys and trying to keep people healthy, hopefully healthier than last year for the playoffs, then they're not going to be just going all out to try to win as many regular season games as they can. But I guess that's, yeah, it's the Dan Szymborski low end theory of the Dodgers. They don't have one. So I'll be watching them and I will also be watching how low can the Marlins go and the Rockies and the White Sox, who will be the worst team in baseball and how bad will it be? Like, are we in an era now where we don't have so many super teams, but we still have some super stinky teams that are just like as historically bad as the super teams who are historically good? Super teams were historically good. We will see.

And then do those teams get actively worse throughout the season as they shed a Luis Robert or a Sandy Alcantara, for instance. So yes, that we're aligned on anything else that is on your radar. Well, I think parity in a way, if you believe the projections, baseball right now has kind of three tiers.

There's kind of the Dodgers in the top tier. Yeah kind of a bottom tier of Of the Rockies and and and and yeah, wait, so Marlins white socks angels Maybe angels maybe But between them there is a wide swath of teams that should probably be projected to win between 75 and 90 games. And that's probably about 26 teams. Yeah, this was one of my bold predictions on our bold prediction pod was that this is going to be the most teams ever to finish above 500 in a season

or the highest percentage of teams ever to finish above 500 in a season. And that's bold because I was predicting something that hadn't happened before, but it's not bold. And that's what the projections say will happen. That's like the median outcome. That's like the base case basically for this season is that you're gonna have a whole bunch of teams

that are just a little bit better than 500 maybe. And ultimately just who ends up making the playoffs or even winning divisions. Now the positive spin you could put on this is that everyone has hope. Almost no one's out of it, except for that handful of teams we just mentioned. And so, you know, other than maybe the NL West,

like the division titles are very much up for grabs. Like the division favorites are far from heavy favorites, and then beyond that, the wild card's just a cluster that probably will come down to the very end of the season, like last season, but maybe even more so. And the thing is, this kind of competitive environment is not surprising because that's basically what a large playoff system in a volatile sport demands,

that unless you are going to be like the Uber team that dominates to be the best team in baseball, you kind of want to win 89 games. Right, you predicted this, I think, as did Ben Clemens when the playoff field was expanding, that this would ultimately be the effect of that, that there just wouldn't be that much incentive to be great. There'd be incentive to be good enough. Now, I guess if you have arguably like 1920 teams at least that are just clear wild card contenders,

maybe more than that, then you might get to a point where it might circle all the way around again, because like just being good enough to win 86 or 88 or whatever is not going to be enough to get you into the playoffs necessarily, because almost every other team is in that same bucket. So maybe eventually, like if we have a bunch of teams, if we do have like 19 or 20 teams that finish at 500 or better, and only 12 of them make the playoffs, then I guess maybe you might see some teams say, oh, it's not enough just to be 500 and hope that luck goes your way and you stay healthy, and that will sort out who makes the playoffs and who doesn't, but that's where we are right now.

And I'm very curious to see, A, if that happens, as we have all expected, but B, is that fun? Is that good? Do we want just competitiveness, even if it comes at the cost of mediocrity? Or will we get sick of that? Will we get sick of, man, just every team is meh, and ultimately, like one team is going to end up a game better than another or not. We might have a three-way tie like we did last year, and then we have to sort it out

with wonky tiebreakers because we did away with tiebreaker games just before we might've actually been able to play one. Will people get excited by that or will it just feel bland? Like everyone's just in the middle and then it's just kind of random who actually ends up winning. Well, on one level, the more random the results are,

the less valuable players are. And team owners like that kind of thing. I guess that's true, yeah. Playing right into their hands. So it's good in the sense that there are very few teams that can count themselves out as the season is starting. And those fan bases should have reason to stay engaged into September.

So pluses and minuses. And maybe it's like, you know, we swung from the super team era to the mediocrity era where everyone's in it, but no one's great. And maybe we'll get sick of that and we'll want to go back to super teams, who knows? But you never want to, I guess, sort of a steady state, even if you determine this is the best way for baseball

to be, if it was that way every single year, then you would probably get bored. Any last ones that you're looking at? Well, I guess just personally, since I'm an Orioles fan, I'm just curious if they can pack together enough pitching to really make a run for the ALA's. I think they will, but it's a really open question. I'm still really annoyed that they didn't recite Corbin Byrnes. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, seems like he wanted to be in Arizona, but nonetheless, it's frustrating for Orioles fans. I know when you're reduced to picking up Kyle Gibson on the eve of opening day, so. I'm also watching the athletics because they actually have spent money this off season as weird as that is. Yeah. And I'm kind of curious that at Sutter Health Park, or I keep calling it Sutter Home Park, but that's a cheap line, I think.

Sutter Health Park, that 12,000 people who are actually, or 10,000 or however many it fits, a full 10,000 fan stadium is a much different game to watch than a mostly empty 10,000 team stadium. It might really increase kind of the excitement of watching those games. So I'm kind of curious how that shakes out, because I think that there is an argument that perhaps even smaller parks have a benefit,

smaller, more exclusive parks, but that's a whole other thing. That's another business of baseball thing. Yeah, the minor league parks aspect of this story, that subplot will, that's one that I wish we could have avoided, but now that it's here, it's hard not to be curious about how that's one that I wish we could have avoided. But now that it's here, it's,

it's hard not to be curious about how that's going to go. And I guess I would also throw in there, yeah, there are certain individual teams that I'm interested in, like the Tigers, for instance, how will they follow up that Cinderella run that they had last year? And, you know, can they keep that mojo going? Or will there be regression? and how hard will that hit them? And I guess just generally the AL Central which I guess is it's kind of the poster division for the competitive but but no great teams, but Nonetheless like who has any idea who will win that division not me So I am kind of curious about how that race will shake out and on an individual player level I mentioned this on hang up and listen this week, but I am, I feel kind of like, you know, it's a bittersweet, but it's

potentially this one song of Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw all at once. We'll see. I mean, those guys, you know, one's 42 and one's 40 and one's 37, but a lot of mileage on all of them, a lot of injuries on all of them. They're all on one year deals. They are all perennially banged up. Kershaw's out till some point mid season. Scherzer, he's already dealing with a thumb issue that has been plaguing him for a while here and maybe limits how deep he can go into games. And Verlinder has pitched well this spring and Scherzer when he's pitched has pitched well. So I hope they have one last run in them, one last hurrah, and that it's not sort of a sad ending.

And I guess odds are that it won't be the last season for all three of them, but it is possible that it will be. I think it's the last season for Verlander and Scherzer. I think Kershaw is not going to officially announce a retirement I think he's just gonna kind of do this thing where if he shows up the following year He has a job with the Dodgers It's kind of like the Mitch Morland thing where he just kind of showed up and the Red Sox has kept paying him like I'm obviously Kershaw's a

Future Hall of Famer and Mitch Moreland was not. But I think there won't be a definitive retirement. He'll, you know, he'll pick, he'll get seven starts this year again, and then people ask, oh, you wanna show up in May 2026? Oh, okay. Yeah, I just, I wonder how long he will wanna do that, cause it, you know, he's intensely competitive, obviously,

but he also is like a family man, and I don you know, he's intensely competitive, obviously, but he also is like a family man. And I don't know that he would be someone who would want to just keep going along if he's not able to pitch the way that he used to. And especially if like surgeries and other ailments keep popping up, is he going to want to keep putting himself through that? So I don't know. Like I think he, it's basically, you know, as long as he wants to keep coming back, the Dodgers will probably let him, but I, I don't know. He has considered at least for the past few years walking away and maybe he will. And it would be nice if those three retired at the same time, whatever year it is, so that

they could all go into Cooperstown together and just have three aces, the best three pitchers of their era. That'd be a hell of a Cooperstown class, but I will be sad to see them go. And I hope they don't go yet. And I hope there's a little life left in those arms. And I hope there's a lot of life left in Jacob deGrom, who is almost the same age as Clayton Kershaw, but it feels like a different generation. I mean, you know, came along later and obviously hasn't pitched nearly as much, but I have much more hope that he could have a vintage year this year for him than I do for any of those other three guys now that he has a fresh ligament and now that he seems to have perhaps a self-preservation

mindset about his velocity. So I really hope that he will pitch a lot and that he will pitch well. So individually, along with, you know, how will Otani pitch a lot and that he will pitch well. So individually, along with how will Otani pitch and when and how much will he pitch, I am wondering the same thing about Jacob DeGrom. I kind of want to get to kind of, we're a long, long way away, but I want to get to the future where we have like graphene printed ligaments.

Yeah. And probably every picture at like 18 is going to like have the graphene ligament put in or something. That's probably not in my lifetime because I'm already pushing 50, but that I think will be a big game changer. You said you're gonna be running those numbers till you're 76 at least, if not 86.

Yeah, 30 years, but I think it's probably more than 30 years away. I think 2026 is gonna be a big retirement year because I think a lot of guys who are kind of on the edge will see that lockout coming and just think they want to go through this one more time. Yeah, that's possible. Yeah. Like Carlos Santana, like there's a lot of guys who are kind of on that edge. Yeah, Goldschmidt. Yeah. AL East race also is, you know, I mean, nothing new that that division is stacked, but it is once again. So that should be a real dogfight. Okay. So we've named a lot of things we're looking forward to, not an exhaustive comprehensive list, but hopefully that gets you psyched for the season. And last thing, if I could do like a little lightning round here, we did that bold predictions

pod that I mentioned, Meg and I and Bowman and Clemens. And if you're listening to this listener before first pitch on opening day, you can still vote. You can still cast your ballot and weigh in on how bold we were by going to ewstats.com. But Chris Hannel, who organizes that whole exercise, he also put on blue sky, he solicited bold predictions from our listeners. So I thought, you know, each of us on that pod, we've did 10 bold predictions. Maybe I could just read out some bold predictions from listeners and you could just sort of give me a snap

judgment, not a, a Zips informed probability, but, uh, you know, just go with your gut, which maybe you're not accustomed to doing, but, uh, just go with your gut, which maybe you're not accustomed to doing, but just fire it off how likely you think this is if you had to assign some probability to these things. So for instance, listener Vicky predicted that there will be a perfect game this season. So the curse of Felix or whatever we're calling it, we're actually going to get the first perfect game

in a very long time in the majors. I will say that we will get a perfect game. Or I'll say 62%. Wow, okay. 62%. That's pretty aggressive. Because offense keeps going down around the league. It does, but so do pitcher workloads.

A low batting averages, your workloads, batting average environment. I'm looking at all the preseason predictions. Were we supposed to all do 10? Because I'm kind of in trouble. I thought I was supposed to write up the ones. So I'm a little confused now. I don't think you have to for fan graphs, but, but no, but I think of Felix, like for me, Felix will forever be the last perfect game basically, but he's not, of course, Domingo Hermann had one in 2023. So it can happen. It has happened more recently than 2014,

but yeah, it's getting easier in some respects and harder in other respects. So it's kind of, it's hard to calculate exactly what the probability is there, but you did it nonetheless. Okay. How about Scott who says one regular season game will reach the 15th inning, which I believe we have not seen in the Zombie Runner era. I don't think so. I will say 24%. Okay. All right. How about another one from Scott? Neither player who leads a league in stolen bases will receive an MVP vote. So Scott is suggesting that the league leaders in stolen bases, they will be speedsters, but they will not be valuable enough overall to draw even even a courtesy down ballot MVP vote.

I would be pretty low with that. I would say like 14% because writers don't strictly go by war. War is important, especially at the top of the ballot. But teams, people will throw like, you know, ninth or 10th place votes at really, really random people. Yeah. And I think like, if if someone steals 80 bases, that hometown writer, there's a good chance

they just throw in a ninth place vote for that guy. So I'm gonna say a low percentage for that. And also I guess the top projected base dealers are also generally projected to be good players like LA Dela Cruz. Now Acuna is projected to steal out of bases. I don't know that that's going to happen post another surgery or that Otani is going to

steal as he's working his way back as a pitcher. But Ellie and Corbin Carroll, you know, Bobby Witt Jr. like these guys are some of the best players in baseball in addition to being the best bets to steal bases. Now there's like a Victor Robles in there and Bryce Terang and Jazz Chisholm and CJ Abrams and other guys who I guess could find that sweet spot of stealing lots of bags but not being that great overall. But nobody who has, see the thing is in baseball today, you don't, teams do not believe that a guy who steals bases

and does nothing else is a good player anymore. Vince Coleman would not have stolen, people are like, how many bases would Vince Coleman have stolen in this environment? I think not that many because no one would really be playing Vince Coleman most of the time. You can't just be stolen bases and nothing else. So the guys who will steal a lot of stolen bases

and had that opportunity will tend to be pretty good. Like you look at like the guys who stole 30 bases last year, none of them were bad players last year at all. I mean, I guess the closest is Jacob Young, but he was really good defensively. He still had like two points something war last year. Yeah, you could get like a SDR Ruiz in 2023 season where he stole 67 bases 1.2 war like that's that's what it would take But that was a like a pre environment and I mean he lost his job as a result pretty much

Yeah, so so it's hard It's like being who's the worst player to to lead the league in plate appearances because you know If you're that bad, you're not going to lead the league in plate appearances, right? Okay Snap judgment Dan says the number of games for the longest white Sox losing streak Will be more than the number of wins earned by Garrett crochet. Yeah, I think so Nobody with a ton of games, and the Red Sox aren't gonna be throwing Garrett Crochet like a lot of seven inning starts,

because he's gonna have a pretty low, I think, ultimate number of wins. And I think the White Sox are actually, I mean, they're gonna be a better team, just because you have to, a lot has to go, quote unquote, right to lose 121 games. Yeah, yeah. But I think Crochet could like, you know,

go like nine and four and be like a young candidate. And the White Sox are certainly capable of losing more than nine games in a row or something like that. I'll say the White Sox, they're bad. And there's not, they don't have Crochet anymore to stop a losing streak. Right. Yeah, okay, so we're going over 50% with that one.

Well, that's 82%. 80%, okay, all right. How about, okay, this is bold from Sam's Ontario Adventure, Philly's trade Andrew Painter. Ooh, I don't know that I can imagine that happening because A, Dombrowski seems to be a little more committed to holding on to prospects. B, he's basically ready to step into that rotation.

So who are you gonna get? Who's gonna help you more than Andrew Painter? And what need do the Phillies have to do that? And also they have, if not the strongest pitching staff in Major League Baseball in rotation, then the second most after the Dodgers. So a lot would have to happen for them to, and like if there's a vacancy in the rotation,

they would just promote Andrew Painter to that role, right? So like, yeah, this seems low to me. It's not impossible. It's not impossible. Because like what if the rotation is healthy and playing well and the Phillies are a game back in July and Bryce Harper breaks his shin bone doing something?

Then you might say, okay, okay, I can see the scenario in which that happens because the Phillies do have a bit of urgency. They're an older team. But I think when they look at keeping some of their players together, having a young starter like Andrew Painter is pretty valuable and they want to have him

the next several years and not pay him much. Because that's one of the fun of young players is you don't have to pay them, I would say 8%. Yeah, okay. Yeah, there was a Bryce Harper related prediction in here from Your Favorite Cat. By the end of the year, Bryce Harper will be pouring coffee in his cereal instead of milk. The revolution has begun I don't know how to score that one, but I guess okay. How about this my cat my

Why is my cat something or is that your favorite cat? That is someone else's favorite Oh someone else's favorite cat. Yeah, I'm referring to them Me or Jacob Tomoyuki Sugano top top three AL Rookie of the Year award finish. Oh, I'd love to say yes, but I got to say no on that one. That's a I'm going to say 10 percent because, yeah, he was really good in Japan, but he's also, you know, kind of a soft tosser who is adjusting to the US and he's in his mid thirties. Yeah. Another Orioles related prediction.

Orioles will, this is from Lucifer, Orioles will trade holiday, mayo, and or Kerstad for pitching. And or or? And or. Okay, so it says holiday, mayo, and or cursed ad for pitching. So that suggests holiday will be traded and then mayo and or cursed. So I guess at least two of them.

See, they're very different answers. They're not trading holiday. I really think they're going to trade Mayo for possibly pitching. That's the most logical thing. I mean, I would actually put Mayo being traded above 50% because they don't really have an obvious place to play him. And he's already expressed some dismay because there's nothing more he can really do in the minors. I really think they're gonna trade Mayo this year for pitching, but they're not gonna trade and Holliday.

Yeah, no, that's a low one. Okay. 9%, no, no, not even that. Not even that. That's a Barry Bonds home run. That's less likely. I'm gonna say like the Jason Tyner home run. I'm gonna say 0.7%.

Okay, Fox Mulder Bat Flip Mason Montgomery of the Rays will have more saves than Mason Miller of the A's. No, no, that's, that's, I think. No, yeah, it's higher than the holiday one, but. That's pretty low, pretty low. That's, we'll say 6%. Okay. Well, no, I shouldn't say that

because pictures get injured all the time. Yeah, relievers, who knows, right? And Miller has been injured before, so 12%. Okay, okay. Well, no, I shouldn't say that because pictures get injured all the time. Yeah, relievers, who knows, right? And Miller has been injured before, so 12%. Okay. Okay. David says, no one will steal 50 plus bases. Context, there have been three players with 50 plus deals in each of the rule change seasons,

but no one has done it twice. Yeah, below 50, that's 15%. Yeah, below 50 that no one will be above 50 on this one. Yeah, that's a low one, I below 50 that's 15% Yeah below 50 that no one will be above 50 on this one Yeah, that's a that's a low one I think and there's another steel related one here which Sean was stolen base question I know stolen bases on the brain Sean Victor Scott the second leads MLB and stolen bases. So There's one I guess there's another candidate who could maybe thread that needle of Doesn't get an MVP vote but leads the league in steals.

Yeah, he's a candidate, but I don't know if he's going to be good enough to keep the job. Now, of course, he had a very good spring. He had four home runs in the spring. His projection went up quite a bit, but quite a bit got him up to like 1.1 more or something in the Zip's projection. That's going gonna go live

in a little while. I will say that's, I'm gonna say 12%. All right, one more from Nick. A San Francisco giant hits 30 home runs for the first time since Barry Bonds. I'm gonna say 45%. I think Shadman has a chance. All right, feeling lucky.

I like it. Yeah, I'm looking at some of these, I'm glad you didn't ask me Mike Bauman's questions because I don't know who Sabrina Carpenter is. Okay. Well, you can do some research and fill out your effectively wild bold predictions ballot after we are done here, which we are. See, I've hit that age where there's a lot of pop culture that I just don't understand anymore. Okay, well, thank you so much for filling in. Dan, this was a clutch performance by you, and thank you for your research assistance with my article and

being a sounding board throughout the year and providing so much useful information for readers and for fellow FanGraphs writers. Well, thank you for having me to pitch in. All right, well, one of my goals for this off season was to interview people with interesting baseball jobs. Some jobs you'd probably immediately wanna know more about, some jobs you might not even know existed, or that you might not have known

you would wanna hear about, but would quickly be convinced that you'd like to learn, we didn't do a great job of falling through on that. But with one thing and another, we did one episode, episode 2269, we talked to a bullpen catcher, we talked to a baseball ops analyst, but if it didn't quite become a regular off-season series, then I hope it will become at least a sporadic feature of the podcast this year and beyond. And so let's bring it back for a second segment today.

I'll be talking to Josh Cantor, the organist at Fenway Park for the Boston Red Sox. And so to play us into the segment, here's Josh with the trailblazing organist Nancy Faust playing some Sweet Caroline. Oh, what a dream, what a dream! Sweet little lamb, ta-ta-ta, Turn and let my sin soar. Ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, Turn and let my sin soar. And I'm not the only lady in the world.

Well, when we mentioned a while back that we wanted to talk to people with interesting baseball jobs and interview them about those jobs on the podcast, we heard a lot of suggestions. We solicited suggestions from our listeners and we got all kinds of great ideas. And many of them

were you need to talk to an organ player, you need to have a baseball organist on. And some of those people named names and requested specific organ players, including Josh Cantor, who is the organist for the Boston Red Sox plays at all the home games at Fenway Park has been doing so for more than 20 years. Josh, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Ben. I'm thrilled that people wanted, you know, an organist to come on, and I'm just totally flattered

that some of them thought of me. Yeah, we've been doing this podcast for 13 years. I think I've missed about as many episodes as you have missed Red Sox home games over that stretch. And so somehow we have not had an organist on. I spoke to Matthew Kaminsky on a former podcast of mine, the Ringer MLB show, and that was a pleasure, but long overdue to have an organist on here. I guess I should ask, do you prefer organist or organ player? Do you have a preference? Ah, no, whatever works. Sometimes it's like, hey keyboard guy.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk to you before the season started, before you got tied up with actually going to games and playing at them. And there are so many things that I could ask because I think you have the sort of job where everyone thinks, oh how cool and this is such a just baseball thing. What could be more baseball than someone playing organ at a baseball game? But the actual process of it and the ins and outs of how that job works is probably pretty opaque to people. So I guess maybe if you could start out by just explaining how you got the gig and your musical background, because you do not just play organ at baseball games, you play all sorts of music, you play in bands, you played for the baseball project who've been on the show. Oh, yeah. Yeah, some of my favorite people in that band, and some of my favorite songwriters. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, most people's jobs are sort of opaque on some level unless

you sort of spend time doing it. This one is on the surface, it's very sort of transparent and obvious. It's like, oh, you play little ditties, you know, at the baseball games on an organ and it's a familiar sound for people. You know, there is sort of more that goes into it beyond that, some of which is part of it and I've learned along the way, some of which I have inflicted upon myself. I was lucky to get an audition shortly before the start of the 2003 season.

It really was right place, right time, because it's such a one in a million kind of gig. But I had been playing organ for a long time and I was well-versed in a lot of popular songs from a lot of different eras and genres. And so that went a long way. And I knew a lot about baseball, which went a long way because just being able to anticipate a pinch hitter

or an infield fly or a double switch or whatever the thing might be, is those kinds of things come in handy. Yeah, but I auditioned, you know, a couple rounds of auditions in front of a committee and just was like extremely lucky to get it and have, you know, been enjoying it a lot ever since then, which is why I'm still doing it. Now, how do they conduct an audition for an organist for a baseball team? Is this, you know, when you're interviewing a manager, you, you might, uh, game out certain scenarios.

You know, it's the bottom of the seventh and, uh, this guy's warming up and what do you, what move do you make here? Is this like, are you in Fenway? Are we like simulating a game and Hey, here comes Nomar or whatever. And like, what do you play? It was a little bit of that. I mean, I think, I think every team does it differently and even from one higher to the next within a team because it's, you know, the people I auditioned for were,

I don't think any of them were musicians, but I think they were all people who were really into music and that's probably why they volunteered or agreed to be part of this committee because sort of like, you know, they have some knowledge and some insight there. They may not have even known exactly what they were looking for, but they were hoping of this committee because sort of like, you know, they have some knowledge and some insight there. They may not have even known exactly what they were looking for, but they were hoping that they would recognize it when they heard it. And I don't know to what extent I gave them that. But you know, they did quiz me on a lot of different genres and eras of popular music,

you know, pop quiz style. And they asked me to play a lot of, you know, sort of short little stings, things, you know, 10 seconds or less, just to come up with as many as I could off the cuff that, you know, that might get a crowd cheering or clapping or humming along. And then, yeah, they did quiz me on some situational things. A lot of it was to do with sort of, you know, when there's breaks in the action. So it's like, well, when the, you know, when the pitching coach goes to talk to the pitcher on the mound, for example. So it's like, well, when the, you know, when the pitching coach goes to talk to the pitcher on the mound, for example, and it's like, you know,

so we just sort of said like, well, if it's, you know, if it's the visiting pitcher and the Red Sox have them on the ropes, then here's a couple of different song ideas for that, or if it's the Red Sox pitcher who's in a little bit of trouble, then here's, you know, a different way to go. And yeah, we just ran through a bunch of those. And I had done, prior to that, I had done a lot of live accompaniment

for improvisational theater. And so that turned out to be a really transferable skill where you're watching action on a stage and waiting to see what happens and trying to be ready quickly with a musical idea that underscores or follows or leads or compliments or comments. So that definitely was like some training

that came in handy for that. I'm sure you get this question a lot, but since you mentioned having to sort of fill time, I guess there's less time to fill these days than there was in 2003. I mean, when you're playing in that era, the Yankees Red Sox epics of the early 2000s, a lot of time for organ fills. Yeah, all those four and a half hour games with all the pitching changes. And now pitch clock, pitching changes limited, et cetera. Do you have to pick your spots

more? Yeah, pick my spots a little more and maybe sometimes keep it a little tighter. I think it's now been a couple years that we've had the pitch clock. And so I've gotten pretty accustomed to the new rhythm of it. And I think overall, the fans seem to like this, this pace better, um, than what it had been before. So that's always a good thing. Part of the trick for me is that, um, I do a lot of playing during inning breaks.

And I do, um, you know a lot of playing during inning breaks and I do, um, you know, I mentioned the, like the self-infliction earlier. I took it upon myself. I don't know, just to make things harder than they need to be. And hopefully to make some people happy. But I take requests, song requests from fans in the stands via social media during the game. So a lot of times I'm hearing, they're sending me the name of the song and I'm then listening to a stream of it. It's the first time I'm hearing it and I'm trying

to just sort of get the basics and come up with like, you know, what's a 22nd clip of the sort of catchiest, hookiest, most sing alongable part of this song that I can play that some people will recognize. And, um, yeah, you know, I used to reliably have at least a couple extra minutes before the third out to kind of get the thing ready. Um, so I, uh, you know, I definitely was feeling a lot more rushed with that when they first started using the, uh, the pitch clock. Now it does having four world series rings interfere with your ability to play. Well, so I've been extremely fortunate to be there for all four World Series.

I did not get a ring the first two times and I did get a ring the third and fourth time. We got to get you some retroactive rings for those years. Complete the set. I'm not too worried about it, but I think there is, you know, people sometimes ask like, Oh, what is it like to, you know, to wear them or to try to play with them? I have tried to play with them a little bit, you know, just kind of as a gag. They are big and heavy and gaudy. And they're beautiful, wonderful keepsakes. They're total emotional treasures,

but they're not exactly attractive. I saw this clip one time of Liberace being interviewed and someone asked him, how do you play with all that jewelry on your fingers? And he said, pretty well actually. So I often think of that when people ask about that. One thing I was wondering is, you know, with the historic park that you're playing

in the historic surroundings, is there also a historic organ? What kind of hardware, what kind of equipment are you working with there, and has that changed over your tenure? What I have is a Yamaha Electone AR100 circa 1995, 96. So I'm using not the exact same unit as I started with, but I'm using the same make and model.

And after my second year there, we swapped it out for a different one. Um, but that's what's been there and it's just something I like it very much. I've gotten very comfortable with it. I hope it holds up and lasts a long time. Um, you know, I definitely, you know, tweak it and program it to get it to have, you know, what I would consider vintage sounds. I want it to feel, I want it to sound like you're at a theater in the 1940s or a baseball

game in the 1940s, even if, you know, maybe I'm playing a song by, by Beyonce. And so it's got some, uh, some modernness to it and some happiness to it. But hopefully it's still kind of evokes what people think of when they think of the, you know, the organ tradition in America with baseball and with old theaters and that kind of thing. How many, I don't know if you know offhand the exact number, but how many teams are still employing organists to play at home games? And I don't know whether you know about the original instruments as opposed to keyboards? Is there any vintage equipment that's still out there? About half the teams have a,

half the major league teams have a live organist currently. That number has fluctuated like between 40 and 60% over the years that I've been doing it. Some teams phased it out, but some teams phased it in. Some teams phased it out and then back in. You know, so there's decent representation there., some places they do have, you know, vintage equipment, you know, old Hammons with the wooden cases that are from maybe like the early 1960s, I don't know if anything goes back to, you know, the forties, which was sort

of the, the birth of, um, Oregon music at ballgames, but it's all, it's all either electric or electronic at this point. You know, they experimented in the early 1940s with like acoustic pipe organs, with actual pipes. And they found pretty quickly that it didn't work because depending on where you were sitting, you were either hearing way too much or not enough. And if the wind changed directions, then that would switch.

I guess we should talk a little bit about someone who I know was a big influence on you, Nancy Faust. And for people who are not aware of Nancy, maybe you could explain just her significance in the annals of organists in baseball and what part she played in influencing you to take up the mantle. I am always delighted to shine a light on her brilliance and her importance. Nancy Faust was a Chicago White Sox organist from 1970 to 2010, and then she retired and she still plays organ.

She was very young when she started, I think like 23 years old or something. She is, you know, just sort of regarded across the, uh, the field, I guess, as the, you know, sort of the Babe Ruth or the Pablo Picasso, um, of sports organists. And she came along at a time, 1970, you know, and, and an age, you know, she was 23. She was very hip to the current hits of the day, a lot of great, you know, soul and pop and R&B and rock and roll. And she was incorporating those songs into the repertoire and all the other organists of that era were sort of still relying on, you know, kind of like pre-1955, sort of like pre-Chuck Berry, pre-Elvis, you know, show tunes and crooners and that kind of thing.

And so she was a hit with, you know, with a lot of young fans who were like, wow, this is great. I love this at a time when people were starting to think like, I don't know, Oregon music, maybe it's kind of square or something. And she just made it really cool. And she, you know, I think a lot of baseball fan, most baseball fans now probably know about the whole, the phenomenon of walk-up music where the players have certain theme songs that get played when they come up to bat.

And, and typically the players select, you know, recordings of those songs that they want to hear at their home games. Um, but she did that before the days of DJs. Um, and she would pick all the songs herself and they were usually some kind of word play on the player's name or number or position or where he had gone to college or what town he was from. And she was really clever with that. You know, she was a master at sort of the humorous commentary of, you know, playing

the right song in the right moment. And that was something that had existed prior to her, but she really sort of elevated it and there's a ton of wonderful examples elevated it. And there's a ton of, um, wonderful examples of it. Um, one of my all time favorites was, this would have been probably mid eighties, I guess she was playing a game and Howard Johnson broke up a no hitter and she played heartbreak hotel and, uh, or I don't know, you know, there was in the 1970s, there was this, there was a lot of streaking going on in the field where fans would run onto the field with no clothes on, you know, and she would play, you know, some guy would run across the field naked and she would play like, is that all there is?

Yeah. You know, very sort of, you know, just cheeky kind of stuff. And she was always so good at it and still is in fact, like, when I talked to her to this day, she's always kind of like, she's in that mindset. She's like, Hey, have you ever thought about trying this song or this situation? Or she's still occasionally we'll do a minor league game every once in a while. And she's always excited to tell me that she, you know, what song she came up with for what situation. Uh, and she also was the first person to play the Nana Hey, Hey, Kiss him goodbye, that became sort of a rat, an international rally and cry at all sorts of sporting events around the world.

Um, but she started doing it in 1977 and it just kind of took off from there. So there's a million reasons why she's the greatest. She's also like the nicest person you could ever hope to meet. And I went to high school in Chicago area and so as a, as a teenager, I used to see her play because she was out in the open and I was always kind of fascinated by it. Um, and I would just sort of watch her work and try to figure out requests and play by ear, you know, which is sort of more the style that I do. And then when I got the Red Sox job in 2003, I called her and asked, you know, if, if she could give me any advice.

And she said, well, you know, next time you come back to the area to visit your parents, let me know and come to the area to visit your parents, let me know and come by the house and I have a couple organs in the living room and I can show you some things. And so I like booked a trip immediately and went out and spent a day with her. And it was just like, you know, the masterclass that I, that I desperately needed in order to go into field, you know, at least a little bit prepared. And she just showed me so many tips and tricks about melodic voicing

and how to pick the right song for the right situation and when to lean more into bass pedals and when not to. It just was magical. She has been a mentor and become a friend and I just cherish that relationship and I now own an organ that had belonged to her for a long time. The White Sox auctioned it off for a charity. So now I have an organ of hers in my living room, so I get to look at it every day and think about her. Yeah. And I guess you're not the only disciple of Nancy Faust who's playing organ for sports

team today. I know Dieter Ruhl with the Dodgers. He's a Dieter's a disciple of Nancy as well. And I was going to ask, I guess, about the fraternity slash sorority of, you know, limited number of people who have the opportunity to do what you do and just how much kind of commiseration there is or communication or picking up tips and tricks from each other or just hanging out socially when you're able to do that, just how much of a bond there is among the small number of people who have had this gig. Kyle Smedley There is a bit of a bond and I think we all appreciate,

you know, having access to each other's, you know, thoughts on different things. So we have a little online discussion group that includes most of the major league baseball organists and several of the NHL organists, and then a few retired sports organists and a few minor league organists. And it's just really nice to be able to check in with people and to talk to, you know, talk shop with the small number of people who sort of understand all the ins and outs of this very weird job. And yeah, I get a lot of great advice.

I give advice when I feel like I have good advice to give. And it's been wonderful, you know, and some I've gotten to know well and become friends with and so we visit each other when, you know, when I'm on tour with a band and I'm playing in San Diego, I'll call up Bobby Cressy and we'll get together for lunch. And so there is a good connection, you know, and we have talked about every once in a while, it's like, oh, we should really like, maybe during the All-Star break, we should have a little convention or something where we all get together and hang out and swap stories and hopefully someday.

Yeah, get a just a super group together, maybe go on the roads over the off season, you know, make an album. It could be a different alternative baseball project. But I also wanted to know, I guess, you know, some organists play multiple sports. They're two-way players or maybe more so than two-way players like Dieter, you know, does hockey and Olympics and soccer, et cetera. I mean, baseball, I guess, is the sport

that is most associated with the organ sound, just, you know, the whole national pastime kind of mythos. But I wonder just what it's like from an organist perspective, does baseball with the downtime that it still has, enable the most opportunities for sort of freestyling and showing your personality or is that kind of consistent across sports? How does the gig vary depending on what event you are playing? Yeah, and I don't know how well I can answer that question. It's a great question because I don't have a lot of experience with the other sports.

I've done some minor league games. I occasionally have other events at Fenway. Our principal owner also owns the Liverpool football team. So they'll have soccer matches with that team come. And I have played for some of those and I've done, you know, some other sort of more, you know, what you would call like fringe, less mainstream sports. I've subbed a handful of times, uh, for the Boston Bruins, uh, Ron poster, who's the, the NHL organist in Boston.

Um, but I never grew up knowing much about hockey. So it's really like, you know, when I, when I fill in for him, it's very much like a substitute teacher kind of thing where I'm like, just make sure the classroom doesn't burn down, keep the seat warm for the real teacher to come back. I don't know how I feel like diehard hockey fans would tell you that the, that the tradition hockey is just as strong, um, as it is in baseball, but I think it hasn't been. You know, the central American sport for a hundred years, more, more years, the way that baseball has been.

So the folks I know who do other sports or who do multiple sports, you know, they'll tell you that there are some differences from one to the other, the timings different and so forth. But I think if you're dedicated to it, sort of whatever personality you're able to bring to it will come through in one way or another. The Atlanta Hawks had a fantastic organist for a number of years recently. And that was a sport where I always thought

there wasn't much downtime to work with. But he was just completely masterful at it and became a bit of a celebrity around the building for his ability. Yeah. And I guess one thing that has probably changed a lot since you got the gig is just the fan participation aspect of this with social media specifically, which is something that you and Matthew are known for and kind of taking requests and interacting during games.

And so I wonder how you first incorporated that, how that has changed your routine, how that changes your preparation for games and just your process is distracting while you're checking your phone while you're in a game or how do you manage all of those things in multitask? Yeah, it is distracting. And I think it's completely changed the way that I do it. The way that I did it in the early years was totally different.

There wasn't really any social media to speak of for 2003 and the first few years after that. I felt like I was operating a little bit in a vacuum. Like sometimes you can tell when something's working, but I just wasn't getting a lot of feedback from fans or from colleagues. And so I was guessing a lot of the time as far as what I thought would work

and trying to learn from that and learn from like when you hit the mark and when you don't. I guess it was around 2011, I sort of reluctantly got on Twitter, you know, just cause people said like, give it a try. And the DJ at the time, who's a very good friend of mine named TJ Connolly, who still DJs the Bruins games and also did the Patriots for a number of years.

He's an early adopter of those kinds of things. And he said, I think you'd be good at it. Give it a shot, you know, just talking to fans. And so I tried it and we just did it word of mouth and, you know, I would get maybe one or two requests each night. And it was a fun little thing to throw them in, you know, to learn how to turn around a song quickly and play it for somebody and then have them be like, Oh, that's really cool that you can, but that's a thing you can do when you go

to a Red Sox game, um, and it just very, very slowly over the years spread. Um, so now I reliably get, I don't know, like usually 15 to 20 every night. And I get to as many of them as I possibly can. And obviously that's still a relatively small number when you're talking about, you know, 37,000 people in the building, but that's plenty enough to like, keep me busy, especially if it's songs that I'm not too familiar with and it's really changed, it's had a huge impact on my ability to like mix it up a lot. You know, I get song requests for so many great,

popular songs that are just not on my radar. I think especially things like, like present day top 40, you know, like I'm an older dude and I'm just not always like attuned to, you know, the new Olivia Rodrigo single, but somebody out there is and will tell me about it. And then I'll listen to it and give it a whirl. And it's really fun to be able to do that for people.

It's funny, my previous guest, just before I brought you on, was saying that he's reached the age where he doesn't know who Sabrina Carpenter is. And so I guess this keeps you young because someone will request espresso and then you have to figure out what that is. Right, I've reached the age where I wouldn't, probably wouldn't know what it was

except that there are people out there telling me. And actually I was super proud of myself. At the beginning of last year, I said to one of our DJs who is younger, she's probably like mid 20s, and I was like, hey, I heard that Chaperone is gonna like break through this year. And she was like, oh, interesting, I don't really know her, I'll have to check that out.

And so I felt, you know, and then to have it come to fruition, I was like, yeah. Sometimes the old man can still score one, you know? Yeah, well, you've got your ear to the ground. How do you then coordinate with DJs? Yeah, we have a little one-on-one pow wow, usually about two hours before the game, and we just kind of go through some things we're anticipating, some things that we know have to happen, like, oh, you know, in the middle of the third we are contractually obligated to show this blooper video that is sponsored by this pizza company that

is paying the Red Sox money to be the sponsor, blah, blah, whatever. And looking and, you know, and being like, okay, that video is 42 seconds. So that leaves us X amount of time before the video and Y amount of time after the video for us to sort of divvy up and maybe one of us will take one of those slots and the other will take the other one. And we talk a lot about, you know, what we're anticipating in terms of the vibe of the crowd, you know, is it a day game? Is it a night game?

Is it beautiful weather? Is it terrible weather? Is the team on a win streak? Is the team on a lose streak? Is there, you know, something exciting, you know, is there something exciting that people are paying attention to like an ace who's starting or a player who's got a, you know, a hit streak going and think about how, you know, and then we, and we check in with each other constantly during and after the game as well.

We're talking to each other on a headset because we're not located physically located very near each other. Um, but we can give each other cues and suggestions and feedback and talk about like, oh yeah, I think this is working or, you know, the crowd seems a little dead tonight. Let's try this other thing instead, you know, and we, and we like to have fun with the pregame ceremonies, which is, you know, there's not a, the place is not packed when that's happening, but they have ceremonies where they greet various, you know, dignitaries and community leaders and sponsors and, um, you know, little league teams and all those sorts of things. And, um And we'll sometimes have fun with like picking little songs

that almost the way Nancy Faust would, you know, like a song that is some sort of word play on the name of the person or their organization or their job title or something. I'm trying to think of like, there was one that was, just to mention an example, like the local, the Massachusetts Nurses Association was at a game and there were like 2,000 nurses there

and they were all cheering and going crazy. And one of them like threw out the ceremonial first pitch and I played, I wanna be sedated. Just 12 seconds or whatever. And it's like, okay, some small number of people is gonna get that, appreciate it. But the DJ and I often will brainstorm on those kinds of ideas in our pregame powwow. But yeah, we work really closely together

and it's a really good relationship. I've heard tell at other teams about how sometimes the DJ and organ feel like they're a bit in competition with each other for playing time. And I feel real fortunate that that's not the case with us. I want the DJ to come across good and they want me to come across good. And that's just a, it's wonderful to have that kind of trust in each other.

And you just kind of alluded to this, but the ballpark atmosphere can change based on the day, certainly based on the season. The Red Sox have certainly been more up than down during your tenure, but you know, you've gone from first place to the last place sometimes in consecutive years to win the World Series and then a swift fall and then a swift rise again. Does that change now? It's still Fenway and the place is still going to be pretty packed and buzzing to some extent. When you've got a great team or a great game versus a bad team and a bad game, do you take it upon yourself to say, I have to inject some life into these proceedings

or is it like if I press too hard, you know, fans will resent like I'm trying to pump them up for this game that is not worth being pumped up for or do you have kind of like read the room? Yeah, it's read the room and it is a balancing act. I think the 2012 season, the Bobby Valentine season was a real learning experience for me because the team had for the first, for my first nine years, the team had been competitive, you

know, anywhere from like very much in the running for playoff spot to World Series champion and sort of everything in between. And I took for granted, you know, that that was going to be the case. And then that, that 2012 team was not good. And it was, I think the worst Red Sox team win loss wise since like the mid sixties. And so I learned a lot about playing for a sad or bitter or angry crowd, you know? And I learned it's like, you can't, especially I think at Fenway, I mean, Red Sox fans pride themselves on being very knowledgeable and you really run the risk

of insulting their intelligence if you are painting a rosier picture than what the reality is on the field. So I learned how to, without being defeatist, how to still sort of say chin up, but to be realistic and to be honest with fans and to not try to, as you say, be delusional or try to convince them to be more excited about a particular circumstance than they ought to be. And since then, we've had more great teams and a few bad teams and everything in between, and so I feel like at this point I've kind of learned how to read, you know, the, the season from, from start to finish, but, um, there are little

changes even just from day to day, depending on a number of factors. It's often, you know, like if it's a Saturday night against the Yankees, you know, people maybe have started drinking early and it's already rowdy enough to begin with, you know, as opposed to a Sunday afternoon against, you know, sort of a non-marquee franchise where, you know, there's a lot of young children present and it's just a much more kind of G-rated vibe. And it can still be, you know, there's a lot of young children present and it's just a much more kind of G rated vibe and it can still be, you know, jubilant, but it's not going to be maybe as,

as like, you know, head banging. Right. Yeah. I guess you have to monitor the, the win expectancy almost. You can't be, uh, you and the DJ doing the make some noise or the charge prompt when you're down 10 runs in the eighth or doing the make some noise or the charge prompt when you're down 10 runs in the eighth or something, right? So yeah, you got to, you know, save that for, for when it really counts. And, and what is your view of the game? And I mean that physically, what

can you see? Where are you exactly? And, and then just in terms of how much attention you can pay, because you've been at all these memorable historic moments, I imagine, but you're probably so busy and distracted. Do you feel like you are now on the other hand, I guess you're paying very close attention to what's going on. It's almost like you're scoring the game, I guess how closely you're monitoring everything,

but still you're juggling so many things that I wonder whether the game is just sort of a blur to you. So my view of the field is okay it's okay, but not great. Um, I, well, it is Fenway. So there's some obstructed. Yeah, right. And I really have to like lean and crane my neck if I want to see left field, for example, um, I do have a video monitor that helps me see some angles and some

shots that I might not otherwise be able to see. So that is helpful. It comes in handy. You know, I'm trying to watch as closely as I can and be ready for anything, but certainly the request thing has changed it a bit. You know, sometimes I'm in the middle of learning a song and I, you know, and I'm, you know, I try not to miss, you know, when a ball is put in play,

you kind of get a sixth sense for, for like a certain kind of sound that happens in the crowd and on headset when a ball is put in play or when it's a strike three or something. In fact, I remember we had an old time, we had one of our scoreboard, left field manual scoreboard operators who works inside the Green Monster and he was there for many, many, many years. He used to claim that he could tell what happened in the game without watching that the crowd made a certain sound that was like a ground rule double or a pop-up or a home run. And, uh, I don't know how true or how accurate that was, but I like, I appreciate

the idea that that is possible. And I do try to be as on top of everything as I possibly can be. The DJ helps keep me on my toes. Um, but yeah, there can be distractions, whether it's, you know, requests coming in or I'm in a sort of semi public area where fans can stop by and say hello. And sometimes they do. And, and sometimes they want to chat and I try to be as, you know, as amiable and, and, and, uh, accommodating as I can be with that, you know, every once in a while,

I'll have to just very politely say like, you know, so sorry, hold on just for two seconds, I just got to play a quick thing and then we can do this conversation. But then it's also something like, you know, when you do it thousands of times, a lot of it becomes muscle memory. You know, we're, we're starting up the home season again, very, very soon. And I'm sure the first couple days I'll be, you know, getting my legs back under me a little bit, just in terms of like remembering the freneticness of all the cues and everything. But I am, I don't know, I'm looking forward to

that. And then looking forward to getting back to that feeling of like, okay, yeah, now I'm in the saddle. Yeah. Spring training for organists too, I suppose, as they say. And where do you consider yourself on the, you know, sometimes the organist will almost become part of home field advantage. There will be a little bit of light taunting or trolling in a musical sense, right? Where you kind of, you know, rag on opposing players in some sort of cheeky way. Do you do much of that? And if so, how? I do it a little bit.

I probably do it, I'm certain that I do it less than Matt Kaminsky with The Braves. He's very, very good at it and really enjoys doing it and his team gives him a certain amount of leeway to do it. I myself, I don't love taunting. I feel like our fans are plenty good enough at taunting without needing an assist from, um, from, from the music. Um, but every once in a while, I, you know, and I'm, I'm someone just like,

like, I go, I won't taunt if it's about an, an off field thing. Um, which, you know, sometimes players get involved in off field things and people want to comment on it. Yeah. But once in a while I don't know I'm trying to think of an example well I remember actually my very first year there was a brawl and I played why can't we be friends and after the game a sort of high-ranking team official said to me like that was great and another one the same night said, don't do that again. So at that point, you're like, well, okay, how do I, you know, how do I thread

this needle? Um, and not that I get feedback from, from the higher ups all that much. It was, you know, extremely rare to get two in the same night for the same thing. But I guess it, I don't know if people, people noticed it. Oh, there was a game a few years ago where a Yankees starting pitcher, I wish I could, I can't believe I'm blanking on the name now, but he got ejected from the game in like the second inning because he had a lot of pine tar in his neck and he kept rubbing the pine tar with his hand. And it was one of those Sunday night, you know, ESPN, national TV, game of the week. Michael Pineda. Yeah. Thank you.

And, um, and so when he got caught, I played, um, I played suspicious minds, you know, which starts with that. They're like, we're caught in a trap. We can't walk out. So, um, that was one where like, it felt, it felt right in the moment and it was pretty light, you know, um, pretty delicate jabbing, um, and the fans, but, you know, pretty delicate jabbing. And the fans, but, you know, obviously the fans had plenty of jabbing and taunting that they were they were able to do on their own in that situation. Let me ask you this. I don't want to get in your head here, but I feel like I have never heard an organist at a ballgame screw up.

I'm sure it happens. And I'm also sure that maybe it flies under the radar because there's just so much else going on and there's crowd noise and you're watching the game and whatever else. But I feel like I haven't really noticed that happening. Now, obviously you don't get that gig unless you're good, but I'm sure that happens. It does happen. Well, to me, it does happen. And when I've talked to other organists about it, I think by and large, they've all said, yes, it does happen to them. I mean you know sometimes

it is the thing where like maybe I'm the only one who notices because it was such a subtle thing. You know I have some friends who are musicians who come to a lot of games and every once in a while they might ask me you know they might be like hey did you did you flub that little thing right there and I'm you know I'm like I guess I did. You know, Miles Davis said, like, when you make a mistake, make the same mistake. When you come back around to that same part of the song. So people think it was on purpose. So I always remember that when I make a mistake and sometimes I'll try to, to

deliberately repeat the mistake. Sometimes people will ask me like, Oh my God, the pressure and all the games. And like, have you ever made a mistake? And what I'll do is I'll, I'll say no with a straight face and see how long I can, you know, maintain that, that facade before, before confessing. The most embarrassing one for me, it was early on, it would have been in my first three years or so. And there was a pop up on the infield to end the game, Red Sox loss,

you know, two outs, bottom of the ninth, they're trailing guy pops up. Makes it's a third out. And then the producer of our audio video crew on the headset, he says, okay, game over, Josh, you know, play us out. And I started to play something and it turns out that the second baseman or whoever it was had dropped the popup and and it was, the ball was in play and the runner reached on an error and the rally was potentially still alive.

And I was playing some, not, probably not too dour but some sort of like, oh, well, nice try. We'll get them again tomorrow. Some kind of song in that vein, you know before I realized like, oh, and ever since then I've always kind of made sure as sure as I possibly can be before I play something like, okay, did it like, did it, did that ball clear the fence?

Did that ball stay in the glove? That kind of thing. So what's the coolest thing that you've gotten to do maybe tangentially related to this or because of this, but the other bands that you've played with, the super groups, the split squad, baseball project, etc. What other exciting opportunities has this job led to? You know, this job has led to, directly or indirectly, to most of the playing with bands that I have done and

certainly in the last like 15 years or so, including a lot of traveling, you know, all over the world. So I mean, just all just those opportunities to play with, you know, artists who musicians who like, they're had a poster of them on my wall when I was in high school, and then x number of years later, I'm on stage with them playing together and hanging out with them. And it's totally wild when that stuff happens. I know I have, like I've played, and this was pretty directly through the Red Sox. Well, it was sort of Peter Gammons, who probably most of your listeners know who that is,

but he like recommended me to Eddie Vedder for some gigs that Eddie was gonna be playing solo and needed a backing band. Um, so I got to do those and I know I certainly have a lot of friends again. It's, it's partly the, you know, being like a, being a 50 year old white man. I have, I have a lot of friends who are like, Whoa, that's the like playing with Eddie Vedder. That's as great as it could possibly get. Um, and it certainly was really, really great.

I think, um, I've played some shows through the baseball project, met John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin and I've played some shows with him around the world. And that always blows my mind a little bit, or even just we've just had like little jams in the hotel room where I'm playing a little accordion and he's playing a little mandolin. And I'm like, please don't wake me up from this dream right now. I played a show with Mavis Staples a couple of years ago that was probably a, mandolin and I'm like, please don't wake me up from this dream right now. I played a show with Mavis Staples a couple of years ago that was probably my professional life highlight because she's always been a favorite of mine.

So yeah, I've just been crazy fortunate to meet some of those folks and get to play with them. Well, it seems like the Red Sox are trending up. They've certainly had an exciting and active off season. And so you've got some new stars to welcome to town for the home opener and Netflix documentary. Everything's coming up Red Sox right now. So I guess you won't have to work quite as hard to supply the excitement this season perhaps because the groundwork has been laid for the atmosphere

to be there, it seems like. Yeah, I think it seems like they had a good off season. It seems like things for the most part have been going really well. It's spring training. On paper, they're definitely a better team right now than they were last year. And so we just hope that guys stay healthy

and that that all translates into wins, you know? And I think, you know, obviously the fact that the farm system has borne some good fruit lately and is slated to bear more good fruit in the very near future, that has people excited. So yeah, so I think it's going to be a fun spring and summer over there. When was the last game that you missed? Cause I know you had an Ironman streak. If you don't still,

uh, yeah, so I do have an Ironman streak. I'm knocking literally knocking on wood right now. I've been there for 22 years and I have been blessed with, um, good health and having nothing better to do. So I've managed to show up for every, uh, every home game at Fenway since, since 2003. Yeah. You're like John Sterling. I know that's the wrong side of the rivalry, but it's all right. I mean, same work ethic. One of these days, something will happen. I will get sick or there will be some kind of emergency.

Well, I was going to ask, have you had a like a Jordan flu game where you kind of had to tough it out or have you just been really lucky? I wouldn't call it a Jordan game, but I, but I've had, I do recall a flu game where probably around, I don't know, maybe around 2009, 2010, I remember a game where I was really sick and I went and you know, was drinking lots of fluids and taking medicine and just powered through and that's one of those things though. like, you know, after COVID came along, you realize like how stupid that is.

So I feel like if I, you know, if I'm ever that sick again on a game night, I will, I will call in sick and I will prevail upon my friend Ron Poster from the Boston Bruins. So that's your, your backup. I was going to ask if you have like an understudy who's been waiting for the call for 22 years and you know, gets their hopes up every day and then then you show up for work. I don't know if he gets his hopes up but I but you know when when the day comes and it will come at some point, I will be more than happy to let him take care of it because he's great and I know he would do great at it.

Well we hope it doesn't come for some time. We wish you health and successful season. I was gonna ask if you could play us out with something. I don't, you know, usually you have to go to Fenway to get that kind of performance, but if you don't mind. Yeah, and I'm gonna power us up here. Is there anything in particular you would like to hear? Gosh, I didn't even prepare a request in advance.

I should have, but no, just feel free. Your dealer's choice. Give me a selection. All right, well, I know you mentioned the Baseball Project, which is a wonderful band that writes and performs songs about baseball. And I've been lucky enough to get to play a bunch of shows with them.

So I'm gonna play a baseball project song. Which one am I gonna play? I'm gonna play, I'm gonna play one that they wrote about Ichiro. Oh, yeah. It's called Ichiro Goes to the Moon. Haven't played this in a few years, so we will find out if I remember how it goes.

Can you hear this? Yes, I feel like I'm at the park. Okay, let's give it a shot. Here we go. So That was not bad. Excellent. Didn't detect any mistakes. Perfect as advertised. So, all right.

If you can give me, give me just a ballpark sound. Give me, I don't know, something to take us out that will set the scene for the home opener on April 4th, Red Sox versus Cardinals. Put us in a seat in Fenway right now. Now let's try this. ["Red Sox vs. Cardinals"] Oh Josh Cantor, everyone. Thank you very much, Josh. Thank you, Ben.

Well, that'll do it for today and for this off season. We made it everyone, survived another winter with the help of Effectively Wild and the Effectively Wild community. Thanks for keeping us company and we look forward to experiencing this season with you, which we can do thanks to listener support on Patreon, which you can provide by going to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and signing up

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and Meg and I will be back to discuss it before the end of the week. ["Sometimes I Still Feel Like That Little Girl"] Sometimes I still feel like that little girl Hearing grandma's handheld readings Collecting baseball cards before I could read They say I waste my time Tracking all these stat lines But it's here I found my kind We're all effectively wild