Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2365: MVP? Wait and See

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about sports equivalents to baseball’s bat crack, Colson Montgomery’s torpedo bat, reserving judgement on the MVP race, Francisco Alvarez’s minor league reset (and subsequent injury), a Kyle Tucker slump/injury update, the hot hitting of Giancarlo Stanton and Jakob Marsee, the Twins’ new knuckleballer, Pierson Ohl, and the ramifications of […]

How do you calculate more? Does it come from the heart? Should we use defensive runs saved or follow the OAA way? Who's gone right in with their quips and opinions? It's effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2365 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of FanGraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. Tried to inject a little suspense into there after the presented by. Who is it presented by? Who presented it? Now, it's our Patreon supporters, as always. Often them, you know? It's just like really them since a while. I don't know.

Several years. Couldn't have done it with Adam. So I learned something yesterday when I was reading a review of a new book about tennis by Defectors Gidey Nathan, who wrote a book called Changeover about the new Carlos Akoraz and Janik Sinner rivalry. Okay. I'm on Hang Up and Listen to talk about it a while back. And Josh Levine, former Hangup and Listen host, he wrote a review of this book for The Washington Post. Okay.

And I learned something, which is that ever. Evidently, scouts think that they can tell something maybe about a tennis player based on the sound of the ball coming off the racket. And I immediately thought, of course, of all the lore that surrounds the crack of the bat. So much lore. So much lore. And maybe people think of Buck O'Neill in Ken Burns' baseball talking about that special bat crack sound. He heard it three times in his life, Babe Ruth, Josh Gibson, and Bo Jackson. So that idea that you can distinguish certain types of hits or certain types of hitters just based on the sound.

And that tracks, that makes sense. And there's some analytical backing to it. Rob Arthur did a couple pieces on this for baseball prospectus back in the day. And he did find that you could sense something just from the loudness, just from the amplitude of the sound, even though there's all kinds of inconsistency when it comes to baseball broadcasts and where they have the mics and how. loud the back cracks are. But even given all of that, he found that, yeah, you could actually tell a harder hit ball based on the crack of the bad or distinguish home runs from non-home runs. And he didn't even look at frequency. There's probably even more to it. Maybe you could

tell certain types of hitters have a sonic footprint. I don't know that there's a lot of utility to that given all the data that we do have from statcast. But I guess if you didn't have that, Maybe if you had no other tracking, maybe you could bring some sort of sound recorder and get an instant estimate of the exit speed or something just based on the back crack. Anyway, I thought that this was a baseball thing. I didn't really know it was a tennis thing, but there is a line in here where Josh is summarizing something from the book. And he says, when a scout first heard sinner play, he thought he was listening to the clamor of a construction site, not the sound of a 14-year-old hitting tennis balls. So a tennis player who sounds like a construction site, I guess bodes well. You might turn out to be one of the best tennis players.

So I thought this was just a baseball thing, but now I'm curious. Are there other examples in other sports of scouts or commentators or fans being able to tell something about a player based on the sound? I'm curious. So please let us know. Yeah, I'm fascinated by that. There's a nice little bit of musicality in that phrasing that you. just shared. I mean, it makes sense. I guess I'm going to betray my ignorance of tennis for a minute. Will you allow me to betray my ignorance of tennis for a minute? We allow each other to betray our ignorance on all types of topics. Yeah. And I imagine that a tennis fan who is not particularly familiar with baseball might ask the same question I'm about to, but as it pertains to baseball bats, and their various compositions, like, how much variation is there in equipment in tennis?

You know, like, obviously, like, everybody's got a racket, and I imagine those rackets are, you know, manufactured by different manufacturers and what have you. But, like, is there as much variation in the string? And it's not really string, right? it's it's like some sort of synthetic um like plasticy polymer something or other right that they're that they're strung with the rackets but we say strong that they're strung he's yeah it's going back to the days when you had the wooden rackets and probably actual strings yeah and it probably was string but now it's like some you know synthetic something or other that probably never biodegrades or what have you but um is there as much variation in that as there is in like the wood

of a bat because like there are different you know different kinds of wood that can be used and then obviously like every tree is but itself you know and then there's there's never another one quite like it and so there is going to be some natural variation bat to bat even if you have the same kind of wood being used and and so the reason I asked this question which are listeners who are also tennis people are probably like well, that's just the dumbest thing you've ever said on the podcast. And look, that's a high, you know, that's kind of a hard barter clear. But I'm always curious when we have this, like, crack at the bat thing, you know?

There's, like, the guy. It's so much of it is about the guy. But some amount of it is about the bat, you know? And, like, the capacity of wood to make that sound. And I'm just curious, because, like, all tennis sounds, like, thwunk, thwunk, thwunk to me. You know, and then there's the ball hitting. And it's more of like a thwap. But so I'm just curious, like, is there, is it easier potentially to really hone in on that being about the tennis player because so much of the, the base equipment stuff is not variable is a question I would ask.

And maybe an uninteresting question, you know, I'll allow for that also. I'll allow the question might be both dumb and uninteresting. Yeah. But it's a question I have having listened to you talk just now. Yeah, those are good questions, I think. I don't know that they are. That's very nice of you to say. We do so much yes-anding on the pod.

There are good noob questions, I think. Okay, fair. Maybe among hardcore tennis people. Yeah, yeah, I'll accept that at it. And to be clear, would not dispute the characterization remotely. I think that it is a fair one. Like, nude indeed. Yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn't call myself a tennis noob, but I'm not an expert. I play, I watch, but I'm not a hardcore fan. But there is, I think, a lot of variability in the materials that they use. I think the string that used to be used and is still sometimes used. It's not string, string. It's like cord. It's like cat gut, you know, which is a misleading name. It's not like actual cats.

No, but it's like in animal intestines, there's like a natural fiber. And so it's cheaper, gore, you know, other animals. I mean, it's not unlike, I guess, the cowhide, the rawhide for baseballs. But, yeah, so there's that natural cord kind of. And then there are various synthetic materials that are used also of varying strengths and consistencies. Like, you know, they use, like, nylon. I think there's even, like, Kevlar, you know, if you need, like, bulletproof strings or polyester. So there's a bunch of different.

And then the rackets themselves have, of course, evolved. Right. You've got graphite rackets, and that's changed the game a lot, of course. But I would imagine that that also does affect the sound that I don't know specifically. But I would think so. Plus, there's the tension of the strings, too. So just how tightly they're strung and wired probably affects that also. Yeah, and I would think, I would think, like, you know, it's like guitar strings, you know,

a lot of different kinds of guitar strings of varying thicknesses and, you know, they can absorb. I'm going to stop talking about what they're like because I'm going to quickly betray my ignorance and yet another thing. But yeah, like, kind of like that. What do you think that first person, this is a gross tangent, and then we can move on to other stuff. What do you think the first person realizing like there's useful little bits in there? How did that happen, you know, when it used to be animal parts? This is horrible because like animal lover, although I guess like every part of the cow, right? you know yeah exactly yeah I'm sure and it's like the sacrifice isn't necessarily in vain although

that's that's self-soothing rationale if ever I heard it right the cows like the animal's like oh well as long as you used every part right every part of the kill me right so anyway we yeah we can move on you don't have you don't have to entertain also for for instruments too for that sort of string so I imagine it goes back quite a way so I guess if you're if you're doing your uh slicing and dicing then you probably do see, oh, hey, you're something I can use. Maybe I can sell this, too, to someone else. I'm selling the meat to this person. I'm selling the string to this person.

Yeah. So profit. Anyway, I would like to know more about that, but also just generally, if there are equivalents, I'm trying to think of other sports. I'm sure cricket has this too. I mean, if it's just, yeah, the crack of the cricket bat also means something, then okay, that's so similar that it's sort of the same idea. But if there's something like that in other sports, then please let us know if there's just sort of folk wisdom about this or actual analytical rigor to it.

Sometimes you hear this in baseball about pitches, too, just pitches like whistling through the air. But that's something that you really have to be up close to hear. Right. You might hear hitters talking about that or catchers or something, like, oh, the sound that that pitch made cutting through the air. But that's probably something that you're not going to be able to tell from afar. Maybe a scout, if you're standing and watching someone throw a bullpen session or something, maybe you could detect that too. But you're not going to hear that from the stands or on a broadcast, for instance. So the crack of the bat, that's one of the louder things.

Yeah. You know, it's like the squeak of the sneaker, right? The squeak of the sneaker on the basketball court. I hate that sound. Yeah, I doubt that's correlated with performance. But something like that, you know, is there like the sound of a slap shot, for instance? or the crash of a player into the boards. I mean, that makes a sound,

but you can probably just tell based on how hard they're going into the boards. I don't know if you need the sound necessarily, though you could say the same about the ball being hit. Usually, you know, if you're a sighted person, you're going to be able to see the ball just being hit very hard and very far. And so the sound, that's just something, you know, if you're not actually watching, if you can't see what is happening, then the sound alone can give you some signal. So let us know if there is an equivalent to that. I am curious.

So speaking of the crack of the bat and various types of bats, someone I believe on Blue Sky informed us that there was a little bit of fairly recent reporting about one torpedo bat user. And it came from Friend of the Show, Fancraft's contributor, James Fegan, who wrote about White Sox slugger Colson Montgomery's use of the torpedo bat. And James wrote about this for Sox machine back on July 30th. And evidently, Colson Montgomery, he started using a torpedo bat shortly before he went on a tear. So how about that?

Yeah. How about that? He had, I guess, from July 4th, which was his first game this season to July 21st, he had a mere 98 WRC plus. Nothing special. He had not hit a home run. in 49 plate appearances. And then he started using the torpedo bat when the White Sox were in Tampa Bay,

the second game they played in Tampa Bay on July 22nd. Okay. And he hit a home run that day, and then he hit a home run the next day. And then he hit a home run the day after that. Oh, my God. Yeah, if he wasn't already sold on the torpedo bat, then you're going to be sold on it after that.

So he kept using it, and for a while there, he was one of the best hitters in baseball. There was a very torrid stretch when he went from July 22nd, first day with the torpedo bat to August 11th. He had a 163 WRC plus over that spin with 10 dingers. Whoa. And the strikeout to walk ratio wasn't great, but his isolated power was 485.

That'll play. He was slug in 712. So despite the low average and on base, he was putting up numbers and he was doing it with the torpedo bat. Now, over his past seven games or so, he has not hit at all. He has a negative 25 WRC plus. So for all we know, that was that. And maybe he'll even forsake the torpedo bat.

But he did have a torpedo-fueled slugging home run derby there for a while. Plus, Cal's still using the torpedo bat, I believe. I think that's right. If he wins an MVP with that thing, then that alone might cement the torpedo bat's status in 2025 baseball lore. I can't believe that you're bringing up the Cal MVP debate closed after 800. I think everybody is just very, everyone should, you know, like, relax a little bit. We've brought it up a couple times. It's interesting.

But ultimately, we just have to wait. Like, let's just wait. We just have to wait. Yeah. Like, there's another five weeks or so of the season left. And Judge and Cal are so close that that's going to make a big difference. And, like, where the Mariners finish and where the Yankees finish and all. all this stuff, like we have to wait and see because, you know, it's, it's the whole season,

full season awards and we have not yet seen a full season. Everybody relax. It's, um, I've tried to stay out of this conversation because like my, my potential bias, I don't think I actually have bias in this case. I think I've been pretty measured about the whole MVP of it all. But I can, I can appreciate how I might be open to accusations of, bias unfounded though they may be so because i haven't been like waiting into this particular side of waters i hadn't noticed like it is the gap is less than half a win at least by our version of war i know that the gap is wider for baseball reference in part because their uh catcher war does not account for framing but uh i had not really realized the degree to which

this had gotten into oh this is this is basically the same war territory right like point four wins that's that's the same that's nothing that's the same more that's well within the sort of margin of error for the stat so it is i think uh there's like a debate to be had here and that's i think exciting like it's these are two great players and i think that a lot of the award stuff the last couple years has been pretty boring you know it's not to say that there aren't races that have been more heavily contested there there have been but a lot of them have been sort of chalk pretty quick you know and we're going to have a couple of those this this year so it's not going to be unanimous i don't think this race it probably shouldn't be so no i think

it shouldn't be and so you know you have at this juncture reasonable arguments on both sides now it might widen out um or collapse and then widen in the other direction i suppose we should allow for that possibility also but at this point like we're just in we're just in wait and sea territory and you know right now neither of them are like hitting super well and so part of it too is like what are each of you going to do like if somebody has a a two-week hot streak that might be enough to just like kind of cinch some stuff but barring that i think we'll judge be back in the field yeah right i mean don't ask them they don't don't ask the errands yeah Don't ask the errands or get confusing and conflicting answers, potentially.

So, yeah, like, is Judge using a torpedo bat? No, he never did. Even early on, he said, yeah, I think I'm good. I don't think I need, which fair. Yeah, like, why would you? If you're Aaron Judge, you're like, can I, like, is it possible for me to be both frozen in Amber and play baseball at the same time? Like, can I somehow occupy to disparate molecular states somehow?

Yeah. Yeah, it'll just be, it'll be fascinating. And I'm sure everyone will be like really chill about it, you know. Big emotion is not bad, to be clear. I obviously don't think big emotion is bad. I'm Italian. But like I sound the most like I'm from New York when I say that phrase. And we're different. Western U.S. Italians and New York Italians different. There's a lot less tanning emphasis in our subculture. Yeah. But I'm going to make a comp, and then you tell me if it's too mean to leave into the show, okay? You know, because I like to be nice, and I also enjoy people thinking I'm nice. Admittedly, not exactly the same thing, although hopefully related endeavors, right? Do you remember the Bo Burnham, like, musical special insight during the pandemic? Okay.

And so he has a line in one of the songs in that in that show, which like, word to the, you know, potentially melancholy. Not a good, like, soundtrack to listen to if you're, like, on the edge of a bad mood. That'll, that'll move you're right into, like, looking out the window territory. But, because, like, you're sad, middle distance territory. I'm not, like, making a bad self-harm joke, I promise. So there's a line in that, in one of the songs in that show where he says, and now it's the, it's the, it's a, talking about him turning 30 and he goes and now my stupid friends are having stupid children and sometimes when I watch people who I have genuine love and affection for having like a little

meltdown on social media I think to myself and now my stupid friends are having stupid children and the children are their posts I get it yeah that was an extended metaphor I don't know if it was worth it but I definitely wasn't mean I don't think you weren't targeting anyone specifically that was a sub tweet or a vague book at worst. Right. And you know my theory of the sub-tweet, which is if you sub-tweet enough people at once, no individual person is allowed to yell at you, right?

Because you just have plausible deniability. Yes. I still call them sub-tweets even though I'm on Blue Sky exclusively. You can't call them a subsky. That sounds insane. Okay. I think that's entered the lexicon. That's okay.

That outlives whatever that service is called. Right. I mean, yeah. Okay. Speaking of Montgomery, by the way, he evidently was a good candidate for the torpedo bat because of his specific swing. So he just has like long levers, as they say. So he has this big power when he gets his arm extended. And so pitchers have tried to prevent him from getting his arms extended by pitching him inside and trying to jam him.

And thus getting a bat that has a little more meat on the inside. On the inside, yeah. closer to the handle, that's good for him. So this was a suggestion from the White Sox quants in the front office. Don't laugh. I'm sure they have some and they probably know what they're doing. So they suggested it based on the swing profile and how he had been pitched and everything. And he bought in.

And then it always helps when you immediately hit home runs in three consecutive games. So anyway, not sure if he's good or if that was just a fun little spree he went on there. But regardless, he was another person who embraced it and not just at the beginning of the season when everyone was embracing it, which suggests that there could be subsequent waves. It won't be a big thing. Sure. You won't talk about it. People won't really write about it except a beat writer writing about their local player doing it. But it will continue to happen when the right player comes along.

In that instance, would you describe his torpedo bat as a meat shield? I mean, maybe in that it is perhaps preventing pitch from hitting him, but it's not made of meat. No, but it's when then the meat of the bat is shifted and it's shielding him from a hole in his swing because there's meat shields. Okay, sure. Let's go with it. Are you applauding yourself? That was Megapotting, by the way. I'm mimicking.

No, I'm not. applauding myself. Have I ever suggested that I have the self-esteem to applaud myself ever in our entire friendship? No, I'm holding up a fist, and that is the meaty part of the torpedo bat, and then I'm whacking that with, and as if to, and it's a shield. Yeah. See, look, you can tell from the same.

I can tell. It's the crack of the bat. It's a crack of a bat. A wop. Okay, so you know how this is our Friday show. Yeah, more or less, we're recorded on Thursday, but it's our last episode of the week. Yeah, it's our last episode of the week. We're leaving it all on the field here.

Okay. There you go. So you know how the minor league reset has become a mini beat of ours? I'm just interested in the minor league reset as a concept as a phenomenon. Well, Francisco Alvarez had a pretty darn successful minor league reset, I would say. We talked about him when he was. He was sent down because it was semi-surprising that he had been sent down as a player who was highly thought of and a lot was expected of him. Sure.

He hadn't been truly terrible, but they were just trying to light a fire under him, get him to work on some specific things. And so they sent him down, and A, he raped in AAA. So that was a good start to the reset. So he had 19 games in AAA from June 24th to July 20th. and he hit 299, 397, 836. He had himself a Colson Montgomery-like stretch where he hit 11 home runs in 19 games, 78-plate appearances. That's a 1233 OPS.

So they said, okay, he was successfully reset. We turned him off and turned him back on again, and now he's working just fine. And they brought him back up, and he continued to rake. So he made it back to the Mets on July 21st, And since then, he's been a top 10 hitter in baseball, minimum 70 plate appearances. He had 323, 408, 645. That's a 193 WRC plus, just right below Shohei Otani.

And, of course, Miguel N. Duhar, two of the best hitters in baseball. Yeah. What's the joke? Explain the joke to me. No, nothing. Not missing anything. So he was going great, and now he's hurt. But now he's hurt.

Yeah. Can't blame that on the minor league reset. The minor league reset worked wonders. This just did exactly what I was supposed to do. But now he's on the IL with a UCL sprain, but a thumb UCL screen, the other UCL because he slid head first into a bag. And he's not just a bag, not just any bag, but a base. But he is now being shut down for a while.

Then he'll be re-evaluated. He was out with a UCL thumb tear in the evening. other thumb last year, and that cost him a lot of time. So he will have to have surgery, but it's possible that he could play through it for the rest of the season. So we will see. But, yeah, it's not great because the Mets, they need all the help they can get these days. And he was a big help once he returned. So hopefully he'll be able to make it back this season and potentially for the playoffs. But the minor league reset went off without a hitch, passed with flying colors.

Flying colors. So Exhibit A for the minor league reset, working. Of course, if he hadn't been reset, maybe he just would have started hitting anyway. We'll never know. But this is an example of it, at least the results that were desired following. So chalk it up another success for the minor league reset. Look, like I am famously not a doctor. That's one of the most well-known facts about me, I would say.

I can't imagine which hand is it, is it his glove hands that has the thumb? Well, he has thumbs on both hands as far as I know, but this one, he... I walked right into, I walked right clear into that. This was his right thumb. The left thumb was last year, I believe. Okay. Yeah. So it's his...

So it should be his glove hand, right? Can you imagine? Wait. No, not his glove. Wait, yes. It's his, okay, yeah, right thumb. I'm trying to imagine myself wearing a glove. So now your hand is a glove.

He throws right. So he... Yeah, it's his non-glove. It's his non-gloving hand. Okay. Yeah. So, like, that's better, I guess. Like, can you...

I'm just imagining, okay, we talk about the thwack of the bat, one of the other, or the crack of the bat. There's a crack of the bat. Then there's the thwack of the glove. It's a real early days of radio after stuff that we're having here. Yeah, we need to get a fully art. in here to just be like doing shoes walking on the ground yeah um anyway it's like i can't imagine the discomfort one would experience particularly when you are catching high velocity fastballs to have a broken digit in your glove hand like in 2022 that was the year that the mariners went back to the

postseason. Cal had a broken finger. I don't remember if it was his thumb. I don't remember what digit it was. And I am, it was in his glove hand. And like, you're just watching Cal catch like Andres Munoz's fastball. I'm going, Jesus. And I mean, with Munoz, his slider too, for that matter. But it's like, I just, every time, I'm like, does it swell? Like, does it look like mangled by the end of a You know, does it like puff up? Anyway, Glad this is throwing hand. That seems like it would be easier to manage from a pain perspective, at least defensively. Still would be uncomfortable to hit with a broken finger.

Yeah, good thing. Yeah. Anyway, it's really a bummer because to your point, they need a lot of help. And it's just been like all these fits and starts for this guy. There's been so much injury stuff so early in his career. he had that one really great season in 2023 where he was like a three-win player and then we just haven't been able to see him really get it going for an extended stretch and to your point like the early returns at the plate have been much more positive this season post reset than they were before and so that's great but it's like you know you just want him to be able to get an extended run it's hard to do yeah and in other news about players playing through injuries we got a Kyle Tucker update because we talked the other day about his extended slump and his own major league reset

just a few days off. Well, you can't send him down. Mini benching, but it then subsequently came out that he did, or even does, but definitely did have a hairline fracture in his right hand.

What is going on with Kyle Tucker and mysterious fractures? I know. What is the deal? The shin saga from last year. Yeah, but so what happened is, And this was another, he was sliding into second base. And he had this hairline.

Initially, they thought it was a jammed finger, but then there was more imaging. There was a slight fracture on the top of his hand near where the pinky and ring finger meet. So this happened. He sustained this injury on June 1st. And as of mid-June, they had more imaging and it was healing, but it was affecting him. Now, he played through this, and he raked in June. It was actually his best month as a hitter. He had a 982 OPS in June.

So at least for that portion, playing through it seemed to be the right call. He was sore, but he was able to play, and it was healing, and he was hitting. So, okay, no harm, no foul, seemingly. But since then, he, of course, has not hit since the start of July, really. And now the question is, is this a lingering after effect of the injury? Jed Hoyer, Cubs Poebo said there's no question that when you look at his numbers, it's had an impact on him for sure. That's the nature sometimes of these small injuries.

They can do that. So they say that he is healed, that it's not still fractured. At least Craig Counsel said that the injury is fully healed. But it could be one of these situations where maybe he changed something to compensate because of the soreness at the time. And then that led to back mechanics. And so now it seems to be lingering. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but it seems like, you know, so often, I think I allowed for this possibility when we talked about it the other day.

I don't remember if I said it. I certainly was thinking it that you have to wonder if there's some sort of disclosed injury. Yeah. And Tucker says, I'm fine. I'm fine going out there. But, you know, the Cubs are in a playoff race and he probably doesn't want to miss time with his impending free agency. Right. He also doesn't want to not play well with his impending free agency.

But yeah, this is, I guess, why you do a reset. If it were purely about the fact that he still had a fracture and was in pain, then a reset, just being benched for a few days, probably wouldn't do anything, right? Like, you just have to be healed. So they seem to think that it's not that, but more just something that happened while he was compensating for this injury and it has endured. I am confused by the whole thing. But in terms of what it means for their postseason,

prospects. I don't know that him being hurt is much comfort. I suppose that if you're him, it's a comfort insofar as you can say, well, there's like an identifiable reason. I haven't just like lost the ability to hit. You know what I mean? So in that respect, it's probably comforting. But what an odd situation just seems so strange to me that there have been two of these now. Yeah. And his former teammate, Yordaun Alvarez, has been going through that sort of thing basically all season, just trying to get back, trying to get healthy, and things coming to light that were previously undetected or is diagnosed or just haven't healed or whatever. So, yeah, it can be a big issue.

But anyway, that maybe explains some of the mystery. As I've often said, I do think, like, yes, there's a certain element of randomness to slumps, but also if we did have perfect information about players, I think that they would really help us explain a lot of those slumps. I do think that there's often an underlying cause that we are not privy to, that we just don't know. And maybe the player knows, maybe the team knows, maybe not in some of those situations. But there's often something going on. So the amount of randomness that there is, I think, if we could perfectly account for what was going on with that players' health and fatigue and mental state and all of those things, then I bet that would explain a.

good deal of the random variation or what appears to be random variation there'd still be plenty of random variation but yeah because a lot of that is as we've often said also just it's lost to history right there's no recording of it if you weren't on the iL if you were just playing through some nagging injury or nursing something and it may never have been reported or it was reported but it's not really recorded in a database somewhere that's publicly accessible and then you just never know. It's like what Mookiee went through this spring with the illness that he had and the weight that he lost. That doesn't show up on his player page. It was a well-reported story in his case. And so you're aware of it if you're watching in real time. But you look decades

later and you see he had a down year and you might not know why that is on the surface because he didn't miss all that much time, at least not with that illness, which was mostly in spring training yeah yeah i think that your our instinct when we're not able to pinpoint an explanation like that often is to go like hey it was probably dinged up or something right our willingness to sort of reach for that as an explanation is also though predicated on there being a bounce back right so if you have like an aberrant down year and then the next year they're fine you probably just go he was probably hurt in a way that we didn't know about or that was like lingering but not sufficiently dramatic to merit an IL stint or whatever, if it persists, then we start to get

in like, well, the client is here kind of territory. But if there's a bounce back, I think we mentally chalk a lot of that stuff up to injury, even if there wasn't, you know, a reported story about it, or there wasn't enough going on where the team was like, we got to put this guy on the injured list. I have enjoyed, though, another New York hitter who has been really raking lately and that's John Carlos Stanton. He has been... How about him? Pummeling, pulverizing the ball.

Those are just the only words you can use when you're talking about John Carlos Stanton. That guy, he's got some bat crack going on. So he, who also had some soreness, although he seems to be better now. I mean, it was as predictable as possible that when he had to play the field a little bit, that that was going to take a toll.

But he seems to be okay, and they've got to keep his bat in the lineup because, boy, if you just go back, and I'm sort of setting arbitrary beginning and endpoints here, but why not? It's fun. Since July 10th, he has a 243 WRC Plus with 13 homers, yeah, and he is the second best hitter in baseball over that span now behind Colonel Kurtz, Nick Kurtz, who's at a 269 WRC Plus. Why are you burdening him with that?

My God. Well, he does have multiple nicknames, but I kind of like that when I'm partial to that. But, Vladgarra Jr. is the third best at 204. So it's really Stanton and Kurtz who are up there in even more rarefied air. And, man, Stanton has hit 360, 433, 837 over that span, while still striking out 30% of the time. Yeah. Which just goes to show. Oh, that's so great.

How hard a hurting he is putting on the ball when he does make contact slugging 837 with 13 pounds. And a lot of them are like 440 feet. Oh, yeah. man when that guy gets hot it is so much fun it's so much fun yeah because there's an element of not understanding how it happens sometimes i mean i know how it happens he's a giant and a paul bunyan figure and he hits the ball probably as hard as anyone has ever hit a ball but he also looks so exploitable and so vulnerable sometimes and he still is as evidenced by the strikeout rate and you just feel like he will chase i don't know if it's just that extreme stance that he has or

just he misses by so much sometimes. And when he's not going well, I think we talked about this in October last year when he was putting on a show because he will just, he's the scariest hitter ever when he's going well. And yet you also feel like, ah, you can handle him.

You can pitch to stand. Sure. Maybe that's how you get in trouble because then you make a mistake. Right. Don't be overconfident. Yeah. But like when he looks bad,

he looks so bad and he looks like you could just throw him three straight sliders and he will just wave at all of them and you don't even have to throw him a strike. Sometimes he does. Yeah. Even when he's in the midst of a streak like this, sometimes he does.

And yet, boy, when he puts bat on ball, it's fireworks. And I'm glad that he still has that in his bat at 35 and all the injury issues that he's had. He certainly hasn't lost the ability to completely just pulverize and well up a pitch when he makes contact. So it's just a.

question of how often he will make contact. But it's up to 444 career homers now. So if anything, he's up in his odds of managing to creep over that 500 mark. And, you know, if he does, he'll have a legitimate Hall of Fame case. I mean, what be the strongest war-wise, but given his peak and how good he was when he was younger and more of an all-around player who could actually play. defense and stay healthy and everything like you know the latter portion of his career here is his not nearly as impressive but he is now just managing to compile and if he compiles that many

more home runs 56 more dingers which that's that's within his prodigious power i would say like it's certainly possible yeah his his home run totals the last four seasons 35 31 24 27 he's at 15 this year so say he needs i don't know 50 more after this season you know it's i mean if he's healthy sure but he never is really so but if he just could repeat his 23 and 24 seasons he'd basically be there so it's just a question of like can he hang on long enough and stay in the lineup long enough to do that because he's he's under contract for two more seasons, I believe, after this one with a plus a team option. But yeah, he's under he's under guaranteed contracts through your 27. You don't know. They might do it. You don't know.

Yeah, that $25 million team option for 2028 at age 38 seems unlikely, even though 10 million would be paid by the Marlins, but there's also a $10 million buyout. Yeah, the Marlins are still paying in 10 million years. Oh, yeah. I would do it just because that's funny. Yeah. You know? I mean, like, that isn't a good reason to do it.

And I doubt that it is one that would sway Yankees' brass. But you can't deny it would be funny, Ben. You know, it would be a ha-ha laughing time. It would be a hoot. And also, I guess we've got to mention the new, new hot slugger. Because we talked about warming Burnabell and we talked about Luke Kishel. but there is a new pop-up player in town, and that's Jacob Marcy, who has been the best player in baseball in August, which is not that long a period.

But still, Jacob Marcy, who knew, 24-year-olds. Longer than either one of us had been the best player in baseball, you know, did you ever think about that? I didn't, but now I have, and I concur, and he is, he's the new Marlin slugger. He's the new Stanton. I mean, probably not, but he, no, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he He was the 27th best Marlins prospect in July, which is not long ago, right? Right. So 27 on the Marlins list, and I guess they have a lot of prospects now.

But still, he was not one of the top ones. And he's 24 years old, but he's completely cream in the ball as well. And Balman just blogged out of him. I'm sorry. I wasn't sure, but, you know, I threw it out there. So he's fun, you know? Yeah. He's just fun.

And, of course, Baumann loves him because he's a college slugger made good. Oh, yeah. But, you know, sixth round drafty. And he has produced just another worldly 215 WRC Plus in August and has the highest war of any player, according to Fancrafts. That's incredible, you know. You think that you're going to miss Hesu Sanchez, and then you don't because you just. just call up Jacob Marcy, and there he is for you. Yeah, it's the Joey Manessus situation all over again, except that Jesus

Sanchez is not really Juan Soto. And maybe Jacob Marcy is a better prospect than Joey Maness. It's not a high part of clear. I think that that's fair to say. I mean, like, you're right to, Marcy is a good example of why you do need to say both the future value and the ordinal ranking, right? Because he was a 40 on that list, not ranked 40th. he is a 40 future value prospect and so like that's a good that's a good player right it's not like

an amazing player it's not a 215 w rc plus player which is what he has as we are recording here on thursday afternoon but it's not a bad player well he's been more than a win and a half i know he's yeah he's up to 1.7 war that that's great i wonder i know that people have done studies on this uh Craig Edwards and Ben Clemens and all, but what the outcome, the expected outcome for a 40 future value prospect is, like is 1.7 worse? Is that like already up there? Like, has he already fulfilled the 40 FV promise? Certainly in a single season, he has already exceeded that because a 50 future value, that's like an average player. Right. And typically we say that an average player is, you know, roughly two war or so over a season. So he has essentially had

an average player's season in less than three weeks or so. Now, if he continues to play, perhaps he will actually subtract from that. Who knows? Maybe the league will catch on, and this toured stretch will not continue. But he could just call it right now, and this would be a successful season, perhaps even most of a successful career for a player who had that sort of projection. I mean, most six-round draftees don't even make the majors, right? So he's already exceeded that expectation.

He's yet another Padres giveaway. He was a Padres draftee, right? He was in the Luisa Rice trade. He was in the Louisa Rice trade, yeah. His origin story. Yep. So I thought you were going to say it. You started to say, you think you know or something.

I thought you were like, you think you know someone. And I didn't know him at all. I'm pretty sure I just had not heard of him. Like if you had asked me what my expectation for Jacob Marcy was in July, I would have said who. And then I would have cited to Eric's scouting report. Yeah. I have to occupy a very odd in between because on the one hand, I don't want to overstate my familiarity. And I have to look up guys all the time, right, even though I edited their blurb, you know.

And so have engaged with them on some level. I don't want to overstate things. But I also am mindful of the fact that, like, my perspective on an engagement with, like, the guys who, like, a normal fan would describe as like randos, you know, who they might call slap dick if they were feeling ungenerous or on a Twitch stream is, it's not representative, right? That's good to keep in mind. That's just a good thing to remember for myself. Probably also good to keep in mind that he had a 125 WRC plus in AAA in more than 400 played

appearances this year. So this is a bit above his head, perhaps. But even down there, he walked a lot. He had almost as many walks as strikeouts. And he is, well, he's obviously not looked overmatched, but even just the strikeout to walk ratio in the majors has been pretty robust. So there's some underlying ability there. But yeah, it's been a fun, even if it turns out to be a flash in the pan, it's been a fun one. And even less known player than Luke Kishel or warming Burnabelle, but similar sort of sensation. Okay. Yeah.

And got to give an update about a knuckleballer who has just suddenly appeared as well. So this is-extry, extra. Yeah, this is exciting. The twins have a new knuckleballer. We were alerted to this by listener J.D., who wrote in to say, subject line, twins have a new knuckleballer, no, not that one. This is related to the effectively wild preseason prediction, because I had made a prediction, bold prediction. I think it was that there would be three legitimate knuckleballers in the big leagues this year, just at least three pitchers, not position player pitchers who were trying something out for fun,

but actual pitchers who throw knuckle balls and threw a certain number of them this year. And so the twins have a new knuckleballer, and it's Pearson Oll. And he threw three of them on Tuesday. He even got a strikeout on one of them. He said the knuckleball, even I don't know which way it's going to go. it's pretty tough to hit and that's the whole point of a knuckleballer really they don't know where it's going to go no one knows where it's going to go unfortunately a catcher also doesn't know where it's going to go but still so Pearson who is a rookie and was promoted fairly recently he's

just gotten into six games in the majors and has made a few starts and they haven't gotten great on the whole but he's a 25 year old 14th rounder drafted by the twins back in 2021 and he's, I guess, one of the people who've benefited from the fact that they traded most of their pitching staff, I guess, at the deadline. And so here's Pearson Oll, and he was not known as a knuckleballer, but he has become one. And it's just one arrow in the quiver for him. Okay. It's not, he's not a primary knuckleball. He didn't suddenly go from zero to 60 with the knuckleballs.

But he's just working it in, which I like. I like that, too. You know, we need the dedicated knuckleballers, too. Those are the most fun, of course. But I also like it when someone just breaks one out, which was basically what Matt Waldron, the other knuckleballer, the Padres knuckleballer, he did that last year. He threw it regularly, but not primarily. And then this year, unfortunately, he's had only one start in the majors, but he is relying much more on the knuckleball this year. and I guess not with the greatest returns in the majors or minors thus far, but I still hold out hope for Matt Waldron.

But Pearson Oll has several pitches, so it's just another look that you give guys. And I love that because sometimes pitchers will just have a show me pitch, and it's just some boring standard pitch, and they just don't have a great one, but they deem it worthwhile to throw it just so it's in the back of the batter's mind. It's just another thing for them to think about, element of surprise. I wish that more guys had a knuckleball as a show-me pitch. But tough thing to cultivate and I guess tough thing to just spring on a catcher every now and then also. So it's got to be like a moral hazard there as a catcher. Because especially, you know, if you're calling the pitches for that pitcher, you have to call the pitch for yourself as the catcher to call that number of hour. Even if you think that the knuckleball is the best pitch to throw in that situation, you've got to be thinking, oh, do I actually want to bring this upon myself?

And not just the hassle of it, but also you've got to factor in the risk of a wild pitch or pass ball. And maybe that plays into the calculus of whether this is the right pitch to call at that point. But I love it. So the quote here from Bobby Nightingale, that's Bob Nightingale Jr., the younger Bobby Nightingale, he, In just his sixth appearance in the big leagues, this is from the Minnesota Star Tribune, he introduced the knuckleball. He said hitters are so good nowadays. They're picking up spin right out of the hand.

When I let go and he reads Rawlings, my guess is he's a little bit confused why he can see that because it's not spinning at all. So he threw three and it was 81 miles per hour and then he threw one that was fouled off. And then later in another inning, I think he got a strikeout with a 79 mile per hour knuckleball. at the top of the zone. That's the thing. It goes in a different direction. Every time that one he swung and missed at, it had some carry on it.

The other ones didn't. You might see no spin or less spin. And it's like, I have a good idea of where it's going. And it ends up in a completely different spot. Yeah, that's the gimmick. So evidently, he threw his first one in a game during his last start in AA last season. Okay. And the team was out of AA playoff contention.

And he'd never had a high strikeout right. So he thought, eh, why not? I'll break out a knuckleball in a two-strike count every now and then. Doesn't throw it that often. But he said, you pray that you're the guy who doesn't get one. And evidently, this was interesting. Once teammates learn that he throws a knuckleball, they're constantly telling him to throw it in games. So I like that.

In the minor leagues, he doesn't think he gave up a hit on one, although he's hesitant to throw it with runners on base because of a wild pitch. And catcher Ryan Jeffers, he actually. suggested it during this four-inning outing. He brought it up and he said, I remember before my debut, Ty France got wind of me throwing a knuckleball. Oll says, he goes,

dude, your first pitch in the big leagues needs to be a knuckleball. I was like, that's not going to happen. It's a good time. But he did learn from the knuckleballer who might have been expected with the twins. That's Corey Lewis, who's in AAA, and I had hoped and thought maybe

he would be up and throwing knuckleballs in the big leagues. But he has like a mid-80s, R.A. Dickey speed one, and it's like tough even to play catch with him, basically. But Rocco Ball Deli approved of old throwing it in a big league game, thought that was a sign of confidence. And I like the idea that everyone else on the team is as into the knuckleball as I am. That it's not just for fans, but when players learn that someone has a knuckleball, they're constantly egging him on to throw it. I would want to see it every day. I would want to see it every day, you know, even if it didn't make sense.

I think, like, just do it. Can you just like, can you just do one? Just do one. Like, just do one. Yeah. Just do one. Can't hurt anyone. Yeah.

No, I mean, like, it would be terrible if we were like, just throw one. And then it's like, so how, okay, here's a, here's a potentially dark question for you. You have a knuckle baller. That's great. That part's not sad. He throws a knuckle ball on the first pitch, and then it's, like, way outside. And then does he get, like, flagged if there's gambling activity? Did they suspect him because he's a knuckleballer?

I know. Just throwing a pitch. It's a pitch fixing scheme. Yeah. That's a sad spin on this. That would be sad. No spin, I guess, in the case of a knuckleball. But, yeah, it's his sixth pitch.

He has five standard pitches. And then every now and then a knuckleball. But yeah, I guess some of the guardians guys, maybe they can just pick up a knuckleball and they can throw that instead of spiking one in the dirt if they need to throw a pitch at some point in the future. If they are proven to have done that at all, disclaimer. Yeah, right. We should talk a little bit about the emerging broadcast picture for Major League Baseball here because there's been some reporting on this topic.

We teased the other day. There was a report at The Athletic by Andrew Marshand that suggested that MLB would be breaking up various packages and would be splintering the inventory across multiple streaming services. And we talked about the pluses and minuses of that. But some additional reporting by Kendall Baker at Yahoo and then also by Marchand at The Athletic and then also by a couple of people at the Wall Street Journal. all this is trickling out, nothing is finalized, no one has signed anything, it sounds like. We're still figuring out what the parameters of this are. But there are some juicy tidbits here. So it would appear that MLB is still going to be in business with ESPN.

And this all arose. That's ESPN sound. I remember. And it is arising out of ESPN opting out of the remaining final three. three years on the deal that it had with MLB, and then MLB saying, fine, we don't need you anyway, we can do better without you, and so we'll just message all of our exes and all of our other various partners and we'll ask if they're up and if they want to get back together and we'll just piece together the same amount of revenue or maybe more by spreading the

wealth around and the wealth will also be lavished on us. And that's still happening, it sounds like. But there's still going to be an MLB ESPN partnership. And this was floated a while back because after the initial maybe face saving Rob Manford, well, we didn't want you anyway, and you don't pay enough attention to us. And then there were overtures. And no, we're still open to it on both sides, really, if we can work something out. So there's the framework of a deal.

I'll just read the lead here from Marchand. Major League Baseball and ESPN have a framework, agreed. that would give the network the exclusive rights to sell all out-of-market regular season games digitally and in-market games for five clubs over the next three years, according to sources. So there are still going to be some regular MLP broadcast on ESPN. About 30 regular season games, but not Sunday Night Baseball. Right.

Yeah. So Sunday Night Baseball, according to this Wall Street Journal report from Thursday, sounds like could be going to NBC, NBC Universal. Maybe that ends up on Peacock, we will see. And then Netflix is still going after the home run Derby. So the Wall Street Journal said that Netflix is close to a deal to stream the Derby for more than $35 million a year. All of this runs through 2028 when all these national contracts expire

and when Rob Minford has signaled that he's hoping to keep. collecting all of the local rights and be able to package as many teams broadcasts together as possible and get a big lump sum payout. So Netflix, Home Run Derby, Comcast NBC Universal, the Sunday Night Baseball package on NBC and Peacock, perhaps, and that would be for about 200 million or so annually that portion of the deal. And overall, Wall Street Journal says that you add all this together that maybe it would come to, say, 600 million or something, which would be a bit more than ESPN was in line to pay. So on that level, I suppose, success for Rob Manford.

But the really interesting thing here is the NLBTV portion of the arrangement. So ESPN would have some regular season broadcasts on a different non-Sunday night, and those games would be exclusive. You'd only be able to see them on ESPN. This would be starting next season. However, this is the part that is really raising eyebrows. I'll just read. Under the framework of an agreement between MLB and ESPN,

ESPN would have MLBTV as part of its direct-to-consumer offering. Right. It is not fully clear yet if out-of-market subscribers who pay for the package through cable or other linear subscription would still be able to receive MLBTV. that way. For digital consumers, fans are likely to need an ESPN direct-to-consumer subscription to go along with MLBTV. The overall new pricing for MLB-TV is not yet decided. It's pretty important, but is expected to be similar or slightly cheaper than the current $299-per-month

rate. So there are a lot of question marks and unknowns here. ESPN would have the full rights to in and out-of-market games for five teams, and the teams that MLB controls the broadcast rights, it's the Guardians, the Twins, the Twins, the Diamondbacks, the Rockies. So then fans would need to subscribe probably to ESPN directly or through cable, I guess, for an added price, then they could get their local teams games. And then possibly the ESPN MLB deal could include MLB network.

Right. But that is also still TBD. And there could be a bundle or a combo offering of some sort. So this is intriguing, maybe dismaying, maybe alluring, but definitely intriguing. It's so hard to know how to react to these things without the specifics. Yeah. Right? Because like, so for instance, the way that I do live TV, quote unquote, is Hulu with life.

And I have a bundle. I have an ESPN, Hulu, Disney Plus bundle. Yeah. And I pay too much for it, but it's what I do. You know, and I got a bunch of add-ons, you know, no commercial on the non-live stuff. And I add the sports package every fall so that I can get Red Zone, although who knows if I'm going to need to do that now? Because ESPN has Red Zone. So, like, for people who already have some sort of subscription relationship with ESPN, I imagine.

I imagine that the question is, like, how much more am I going to end up paying for the thing that I already have? Because it's going to be some amount more, right? But I also pay for MLBTV. So is it going to be enough more that I'm annoyed? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. J.J. Cooper put it this way on Blue Sky.

Paying $30 a month for ESPN with the MLBTV games included? Great. where do I sign up? Being required to pay $30 a month for ESPN and then paying more on top of that for MLBTV? Well, that would not be great. And so it depends on the amounts. But yeah, it could be a nice deal. It could be convenient or you might end up paying much more than you were currently paying.

And it's also just sort of scary because MLBTV is, on the whole, an excellent product. It works. Yeah, there are some issues and glitches and bugs and buffering. But on the whole, it's been a pretty impressive transformative product. I think it's generally regarded to be maybe the best of the league-owned and operated streaming services and packages. And the first and a trailblazer. And obviously the streaming technology was a windfall for MLB and the entity that was MLB advanced media that was distributed to all the teams and big payouts. So this was something that MLB really did well.

and the digital arm of the league being on the forefront of things for once and being kind of underlying technology that's been used and acquired and licensed by other companies. And it's been big in the streaming space, as they say. So there's sort of a protective impulse where, you know, don't insidify MLBTV. This is one thing that baseball has done well that works quite well. And yeah, there are blackouts. and that's not really the league's fault currently, and they'd like there not to be.

But, you know, there are drawbacks. You can't get everything. It doesn't work perfectly. But this is the sort of thing that would have absolutely blown our minds in the past. I mean, it did blow our minds when it started to become available. We have it good.

We're sort of spoiled with how good this is. And so you don't want to be upsold or to have it paywalled in some way beyond the additional, beyond the paywall that it has already been behind. and then for it to work worse in other ways. So there's sort of a protect MLBTV impulse to this. There is, but if I can offer some reassurance, like, it's not like this is a new,

I would be much more concerned if, like, Apple was the one that was doing this, or Apple even would be fine compared to Netflix, right? ESPN has a ton of experience with this sort of thing, right? Like, watching NHL hockey on ESPN goes fine most of the time, right? Right? College football goes fine. Like, they are seasoned in this in a way that I think puts me at ease. Like, I'm not worried about the products starting to suck. I'm worried about the products starting to be prohibitively expensive for people.

Like, that part of it, I think, is a more pressing concern, which isn't to say that it can't get worse, but, like, they also are so incentivized for this to go well, right? Because they need to attract people to the standalone streaming option. And so I imagine that they are putting a, they will put a tremendous amount of resource into this to get it done well, which again, like ESPN has its issues. I'm not saying that it doesn't, but I do think the incentives are properly aligned here. And there's a baseline competence that gives me confidence that this part will go well. Yeah. And you'd hope that don't mess with success. I guess the whole idea of incitification, the Cori Doctoro idea is that people do mess with success.

It's like they start just charging you more because they get you in the door and then they just make things worse or more expensive or both. But yeah, you'd think that they do have a lot writing on this and the service works well and they'd want it to continue to work well. Because this is all happening against the backdrop. If you're not following the ins and outs of the broadcast deals, this is all happening because people are cord cutting if they had the cords connected. This is bringing it full circle to chords and strings. This is not the animal gut kind of cords. This is the cable cord. And ESPN used to have 100 million subscribers.

And now it has something like 60 million, which is still a lot, obviously. But because a lot of people have canceled their cable service and ESPN was a big part of that, ESPN had it great for years because it was just part of the standard cable bundle. And so people were subsidizing it. People who had no interest in ESPN or sports were still paying as people. part of their cable bill. And everyone else kind of had it good in a way. The people who actually wanted ESPN had it good in a way because their ESPN was sort of subsidized by the people who were paying for it without wanting it. So in a way, I guess everyone made out well in that bargain except for the people who had no interest in sports and were still paying for it. But so we're

continuing to see cord cutting. It's slowing, I think, the pace of it just because there is some built-in audience of people who are just going to go to the grave with cable because it's just what they're used to and they're just not going to switch over. So it doesn't look like cable subscribers are just going to flatline and go to zero in the near future, but it's going to be continued slippage. And so ESPN is making this big bid by launching its own direct-to-consumer service, which did launch on Thursday, which is the day we're recording. Somewhat confusingly, It's just called ESPN. This is not ESPN Plus.

It's just ESPN, but it's the streaming version of ESPN. And because ESPN has lots of streaming competitors, it's now competing with Prime Video and Netflix and all these other services. And so it has spent big on sports rights because that is one of the things that still attracts eyeballs and gets people in the door and you need to watch it live so you can get advertising revenue. And so they've made some splashy. outlays on sports rights and this could be part of that and they're making all sorts of moves right they have now the NFL has a stake in ESPN which has all kinds of ramifications and then

the ESPN is is now bringing WWE pay-per-view events which will be exclusive to this ESPN streaming even though you know Netflix has a big deal with with WWE also and yeah you mentioned red zone and NFL network becoming part of ESPN as part of this investment by the NFL in ESPN. So all these dominoes are falling, but it's connected to ESPN making this bid for streaming supremacy and longevity. And so that's like 30 bucks a month for that ESPN service, which is more than you were paying for ESPN if you had a cable bundle. But they're kind of raising the price for that because now they're really.

lying on people who actually want their product. And so you've got to charge those people a bit more to make up for the revenue that you've lost by losing the people who didn't want your product, but we're paying for it anyway. Right. And MLB is now going to be part of this. So if they can now also give people a bunch of baseball games or MLB TV through the CSPN service, well, that's another big draw. But for us, for the sickos, for the baseball fans who are already on board and have had an enjoy. MLBTV. Well, now we have to wonder how much of an extra expense or hassle is this going to be. Can you still get MLBTV through the league? It sounds like probably not. Like you might just have to get ESPN. And okay, maybe a lot of people who have MLBTV want ESPN anyway. There's going to be plenty of overlap there. And if it all works seamlessly, then okay. But if it's way more expensive or if there are additional hurdles. Then maybe you're leaving out people who either don't have the tech know-how or don't want to switch to streaming or don't have the disposable income for that.

So there are all kinds of complications here and a lot will depend on the specifics. But it does sound like MLB is going to get paid, which is the important thing or one of the most important things to Ron Manfred and the people he works for. Yeah, it's certainly one of the most important things from their perspective. And, like, I think that sometimes we can go, not you and I necessarily, although I'm probably guilty of this. So I don't, I should take whatever responsibility I need to here. Like, sometimes particularly as it pertains to player salaries, people will be like, what do I care? What do I care how well, what the ratings are like for this? And it's like, well, you should care a little because like it needs to be viable, right?

And we can debate like how profit maximizing viability should be because I think we're over-indexed on that a lot of the time. But, like, you want it to be a viable going concern, you know? It needs to be a going concern. And I think that you want people to want to watch the sport, not because you're doing, like, a, like, please, like my sport thing, but because you need people to be invested enough that the sport has legs long term. You need, you need legs, you know?

Yes. It helps to have legs. Not always. Lots of ways to do sports. But, you know, you want the sport to have the resources it needs to attract good players, to have competitive teams. And all of that tends to be related to popularity, at least on some level. So, you know, I don't want us to be overly cavalier about the whole thing. And I think sometimes we collectively can be guilty of that.

But I also want the sport to be accessible. and there needs to be balanced between those two things. And, you know, I don't think most people, like, it's not that there aren't networks that inspire ire to the point that people wouldn't want to subscribe to them as a standalone service. Like, we can all imagine that being true. I don't know that people have, like, such a strong anti-ESPN partisan leaning or whatever that they would be like, no, I'll never subscribe if it's, you know,

like, I don't think that that's really a thing. But I understand that people have. a lot of ire for the sports shouters on ESPN, of course. And as they have cut in some areas, they have heavily invested in some of those areas. And that has turned people off to some extent. And to be clear, like, amen, brother, you know, I'm with you on that. I have plenty. I have a list of grievances that I can lay at the feet of ESPN.

They are not so severe that I would be like, well, now that MLB TV is going to be on ESPN, I guess I'm never watching baseball again, right? And I think that that's the, that's mostly where we're sitting with a lot of this stuff where people are like, hey, I have some notes, but like, sure, if it's easy and especially for people, I think the piece of this that will be important for them to get right is to, like, for people who have some sort of existing subscription relationship with ESPN, I'm sure there are a lot of people in my bucket, right, where it's like you have this bundle because you want to be able to, did I tell you I'm finally watching and? You know? Oh, excellent. Wow. You started an indoor. Slow bit steady because it's a solo watch and so like finding times to watch it. You know, you got to find your, I'm really liking it so far. You were all right. You know, I didn't, to be clear, I wasn't like a and or contrarian. I was a, I don't have time to do this just yet, contrarian. I got on board. Yeah. Now I'm, now I'm on board. But anyway, for people like me who already have like a subscription, whatever, and have a subscription with MLB. BTV having it be like an easy and seamless transition at a price point that isn't like wild is

going to I think affect how people react to the the whole thing when it's all said and done but yeah I'll just reiterate like don't make it too expensive that it's onerous which like I'm sure there will be your mileage might vary on that right it's not like there's one answer to what becomes too expensive of a platform like that's going to vary household to household so threading the needle on that will be difficult, but I'm sure that they can breach a rate where it's like, okay, this is survivable. Make the transition to the whole thing

pretty straightforward. But mostly, I'm happy that MLBTV is going to a place where like the thing they do is sports, you know? Because if you had told me that like Netflix was going to buy MLBTV, my base reaction would be, this is going to be a disaster and they have to prove me wrong. Because I've tried to watch live stuff on Netflix and woo, a very variable experience with that.

It has, yeah, they certainly had some hiccups with the Tyson-Paul fight, at least at first. They have improved that, I think. They were probably unprepared for just the number of people who would be streaming that. How was that possible, though? It was an enormous number of people. It was just huge, but yes, subsequent events have gone a bit better, but there have been hiccups for sure. Their NFL games have been better.

And they did not screw up the most important live thing they've broadcast lately, which was the Beyonce halftime show. Like that they did. Yeah. I did not have issues on that. Yeah. The thing about Netflix is that you're going to get eyeballs on whatever it is that they're broadcasting. So that's the good news.

And that's the good news really about MLB being in business with ESPN. I mean, they kind of have us where they want us. ESPN does. That's the whole point. of snapping up sports rights because they want to make themselves indispensable. And even if you don't have warm, fuzzy feelings about ESPN, you're going to think, well, they've got me over a barrel because I want to watch this thing, and I can watch it only on ESPN. And I think it's good for baseball to be in business with ESPN in some capacity, because even if ESPN is,

as Rob Manfred said, a shrinking platform, it's still a really large platform. And especially for sports, and it's sort of synonymous with sports. And we don't want MLB to be behind a paywall that is so high that no one sees it and no one stumbles across it. And even if there's a reduced baseball broadcast load on regular, linear broadcast, if MLB TV is part of that package, then a lot of people are going to have access to baseball, at least potentially through that. And that's good news. I mean, that's much better, I think, than if it had gone to Apple TV Plus, which I love. but no one else watches. I mean, relative to the other major streaming services,

I was watching Plotonic Season 2 just last night. Great show. What the hell? No. No. I have to start fabricating Apple TV Plus shows that don't exist to see if you can catch it. But no, they exist. Yeah, they're real and spectacular.

Show. Yeah, it's Seth Rogen, Roseburn kind of comedy. It's very fun. Yeah. Good show. But wait, doesn't Seth Rogen also has the other show. The studio. Is that also?

on? Yes, that is also on Apple. The studio is on Apple? People really like the studio. See, like the studio I've heard of, it has so many people in it that I like that at some point I'm going to have to watch this because like, like, pound for pound. Berenholz is funny. Caternhan is in this show? It is

my favorite streaming service. It's just really good. And I'm an Apple hater and yet. I like the other Berenholtz better. I'm a John Berenholtz over Ike actually. Oh, I don't have like a strong opinion. John.

Not saying I dislike Ike, but, but John, John Berenholtz, he's not as famous, but he, he completely just kills it on everything. He's on Superstore, American Auto. Anyway, check out the other Barrenholtz's brother. Yeah. They're not on Apple TV plus, I don't think. So funny how he does and doesn't look like his, are they brothers? They're brothers, yeah.

Okay. Point is, it's a lot of great stuff for me for a prestige TV viewer on Apple TV Plus, but as the MLS example shows it's not great for getting visibility for your sport. And so for MLB and ESPN to still have a partnership, I think is for the best for baseball. So hopefully it will also be good for existing baseball fans, but I think it's good for making new baseball fans for discovery, for accessibility, for exposure, for coverage. I mean, we'll see. Obviously, that was a legitimate gripe that MLB has had with ESPN. Just you're not going to hear or read that much about baseball on most of ESPN's platforms. It's just going to be completely dominated by

football and basketball. And that will be even more true now that ESPN is in business with the NFL, if it's possible for the coverage of the NFL to be any more pervasive on ESPN. It will be. And that leads to a lot of questions, of course, about independence of journalists. And can you actually have the NFL owning a sizable stake in ESPN and ESPN operating the NFL not? network and all these things and not have an even stronger conflict of interest than there has already been for decades, which has manifested itself in any number of ways because ESPN has been broadcasting NFL games since the 80s, right? So these leagues and partners are already in bed together, and there are all sorts of

incentives there, right? But ESPN at least has done some good reporting about the NFL despite all of those entanglements, and so there's some question about whether that will continue. And we talked about that at some length on Hangup and Listen. We haven't really gotten into it that much here because it wasn't specifically affecting MLB. But I guess there's a possibility that it could, that there could be a similar arrangement. That's not really being floated or reported here that there would be a stake like MLB taking stake in ESPN. But it's possible that something like that could happen.

If ESPN is operating MLB Network, which is league owned, I mean, there could be even tighter entanglements there. And the journalists who are at ESPN, well, that'll be good for them in some ways to be a rights holder, but then also not potentially. And you have to wonder about reporters pulling punches or stories not getting green lid or getting buried because of these relationships between leagues and broadcast partners. It's very messy. Yeah, it's messy, you know, and we don't have to remark on it much more than we have. But, boy, it's not the best, my opinion. Yeah. Well, this is starting to take shape. We will return to it when we have final agreements and revenue figures and details, which will have a big bearing on how we feel about this. But MLB, ESPN, making moves. Maybe we can close with a couple quick questions here at the end of this week. One of them I went to an official scorer for an answer. So that one we can dispense with quite quickly. This is from Mark, Patreon supporter, who says, I don't know if this is the right place to ask a question, but I hope.

it is. Yes, it was, Mark. During the August 15th, Yankees at Cardinals game, with Jose Caballero at second, Cardinals pitcher Ryan Fernandez attempted a pickoff. The thing is, Caballero was standing on the base, and no Cardinals player was anywhere near it. The throw went directly toward Caboero's face. He dodged it and then moved to third on the error. My question is, what if Caballero had instinctively caught the pick-off throw out of self-preservation. Oh, sure. He was standing on the bag and not getting in the way of a Cardinals player completing the pick-off. So would it be interference if anything it would have helped the defense?

So if just on a lark just for fun or for a brain fart or whatever, the runner on second, standing all alone with no one covering, had just caught the pick-off attempt throw from the pitcher. what would have happened. So I went to our unnamed official score who sometimes answers questions like this for the podcast, who said, I was really trying to find language in the rulebook and our extended casebook that would cover the specific situation. Ultimately, I had to apply logic of other plays I've seen and how those are called on the field. Take the example of a runner getting hit by a thrown ball in a rundown. Mani Machado had a famous one last year in the playoffs. Yeah, when he took a path to second base to make a throw more difficult. legally. This is not interference unless a runner deliberately tries to get hit by it, and that's the umpires' judgment. So in this case, on the bag or not, if umpires felt the runner was just trying to protect himself, no interference would be called. I would treat this as any other play where a runner was hit by a thrown ball. So even if it was caught to protect himself and not to interfere with the fielding of the ball, I think we just have a live ball as long as it is dropped. If he holds

on to it, allowing some other advance, I think we would have a case of deliberate interference and runners would need to return to bases. So, yeah, if he just caught the ball and held onto it and said, I'm not giving it back to you, then, yeah, that seems like interference can't do that. But if it's just self-preservation or, I guess, for fun, but it doesn't interfere with anyone and doesn't harm anyone, then he thinks it would be a live ball. But now I sort of want to see that situation just to happen. He thought this was specifically covered in the Scores handbook or in the umpire handbook or something,

but he couldn't find anything that addressed this specific case. But extrapolating from other cases seems reasonable enough. But, yeah, let's test that contention, runners who are just standing by yourselves. So if this happens again, I want to see someone just catch it for fun. And then we'll find out. Okay. Similarly, whimsical question from Ryan. who says that the podcast has been a bomb in a long, brave season.

Your conversation about an umpire's attention or inattention on check swing appeals got me thinking has a perfectly timed sneeze ever impeded an umpire's ability to make a call. Almost certainly. If you consider all the games ever played in the history of professional baseball and the dusty allergen riddled surfaces on which they're played, how would it be possible that not once has an umpire's. sneezed at the most crucial moment of a play or pitch. And since we all know that it's impossible to keep one's eyes open during a sneeze,

clearly we can assume the umpire would not be able to determine the proper call. Do you or the podcast community have any recollection of such an instance? Not really? I don't think so. Yeah. We might not know. I guess it might be tough to tell because you got the mask on and it's so quick that you might not sense it even.

But in the event of such a play, what is the umpire's obligation? I suppose in the age of replay, the answer is more obvious, but what about a time before replay is the umpire obliged to ask for help from whom exactly? Right. Can we assume the remaining three umpires were dialed in closely enough to make the proper call? Or, since we don't know the precise moment at which an umpire's eyes were closed, are we to defer to the judgment and trust the call on the field? So, sneezing, umpires, what would happen? I feel like the answer has to be yes, that this has happened. I can't think of a specific instance.

Like, I can't be like, oh, yeah, that guy, he sneezed that one time. But, like, the answer has to be yes, right? Yeah, you'd think just given the hundreds of thousands of pitches in a single season. And, yeah, it's dusty and you got the mask. And yeah, you'd think that there would have to have been a sneeze. I would say that it is possible to delay a sneeze. If you feel it coming on, there are various mechanisms to postpone the sneeze. Right? And, you know, maybe the success rates vary there. But I feel like if you felt the sneeze coming on and the pitch was about to be delivered, you could delay the sneeze a sufficient amount of time because the pitch is getting to the plate in a fraction of a second, of course. And so all you had to do is just delay it. I don't know if you have a specific method for delaying a sneeze. I have often, I just put my finger just below my nose and like push up on.

on the bottom of my nose. That helps, sort of. But I know that some people maybe can do like a sort of put your tongue on the roof of your mouth or something like that. Like they have brain freeze? Maybe just trying to like. That's how you get rid of brain freeze. Okay.

You're trying to trick the nerves like there's a sneeze reflex and yeah, you do whatever. And so maybe umpires prepare for this. For all I know they do. Maybe this is part of umpire school. Maybe. Because you wouldn't have to delay it that. long. Now, if it's like a play at the plate, you have to make a call, you have to hustle over somewhere, it's also, I wonder if maybe you're so hyper-focused on something that maybe

that is enough to just like the complete concentration that you have there could kind of delay the sneeze. But I don't know, unless it's like an extended play, I feel like you could put off the sneeze long enough to be able to make a call. You should just sneeze. Putting off sneeze is bad for you. If you don't sneeze, of course, there are cases where you get a bug in your mouth or a bug in your eye or, you know, something. Remember when the one guy got a bug in his ear? Yeah. Yeah.

And they had to fish it out. And then when they fish it out, it was still flying and fluttering. Yeah. So that has happened with umpires and with players. But I don't really recall seeing a sneeze. And you might just not notice. I don't think you could really ask for help if it's a ball strike call because you're just going to be. You're too far away and you're not paying attention.

I feel like you'd have to fake it. Like if that happened and somehow you just couldn't delay the sneeze. Right. I feel like you'd probably just because you'd see something. You'd probably see the pitch along some part of the trajectory. Or maybe you'd see where it was received or you'd see where the catcher made it look like it was received. And probably you would just pretend because what else are you going to do? You can't just say, yeah?

Well, I sneezed. Sorry, can't help you. Like, the game just grinds to a halt. And umpires, as we discussed on that check swing conversation, they're supposed to project confidence and authority. And so you probably would just power through it, I would say. Now, the catcher might suspect something or the batterer because they hear you sneeze. Well, because they could hear your sneeze.

Yeah. Right. So it might be tough to maintain that you actually saw it. But no one is. is really actually seeing whether your eyes were closed at that instance. Maybe the pitcher could tell, but the batter or the catcher can't see you. You're behind them, and you have the mask on. So I feel like you'd have plausible deniability to say, yeah, I saw that pitch.

Yeah, I think you would. And so you would just fib and then hope that they don't ask any questions. Like, you wouldn't, it would suck for the batter in that moment to be like, oh, is that a little, was that a little low, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it would be bad if it were like a glaring, terrible call, of course. I think you could pick up from context clues,

even if you didn't see much of the pitch, you could just not have it be a complete howler, but that could happen, I guess. But you could probably just sense enough from your long experience and the positioning of everything to make an educated guess, which frankly is what umpires are doing,

even with their eyes open sometimes. If it's a borderline pit, and it's moving and it's going super fast and it's on the edge and the catcher's moving his glove around, you're just, you're running some kind of calculation in your head that you hope will lead to the correct call, but you're not sure, right? You're not sure. Yeah. I think it's probably even, because if you were being completely honest, you'd say, ah, I cannot

tell a lie, I must disclose here that I sneezed and I didn't see the pitch, but what good would that serve ultimately? Right. It's probably in the best interest of baseball to pretend that you saw it because you can't really just defer to someone else. Now, if you have ABS, maybe you can then. And if you completely blow the call, then it'll be appealed and justice will be done, I guess. And maybe you could even cede your authority in that case if you knew that the ABS system was operating. I guess you could even like maybe there could be like an umpires challenge or something.

Even if we don't have full ABS and full robo-umps, but just the challenge system. They'll never use it, but yeah. Probably they'd never use it. But if they just said, I don't know, I had something in my eye, I missed that one. You could defer to the system if you wanted to and felt you had to. Yeah, you could, but they'll never use it. They wouldn't use it even in an instance where they think they should, I'm just saying, they wouldn't use it. We were surprised recently by the fact that a virus seemed maybe more in favor of full ABS than we wouldn't.

of thought. So who knows? Okay. Last question comes to us from Christian, who says, with your discussion of Manfred's realignment comments and the possibility of getting rid of the traditional ALNL distinction, I was thinking about what MLB might do with their awards. Baseball is the only major sport that I know of that gives out two MVPs, two rookies of the year, et cetera, each year. Is this a new entry in baseball exceptionalism? That's Christian asked that question, our long-running series of things that baseball was unique or unusual in compared to other sports. But the only reason is, of course, because of the traditional separation between AL and NL, which I suppose is true. I mean, even some of the awards that we have now were single

awards. Like there was a period where there was just a single Sy Young Award winner before there were two each season. Will we see MLB align with the other sports and start awards? only one set of awards per year. For some reason, I have a hard time believing people would take Eastern slash Western Conference MVP seriously, even if that's effectively what we have now. And, of course, what impact would this change have on record keeping, Hall of Fame discussions, contract incentives, things of that nature. So, okay, if we were to do away with AL and NL, which is far from a certainty. Yeah. And I would bet if I had to bet that they would probably keep those terms, even if they rearrange everything.

I think they'd probably just slap American League, National League, on it. Even if it's a different alignment of teams belonging to those leagues, you've got to call them something, probably, and you might as well just call them AL&NL for a tradition's sake. But let's say they do away with AL and NL or they shake things up entirely. do you think that they would ever go to a unified end of season, full season award? I'm skeptical that they would just because there's so much. I know that it wasn't always this way, but at this point there's just been so much precedent for two that I think that they would retain it. Because part of what, you know, there's going to be this funny challenge that they have to deal with because it's good for there to be some realignment. It's good for there to be changed.

but they are going to want it to feel similar to viewers, right, and to fans. And so I think that stuff like this where they can hold on to something that folks are familiar with, so it doesn't feel like, you know, the rugs being pulled out from under you. I think that they will want to hold on to. And the BBWA, I think, will want to retain too, right? And they are our awards, right? Like, we could rejigger them, but on some level, like, you know, there's feedback from the league, But, like, there are awards, you know, which has been, like, a point of controversy lately.

So, so, yeah, I think that they will, that we will keep two and then kind of go from there. But I don't imagine that they will want to shift everything at once. Yeah. And even MLB does have, I mean, a partnership with the BBWA to broadcast the BBWA awards. And so MLB probably likes having those awards and doing the whole rigamarole with the finalists and the unveiling on MLB Network and all of that. And yeah, it gives writers things to write about. And players are probably in favor of more awards, too,

because people like winning awards. So, yeah. Now, if you did just remove the AL-NL structure or essentially remove it even more than we have now where you even remove the historic affiliations that at least some teams have had for decades or more than a century with a certain league, then it might seem like a flimsy pretence

to keep giving out multiple awards because ultimately what is even the basis for doing this and I might be in favor of having an overall award in addition to the league awards like kind of like you have gold gloves but then you have the platinum glove

like maybe if you just had the single supreme MVP like you know you have the league MVP and then you have who was the more valuable of the two MVP's like maybe something like that would work but no I think there's so much history and tradition with this that I don't know that anyone would want it to go away I'm trying to think of like who which party would actually be motivated you know yeah and yeah fans wouldn't

I mean fans like debating the stuff writers media members the league it's more publicity for baseball players you know who might want there to be one would be teams because contract incentives yeah yeah yeah I guess reduces the odds even further that like you're going to be forced to pay out more you know maybe yeah maybe the the real villain is the pirates all along you know although sorry you just have a skeins you're going to have to deal with it yeah um by the time he's into contract incentive territory there he's not going to be a pirate anymore what am I talking about sorry pirates fans you're just like I'm just sitting here Out of the clear blue nowhere, I get whacked with that.

I know. I wonder if those incentives actually help get deals done sometimes, though, just because it's something you throw into the pot, just sort of sweeten the offer. I wonder if you could quantify what those clauses and incentives are worth, like the expected worth to them. Do players and agents value them more highly than they should or less highly because they believe in themselves and they think,

yeah, I can win that, but ultimately the odds are going to be against you, right? It's just going to be a lot of Judge and Otani winning that award year and you're out. And so maybe like as a bet on yourself, you're thinking, oh, okay, they threw in that I get this extra money if I'm top X or whatever. And maybe the odds of that are actually lower than your thinking, perhaps. So maybe I wonder because sometimes with the deferrals, like Scott Boris has talked about that is just like a way to get deals done. maybe it's just another button you can press basically as you're going back and forth with teams and we're trying to figure out a structure that works for both sides.

Okay, here's a signing bonus and here's a deferral and we can just kind of come to some compromise and so maybe those incentives actually work out well, who knows? But I guess it would sort of screw you over if you had an existing long-term deal that had those because if you're just making a new deal in that new world with unified awards, well, then you'd be able to evaluate that fairly. But if you're one of these guys who's on a decade-plus long deal and suddenly the possibility of your winning those awards has been halved or something, that would be a bit of a raw deal.

Yeah, I agree. Okay. Just a few follow-ups. First, Adley Rutchman went on the injured list with an oblique strain. So for now, I guess that answers the question of where and how often Samuil Bessio will play. He will be the starting catcher. Listener Chris, responding to Meg's fascination with the nickname Bubba in episode 2364 said, that is a pretty common term of endearment for someone's brother in the deep south.

I've heard adults use it to refer to adults. I did have a sense that it was a southern thing, but didn't know that it was specifically for brothers. We also got a local perspective subject matter expert on the George Webb versus Copps debate about the best burgers in Wisconsin. Patreon supporter Matt writes in about the plausibility of Craig Counsel, never having seen a George Webb. They are fairly nondescript. He's probably lying about never see. one. Also, I've been seeing headlines and posts about how council left Milwaukee for the big city and it's backfiring. If I were him and kept seeing those, I would probably also be a little bit

petulant, though I am a Cubs fan living in Milwaukee, so I might also be feeling just a tad salty. But Cops versus George Webb's is no contest. George Webb feels like a chain, like a better Denny's. They do breakfast and burgers and sandwiches, and it all feels very ordinary. Cops is hands down better. Three total locations, huge burgers that are incredible. probably the best custard in Milwaukee, or at least my favorite, hardly any seating, but always packed, so you know it's worth it. He does note that the tribute custard, cops made for Bob Yucer, was a little too peanut heavy. Good to know. Listener Ethan writes in to make a fine point that I swear I meant to make, but I neglected to. I really enjoyed the segment on baseball

in TV shows like Alien Earth and Star Trek and their proclivity for picking 20th century anecdotes and callouts that their audiences will be familiar with. You mentioned an in-universe explanation for this, the availability of video footage. That might make the modern sport live on for fans in future centuries. I always had a different view. I don't think Star Trek characters are normal in their own world. Tom Paris and Voyager is into early sci-fi serials and tinkering on 1960s cars, both of which are about 350 years before his time. It's like if you met someone today who was really into Baroque music, Shakespeare, and 17th century wagon restoration. You'd understand exactly what that person is, a complete dork.

I say this extremely lovingly, as I am one. The original writer's biography of Cisco had this to say. He has a weakness for baseball, a sport that died out in the 22nd century, and he frequently goes to a hollow suite to have a chat and a catch with one of his legendary ballplayer heroes. Of course, Cisco is into 1960s baseball if he's into baseball at all. This is an eccentric interest in his world. Starfleet officers are weirdos who are into extremely old-fashioned things.

They're nerds and larkers. They live in a post-scarcity world, and they've chosen to have jobs, stressful ones at that. I find that characterization much more fun than the idea that all of society has remembered Willie Mays. And final follow-up from listener, Patreon supporter Tim, in response to our discussion about the worst ways for games to end due to the zombie runner, Tim says, I think the Phillies July 21st win against the Red Sox deserves more consideration. This was something that Meg and Bowman talked about a bit on that episode when I was on vacation, but Tim drives home how wacky it was, the winning run, a zombie runner, scored due to an official's review of a check swing of a pitch that was originally called a ball. In other words, the winning

runner did not get on base of his own accord, was awarded home plate on a pitch that the pitcher didn't intend to be a strike and the batter didn't intend to swing by an official who was not in the stadium. I'm a Phillies fan, and this seemed like a wholly unsatisfying end to the game, even if I was happy with the result. I am always happy with the result of one of our listeners deciding to support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad-free and get yourself access to some perks,

as have the following five listeners. Will W., Jackie, George Lewis, Fletcher Weld, and Josh Held. Weld and Held. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and so much more, check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you have checked out the offerings and found them satisfactory and signed up to be a Patreon

supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, to music and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild sub-edit

at our slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes at Fangraphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Thanks to you for listening. That will do it for today and for this week.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week. Baseball is a simulation. It's all just one big math equation You're all about these stats we've compiled Because you listen to Effectively Wild With Ben Lindberg and McRolle

Come for the ball Bantor is free Baseball is a simulation It's all just one big conversation Effectively wild