Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2351: The Worst Way to Lose

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Meg Rowley and guest co-host Michael Baumann discuss the Brewers’ recent win streak, what’s contributing to their success, and the general state of the National League playoff field and what it might mean for the trade deadline. Then they consider the worst ways to lose (and win) a baseball game on the back of the […]

Let's play ball. It's effectively wild. It's effectively wild. It's effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2351 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia of FanGraphs and I am joined today by Michael Bauman, also of FanGraphs, because Ben finally took a vacation. Hello, Bauman. How are you? I'm surprised Ben's not podcasting from, I was going to say the beach. He's probably like vacationing at the gym down the street from his apartment.

I think they might, I think they might've gone to the beach. Maybe. We'll get the full Ben vacation report. Man, I hope he's wearing sunscreen if that's the case, because that is one pasty man. I told him that he could take Tuesday off. He's like, I could podcast. I was like, no, I think that that's unnecessary. We can hold down the fort in your absence at least for one day. But we have sort of a hodgepodge agenda for today because we're in this weird interregnum between the All-Star break and the trade deadline where the pod might be completely out of date by the time folks listen to it if somebody swings a big trade between now

and when we hit publish. But I thought today we would do a little brewer's talk because look out, the Milwaukee Brewers are coming for you. And also just the state of the National League in general as we approached the deadline because I was struck by a line in a piece that you wrote for the site today about how there are no really invulnerable teams in the NL, which was not my guess coming into the year. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the worst ways to win a baseball game potentially, and also answer an email that had your name just written all over it. They didn't know, but I knew. And so here we are. We are recording on Tuesday. in the middle of the day, game action has not begun. But as things stand, the Milwaukee Brewers are currently writing an 11-game win streak,

which is a lot of games. And it puts them in a surprising position as far as I'm concerned, because I thought the Brewers would be, you know, like, maybe kind of mid. They'd be competitive, given a division that is kind of weak. But now, as things stand, they are tied with the Tigers for the most wins in baseball. Look out, the Central's are coming for you. They have more wins than the Dodgers, than their division rivals, the Cubs, than the Blue Jays, less relevant to the NL picture, obviously. And I just wonder, like, how we got here, because it can't all be Jacob Mizorowski,

although I'm sure that that can't hurt. BOWEN No, it's less Jacob Mizorowski than you would think, in fact. AMTHAE Yeah. BOWEN Because they have, as you would have expect, pitched really well. I guess some of that is just around the all-star break. Mizorowski's only made one start during the streak and Brandon Woodruff and Freddie Peralta have made three apiece.

But there's those guys, there's Quinn Priester, they've just pitched. And I think that like even not expecting Mizorowski to be this good, I think we expected the Brewers to pitch well because they just have a lot of talent. And even without him, I guess maybe we expect more at Tobias Myers than they've gotten this season,

but or DL Hall or some of the other guys, because it's the modern pitching staff, they've dealt with injuries. But yeah, they're not allowing many runs. I think they've only allowed 26 runs over 11 games, and you're gonna win more your games than not if you Allow two and a half runs a game and I you know, I think that that's Kind of a reductive way to look at it, but also fairly accurate, you know what I was poking through

Stats there was nothing that like really jumped off the page at me Like it's not you know, two and a half runs per game allowed is incredible, but it's Like barely I think, the best in baseball. You know, they haven't blown out a lot of teams. They played a lot of low scoring games, a couple of one run games, but it's impressive that they did a lot of this against the Dodgers. I think the, you know, they've gone six and oh against the Dodgers during this winning

streak and so maybe the Dodgers aren't actually falling apart. Maybe they just ran into the hottest team in baseball at the wrong time. But the thing, like the big thing that I would want to pick up from this is how good Brandon Woodruff's been. And this is a guy who, you know, I thought was maybe not like capital A ace of aces in his prime, but he was somebody that I would feel comfortable starting in game one of a playoff series. And I thought when he got the shoulder injury, that was it, you know, for the foreseeable future.

And now he's back. And if he's rounding in the form at just the right time, you think about Mizrowski and Freddie Peralta, and all of a sudden, like that's looking like one of the best playoff rotations in baseball. Yeah, and I, you know, I wouldn't be shocked if Miz has, you know, he's going to have superlative starts because he's very talented and he's super freaky. But he's also a guy where you can see where the blow up starts might come from, right? Like he struggles with command. He's got a career best walk rate right now,

I think like 11.2%. Now, he's doing that as Ben noted in his write-up of Mizorowski for the trade value series today. He's doing that at the highest level of competition he's ever faced, but also, he's walking 11%, I guess. It's not ideal. So you can imagine there being growing pains for him over the rest of the season, but while they're continuing to get good performance from the rest of that rotation, like, I don't know, he might be able to weather that stuff. I'm the most surprised by this bullpen

because I thought when they made the off-season moves that they did when they dealt Williams away that like, oh God, who's gonna head up this thing? But they have the 10th best bullpen in baseball. There's like, you know, the top three teams, Minnesota, San Diego and Houston, and then like a pretty sizable gap starts to emerge. But like they've been able to hold things down in the later innings. And when you couple that with, you know, what their rotations been able to do, I don't know, you can win 10 games. I like how you're inviting Dodger fans not to crash out over there. I'm trying so this is all I've been doing this year, which is just telling people to stop being such whiny babies about a baseball team that loses more than once a week.

Like I did a hit in Toronto and I was just explaining like, you know, they asked me about the Phillies and said, oh, are Phillies fans crashing out? I said, they're always crashing out. Yeah, welcome to the Phillies. Welcome to joining a, you know, welcome to following a first-place team. And it's the same thing with the Dodgers. And I think that, you know, I don't know if Dodgers fans are really hysterical, or just I think they are on account of being friends with Craig Goldstein. But, you know, I don't't wanna tell people to be less invested in their team, and not to feel like the ups and downs

of that's the beauty of following a baseball team over the course of a season. But I think some people could use a little bit less beauty in their lives. Because if you're not just doing a bit, if you're actually having your mood changed, if you have to go for a long walk after a Tuesday night loss in July, like,

like you need to go play Warhammer or something, like. Go play video games, the Michael Bowman plea. I've been, I mean, I've been playing a lot of video games. The new college football came out. We could talk about what a misery playing with Rice is, if you want to, but. I don't, but I do find it weird that you're able to play with like,

something about being able to play with current college teams sits differently with me than, you know, like MLB the show, where it's like, well, yeah, these are pro athletes. Of course they're in the- So we're college football players now. I know, I know. And also I think this is a major nostalgia trip too.

Yes. Because I think like my relationship with my brother has not been the same since he figured out how to play with Kansas State in NCAA 03 for GameCube. It was the one with Darren Sprouls and Elle Roberson. And yeah, it did real damage to our relationship. So like there's the nostalgia trip for that. But also Warhammer is not a video game. It's a tabletop game.

Oh boy, oh boy. I know what your listeners are like, and I just didn't want to leave that potential for just ur nerd pedantry hanging out there. I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping now and save everybody the trouble. I can't believe that you're doing a video game take when Ben isn't here that will absolutely inspire emails. And I just want our listeners to know, I will not answer them. Although

Ben might because you know, his vacation is coming to a close. I do want to put a just a bow on the Brewers briefly. I would be remiss of course, if I didn't mention that, you know, in the midst of this good run where they are playing very well and they are not to your point allowing very many runs, they are a little like over their skis. I think they're plus five relative to their base runs record, although they're bang on their Pythagorean pad expectations. So there's like, you know, a little bit of sequencing that's going their way. And it's weird because this is like still not a very potent offense.

But you know, it's good enough. But also find me a team on an 11 game winning streak that isn't out over their skis a little bit. So it's you know, it's the cost of doing business. I will say with what you mentioned about Ms. like maybe not actually being the Paul Skeen's clone. He's being marketed as I speaking and, speaking, and also speaking of games I've been playing on my computer instead of working,

I've been spending a lot of time on the crowd-sourced trade value machine, and I've been fading Miz quite a bit. We are dumping him to well outside the top 10. Oh no. I, look, I think that he's an incredibly exciting young player and I, you know, Rob Manford was asked about his inclusion in the All-Star game during his BBWA media availability in Atlanta and he, I don't hand it to the commissioner very often because I often disagree with him,

but he was like, a lot of guys said no, and this is the most exciting young guy. Like I think it's fine to have him in the game. You know, people want to see him throw 103 and he did not cite Mierzewski's extension numbers, but I'm sure that that is is factoring into some folks excitement too. And I was like, that seems like a fine answer. Like none of these guys actually want to play in the All-Star game. Yeah, I don't really have any problem with it. When they got to the swing off, I also had that moment where I was like,

wait, why aren't they bringing like Ohtani and O'Neill Cruz back? And I was like, oh wait, Ohtani is already on a plane back to California. Yeah, he's in traffic outside of Truist. He's not trying to stick around for any of that stuff. No way. I think you're right that we don't want to underrate what the Brewers are doing on their own. Their recent success against the Dodgers

is not merely an artifact of the Dodgers floundering, but they are kind of floundering some. And as I said, I thought that the National League was going to be this hotly contested, incredibly good, obvious World Series favorites relative to their competition in the ALE with the possible exception of the Yankees. And now we kind of have a fair amount of mid going on. Some of that is not anybody's fault. There are good players who

are hurt. There are teams that are suffering from injuries, including the ones with good records. What is your general sense of how the National League or the teams that are in contention are going to grapple with the trade deadline? You and Jay wrote a point counterpoint at my request on what the Diamondbacks should do with their sort of Hall of Good, but soon to be free agent players. What do you think is going to happen? Are we going to be busy next Thursday? Probably, but I think it's going to be a lot of relievers moving. I think, you know, I don't see like the, I guess, you know, Garret Crochet didn't get traded at the deadline, but I thought that it was like he got talked about as a potential deadline trade candidate.

And there's not really anybody even on that level to me who is getting talked about as like a, you know, a major piece, like, you know, Eugenio Suarez to pick the cream of the crop of the Diamondbacks class. I think, like, he's a player I have great affection for, and he is having just an unbelievable offensive season, but, like, rental Eugenio Suarez is not, how much better is he gonna make a lot of these teams? And also, there's only one of them.

And so, and it's not even a lock he's going to get traded. And so I just don't know what's out there that's going to really move the needle. And maybe this is a result of talent development, that spigot being turned off a little bit with the shortening of the draft in the minor leagues, or our teams locking up all the good cost-controlled players to super long extensions, and taking potential free agents or rentals or guys who were two years from free agency off the market. Is it the expanded playoffs?

Because there's like 22 teams that have, I think, a pretty compelling argument that they should at the very least stand pat. And so it's just, I don't know if it's all those things, none of those things are some combination, but it's gonna be pretty sedate. But I think, you know, we're gonna see movement just because everybody needs relief pitchers.

And so, you know, there's gonna be 10 people in the FanGraph Slack writing up 35 David Bednar trades next week, which is fine. Like, you know, I wrote a thousand words about the Adam Frazier trade, but we, you know, we can make it work, but it's not as exciting as, as like the Dodgers trading for you, Darvish or Mandy Machado at the end of the world this decade. Yeah. I, um, people are going to care about the deadline kind of regardless, but in terms of the,

am I sitting at Fangrass refreshing rapidly to see what the latest analysis is? I don't know if David Bednar moves the needle for everyone, although we do have a lot of sickos who read the site. So those sickos might just find themselves deeply satisfied. But I don't know. I don't know what to make of the impact of the guys available because you're right to say that Suarez is definitely the best pure hitter on the market. And I am not enthused by how much any of the available starters move the needle with the possible

exception of Merrill Kelly, which feels like a wild thing to say given what we might have said about it like a year ago, you'd be like, Oh God, Zach Allen's on the market. Great. Go get that guy. Zach Allen kind of sucks right now. I think the best summation that you could make is Jeff Pass and did like a top 50 trade candidates thing at ESPN. I think it went up yesterday morning and number four on the list was Sandy Alcontra. And there was a caveat about,

yeah, his ERA is over seven right now, but, and I'm like, what are we even doing here? If this is one of the best, one of the five best players who can move at the deadline, like it feels like it's gonna be underwhelming. But, you know, for the sake of traffic, I definitely think that you should continue refreshing fangraphs.com on Thursday because we're going to have analysis of whatever happens.

We'll make it interesting. There's no transaction too small for us. We, you know, there are no small transactions, only small people. Sometimes smaller people are included in the transactions. I think Adam Frazier's both. Ben has beef with Adam Frazier, he revealed. He doesn't really, but he thinks that Adam Frazier sucks and is going to be outproduced by the prospect he was traded for.

I also think that. Yeah, but it's weird for Ben to take a stand on something. Yeah, the only thing I remember him disliking in all the time we've known each other were college baseball and Mets fans. He's coming around on college baseball. I think that your slow war has started to gain ground. I don't think so. Because the last interaction we had, he and I, was over the weekend, he sent me a link to,

you can't say blog without it sounding pejorative, and that's not how I mean it, but it was a guy who followed college baseball for the first time and came away with the conclusion that it doesn't have the juice and will never have the juice. And Ben was like, what do you think about this? And that very like, he can be a pest when he wants to.

Yeah, but he's our pest. So we have a function. Now he's your pest now. Yeah, he's like, you're like, this isn't my problem. Well, the deadline will come and it will go and some guys will move and some of them will help their teams win and others will prove to be a disappointment.

My fear is that the Mariners will trade for Eohanio Suarez and then he will immediately have a power outage and not hit another home run the rest of the season. That's my concern. I'm worried about it. Mostly for his sake because he seems like a nice guy who everyone likes. Drop the hair care routine right now. It's just lustrous. I live in the same desert he does and my hair looks terrible all the time. So dry. Unlike in Atlanta where it looked terrible because it was very large. That's the Brewers. That's the National League, such as it is. How worried about the Dodgers are you actually before we move on? I don't give a **** about the Dodgers.

Oh, I mean, you mean like intellectually? Not not particularly. They've still got to. The Padres and Giants are still sort of groping around in the dark. The Diamondbacks are still miles back. They've got to lead like there are elements of this. Like, I'm not comfortable with what Mookie Betts stat line looks like right now. Yeah. Like I this is a guy who I never thought was going to get old. Maybe suddenly getting old. But they're still the most talented team in the league. They've still got, I don't

know, I actually, day by day, I have to go to roster resource and see which ones of their pitchers are on the IL. But you know, what they got now, you know, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Otani, like, that'll play in the playoffs just fine. Yeah, Yamamoto is having a hell of a year. Otani, I enjoyed him giving up a home run and then hitting one yesterday. I was like, Oh, yes, two way Otani. This is fun. The Tony Dungey. The Tony Dungey.

You remember that when he was coaching the Bucks, that was the trivia question that they got. They kept throwing around every time they wanted to say something interesting about Tony Dungy. It might be the only interesting thing about Tony Dungy, but he was the last player to throw a touchdown pass and intercept a pass in the same NFL game. Huh. But see, that's like a... It's not quite a Tony Dungy, right? Because you don't want to give up a home run. You want to, he caught an, or did he throw a pick

and he caught a pick? Dungy is the most recent NFL player to throw an interception and intercept a pass in the same game. That's the Otani thing. Yeah, because otherwise, like if you're throwing a touchdown and then somehow intercepting a ball, like that's the best day of sports You've ever had really but given up a homerun. He didn't want to give up a homerun to Buxton

He just did that because Byron Buxton hits home run sometimes Do you have any more to say about Tony Dungy or the Dodgers? Not that I feel comfortable Making you responsible for legally vetting. That's good looking out. I appreciate that. Other things happened yesterday. You talked about Phillies fans crashing out. I think that Boston fans were on the receiving end of a crash out. Where were you when you learned that the Phillies Red Sox game yesterday had ended on a catcher's interference call? I was actually in my office. I had nothing to

do. I was flipping through the three. I get the Phillies and both New York teams on my cable package and so I was just giving MLB.TV the night off and flipping between whichever game was closest and then I saw that the the Phillies and Red Sox were going to extra innings. And so I watched Max Lazar look like Prime Roy Halliday for one inning. Yeah. And then watched Jordan Hicks get the yips

when confronted with a guy. I was like, why are they squaring around a bunt with Otto Kemp? And it's because Jordan Hicks will throw behind you if you square around a bunt. So he loaded the bases and then, and Mundo Sosa caught Carlos Novias' mitt on the, on the backswing, if you want to call it that, because

our friend Sam Miller was right on the spot about this. He had written earlier in the season about catcher's interference on non-swings. And this was another example. So I would definitely recommend you go check out Sam's newsletter post about that because this was that except in a walk-off situation, which, and I love the immediate reaction because the Phillies, I mean, Sosa and I think JT Rumiuto and Kyle Schwaber all immediately clocked it and they were like, we need to go review this.

And as they started showing it, you know, reviewing it, the Phillies booth, everybody in the Phillies booth was like, wow, that's like a walk-off catcher's interference. I've never heard of that before. And so, you know, the game ended, I flipped over to the Mets game and Gary Cohen was like, you're not going to believe how the Phillies game ended.

On a catcher's interference. And either Keith or Ron was like, wow, I've never seen that before. And you want to know why nobody's ever seen that before? Because it's only ever happened once in Major League history. That's crazy. There have been so many thousands and thousands of Major League games. And this is something that's only ever happened once before in 1971.

How cool is that? Yeah. It was it was fun because I went from, well first I went from watching, I don't know if I'm getting my chronology quite right. First I went from watching the Yankees infield absolutely sh** the bed in a way that was devastating and inspired me to ask Matt Martell, are the Yankees okay? And then I went to the Phillies game, I think this is right, and saw that. And then as I started to bounce around to other games, it felt like this cascading revelation on the part of every booth, like you're never going

to believe how, to the point that when Big Inning came on, they kept having to cut away to other games because it was just the booth recapping what had happened in the red sox game for each individual one. It was like spread the word, XG, XG. It was, it was like not a good hitter. He's a 102 WRC plus, but I guess you can do that. The question I put to you in Slack before we were recording as we were thinking of what we might want to discuss today, I was like, what are the worst ways to lose a baseball game? Like that

make you feel the worst? And I would say before you answer, this has to be, I don't know how great I would feel about winning this way. I mean, you'd rather win rather than not. Oh, I don't care. Like, I guess the only bad way to win is on an extra inning sacrifice fly. Oh, I'll give a specific example. When I was 24, I went to a Phillies game with my best friend and it went 19 innings. Roy Halliday started against Travis Wood. The game went 19 innings. Danis Baez had like a basically a career ending five inning relief stint.

And it ended with Wilson Valdez, the Phillies utility infielder and one of my least favorite players in major league history coming out, coming in from shortstop and pumping 91 and retiring the side. And he became the first player since Babe Ruth to start a game in the field and win it on the mound.

And this is one of the best games I've ever been to, probably like the most memorable regular season game I've ever been to or will ever go to. And it ended on a sacrifice fly. And that's like the only thing that it just felt so anticlimactic. And so I think from the winning perspective, as long as it's not a sack fly, and even then, like even a close play at the plate is really cool.

Like that's a really exciting play. But if it's just like, you know, routine ball five feet short of the warning track, and there's a decent runner on third, you know, the center fielder just barely, you know, doesn't even put in an effort, like that stinks. But any other kind of win, I think is good. Any other kind, obviously, like if a guy gets injured, like if

you have a Kendris Morales situation where like you have a walk off and then a guy gets hurt, like that kind of puts a damper on things. But I'm sure you're happy to win always. And particularly the Phillies being sort of locked with the Mets for the division. They need to win. Every win is important and you want to win in extras and all this stuff, but it would feel like you're getting away with one a little bit there, I would imagine. Jared Sautner So I would say feeling like you're getting away with one is a great feeling. Stacey Doherty Oh, I don't like that feeling. It makes me feel guilty. Jared Sautner How are you more Presbyterian than me about this? one is a great feeling. Oh, I don't like that feeling. It makes me feel guilty.

Howard, you more Presbyterian than me about this. I don't know. I'm more a lot of things. The guilt for no reason strikes me as deeply Catholic, and that hasn't been a theme in the family for quite a while. So I don't know what to tell you, man. This is definitely an argument that I make a lot to people. like, they get mad, you know, if your team wins on a blown call, regardless of sport, like, you know, people say, Oh, you only won because the refs messed up. And my response to that is always, yeah, isn't that awesome? Like, that means that, like, the gods favor us, because, you know, they're performing miracles to intercede on our behalf, you know, maybe if you were as

righteous, that would happen to you too. And I think that's the attitude you gotta have to stuff like this. You take your wins however you can get them and definitely complain about weird stuff happening if it causes you to lose, but change the rules, move the goalposts depending on whether

it suits your argument or not. There's not enough of that in sports discourse, I think. And I think everybody wants to feel like they're the best. And the point is not to be the best, the point's to win. Yeah, I mean, I think that really what it obscures is that even the best have a fair amount of like stuff going their way that helps them to that end. So we could perhaps be a little less, I don't know,

self-righteous about it or puritanical or maybe suggest that I believe in a malevolent, all-powerful being in a way that I don't normally account for, that I'm like worried that, you know, my favorite team is going to be held to account for their dodge, right, that it'll come back around to them or something. I don't think I do, but maybe. I mean, that's a major stumbling point for Christian theology is the belief in an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God and reconciling that with pain and injustice and suffering. And one way to get around that is to say God is all-knowing and all-powerful, but He is

not all-loving. Well, we can avoid the rest of the philosophy talk, but I want to hear the worst ways to lose. What are your worst ways to lose, Bauman? So I would rather lose on a catcher's interference a hundred times out of a hundred than lose a game the way it looks like Jordan Hicks was going to lose this game for the Red Sox. The guy who just like the relief pitcher, even a good relief pitcher, and I know

Hicks is not having a great season, but he's got a long track record of being at the very least a competent pitcher who just can't find the zone. This was, I think this is something that part of the reason Phillies fans are like this is this happened to Craig Kim, Roland and Ryan Kirkering in the playoffs two years ago, and that's just such an awful way to go. I understand it cooking people's brains a little bit. And I just hate the, I don't mind losing big. I don't mind just like getting beat, but just you can't find the fricking strike

zone is it drives me nuts. And so I'd rather lose on this weird. Cause you know, you lose this, you lose on catcher's interference. Like, oh, we lost, but we saw something that you only see once every 50 years. That's kind of neat. But just walking the world in a tie game and extra innings, it's just, it's a bad way to go.

Yeah, it's not ideal. The extra innings of it all makes it more painful. I guess you could take a little bit of the burden off when you remember that a guy started at second base that you had nothing to do with, but that's kind of cold comfort when it really comes down to it. I don't like any time that a game ends in a way where, and it doesn't have to happen in the final frame, right? Sometimes this moment comes much earlier, like in that Yankees game where again, they

just like could not stop throwing the ball around. Anytime where you're going to have like a prolonged close up of a player just after an error, I'm like, that's a really bad way to experience this. Because then you're in a position where you feel animus toward one of your guys and that's not a good feeling and he feels terrible, presumably. And even if you benefit, there's like a moment of human empathy that takes the shine off it. Particularly when it's a guy like Volpe where you're just like, I don't know, man, they might need to put this dude in witness protection in New York because Yankees fans do not seem to be able to engage with the kind of failure he's presenting in any

sort of a rational way. They should have just signed a better shortstop maybe. You should tell Yankees fans to go watch the first inning of the Mets-Angels game that I watched. It wasn't the first inning of the game, but it was the first inning that was on after the Phillies game ended. Chris Taylor made one of the worst plays on a fly ball I've ever seen. That was quite bad.

Was that the Alvarez fly ball? Yes. The one that he just like, I don't think he knew where. So like you're going back and you're, you're tracking a ball. You need to know where you are. You need to know where the ball is and you need to know where the fence is. And I don't think he had an idea where any of those things were. And just the ball bounced behind him.

I have no idea how the ball bounced behind him, because there was so little space between him and the fence. And it just rolled away, and he just put his shoulders down and looked like he wanted to, like, teleport himself anywhere else in the world. And it reminded me this is a mean thing to bring up, wanted to like teleport himself anywhere else in the world. And it reminded me, this is a mean thing to bring up because he's having a good season in a way that I think makes a lot of people happy because Joe Adele has struggled. But do you remember in 2020 when Joe Adele

like helped a home run over the fence? Something about being an angels outfielder, man, it just gets you. Was this the same season where he hurt both his knees on the same different incidents in the same base running play? Maybe. It could be. Yeah, but he's just been through so much.

Yeah, the poor guy's been through a lot. Yeah. Chris Taylor, I don't know. I guess the Angels want to pay him money to play baseball, so that's something, but it's like you could be done, my guy. So I posted to that effect when he signed with the Angels. I was like, I said almost the exact same thing. Like, you've got multiple rings,

you made an All-Star team, there's nothing more for you to prove to anybody. What are you doing with the Angels? And a bunch of people replied, like he's very close to 10 years of service time. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. That makes a big difference. It's an important investing date. I didn't realize that. Well, Chris, go get it. I hope that, you know, what are what are the

angels not going to play Chris Taylor? Do they have an abundance of other outfield options that we've been missing? If I had to put my money on a team making the wrong decision about whether they should buy or sell, I think it's actually on the angels because they're like in it enough that I could imagine them being like, no, like we should, we should keep these guys. We should try to add some dudes. We should try to- Does that even count?

Like, we know they're going to make the wrong decision. It's almost like taking the free space. 49 and 51. Huh. What other bad ways are there to lose? I think you made a good point about it doesn't have to happen in the last inning. If anything, like when you know you've lost the game in like the seventh, yeah, and you got to play out the string and you hope that like there was and not to keep going back to the 23 NLCS, but there was in game seven, there was a ball that, I don't think people realize how close Bryce Harper came

to turning that series around with the swing, but it ended up being like 20 feet shorter. He crushed it, but he got under it just a little bit and it ended up not even making the warning track. And after that, I was like, everybody was like, oh man, that was it, that was the shot. And you just sort of have to play out the string. I think that when the, and like,

that's not a bad way to lose in the grand scheme of things. But with the Pete Cosma infield fly roll thing happens and you still have three innings left. That's just, and you're already mad that you've lost a game that you haven't actually lost yet. Yeah. Because then you just have to keep going and like, what are you going to, you have to kind of put on a show for people.

You have to at least feign like trying to come back a little bit, but your heart's not going to be in it. I asked this question to Craig Goldstein and he offered an answer related to his team that the way that the Twins lost yesterday might be one of the more heartbreaking ways because they had runners on first and second, Correa's up. He looks like he has just hit a game tying home run. And then all of a sudden James Outman is there to rob his home run and the game ends sort of unceremoniously and the Dodgers win. But he looked like he had it, you know, and the ball's in the air for long enough that

Twins fans could be like, oh my God, we did it. We're going to play extras and maybe we'll be able to pull this thing out like our bullpens could. No, it didn't happen. It's devastating. I think you and I have very different senses of like, very different things make us feel bad, which is interesting. I would not have guessed that. But that like, you know, you come so close, you feel like you're in it and you know, you lose on a great play. I don't know, that doesn't feel as terrible to me. I just feels like having the having that window, you know, having that window

where you're like, oh, my God, we did it and then have it ripped away. And you're sitting there like, maybe maybe we were wrong. Maybe you didn't catch it after all. No, he did. James Outman. I mean, great name for that kind of a play. Right. But no, not good for twins fans. That almost feels like a kind of pain that's like there's I remember reading some of the people with clinical depression, like eating spicy foods because it hurts.

Oh, gosh. Like gives you like an endorphin rush from the pain. And that's sort of what that plate feels like to me. My one hobby apart from baseball is making hot sauce. So draw your own conclusions. Hot sauce is good for you. I think it clears you out in a way that's important. Yeah. I keep meaning to bring some around when I come down there for various baseball trips, but I'll make sure to make up a batch next time.

You know, I love a sauce. Can you take hot sauce through airport security? As long as it's either in your carry or in your checked luggage or it's in a bottle of less than three ounces, right? You can bring a little three ounce thing of hot sauce to the Fan Graf's desert compound. That would be good. I love sauce. I'm a sauce gal. Sauce is great. Oh man, that's... We could talk about that. I could go on about sauce. We could talk about sauce, you know, we could talk. Look, like I have,

I have a lot of different sauces on hand at any given time, a variety of mustards. I don't think you can have too many mustards. I mean, you do get to a point where you're like, how long has this been in the fridge? Does this need to be thrown away? Yeah. Mustard has a shelf life. Yeah. Yeah. I don't eat a lot of mustard just in the course of, you know, eating, but I usually have like four or five different kinds of mustards. You got to have like yellow.

You got just like your standard yellow. You got to have the spicy brown. You got to have a Dijon because that's useful for various cooking applications. And then like you get into specialty mustard, horseradish, honey mustard, and that's not even Chinese mustard. Like, you can really just fill your entire fridge. That really strong English mustard, which is surprising because not a big spice culinary tradition. But that, you know, that English mustard will put hair on your chest.

Yeah, I think they do horseradish and stuff in there. I love horseradish. Horseradish is perfect food. English mustard will put hair on your chest. Yeah, they do they do horse radish and stuff in. I love horse radish. Yeah. Horse radish is perfect food. Yeah, clears you out. And then you do have to do the dance of like, how long has this been in here? Sometimes you're the power to your fridge goes out for long enough that you feel like you have to get rid of some things because you don't want botulism, but you're sad about it because then like you've lost this sauce. You're like, is the vinegar content in this high enough that it could kill anything that might grow

in, you know? So that's the thing. Like I've in my hot sauce education, like growing peppers in my yard and stuff. Yeah. I have become an aficionado and acolyte of smoking Ed Curry. You familiar with smoking Ed Curry? No. The creator of the Carolina Reaper Pepper. Okay. He makes, oh, he makes the, the, the bomb hot sauce from the talk show with the bald guy. Yeah, hot ones.

So Smoke and Ed says that, I think if the pH of your sauce is under four point, and please like double check this before you, you know, take food safety tips from this podcast. I think it's 4.1 or 4.2 if it's below that, it's so acidic, you won't grow bacteria. And so like even a lot of stuff that says you should refrigerate it is just like,

basically that labeling is CYA for like, you know, what if it gets contaminated somehow in packaging or if you're like dabbing the hot sauce and you accidentally get like food particulates on it, you know, that can go bad. But the sauce itself, if it's, if it's acidic enough, it's not going to go bad. And so, you know, I don't know if mustard's acidic actually, but I do have pH testing strips for when I make hot sauce to make sure it's below the smoke and Ed Curry line. You know, when you buy hot sauce, if you buy like a season pack of hot sauce from the the Hot Ones people, because they'll send you like, you know, well, you can buy any of them

individually, I think, but you can buy like the season 10 lineup or whatever Interesting. And if you do that, they send you a, a De Balm, but it's not a De Balm. It's like a different thing. And I think it's made by the same people, but I think that they can't send De Balm through the mail. I think they're not allowed to ship DeBomb, which seems smart because every time I'm like, I'm worried about Sean's innards. I feel like he's getting his gut all screwed up from that.

And you just live a life. You make your peace with poop and more than. I just am like, does he have an ulcer or something? Does it like corrode? Is it that rough? I feel like we've talked about where ulcers come from. I thought it was like bacteria. Oh right, it's not actually spicy food. I think it is often, yeah, it is often bacteria. It's not.

Yeah, you eat too much hot food, like it'll do weird stuff to your gut biome. I'm not saying that's not true. But it won't actually cause an ulcer. I hope not. But with the season pack, so my parents are, my dad was the cook in our home growing up and he is, and I'll say this because I don't think anybody, because this is not my podcast, so nobody in my family is going to listen to it.

He's not a very good cook. And when I went to college, my summer job was I waited tables at Carolina Wings and Ribs and got familiar with hot sauces for the first time in my life. And I was like, oh, this food tastes like stuff. Where has this been my entire life? Yeah. So when I came home, I started putting hot sauce on everything that we had been eating. And my parents thought this was this was so unusual to them. They thought like hot sauce is my entire personality.

was so unusual to them. They thought like hot sauce is my entire personality. So they started giving me like, you know, gifts of hot sauce and spicy salsa, which you know, I do. I love spicy food. But a few years ago, they got me for Christmas an advent calendar of 24 different hot sauces. That's delightful. It was one of the most enjoyable gift experiences I've ever had. Because you open a different one each day and there's so much variety. And I'm a person who left his own devices. Like I'll fill my entire pantry with different hot sauces and forget about half of them. But it was just a really incredible experience.

So if there's somebody in your life who loves spicy food, it's a great Christmas gift if this company is still doing that. Yeah, it's, I think having a nice variety, especially like if you have people over and it's a, you know, it's like, oh, it's taco night and look at all these sauces. It's an instant conversation starter. It really is. Some of the sauces I haven't opened yet and I kind of need to like get going on those hot sauces

because they do have an expiration and I'm not gonna like throw things away the day they expire. But after- Seven years. Yeah, but after a while. Like seriously, you can't get around for, now you just shake it up and it'll reconstitutes.

That is the thing. Like sometimes it separates to the point of like taking a lot of work to get it to like re kind of emulsify. And then I'm like, I don't think this might be done. And then you watch some seasons and you're like, no one liked that sauce. Like do I need to open that sauce? They always try to be polite about it, but some of the sauces you can tell like, it's like, Oh, that queso one, people were not into that queso one from a couple of years ago.

They thought that one was bad, but everyone liked the lemon pepper. And let me tell you the lemon pepper, it was great. It had two gals on the, the label. Can't remember the name. Should we do an email? Should we do your email? This email came in six hours ago and it is from listener Andrew. And again, as soon as I read it, I was like, I got to bother Bauman about this. It starts dearest Ben and Meg, but we'll imagine that he was actually addressing it to you because if he had known you were coming on the show. I had already agreed to come on the show six hours ago.

So maybe he's just in our, in our internets listening into our conversations. Maybe, be benevolent if you are a listener, Andrew. Okay, dearest Ben slash Bauman and Meg, I was listening to acquired, another of my favorite podcasts a while ago, as they broke down the business of the Indian Premier Cricket League. They took several minutes to berate our beloved MLB for being a declining sport that is hurting itself by sticking to the past and not making itself a good investment for its owners. Citation needed.

Hold on. Okay, sorry. Citation. What the? Hold on. Okay, sorry. It is not listener Andrew's fault what they are saying on Acquired, a podcast that I'm glad he likes but that I have never heard of. One of their main points was that MLB has no salary cap.

These are business slash technology startup slash investment thinking slash venture capital guys. That's why they don't know what they're talking about. As an early 20s baseball fan and a finance professional, I disagree with these sentiments, but the owners will obviously use similar arguments, especially if their supposed plight is repeated in popular business media. My hypothetical for y'all is if you were the sole negotiator

for the players in the CBA negotiations this go round, what would you demand in exchange for a salary cap? This is your chance to try and eliminate any of the things we don't like about the state of baseball. Would you accept fewer years until free agency or team salary minimum? Would you take a salary cap on the condition that John Fisher and Bob Nutting have to sell their teams? What could we change about the game that will benefit the players as much as a salary cap might hurt them? That is listener Andrew's question. And then he says some nice things about the podcast, which I won't make you blush by, but which I did. Thank you listener Andrew. So

I put this question to you in our Slack and you can now rail against private equity if you'd like to, but we should also make sure to answer listener Andrew's question. Yeah, this is not, this is not a bad question. It's a question that I do, I admit, and this is not listener Andrew's fault, but I do find like, what should the players give up in exchange for a salary cap to be kind of a tedious talking point because they'll never do it and also nothing that the owners would never do anything that would make it worth it. I think at the very least a salary floor that's very close to the salary cap, like you have in the NBA and NHL.

Fewer years free agency is an obvious thing. I think like going to the end again, this will never happen because the owners will never agree to it. Going to the NHL model where it's based on age instead of professional experience would solve particularly with restricted free agency model after the initial like along with the arbitration progression, I think that would solve like 65% of what Ales baseball transactions is making everybody free agents at 27 or 28 and having a big salary escalator and the potential for restricted free agency after three years. Those are two like serious answers to the question.

First of all, I'm not gonna take this as a declining sport from cricket people. Like, go away. You're like, should I swear and make Shane bleep it or should I try to clean this clean? I feel like you know about me that I will watch any sport, that there is no sport that, cricket is the one exception. Cricket is stupid.

And I can't believe that proud countries with such like profoundly interesting heritage like India and Pakistan and Australia and the West, West Indies all come together for cricket because they can't throw off the fricking colonial yoke. It's just, it's humiliating that the people do this. So first of all, I'm not gonna take this from, also like cricket players don't make that much money

compared to baseball people. There's not that much money in cricket compared to baseball. And like, just the idea, like if you're a business person and you think that the lack of a salary cap has held ownership back from, it's a level of misunderstanding of like the base, not even the sport, the basic business principles

of the sport, the historical record, it's a factual error that would undermine anything else that you said if you're talking about baseball or indeed business. It's the equivalent of me coming out here and talking about Edmundo Sosa reaching on catcher's interference and then talking about how the ball he tried to hit was actually a cube. It's like it's that level of just not knowing ball. And so again, Andrew, I hope you enjoy listening to these morons.

What you do with your other podcast listening is none of my business. But like I said, the question is interesting and those are the serious answers, right? Like salary floor, quicker free agency, abolish the spending restrictions on the draft and international free agency, just streamline everything. And I think that a lot of people, our squishy lefty baseball friends, people who think of themselves as pro labor,

tend to just side with the players association because the enemy, you know, because ownership in a lot of cases like is societally our enemy. And also, you know, the reason that I care about labor and baseball is not because I care that much personally about the fortunes of these millionaires. It's a metaphor, you know, it's useful when we're talking about our own, you know, relationships with management and ownership, he says on a podcast with his boss. But so, you know, from that perspective, you know, my allegiance is to, my philosophical allegiance is to like workers as a class of people, not to the MLBPA specifically.

And from that perspective, I'm, I think there's a fairly convincing argument workers as a class of people, not to the MLBPA specifically. Right. And from that perspective, I think there's a fairly convincing argument to be made that as much as the no salary cap, no matter what stance is, and is perfectly defensible, I think that the players have left money on the table. I think you could make an argument that players have left money on the table, not getting a floor. If the cap happens in 2002 or 1994, who knows where it is now. So, you know, it's a complicated enough counterfactual that I don't think you can say for certain, but I think that there's an argument to be made that maybe this was a strategic mistake. So, I don't think

it's that crazy a question, but also doesn't mean I can't give a strategic mistake. So I, you know, I don't think it's, it's that crazy a question, but also doesn't mean I can't give a crazy answer. Right. What I said, you know, I'll take a salary cap. I'll take a salary cap that limits individual player salaries to $500,000 to $400,000 less than that. Even if we expropriate every professional baseball team and turn it over to municipal ownership. And I started thinking about my award-winning article from a few years ago about how Major League Baseball should expand to 48 or even 64 teams. Meg, I'm going to say a sentence that you know usually heralds the arrival of trouble. I started making a spreadsheet. Oh, God. I can't believe you turned this around in the like three hours

since I pestered you with this question initially. No, I started thinking about this. Like, I turned this around in like 30 minutes. Like, while I was waiting for you to finish what you were doing before this, I thought about, I started looking at the largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and thought, you know, obviously, like, if you have New York, you know, like a New York team competing with a Cincinnati team, and it's municipally owned, obviously, that's not a fair fight. But I think about how would you do things if you were starting baseball from scratch? And, you know, there are other ways to to do this apart from the North American model,

one of those is European soccer model. There's more than a dozen professional teams in London, for instance. There's a handful in Greater Manchester, in Paris, in Munich, in Milan. They aren't one of the 30 biggest in the world, not all of them, but they're fully fledged professional teams. I've talked to Michael Kaley about this from the double double pivot pod, you know, one of the major soccer equivalent of sabermetric thinkers. And he was saying that we were talking about high level salaries of who was it? I think it was Phil Foden from Manchester City was the player

we were talking about. And I was like, and he makes nothing compared to like even middle relievers. And he's a hundred times more famous than David Bednar, for instance. But he's making about the same amount of money. And Michael Cale was saying basically that the financial considering the financial like wage structures, they call it in soccer is much more level where, you know, messy and killing and Mbappe don't make as much as Juan Soto or Shohei Otani maybe, but there's so many more high level professional jobs like there's a hunt, you know, there's like a couple thousand full time you can get rich doing this jobs in all of baseball, but you can go four levels deep in the English professional pyramid and still make a good pro athlete wage. Or you can go two or three levels deep in a lot of other European countries,

and the US and Brazil and Japan. there's a professional soccer league that pays professional athlete wages in dozens or even hundreds of countries around the world. And so like, you know, the number of people who are making $20 million a year is not that great, but the number of people who are making $400,000 a year or something like that is, is enormous compared to what it is in other sports, particularly North American sports. So I thought about what would it mean if you had, if you allocated basically, if you had

municipal ownership of baseball teams and you allocated teams to different cities based on population. And so the number I came up with was for every 1.4 million residents your metropolitan statistical area has, you get one major league baseball team. Okay. And I separated, I picked 1.4 because it was gonna be 1.5, but there were a bunch of Canadian cities.

There was, I think three Canadian cities that had somewhere in the 1.4 millions. So I lowered the threshold a little bit and came up with 150 professional baseball or major league baseball teams allocated across the largest cities in the North American and Caribbean countries that play baseball. So U.S., Dominican Republic, Canada, Mexico, Cuba.

And, you know, you have 150 teams, you could divide them up regionally, you could divide that, you know, divide them up into promotion and relegation, you could have, you know, leagues of 20 or 30 or 40 and have multiple tiers. And so, you know, but like you'd have, for instance, in my, my model, you'd have 15 teams in the Mexico City area, 14 teams you'd have, for instance, in my model, you'd have 15 teams in the Mexico city area, 14 teams in New York, nine in Los Angeles, six in Chicago, four in Toronto, and all the way down to like one in Raleigh, North Carolina, one in Edmonton, one in Oklahoma

city, one in Tijuana. And you could organize them in whatever form you wanted, but they would be municipally owned. They'd be baseball rules. So like the owner couldn't pick them up and move them to a more profitable city. And you know, you pay not like 40 or $50 million for the highest players, but you get more jobs

where players can earn a comfortable living. And for the farm system, you allocate one team, you allocate like a minor league team, a double A or triple A level team, per 500,000 residents in a statistical area for cities with between 500,000 and 1.4 million. And that's an additional 130 teams across those various countries. And so this is my- This is your ask.

Yes. I want public ownership of teams. I want 280 teams across North America and the Caribbean, dispersed, municipally owned, publicly owned, or worker owned maybe, and we'll figure out the rest later. But I will, you give me that, I will sign on for a salary cap right here, right now. I don't ask this question as if I am taking the side of the good people it acquired. What What incentive does, and the owner would just be like the majority owner in the municipally owned team.

Like how does one do ownership in that situation? Like who's making, why is the owner then an owner? Like the city or the county. And, but I mean- Like this is a public utility. This is like a bridge or a toll road. And, you know, you sell tickets or, you know, maybe you make it a nonprofit, like, you know, like a city orchestra or something.

But, you know, these are things that don't have to, you know, you think about how expensive stadiums are like, do you need, you know, if you have 150 top level teams, Yeah. you know, not everyone needs to be a billion and a half dollar stadium that seats 50,000 people and has, Right. you know, like a two square mile video scoreboard. Like, you could have, stuff can still be nice. It can still be, it can still hold a lot of people, it can still work, but it doesn't have to have like luxury boxes, for instance. You know, we get beyond like what can, it's not even this is going to, you're going to get your money's worth out of this podcast appearance,

apparently, because I'm going to do it. You know, really do my thing. Baseball right now is set up. It's not even set up to make money. It's set up to up to raise share prices. Right. And it's, you're building, you're making real estate investments basically.

And so it's not like our team makes money because it sells a lot of jerseys. Or, you know, our team makes money because we make our, you know, our TV revenue is X, Y, and Z, or we sell this many tickets. Our team makes money because our stadium is, you know, the bells and whistles are worth this much and its location is worth this much in real estate. And it's all made up.

It's all like stock market bullsh**. And what if you made a baseball team that was just meant to win games, you know, to entertain the fans, to, you know, to build civic pride? How would you go about doing that, you know, without not even the pursuit of profit, but the pursuit of increased theoretical franchise value? Which is two steps divorced from anything that we really ought to be incentivizing as a society. And so, you know, maybe your stadium doesn't need to cost a billion dollars. Maybe it needs to cost 90 million. And, you know, everybody can get there comfortably and have a good time watching the game

and eat peanuts and Cracker Jack. You know, maybe so did the concession stand can cost two bucks instead of seven. And so you just take down, you know, you make the game more accessible, more affordable at every step. If you're not gouging the absolute out of your, your consumer base at every opportunity, these things get so much more easy, you know, so much easier and so much more affordable. And by the way, you could still make bucket loads of money you can put into, you know, funding road construction or public housing or public libraries or build hospitals or all sorts of stuff.

And, you know, use this thing that everybody like baseball might be a dying sport, according to wicked googly over there. But it's still a multibillion dollar enterprise. And what and I think it should be like,, but it's still a multi-billion dollar enterprise. And what, and I think it should be like, it's something that deserves our attention. It's great. There's so much history and there's so much sense of belonging to baseball.

And I'm happy to throw my money toward tickets and MLB.TV subscriptions, buying merch and stuff like that. And so are millions of other Americans and Mexicans and Canadians and Dominicans and so forth. And what if that went toward improving the product or improving the community instead of just Stu Sternberg deciding to sell the team after sucking all the life out of the community

for 20 years, pocketing his $1.5 billion profit and then, you know, vanishing off to. No, I'm not going to say that that's actionable, but you get the idea. 1.7, 1.7 billion. Did he put $1.7 billion worth of value into that team over the past 20 years? I would, I think you'd be hard pressed to say so. And I'm something of a raise apologist, but yeah, I think it would be tricky to say that that's been the case. I guess the best part of your proposal is that the current ownership groups of Major

League Baseball would say, we're not giving up our franchises to be publicly owned, like we're the Packers. And so then they just say no and continue to accept him. No salary cap support, right? Well, yeah, definitely. I mean, in my, in my hypothetical, you know, you agree to, you know, I would say if your team gets eminent domain, you're, you're worth, you're, you're, you know, you're entitled to compensation.

But if you say no, then say hello to the People's Commissar for Sports and his, you know, why do I believe that millions of heavily armed communists can defeat fascism? Because it's the only thing that ever has. Only thing that ever has. Well, Bauman, it's such a joy when you come on the show because you do detailed spreadsheet work that leads to the... I might get an article out of this. I hope you do, especially if you've already done the spreadsheet work and it only took

you a half hour. I feel like springboard off of that because normally you come to me, I can't see you because we're over Slack, but I can tell that you are in a state of anxiety sweats about how long the spreadsheet has taken to assemble. And if this only took you half an hour, I think whip something off of that. This is not the love is blind spreadsheet, which legitimately took me three straight 12 hour days to actually put it together. You're like, this is going to take longer to write, but it will be worth it. And let me tell you, people that broke contained, people who don't care about baseball read

that piece. I think it helps that I found the perfect picture of Goldie Gopher though to use as the profile pic there. I was so proud of that that I tweeted about it while I was on vacation. But I was going to say, always a joy to have you on. Also, for our listeners, just a delight, I think, to have some variation in episode length. So I think we will call it there. Do you have anything that you would like to plug, either at FanGraphs or with your wonderful cycling newsletter? I was going to say, I have a cycling newsletter called WheelieSports at wheeliesports.substack.com.

You might not be aware of this. Hey, speaking here, you want to proof that I will watch any like bullsh** sports that comes on? The Tour de France is on right now. So we had a great stage today. Comes out once a week. So we'll write about, you know, what happened this week. And also the Tour de France femme starts this weekend. So, you know, if you don't like watching men cycle up mountains in France, maybe you like watching women cycle up mountains in France. So I'm going to cover that a little bit too. I guess it should have occurred to me that there is a women's Tour de France, but I... It's new.

Oh. Yeah. So most of the big races have really only started putting on a women's edition in the past five years. Okay. And it's in a lot of, I think in a lot of respects, better than the men's. Like they're, just the standards of professionalism have just gone through the roof in women's cycling over the past decade. Interesting. So I think, like you want to talk about a growing sport, that's it.

Interesting. I had no idea. Well, people seem very excited or scared for the cyclists now that they're climbing. Isn't it all mountains? Are there any non mountain portions of the Tour de France? There are a few there. You know, the big one from now

until the end of the race is they do a flat stage. I guess tomorrow's a sprint stage, too. So it's relatively flat tomorrow. And the last one, they come in like they take it easy on the ride into Paris. And then they start doing laps of the Champs-Élysées, and that's like the fastest day of racing of the entire year. And so that's like a big, big event.

That's the sprinters really go all out for that. So that's usually a fun, fun day racing. Yeah. It's like, congratulations. It's flat, but you have to ride faster than you were riding before. Like that seems stressful. A lot of the, the coverage is either like on mountains or, you know, camera men are sitting on motorbikes or in helicopters.

So you don't really get a sense of how fast these people are going. Yeah. And the, but because it's on a closed circuit, they have static camera positions and just, you would not believe how fast you can ride a bike if, if that's what you devote your entire life to. Got it. And I have, I'm going to ask you a very big cycling question and you can tell me that it's too big for you to, to really answer.

Do you feel like the sport has recovered from the scandal of Lance Armstrong? Has it gotten out of its, you know, because like it took, as our listeners know, as you know, I'm not telling you anything, like it took a while for baseball to recover post-steroid era. Like it really, you know, we needed a minute before I think the game had really regained its, not only its reputation, but also like the attention of its most devoted fans. Was there like a similar dip after like the doping stuff with Armstrong or is it too individualistic? I've got like six minutes worth answer to this question, so I can either say you can either say sort of or you can.

OK, so part of what made Lance Armstrong such a big deal is the year before he won his first Tour de France, a team staffer from one of the biggest teams called Festina, they were named after a watch company because they were the main sponsor, one of their trainers got busted smuggling drugs, like performance enhancing drugs. And so like a third of the race either tested positive or dropped out or quit. And there was a strike in that race,

like the race, you know, the riders just said like, hey, this is ridiculous, we're not going on until, you know, the police raids stopped basically. And so that was like a scandal that was close to killing the sport. And even though like the guy who won the Tour de France, by the way, all three guys who finished on the podium that year were doping like you would not believe. And they just weren't on the teams that got rated. There's a great book about this by Alistair Fatheringham.

I think it's called The Faustina Affair. So Lance Armstrong comes in and he's an American, he's very personable, he's just come back from cancer, he's this great comeback story. And that's why people were like, he has rejuvenated cycling, he has saved cycling. And there's all sorts, there's more books than I can name that are about how he manipulated everybody around him

to keep his job in quiet. But after that started snowballing, there were teams, and he wasn't the only one, you know, there was, basically every major rider from 1990 to 2010 was at some level implicated in this. And so they basically tore up the sport and started over. And a lot of teams made a big show of being anti-doping. And that sort of carried along for a while.

The doping or PD suspensions and stuff started to peter out throughout the 2010s. There were some there were clouds about Chris Froome, who won four tours to France and a bunch of other big races because his team was abusing therapeutic use exemptions to get asthma medication for all of its riders. Like, you know, we have TUEs in baseball and it's mostly like for Adderall or stuff like that, ADHD medications. And, you know, a lot of people need it

and some people are using it as a back door to basically get amphetamines back into the sport. And so, you know, cycling, I think it was even more brazen than that. Froome is, he hasn't been, he had a really bad crash in the late 2010s and has not been a factor since then. And so everything has sort of settled down.

There's no major, there's really only been one like star level athlete who's gotten busted for drugs in the 2020s. And so now I think it's mostly behind us culturally, but the guy who is beating wholesale ass right now is a Slovenian guy named Tadej Pogacar. And he's on route to winning his fourth Tour de France title since 2000.

And it's cycling has a bunch of different types of races. So you mentioned the mountains, but also there's sprinting, flat ground races, and there's one day races that are these long, flat, or races that take place on cobblestones a lot of these amazing flat ground races and there's one day races that are these long flat or races that take place on cobblestones a lot. And so- That's terrible. That seems like it would be terrible. And so you basically can't be good at both because if you're, you know, men's cycling

at least in this day and age has advanced to a point where if you're skinny enough to get up the mountains quickly, you're going to freeze to death and or get bounced off the road in the cobbled races, Perry Roubaix and Tora Flanders. And so Bogotur is not only dominant in climbing, he's dominant in time trial and he's dominant in these cobbled races too. He won the Tora Flanders for the second time this year. He was second in Paris-Roubaix and this is just unheard of. And he's winning, you know, last year he won the Giro d'Italia, which is basically the Tour de France for Italy and the Tour de France in the same year. That hasn't happened since 1998 when everybody, you know, the field got thinned

out because everybody got busted for smuggling drugs. And he went on to win the world championship, which is a one day road race. And nobody had won all three of those races in the same year since 1987. And it had only ever been done once before that. So he was the third person ever to win the Triple Crown, as they call it. So it's like there's an Otani level of how is this guy doing both things so well? How is he the best in the world at all of this? But because it's cycling, because so much of it, and he's just so, he's like if Otani was also Paul Skeens and was also hitting like 460. Wow.

also Paul Skeens and was also hitting like 460. Wow. Uh, and he's so dominant that people are like, something has got to be up and you know, there are, so I, you know, some of that, I think it's just like the cultural trauma, you know, we went through this with, you know, Lance Armstrong was as bad as PED stuff was in baseball, as hysterical as people got about it, it was so much worse than cycling. And the big scandal itself came on the heels

of the sport healing after another existential scandal. So, you're never gonna get over it all the way. And I think until Pagache really came out and started doing, he's doing superhuman stuff and it's hard not to look at somebody doing superhuman stuff in this sport with this history and not be a little bit skeptical. Yeah.

You know, there's no evidence, there's no reporting that I'm aware of, you know, and there's no even like particularly credible rumors about it, but it's hard not to, you know, have that doubt in your mind. And, you know, there were also, there was stuff that the big doping thing in cycling in the 90s was

they would take an anemia medicine, you know, erythropoietin or EPO, which basically caused you to grow way more red blood cells than you needed. So you have more oxygen in your blood, you can go harder for longer. It got bad enough that people had so many red blood cells that certain riders had to wake up in the middle of the night and do cardio or else like their blood was so thick, their heart wouldn't pump it and they die of a heart attack in their sleep.

Oh my God. And so there are other ways to build huge red blood cell counts without drugs. And so that's what teams are doing now. They're doing like tons of altitude training. There was a minor scandal about using carbon monoxide rebreathers in training to restrict the oxygen intake and force the body to produce more red blood cells. So there's definitely stuff like that, but it's not, certainly not as brazen as it was.

A week ago, they did a big climb on a famous climb to Hodokam in France. It's a ski resort. And Pigotra's time was not, it was like 30 seconds below what the 1996 Tour de France winner did. And Pigotra is not, he's big for like this kind of cyclists, but he's like 150 pounds. Yeah. He's big for like this kind of cyclist, but he's like 150 pounds. The guy who did the record time, Bjorn Rees, was like six foot 170. And he looks like a linebacker.

So like they're not as doped up as they used to be if they are still doped up. I've learned a lot. Was that six minutes? That might've been longer than six minutes. It might've been a little bit longer, but not by too terribly much. And Ben will be thrilled because he's gonna listen through to the end and be like,

look at Meg. Look at Meg doing almost a normal episode. Not quite there though. And he'll be like, thank God I didn't have to sit through this. You asked a, it's a big question. It's a big question. I suspected that I was giving you a long runway there. And I gave you the out.

I could have said sort of. I know, but I'm interested. You know, that's how we, he feels like I'm dramatizing it a little bit or maybe making it bigger than it is, but like, you know, I feel like even we're past PEDs in baseball, at least as like a primary animating concern.

Thank goodness. But every time somebody does something a little weird, people are like, are they asterosing it? So it doesn't, you know, and that wasn't a violation on the same level. I'm not saying he was good. People feel very strongly about Houston still. So I'm not trying to say that anyone

who cares about it is wrong. No, get over it. You know, but I think that I would be correct in saying that its impact on the sport was not as potentially existential as the steroid era was, right? But people get, you know, people just assume it's like they're doing something funky. And for all I know, they are. I don't mean to say that people aren't cheating. People have to cheat. You know, there's a bunch of cheaters everywhere. You want to know, actually, you want to know what the other big thing that people are complaining about in cycling is? What?

That the rich teams have too much money and are buying up all the talent and they should have a salary cap. You know, it all comes full circle. They need to I was going to say they need to crash out like Dodgers fans. But I realize that in a cycling context, that might might be an inelegant bit of phrasing. Also, like all the cycling fans are like French and Italian people. Right. So they don't need your permission to have an emotional meltdown.

We are, we are prone to big feeling. It's true. I can only speak for the Italians, of course, but I feel comfortable doing so. Well, Michael, this was lovely. Thank you so much. That'll do it for today. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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Perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, monthly bonus episodes, playoff livestreams, potential podcast appearances, prioritize email answers, add free Fangrafts membership, and much, much more. Again, you can check out all of the perks at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for us coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're already a supporter. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his

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