Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2417: Just Passan Time

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Ben Lindbergh brings on ESPN senior MLB insider Jeff Passan to discuss the ins and outs of the newsbreaking business—how he reports and announces news, how newsbreaking in baseball differs from newsbreaking in other sports, conflicts of interest, the ills of social media, work-life balance, aging, his flirtation with switching to the basketball beat, and more—plus Jeff’s thoughts on ESPN’s relationship with MLB, the biggest surprises and questions of this hot stove season, and the outlook for a lockout. Then (1:06:55) Ben talks to The Athletic’s Sam Blum about what he learned from covering the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Tyler Skaggs against the Angels, which was settled just before the jury reached a verdict. Audio intro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio interstitial: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Jeff’s last EW appearance Link to Jeff’s newsbreaking origins Link to Jeff’s gravy tweet Link to aging research Link to article about aging Link to Woj comments Link to Schefter comments Link to Shams comments Link to Shams profile Link to Shams vs. Woj feature Link to Passan NBA report Link to exhibit 49 info Link to more exhibit 49 info Link to ESPN-MLB deal Link to ESPN-NFL deal Link to ESPN evolution Link to Jeff’s trade tweet Link to news about Jeff’s son Link to The LAT on the settlement Link to Sam on the settlement Link to Sam on Trout Link to MLB testing change  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Hello, past, past, placid, better for free. Three new episodes for us each week. Defectively. Why, oh, bio. Defendantily. Hello, and welcome to episode 2417 of Effectively. Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, not joined today by Meg Rally of Fangraphs, who's off this week.

We'll catch up on signings and trades next time. Lots of transactions to talk about, but I've got a couple of good guests for you today. In Meg's stead, I will be bringing you none other than ESPN senior MLB insider Jeff Passen. Jeff will join me in Just a sec for a wide-ranging conversation about how he reports and announce his news, his thoughts on social media, his work-life balance, his dalliance with switching to the basketball beat, and so much more, he'll even answer a call from a source while we are podcasting. We'll also get into some big-picture hot stove questions, the outlook for a lockout, and much, much more. It is, I think, a revealing, engaging conversation with one of baseball's biggest and best media members.

Also, I will warn you, there's a bit of profanity. Jeff drops a few F-bombs, and I told producer Shane, maybe we won't bleep them this time. just because it's fun to hear Jeff Passen say some words that he wouldn't say on SportsCenter. So be warned. Cover your kids' ears if you care to. After that, the athletic Sam Blum will come on to talk about the ins and outs of a wrongful death case filed by the family of former Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs against the Angels. That case reached its conclusion on Friday.

It resulted in a settlement, but Sam has a whole lot to share from following and covering that case closely. So I hope you won't want to miss that conversation either. But first, making his long-awaited, return to the podcast, Jeff Passon. Joining me now is ESPN senior MLB insider Jeff Passon, who somehow hasn't been on this show since 2018. Jeff, thanks for joining us outsiders again. Seven years. My God. It's a long time. Dude, all you have to do is ask. I know. It's not as if we've been inviting you and you've been big-timing us, to be clear. I just feel guilty about bothering you. I sent you a text this morning

and apologized that it was not a hot tip about a transaction, because I assume that you're just constantly blowing up with more important texts. I try to. That doesn't lessen your importance, Ben Lindberg. I mean, I'm just like, apparently I haven't done anything relevant in seven years. That sucks. I mean, you do have some other platforms so that you can go on

that have welcomed you from time to time. So it's not as if you're lacking in media exposure, but you're going to get the big fan grafts effectively wild bump this time. Hopefully we'll do it again in fewer than seven years, but we'll see how it goes. You know, we'll consider it a trial. And let's get the ground rule straight here, because we dodged a bullet with the Shane Boz trade, which you partially reported going down about an hour before we were due to talk. So how major a move would have to transpire while we're speaking for it to disrupt the podcast?

Probably not very much. Yeah. The bar's pretty low. Yeah. Like, if, I mean, if there's a big leaguer involved, I'm probably going to big league like, not lying. Well, I just said you hadn't been big-timing us, but you might be about to be. That's fair. I don't want to get in between you and a scoop.

And if we could capture you composing a breaking news tweet while we're podcasting, even better. That would be riveting radio. Well, I have one ready right now. I think by the time this is. up the three-way trade among Pittsburgh, Houston, and Tampa Bay is going to be done. But I generally have a rule by which I try my very best to abide that until players have been informed, I do not report their names. Sometimes in the fog of war, so to speak, that doesn't happen. But in this case, there has been no informing. There's still medicals going on. So that is why Chandler-Rome and

Ken Rosenthal wrote about it a while back, and I have not acknowledged it publicly to this point. Because those guys, they have no scruples. Oh, they have, listen, everyone can do the job the way he or she sees best fit. And, well, there have just been some instances in the past where, like, a guy came up to me and said, do you know that I found out that I got traded from your Twitter. And I felt kind of terrible about that because, look, we forget sometimes that as much as we enjoy the transactions and as much as we enjoy crazy things going on in baseball that people's lives are at stake here and people's, like, there's, there are a few things in life that are more alarming to someone, I think, than, oh, by the way,

you're going to be plying your trade somewhere else. You're going to have to move. It doesn't matter what your situation is familially. You might have a kid on the way. You might be getting married. There are always things that we don't know about that affect people as human beings. And I don't know that it's particularly fair that somebody learns their life's going to be turned upside down through social media. And that's something like, I think, treating the people I cover like human beings rather than, I'm not going to say chattel, but like pieces of a larger business is, it's not how I like doing things.

So I try to abide by these standards as much as I can, and I lose scoops because of it, and frankly, I'm okay with that. You're a man of principle. I admire it. And how do you, I don't expect you to give away all of your methods, but can you always confirm that the player has been informed? Because you can't text the player and say, hey, did you hear that you got traded? Because that would be a bit of a spoiler yourself. So I assume that you then have to confirm it with the team or the agent that is telling that player and they may or may not get back to you. You know, I think it depends on my relationship with a player too, because a lot of times players will know that that.

They're on the trade block. And if, you know, if I have the kind of relationship with a player where I know that he would appreciate me telling him, then I will do. I have done that before, yes. I see. Oh, interesting. So, so you don't want them to find out from you tweeting about it, but it's okay if they find out from you texting them about it. I think, I think, is, am I being hypocritical there? because I see it's a very, it's a very narrow line.

Either way, you're getting a notification from Jeff Basson, but I guess it's a personalized notification as opposed to. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's exactly what it is. It's like, I'm, you know, and I'm not going to DM you or text you that you've been traded. It would always be via a phone call, but maybe I'm just old fashioned that way and thinking that, like, talking to somebody in delivering them life-changing news is better than doing it be a text. It's like if someone's breaking up with you, wouldn't you rather it be done? Like in a phone

call or face-to-face conversation rather than a text? Well, they're getting broken up with by their team. Maybe teams should just start ghosting players. Just, you know, never tell them. And then they show up in spring training and the door is barred. That would probably be worse. I think it's always nice to notify them one way or another. If you do fire off some tweets while we're talking, that's okay. It would not be a first. Every now and then, I'll see that Meg posted something. on blue sky while we were speaking. Oh. I'll think, how did she do that?

Was that while I was talking? Was that while she was talking? So I'm sure that you've tweeted out news mid-interview before it would not be a first for you either. I have, but the problem is when I'm actually doing the talking, I'm worried that I'm going to conflate what I'm thinking in my head and what I'm typing with my fingers. And I make typos occasionally, perhaps not as occasionally. as some peers do, but I make typos occasionally, and I get reamed for them. So, like, my

great fear is that I'm going to be talking and thinking about somebody, and they're not involved with what I'm typing, but their name's going to get in there. Like, you've done that before, right? Sure, yeah. That'd be the worst case scenario. You notify someone that they were traded and they weren't actually. It was the wrong player entirely. Oh, dude, that's, that's like, I mean, The great fear that I live with every day is just getting things wrong. And not just because it's the job to get them right, but because it's sort of like my brand now. I don't like that word. I find it kind of obnoxious.

But I think that I'm, if not the guy, then a guy that people look at and they're like, if he says it, it's true. And I don't ever want that to change. I feel like that's an extraordinarily important thing because you're only as good as the trust that you've got from the people that you're delivering this information to. And if they feel like they lose trust in me because I get something wrong, then, you know, I'm worthless. Well, speaking of blue sky, when are you going to lighten the load on the poor hardworking Jeff Passenbot over there and head over to the other side yourself? I have zero interest in expanding my social media presence whatsoever. If I could nuke every account, I would. Yeah.

I find, generally speaking, I find social media to be a horrible and destructive tool. And all of the good that we have seen from it, and that we still see occasionally, is far outweighed by just what it does to our brains, what it does to us as people. Yeah. I mean, social media, like, let's just be real. Social media is a drug. And we have all been fed it, and the vast, vast, vast majority of us have willfully become addicted to it. And I think if we acknowledge that, then we start wondering, does the utility of what we get from it outweigh the damage that it does, not just us individually, but writ large? And it's kind of a scary answer that you don't want to ask yourself because I think it's pretty self-evidence.

Yeah, well, can't make any typos if you don't tweet at all, which is mostly my policy these days. I was going to say, the Tom Verducci Corollary. Yes, exactly. Tom's got the right idea. Tom was the smart one with us. I got sucked in. I was in, I think I was in Big Bear. And this is back when I was with Yahoo, and I was meeting Sean.

white for breakfast because I did a you know I covered the Olympics in addition to baseball at Yahoo and I got a text that morning from somebody that Aroldus Chapman who had defected from Cuba was about the sign so this shows you how long ago it was like my social media career has uh spanned Aroldus chapman's professional baseball career in the united states and my first tweet uh I believe it was something to the effect of a Cuban left-hander. I think I said Albertine enrolled as Chapman, because I think that's what his given name is,

is signing with a National League Central team. Didn't realize it was the Reds, didn't have the sourcing at the time to lock that down, because I think this was back in 2009. But, yeah, that is how I started. Can you look at how many tweets you've sent?

There is a way to check that on some platforms, I think. But maybe it's better not to know. I mean, it has to, like, we have to be at the point where it's five figures. Yeah. Well, I'm sure it's paid off for you in some respects, but you are kind of chained to it. And it's true. I remember the first episode of this podcast was actually about whether Oldest Chapman should be a starter or a reliever. That was in 2012, so we're still going. I guess we're both prisoners of podcasts slash social media now, and it all started with the Roller's Chapman in both cases. He's been around for a while, I guess, is the takeaway here. Yeah, I think the takeaway from me is that I'm fucking old.

I'm five years shy of 50 now, man. Like, we're getting up there. I have a kid going to college next year. Like, that is, I feel like that's getting into old-ass territory. To play Baseball, no less, although I think you've just confirmed some news yourself, because I don't know if you know this, but your Wikipedia page says Jeff Pass, in parentheses, born 1980 or 1981. And then under your image, it says age 44 to 45. So you have not been pinned down on exactly how old you are. But I think you just spilled the beans. You're the big four, five, it sounds like. I am the big four five. 1980 is, uh, that is the correct birth year. for anybody who wants to edit the Wikipedia page. Excellent. Straight from the primary source. Okay.

Well, I think people are often surprised, though, that you are as old as you are. I'm not calling you old. You called yourself old. But you have a youthful face, I think. When people find out that you're about to have a kid in college, I think they're sometimes surprised by that. So you must be moisturizing or something. It's a little alarming to people, which I very much appreciate. And it's going to change.

Like, the gray hairs are starting to come in more frequently. And I have resolved to let that happen naturally. Like, there's, listen, there is always going to be a sense of vanity that is particularly acute when you're spending time on television. Yeah, you're an on-camera personality. You're in 4K sometimes, too, probably. It's unforgiving. But yes, I imagine that I am. But I've always admired men who age gracefully with the subtle graying of their hair that to me signals a transition into not adulthood, but into knowing shit.

And that's where I feel like I am in my life right now. I feel like I understand things a little bit better. Like, the, I've loved my 40s. Like, I, I was a little scared because I feel like it marks the midpoint of your life. And who knows how that's going to go? And then, like, you get hit by a tree, and that's no fun. But no. I've found myself a much calmer presence and soul in my 40s.

And I've, you know, half a decade in, I've been enjoying them. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I'm not there yet, but I'm not far. from it so i'm i'm i'm looking forward to my 40s too so that's good to know i mean you're gonna you're gonna wake up in the morning and ask yourself why does this hurt yeah like there's that part of it is very real like body changes uh that happens so so get ready for that but yeah uh they're they're outweighed uh i think in in a positive fashion uh by the the the brain evolving as well. Yeah, there is that idea of some research that suggests that aging

hits us all at once at various times. Maybe you've seen it's like 44 is one of the years supposedly. I'm skeptical because it just sounds unlikely to me that we would all be just hit by age at the same time, but it's like 44, 60. It's, you know, it goes from like a gradual thing to all at once. Yeah, but dude, isn't it the same way when you buy an appliance now, you know, you have a a finite number of years on it, like the pieces and the parts are likely to corrode or to be used to the point where no longer they're effective after a certain period of time. I think you can kind of apply the same thing to body parts. Can you not? Maybe. I mean, people say that about pitchers, as you know well, from writing the arm. The idea that you have only so many bullets in the elbow,

that sort of thing, which it's probably true to some extent, but I'm always skeptical of that, too, just because you can do things to reload the chamber or empty it more or less slowly, right? So if you take care of yourself, condition, you know, don't abuse the body, then it will last a little longer. But within reason, I guess, there's sort of a planned obsolescence. I mean, if we're talking about, you know, iPhone batteries expiring so that you have to get a new one, that kind of thing. Yeah, I don't know if bodies work exactly the same way, but we do all have an expiration date. All I know is I have a refrigerator in my basement. It was our old refrigerator, and we kept it around just to have another one.

And this thing is rusted. It's got holes like – it's like a freezer on top, fridge on bottom. Like there's a hole between the freezer and the fridge. I don't know where it came from or why it's there, but it is. And that fucker just keeps ticking. And I know one day, like, we're going to wake up. But hopefully I catch this before we have, like, a bunch of rotted meat and maggots in that fridge. But that thing, man, that thing has been a lifesaver, and it's got to be 20-plus years old right now.

So I feel like I have the Justin Verlander of refrigerators downstairs, you know, something that just, it's an outlier. And Justin Verlander is much prettier than this refrigerator. Like, this thing is, it's just an unsightly looking mess. but it gets the job done. Maybe it's like the Jamie Moyer of refrigerators. Yeah, the ageless lefty. It's going to be a sad day when that refrigerator goes. It's probably going to force some sort of midlife crisis for you, maybe.

It's like Rich Hill, right? It's like as long as Rich Hill's around. Is Rich Hill older than you, or I'm trying to pin down your exact age now. But Rich Hill is also 45. Let's see, he was March 11th, 1980. I was going to say, Rich Hill's got me by six months. Okay, all right, perfect. Yeah, it's the last, I mean, you know, when you cover baseball for a long time,

there's always like that day where you're older than every player. Rich Hill has been doing yeoman's work. Yes, he's staped up that day. In keeping me from having that be the case. But it feels like, it feels like it's coming. Like it's happening. It's imminent. And it gets to the point then where I feel like I have to acknowledge

that the players who are coming up right now could be my kids. Sure. You know, the 21 years old, like, very easily could be a kid. And I have to, I have to check myself sometimes with the kinds of relationships

that I have with these players and the kinds of things that I talk about them. I don't want to be Steve Buscemi. How do you do fellow kids? But I also need to be able to, to have those kinds of conversations with them where they see me as someone who's valuable and worth their time and talking to and telling their stories. So it's a constant balancing act for me in trying to acknowledge that these relationships are necessary, but not overplaying my

hand in terms of how I connect with people. Yeah, I don't, you know, you don't have the skateboards over your back or anything. You are constantly in a suit. Are you in a suit right? now? I'm not in a suit right now. I'm in my, I'm in my winter uniform. I've gotten to, I've gotten to the point now, and God, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I really don't care. That's what we get in our 40s, Ben. We stop caring about embarrassing things. But if I find a shirt that I like, I will buy it in all the colors. Like, I will do that. And if I have, There's this particular pair of REI, like, fleece-type pants that fit me well, that are comfortable, that I love, and I will scour eBay to find these pants because they don't make them anymore. So I think I have seven or eight pairs of this one type of pants, and I just, I rotate through them.

So it looks like I am wearing the same thing every day. It is either some kind of hoodie or I have like this cashmere hoodie that I love. I have like five of the same kind. So if it looks like I don't have a lot of clothes, it's because I don't. But when I find something that I like, I will use it and abuse it to no end. You rarely appear in public in the REI pants. I don't think you are famous for a suit. That is probably part of your brand, even if you don't like having a brand.

You and Will Leach, I don't think I've ever seen outside of a suit in a public. place. So I'm just saying it's not as if you're trying to dress down to fit in with a younger crowd. You've been you've been sporting the suit since you were the younger crowd. No, but I did at the All-Star game a couple of years ago. I was meeting up with some sources at a club in Hollywood. And I showed up and I was wearing shorts. And the dress code did not let me in. Thankfully, one of the people I was meeting was able to finagle things. And so this was a, I think Travis Kelsey was there that night, and there were a couple of other, like, very famous people. I was the only guy wearing shorts.

And so, you know, I think I will in my head try to do things that seem like they would be right. But I just, I lack feel in that area to a great extent. So, you know, it's a lack of experience with casual dress. So we've established that this podcast does not rate highly enough to preclude you breaking news while you're speaking to me. But is there a bar, there clearly is a bar for you to tweet something at all. And I wonder where that bar is because, you know, there's a little bit of quid pro quo that goes into newsbreaking probably and maybe agents want to get their guys the attention of getting a tweet from some big newsbreaker. And so maybe they're feeding you that info, but then you have to decide, is this journalistically worthy of everyone's time?

And so where do you draw that line? And do you have to break that news to an agent? You know, this guy doesn't quite merit a pass-and-tweet. Yes. And it's always a very uncomfortable conversation, but there will be times where, you know, if I know a player, for example, and he asks, then I feel like I'm, I feel like I I'm pretty much obliged to do at that point. There's a small segment of people on Twitter that I've come across recently who will show.

I don't know if it was a Slack message or a Discord message. I can't really tell because I don't use either. But they've started calling the quote-unquote lesser news, pointless pings. And honestly, I kind of like delivering. pointless pings. I kind of take a perverse pleasure when people say this was not worthy of a pass-in-tweet. Yeah. Because I don't think that's fair. Is it because a player has to be at a certain level for me to acknowledge them? I don't like that. I try to look at baseball as a universe where there are many, many different people.

And some of those people happen to be star players or very good players or players worthy of multi-year contracts. And I respect them. But I respect every bit as much the guy who might not be as talented or might not be as good and has to work that much harder to maintain his career. And the notion that I'm going to ignore that because there's some perception that news I deliver has to be at a particular level. I just don't agree with that.

I don't like that. I think it sets a bad precedent, and I think it would be an arrogant thing to do. I have respect for anybody who goes out there and tries to play professional baseball. And I think that respect has grown, frankly, in seeing my kid just trying to play college baseball. You know, you never have the types of relationships

unless you're writing a book on someone where you're in their lives every day and understand what they have to go through. So my information is always limited on players. But seeing my son and the things that he's had to do to, you know, he could have played low-level Division I baseball, and I think he would have been good there. But he prioritized academics,

and so he's playing D3 baseball. And, you know, just to become a competent Division III baseball player has taken a ton from him and taken a ton out of him and getting to see that whole process and see what he's put in, it's very exciting and it makes me swell with pride. And I'm getting a call right now, so I'm going to pick this up. Hold on one second. Okay. I am doing Ben Lindberg's podcast right now.

I will make sure to do that. I will not, I mean, we're literally recording live right now, so I'm not going to tell him that you. said hello, specifically who you are. But Ben, this person says hi. All right. Well, provisionally, I return the high without knowing who I'm highing. I will give you a call a little bit later. I appreciate you understanding. And is there anything pertinent or imminent or you just want to bullshit? I will make sure to do that. All right. I'll talk to you soon. And that is how my day goes, Ben Lindbergh right there. Look at that.

That is a little narrow window into the life of what breaking the curtain is like. Incredible. Yeah. And I outranked whoever that was. Maybe you can tell me later so I can feel good about myself. I'm not going to say you outranked, but because there was, he does have a little bit of news there. But he said it could wait a little while. So that's okay.

All right. Still, still, I'll take it. It makes me feel good, makes me feel important. Say someone got big-timed because of Ben Lindberg instead of Ben-Lenberg getting big-times. That's exciting. So I was going to ask you about the standard for tweeting, though, given that you have many people hanging on your every word in the off-season,

because you did, as everyone was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner on the evening of November 27th, break the news that you are thankful for gravy. And that alert presumably went out to many, thousands of people who probably thought, either why am I being bothered while I'm eating my turkey, or this must be big news. Kyle Tucker must have signed on Thanksgiving Day. Otherwise, why would pass and be tweeting right now?

And then it was that you were thankful for gravy. I assume that was something of a troll. But still, just the, if social media is a drug, you're supplying some of the highs. And you have to know that the second you press tweet that many people around the world are going to be notified about that. And I guess you like to have fun with that sometimes. Yeah, I do know that. And I think part of, I'd like to believe that part of my appeal is that I don't take things all that seriously. And I understand this, yes, this is a many, many, many billion dollar business. And I need to have rigor in covering it. And I need to understand the,

the power of the position that I'm in. When people look to you to deliver them news, like, you can't be frivolous all the time. But a little bit of frivolity, I think, is important. And frankly, I don't think gravy is a frivolous thing. I take it very seriously. The, you know, the thickness matters. And, you know, I made my own turkey stock this year. So I was, I was very proud of my gravy. And on a day like that, it was my little way to acknowledge to everyone that I hope you're having a very good Thanksgiving without saying so in such an earnest fashion. And also beyond that, like, who doesn't like gravy, man? Yeah, not a controversial take in particular. It's not, but sometimes it needs to be said. Sometimes things that are not as appreciated as they should be need to get some love. And I don't know how many engagements that tweet had. I genuinely do not follow that sort of thing.

Like my mom will text me. Did you see how many likes you had? And I was like, no, mom, I didn't. But thank you. I'm glad you're following. But when it comes to matters of great import like food, I'm not going to fuck around with that. I think it's important to let the world know what you like. and gravy deserves love as much as anything else.

Roughly 7,000 likes on that one. And that was about half as many as the Dylan C. Steele the day before. But more than the Ryan Helsley deal the next day. So gravy outdid Ryan Halsley. Gravy over Helsley. Yeah. And I like that you'll chop it up on Twitter sometimes. And it's nice because, you know, your senior MLB Insider.

I mean, it's great gravity goes along with this position. And clearly, you take that responsibility seriously. But there are some newsbreakers who just keep it to the facts, and it's all business. And everything is just baseball and not much personality there. But you, you're a real rascal on there sometimes. So I appreciate that that's still true, even though you do have a large platform. It's a tough thing to balance. And there are a lot more deleted tweets where I just,

I have I like I've had enough incidents that have have rubbed my bosses understandably by the way chastised by unspecified employers at times I don't think chastised I think it's more it's more the tack that I take with my kids like you did this I'm not mad I'm just disappointed and boy the power of disappointment is a very, very strong tool. And in these cases, it's just, I have to ask myself, like, okay, what's the downside here? Is this worth it? And most of the time, the answer is no. And even sometimes when I do hit that post button, I say to myself, well, did that reach the threshold? Like, are you doing something here that you shouldn't be doing? But I, I have to be extremely cognizant of it because that's the right thing to do.

And because a lot of times, you know, I should be the adult in the room. So act like it. Yeah. It does help humanize you, I think, that you're more than just a transaction tweeter, that there's an actual person behind the tweets. I hope so. And that's, you know, that's what I've been proudest of over the last, you know, 10, 15 years as my career has taken off, that I think people see that I really do love baseball and that I really do care about the game and the people who are in the game and bringing new people into it

and getting them excited. Like that to me, you know, a scoop, like, that's great. But that's just the job. It's the decision I made, you know, a decade plus ago that I'm going to foray into this area where I was frankly terrible at it and didn't like doing it. And let's see if I read that your wife prodded you into it by, I think your word was emasculating you because you had some trepidation about being a newsbreaker and whether you could cut it in those circles. And she was just like, what are you waiting for? Just do it. What are you afraid of? Pretty much. She, and as usual, she was right. Yeah. Smart move. Yeah.

It has made my life completely different and on a completely different trajectory than it would have been otherwise. Although I wonder whether she ever regrets that when you are tied up with something unpredictably. And she's like, I cause this. I open Pandora's box by lighting this fire under him. And now he's tied up on the phone all the time. Yeah, there are those moments for sure. I'd like to think that the good outweigh the bad, but this is, to me, this is a job that has a finite amount of time where you can do it and do it well. And it's why I respect Ken Rosenthal as much as I do. I mean, he has been doing this at an extremely high level for a really long time.

And, you know, being right matters to him and being good matters to him. and, you know, he's, for my generation, he's been the standard. And, you know, I don't know how much longer Ken's going to do this. But, you know, once he stops, I hope that for the next generation, I can sort of provide that, you know, I hope they look at me the same way that I look at him. I had a couple more questions about the mechanics of all this newsbreaking business. How do you decide if something's big enough for a breaking in all caps? breaking which i think you only do you reserve for if you are actually the one breaking it which correct occasionally i see someone doing a breaking on something that someone else broke

and it's just yeah it's like stolen transaction clout or something you you can't do the breaking if you didn't break it breaking breaking breaking should be reserved for i have it first right and and that's it and my all caps uh tends to be the threshold tends to be 50 million dollars or more Oh, interesting. Okay. So you did breaking for Schwerber for Alonzo. You did do breaking for Robert Suarez, which I think was right below that 50 million threshold. That's correct. Do you know what pushed that one over the edge to be in all caps breaking? The fact that I beat at Braves. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's rare. Yeah. You didn't get the press release with the Braves Foundation donation and everything. You beat them to the part. Wow. Wow. So it's, you know, it's not a hard and fast rule. I think I did it for Justin Verlander going to the Giants last year.

You did it for the Michael Garcia extension. You did it for the Nimmo Semyon trade. But no breaking for Kenley Jansen, Dustin May, the Taylor Ward for Grayson Rodriguez. Those just get that you prefaced with trade news, just a much more restrained trade news. Yeah. Yeah, and lowercase consonants and vowels were used in there as well. Yes, you did say quite a trade at the end, but still, not quite breaking. There are occasionally like three or four word summations at the end.

So if it's a big one, I'll usually have something like that. Another thing I wonder is how you keep track of who had it first. And, you know, some people think it's silly that everyone's constantly. crediting who had it first. I think it's nice. I think it's collegial. I think it shows that there's some fraternity here or that you have respect for each other's work. And even if no one else is really keeping score other than you, the newsbreakers, I still think there's something laudable about that. But I just wonder, you know, sometimes you're ahead of or behind someone by a minute or two minutes. So how do you even know as you're composing the tweet, whether you have it

first, do you have notifications set up for everyone? And are you just quickly scanning everyone else's feed to see if you're first? How do you, or do you add the had it first after the fact? How does that work? Often the credit will come in a follow-up tweet because I think that I look at it like if I'm writing a news story and somebody has beat me first, I'm not putting that in the first paragraph. Yeah. They deserve acknowledgement and recognition for what they do, but it is, it is not always necessarily the first thing that comes to mind.

So when you're limited by 280 characters, that will occasionally factor into it. I have notifications for pretty much everyone you think I would have notifications for. Okay. All right. Good to know. It's not, you know, all the national guys, more or less. And there are handfuls of beatwriters who tend to get news on their teams, and I'll have them on as well. Yeah.

And if my notifications also, like if I know somebody is about to sign, but it's not done yet, and it so happens that whether it's because I have a sense of another reporter's relationship with the front office or with an agent, I will add and subtract. during the winter notifications. Well, one interesting thing is that you have to have a lot of notifications on because even though you break a ton of news, it's more widely distributed, I think, the newsbreaking in baseball than it is on other sports beats where, you know, your colleagues, Shams, Schaefter, they just kind of own those corners, it seems like. It's almost monopolistic and woge before them. Whereas in baseball, I consider you and Ken kind of the class of the newsbreakers, but then

You know, your colleagues, Jesse Rogers, Buster Only, there's Ken, there's Heyman, there's Nightingale sometimes, there's Murray, there's Sherman, there's Curry, there's Salmon, there's Marosi, there's Fineset, there's a pretty long list of national folks and even local folks who get scoops. So what accounts for that difference in MLB compared to other leagues, other sports? You know, I think that there are similar, it's not quite as acute, there are similar situations. and other sports, though, like, you know, Adam's the best in football, but he in Rappaport will get stuff, you know. In the NBA, it's, you know,

it's a handful of guys aside from Shams. But, yeah, baseball, I think, I've asked myself why, and I've never come up with a particularly good answer. Maybe I'm just not as good as Adam. I mean, that's probably the answer? Yeah, I feel like I need to, yeah, channel your wife here and just be like, be better. Just own everything.

This is your corner. Could I do that? Probably not. But if I tried, I think the balance that I've struck in my life that has me in a very contented place would probably cease to exist. And my, that balance is more important to me than I. owning everything. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that, too, because, yes, Woj and Shams and Schaefter, these guys have talked pretty frankly about the sacrifices that they have to make in order to do what they do, and granted, they're well compensated for that. But these sounds

like horror stories sometimes. You know, it's like I'm taking the phone into the shower, I can't go to dinner, I can't go on a date, all these things. From afar, you seem to actually have a fulfilling personal life and be fairly well adjusted. You're married. You have a couple kids. It seems like you have some measure of balance here. Like, you know, the way that some other people, colleagues, counterparts tell it, it's like you couldn't pay me enough to do that. I don't think. Not that anyone has offered, to be clear. So that contention hasn't actually been tested, but it just sounds like I don't know that any money in the world would be worth this sort of thing. And I'm a fairly hard worker, but that's like an entire another level.

So I wonder about that. And also just like about the general unpredictability of your life sort of being subject to news. Like, you know, when I emailed you on Monday, we're speaking on Friday, I emailed you on Monday to see if maybe you could talk today. And you said that should be good, but subject to news, understandably. So everything you do essentially is subject to, yeah. So that has to take its toll. I guess so. I just, if the toll was too great, I'd just stop.

Yeah. Like, that's the reality. If it was too much or if it was putting me in a position where the juice was not worth the squeeze, I would find something else to do. And, you know, I think over time that that's going to be the case. You know, my oldest is going to be out of the house in August. my youngest is going to be a freshman in high school next year and he's going to be off to college in four years and at that point you know i i haven't taken the i haven't seen the world with my wife i would like to do that um and i i don't sleep nearly as much as i should and i do not want

the end of my life to be shortened on account of the the things that i was doing uh to to do this job well speaking of the body breaking down yeah yeah and so that you know there there are going to be ways i think to transition out of that but i also asked the question if i'm not doing news and and this is this tends to be a rhetorical question i've i've actually asked it to some people because i don't know the answer to it but if i'm not doing news uh do i matter anymore. And mattering is not important to me. Like, I don't sit here and try and get relevancy or I don't think I do clickbait online. Like, I try desperately not to because I don't ever want to be accused of that. But, you know, where is my relevance in the industry if I'm not doing news?

And that matters to me because what I found over time, what I didn't realize earlier on in my career And what's been such a boon to me is that chasing news forces me to make the phone calls that I might not have otherwise. And in those phone calls, I learn about all kinds of other things. And I know the sport better now because, and this is directly attributable, because of news, I am better at understanding baseball and all of its tentacles now than I ever was beforehand when I wasn't focusing on it. So am I going to lose that element of things? if news is not the number one priority. Yeah.

You know, we'll see. Like, there are a lot of great ways to cover baseball. And the one that I found has been enormously beneficial for my life, for my family's life. And we've managed to, you know, I don't miss high school baseball games. Like, I just don't. That is, my bosses know that that is my priority. And it's going to be. And if there's some news going on, then I will figure out how to do it.

do it from the game because I just don't, I don't need to miss these things that I don't have many more of. Well, this seems like another difference between the baseball newsbreakers and the newsbreakers and other sports is that you write a lot, which I really respect. You're prolific. You're an excellent writer, of course, but you will write in-depth features and thousands of words and look at Ken cranking out a column every day, right? And so there seems to be this expectation.

I don't know if it's personal preference, just that you guys. really value the written words and would miss it. But it seems like some other newsbreakers are primarily just breaking news. And maybe they'll do a brief write-up of that news. But it's essentially the tweet. And that's the value and that's the proposition. I don't know whether that's because of the literary tradition of baseball or because baseball newsbreaking isn't quite as just big as basketball or football newsbreaking, the audience or the appetite for it or what, but why is that? Why is it that you have not pivoted entirely towards the newsbreaking, but you still do everything? If I weren't telling stories, I would feel like I've lost the

plot. I got into the journalism industry because I felt like I had the ability to take all of the things that are going on into the world, or going on in the world, rather, and in this narrow world of baseball and explain them to people and be a teacher of sorts. And I love that. I love the idea that something I write or say will be repeated and parroted by who knows how many people when they're sitting down with their friends at a bar that night or that it gets sent you know, via the person in a group text who's, every group text has like the person who's on top of the news and, you know, that they'll take one of my tweets and send it to their friends and it'll start a whole discussion. I feel like that's, that's the value of social media. It's of bringing people

together. And it's knowing that people have come up to me saying, I remember where I was when you tweeted this and that I'm part of their lives. That, that is. is really cool to me. But at the end of the day, to me, that doesn't compare to telling a great story. And great stories can be told in different ways now. The written word is something that's near and dear to my heart, because I've been doing it since I was 15 years old,

like writing for local newspapers before I could drive. There's a romanticism to that. And I just, you know, I don't want to give up on the written word. I read something in The Times, I think it was last, week about how kids aren't reading books in school anymore and I see it with my own kids. I see them sitting there and watching short form video and playing it on 2x speed. And I'm like, what the hell kind of dystopian world are we living in right now? If I can help in some small form or fashion keep the written word alive and thriving, I would like to be part of that

rather than go to some other side of things. But that doesn't discount the possibility that there are multiple ways to tell a story. And those other avenues are really intriguing and really exciting to me. And something that, you know, in the years to come, I imagine I'm going to be doing more. Well, that's good.

I'm glad when you look back at the end of the year on the work that you did, I'm sure some of the highlights are, I broke this transaction and I beat that guy to the news. But ultimately, of course, that news is going to come out one way, another, you know, and the team's going to announce it if you don't beat them to it. So I would guess that some of those longer form stories that you do and more of the personality-driven

profiles, probably ultimately more satisfying in a lasting sense. Yeah, for sure. And getting to tell a story that's not just this happened, this is why it happened, but something about this happened, this is why it happened, this is how it happened, and there are interesting details behind it. Like every great story to me, it's great because of the details they're in. And a lot of times when I'm doing breaking news, there aren't a whole lot of details other than player team contract or players teams trade. You know, doing a couple years ago when Soto got traded to the Padres, I did a TikTok of how that deal came down.

And those, like reconstructing things that happened and trying to bring them to life, that brings me more professional joy than any new story ever will. To be clear, for anyone who's hearing you say TikTok and says, I thought he hates short form video. Jeff, Jeff means the journalistic term TikTok, just a long story about how it came together. Yes, a TikTok is, the idea is a minute by a minute, but it's not always a minute by a minute of how it happened. It's just the generally the broader strokes and, you know, you zoom in on a couple of the more pertinent points of how it happened. One thing I wonder about, technically teams are prohibited from telling you, at least some of the things that they tell you. And I don't mean just in the sense that, you know, front office person X isn't authorized to speak for the team. But the CBA, I believe this was a provision in the 2017 to 2021 CBA.

It's still in the current one, but it was added in that one. It's known as Attachment 49 or Exhibit 49, a memo from the deputy commissioner laying out what the covered parties can or can't disclose to the media. And technically, they're not supposed to say, you know, the substance of contract discussions between a player and a team. the substance of offers, decisions not to make offers, they're not supposed to announce agreements that are contingent on a physical until the physical actually takes place, right? You're not supposed to comment about the value of an unsigned free agent, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes teams will say, oh, we can't comment on free agents. That's not quite true.

There are some things that they could say, you know, they could say, we like that guy, you know, as long as he's not on someone else's roster and it's not tampering. They could say they're interested in him. But a lot of the news that you break technically is not supposed to be shared. I mean, you can share it. If someone tells it to you, you're allowed to do whatever you want with it. But they shouldn't, right? So is that an obstacle at all?

Has that made the news breaking harder? Or is that just entirely ignored, you know, as long as there's anonymity and it's not going to come back on anyone in particular? It just all depends on the person. There are some people who don't give a shit. And there are some people who do. And, you know, I've absolutely lost scoops because of people abiding by that. And that's, you know, it's part of the game, man.

It's one of those things where it's not just me who's subject to that. It's all the other reporters, too. So I feel like as long as the playing field is even there, then it's just a matter of, okay, like, who can do this the best? I don't know if you can answer this if enough time has passed. If not, that's okay. But there was a period last year in the interregnum between Woj and Shams, where ESPN was deciding who would be the replacement for Wojj. And there was some reporting that it could be you that you were considered, at least. And ultimately, that didn't turn out to be the case, of course.

And I'm glad we didn't lose you on the baseball beat. But were you seriously considered? Were you ever seriously considering switching sports? because that's, you know, you've built up this legacy and this rolodex and to switch to another sport, that's no small feat to take on that kind of role. So I wondered at the time, like, is this real? Is this a bargaining ploy or is he actually interested in this? It was very real. It was not a bargaining ploy. It was something that a lot of people were encouraging me to do. and something that I genuinely strongly considered because not because I'm bored. I've never, like, I've been lucky.

I've never had one of those moments where I was like, you know what, I feel burned out. This is too, no, it's never been like that. I've, I've been doing this almost 25 years now. And the joy that I had that first day walking into a clubhouse, it still exists now. And if ever it got to the point where it didn't, then I would very much consider doing something else. But in this case, it was like, boy, this would be a pretty good challenge. This would be very interesting. And at the end of the day, what it came down to, I think, was that the end – like, I – as I was considering this, I almost reported this job out like it was a –

story. I talked with a lot of people who have done it and who have done it well. I talked with a couple of GMs in the NBA. I talked with all kinds of people, just trying to get a sense of, is this going to fit in my life? And I think what it came down to is that it was going to take me two years to get good at this. And those two years would have been my older sons, junior and senior years in high school. And I just, I didn't want to miss things. And I know in this job that I have right now that I'm good enough at it and that I have enough contacts where I can have the kind of life that I want. And that is a, frankly, the number one necessity for me. Can I be to my family what they need me to be? Because that is no offense to anybody who gets news from me.

but sorry, that's more important. Announce Kyle Tucker. Do you get tired of those replies? You know, I'm used to by now. You probably don't see them. Yeah, totally used to. And at the end, when I factored in all of the things that it was going to take and the compensation and what it would mean for my family,

in the end, it just didn't make enough sense to pursue. And so this was not, you know, as much as I would love to say that this was out of a pure love of baseball and I could never leave baseball. That's not true. I do love baseball. But if something that was better for my life came along and better for my family came along, then I'd be stupid not to listen to it and at least consider it. And that's exactly what I did here. What was it like for you as the senior MLB insider at ESPN when ESPN and MLB briefly broke up earlier this year and then got back together again? Well, I'd like to say, we're not a failing platform. So I think I think we've proven that. It's, you know, it's a part of the business that I never had to deal with during my time at the Kansas City Star or Yahoo. We were not, you know, we weren't partners with the league.

And there are inherent conflicts when you're on the journalist side, when the company that you work for is in business with the league that you're covering. And yet, ESPN has, I appreciate this. They've never gotten in the way of the coverage that I've had. There's never been anything like you can't say that. No, it's never been anything like that. And so to me, this was just, it was just part of how things go. And I was hopeful that, you know, we were going to keep baseball. I think the game needs ESPN and not needs ESPN, like as a corporate entity or anything like that,

but needs the reach of ESPN. Because at the end of the day, we still are the 800-pound gorilla in sports media. We still are the place that people go to. It's remarkable to me that ESPN's had the stranglehold for as long as it has on the business of sports media. And look, the company's always evolving. I was just hopeful that it would not evolve away from baseball because I think it's mutually beneficial relationship. I think baseball on ESPN gets the audience that it deserves, and ESPN having baseball shows that we cover as wide of a breath. of sports as we do. I was going to ask about the conflict of interest, not even that one that you

mentioned, although yes, that's a thing. And, you know, that's been even more explicitly discussed with ESPN in the NFL, with the league having an equity stake in the company, et cetera, but also sort of like a softer conflict of interest when you are a newsbreaker and you're to some degree dependent on people passing information to you. And yet you're also someone who publicizes information that is not flattering to perhaps those same people or teams sometimes. And to your credit, you certainly will publish stories that paints possible sources in a negative light. And other baseball newsbreakers do that too. So you're not one of these sort of, you know, mouthpieces or stenographers for whatever a team or an agent or someone wants you to say.

But I assume that there are sometimes when, you know, you're pressing publish, you're reporting out a story and you're thinking, well, I'm burning this bridge. You know, that's going to come back to bite me at some point. Yep. It's not great. Yeah. But it's the job. And I make it clear to all of my sources that that's the case. And most of them understand.

Some of them do not. And that's just, you know, that's the burden that I have to deal with. And if that's one of the worst things that happens in my job, uncomfortable conversations, then I'm living pretty good. been. Well, I'm not going to ask you to announce Kyle Tucker, but is there any big picture thought, anything that surprised you, let's say, about the hot stove season so far about the market in general? I think the market's been really good for players, actually. Like, the contracts that have been signed have been what, you know, especially like on the relief side, there have been

a lot of good deals, a lot of big numbers there. And yet we're still in a place where the top five free agents on Kylie McDaniels board this winter still haven't signed. So there's a lot left to be done. And I think it's going to be really fascinating to see which teams step up and spend. Are the Blue Jays going to do more? Who are the Red Sox going to get? Because they have to get a big bat somewhere, whether it's bringing Alex Bregman back or replacing him via trade or free agency. The Red Sox have to do stuff.

The Mets, it's been kind of a mess of a winter so far. But I'm not counting them out at this point by any means. They still have the richest owner in the game. They still have motivation to go out there and do it. Or there are going to be other teams, though, that are in the mix as well. Do the Orioles have another bullet to fire? Do the tigers or the Cubs step up? Like, there are opportunities there, I think, for teams to still improve themselves demonstrably.

And that's why this offseason to me is so fascinating because as slow developing as it's been at the top of the market, I think there are going to be levers in place that get things moving. And, you know, the posting end dates for Munataka Morkami and Tatsuya Mai and Kazuma Okamoto, I think that's going to be part of it. Maybe there aren't dominoes that fall immediately in the aftermath of those, but at least there are dates that offer a little bit more clarity on the market. And I assume you get asked this daily, but what is your current read, your snapshot, snap judgment? on whether there will be a work stoppage that actually jeopardizes games? I think that the game is in too good of a place for all of the parties involved to potentially ruin that.

I fear the lack of institutional knowledge and people seeming to forget just how bad the aftermath of the strike was will be a hindrance to that. But at the end of the day, if you ask me, Will they lose games or will they not? Right now, I'm saying they will not. Good. That's my sentiments, too. But yours is probably more telling than mine because you are constantly talking to people. And you've been talking to me for a while now. So I'll let you go. This was very generous of you. We've made up for lost time. I've compressed the past seven years of not having you on into this one podcast appearance. And please apologize to whoever called you in the middle of this conversation for delaying the return call. I will make sure to do that, and I'm glad we were able to do this as long as we were. I got a couple of messages that I got to return now, but the transaction gods smiled upon us, Ben. They did. The hot stove gods held off. You did not tweet during this conversation.

You retweeted, but you did not tweet. So that's good. Happy Hanukkah. I look forward to your thankful for Latka's tweet on Monday. I am thankful for lockas. That is very true. I'm thankful for the, for salad spinners too, because if you shred your potatoes and your onions, they tend to, they tend to weep a little bit. And nobody wants soggy lockas. So spin that sucker, throw a little bit of starch in there, fry them up, and it doesn't get a whole lot better than that. Lovely. Food prep tips from Jeff Passon.

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate you having me. Well, Jeff informed me who had called him. and guess what, it turned out to be a former effectively wild guest. But which one, I will not say, because I will not burn Jeff Passon's sources. Right after we finished speaking, evidently satisfied that all the players involved had been informed, Jeff did tweet out the three-way trade news.

This is the Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, and Houston Swap, featuring Brandon Lau and others. As I mentioned, we'll get into that next time. And because Jeff was wondering how many times he had tweeted, that was his 39,578th tweet In 6,087 days since he joined Twitter in April of 2009, that's 6.5 tweets per day on average. Could be worse, Jeff next tweeted on Sunday when he broke the Munitake Morikami signing. And Jeff also broke his rule again about when to use breaking in all caps. He did it for this one, even though it was a two-year deal for a mere $34 million. Big news and big name and big addition for the White Sox, though.

And a bonanza for Meg, who took the under on 180. million for Murakami in the free agent contracts over underdraft. She's now way ahead of me, based on that signing alone. More on Morikami to come. Another thing that happened after I spoke to Jeff, the Angels and the family of Tyler Skaggs settled a wrongful death lawsuit that's been wending its way through the legal system for years. Although the settlement staved off a jury verdict, the L.A. Times reported the jury foreman Richard Chung said after the settlement was announced that the panel had agreed to award Skaggs' family roughly $100 million when they were told to cease deliberation. 60 million to 80 million for economic damages, 5 million to 15 million for emotional distress

damages, and 10 million to 20 million for punitive damages. How did the case get to that point? What did the angels do wrong? What did we learn from these proceedings and what could come next? Sam Blum of The Athletic, who's been covering this case from the start will join me in just a moment to answer all of those questions and more. Substance, abuse, and addiction will come up, of course, in connection with Skaggs. Nothing too graphic, but be aware. I will be right back. Effectively wild. Effectively wild.

Effectively wild. Affectively wild. Well, on Friday at Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana, the Angels and the family of former Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died of an overdose while on a team road trip in 2019, settled the wrongful death suit that the family had filed four and a half years ago. That brought an end to a three-month trial, just as the deliberating jury was nearing its verdict. Sam Blum, who covers the Angels and MLB for the Athletic, was on the scene, as he has been throughout the rather sad and

sorted case, and he joins me now. Hey, Sam. Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me. So we don't probably won't know the terms of the settlement, but all indications are that this was not going well for the angels and that if the jury had been allowed to come to a verdict, that things would not have gone well for the angels. So you observed the case. You talked to the foreman. What did we know about how this might have ended and why the angels presumably were motivated to seek or acquiesce to a settlement. So we thought, which ended up talking to quite a few of the jurors today, actually. And there was a range, I would say, in terms of how they viewed this case. You know, when they first got the case, there were about four of the 12 jurors that I don't think wanted to award the Skaggs family

any money, about four that were undecided and four that were very, very pro plaintiffs, pro, you know, a large judgment, essentially. Now, I think through evaluating all the evidence, getting a better sense of, you know, kind of how they all viewed this, you know, three months, really. I mean, two and a half months of testimony, three months of trial proceedings. You know, I think that there was a lot to go through. And once they did that, they ultimately determined, I think, fairly quickly that there was liability on the Angels front. Now, it's maybe the ultimate award would have been somewhere in the $80 to $100 million range before they put the apportionment, which is, you know, the comparative fault, the percentages of how, you know, a fault for each, you know,

party involved, all three of them, which is Tyler Skaggs, Eric Kay, and the Los Angeles Angels. So that could have lowered the value, depending on how much fault they ultimately would have put on Tyler Skaggs himself for his own death. I know it's so complicated, and there's so many elements to all this, and that's why the jury took, you know, two and a half days, essentially, before they called this thing, and I think the jury was going to find punitive damages, and that was why this case settled. I mean, on Wednesday afternoon, they asked a question of the court. where do we put in for punitive damages? Because on the form, they actually have to have a separate

mini trial to determine what those punitive damages would have been because the case was bifurcated before it ever started, right? It was split into two. And it was specifically on that punitive damages element. So they would have had to come back in and evaluate that. Here's some testimony about the value of the angels as an organization financially. So that was why this whole case ended. I mean, they asked that question, and I think the angels panicked. I think you're totally right that the Angels believed that they were going to have a huge judgment. I also think that punitive damages are not something that would have been insured, essentially. Like, a lot of this was paid out through insurance, but that would not have been.

That would have had to come in of Arnie Moreno's pocket, I believe. So that, I think, all of that played a role into kind of how we got to where we did today. And you're right, it's a confidential settlement, so we'll see if that ever comes out. But for now, I mean, you know, the Skaggs family looked at peace and, you know, having sat there for as long as I did and for all those months and really getting to know their family, you know, you feel for them. I don't think you can, that's irrespective of the sides you perceive and the facts of the case and everything you know about it. Like this is somebody that lost, you know, they lost their son, they lost their husband, they lost their friends. And this is, you know, it's just it was a hard thing. see them kind of at peace, I think was a nice silver line to, you know, what has been a really

difficult few months for everybody involved, but also just, you know, a long six and a half years for that family. Yeah, you lost a loved one. No amount of money is exactly going to make up for that. It's just, you know, there's no, I mean, there are a lot of villains and victims in all of this, really. It's hard to feel good about any outcome, right? Because it's just top to bottom. It's just tragic and sad. Eric Kay, whom you just mentioned, if anyone hasn't been following this closely, the former Angels communication director who supplied the pill to Skaggs had a drug problem himself, the pill that was ruled or found to have precipitated Skaggs' death.

And Kay himself is serving 22 years in federal prison for his role in that, which I know plenty of people who think that he's quite culpable, still think that that that. was excessive, right? So it's, you know, I sat through that whole trial. As I said, I was there in 2022. And yeah, I mean, listen, I think that you can make a lot of, a lot of testimony came out about Eric Kay's conduct over the course of his time with the Angels, including, you know, numerous affairs, berating people on the staff. Obviously, you know, the drug element of it. I mean, he was high at work. He was eating a pimple off of Mike Trots back. A lot of things were happening. So, I mean, you know, you could sit around and say, yeah, R.K., but the thing that has come to me throughout, covering this case for five years now is, is you learn a lot about addiction. You learn a lot about what everybody was dealing with. And the dynamics that, you know, between player and PR staff, I mean, just so many, so many elements to this. And I have a hard time with Eric K being in prison for 22 years personally. I went to prison. I spent time with Eric K. Not myself. I didn't go to. I mean, I was at the prison. I did not go to prison.

Yeah. But, you know, I spend time with Eric at that prison. You know, he's a complicated person. It's a tough thing. It's a tough thing that he's there for 22 years. I firmly believe that. So what came to light about this case or about the Angels organization? You know, it's often when we talk to you and it's typically around team preview time and maybe we'll have you back in a couple months. But, you know, when we kind of talk about Angels dysfunction or incompetence, the stakes are very. fairly low. You know, we talk about the team cheaping out and minor league pay and minor league nutrition and, you know, not sending broadcasters on the road and backward player development and all of that. It's baseball stuff, you know, and this is life or death, obviously. So what did you learn or what came out as a result of this long proceeding in the, what, 40 plus witnesses who came to the stand, including Mike Trout, as you said, Angels players, former personnel. What did we learn and what sort of picture did it paint about the Angels organization?

You know, I think you mentioned all those things. And I want to be careful and kind of how I characterize this. But, you know, I don't always see a lot of daylight between some of those maybe lower stakes, you know, issues that you see in a bigger issue, right? Like what I learned about the Angels was that they took no responsibility for this, right? They believe they, at least they say they believe they acted reasonably and responsibly with Eric Kay. And the evidence showed otherwise from what I was, I sat there and I watched it and, you know, the evidence was what it was. And so, you know, you just see flaws. You see in this organization.

You see ways that things, you know, just, I don't know, the power structure, the, I mean, the fact that so many angels employees got up there and, you know, I don't know what was in their heart or what was in their head, but there were a lot of times where I just didn't find their testimony credible. And it's, and I think it's as a result of kind of, you know, who they work for and where they're, you know, what they're kind of almost. being instructed to testify to. And, you know, so you don't want to equate, hey, like, you know, the minor leaguers are making enough money and this, because these are very different things.

But I just, you see something within this organization that just, it needs addressing. And I think that always starts at the very, very top. I think I've met a lot of people in this organization that are really good, really good, good people that do the right thing, that want to do the right thing. And a lot of those people testify, in my opinion, too. You know, the craziest thing, and I say, you know, I think this all the time is, like, the Angels PR staff is the group that really got much maligned through this whole trial and everything that kind of came out and, you know, this was where Eric Kay was and these are the people that worked alongside him. And I think that staff does as good of a job as you will find in Major League Baseball, if not better. I mean, I really do think that, and it's tough because it's like, you know, these are people I've gotten closer to, has gotten to know them. And I've always found them to be really credible and really helpful.

And so, you know, you just, you want to be careful about how you care. characterize the whole organization. But I do think that there are, there is something fundamentally a little bit broken, clearly. This doesn't happen without that. And I just think that comes from the highest elements of this franchise. And it's, it's the people below that that I feel for who are, who are just trying to keep their jobs, just trying to do their jobs, just trying to exist within the framework that they've been given. And it's not easy. Yeah. Plenty of people bear some responsibility for this and played some part in it, but just reading your coverage of the case, it's, it just doesn't seem credible that the team could not have known about Kay's behavior or

intervened in some way. So it's, you know, the team is not solely responsible, but, uh, it certainly seems like bore some responsibility in that the jury was going to come to that conclusion, too. I kind of feel for the jurors who, you know, set a few months of their life aside and then the case is settled as they are about to reach a verdict. I guess that's, you know, that happens. I mean, that's, it's not as if the case was meaningless or something because of that. This settlement only happens because of those proceedings. And this is actually kind of relieved. I mean, you know, I don't want to speak for all of them, but we talked to a good amount,

and a lot of them were like happy that it's settled. You know, I think that's a lot of pressure to put, you know, this isn't right. This is not a criminal case. So ultimately, right, like nobody's going to jail. Like there's nobody's lives are going to, you know, be severely impacted beyond, I guess, kind of the ramifications of what comes out of a civil trial and the money. but I think some of them were just like, you know, they were relieved. I think a lot of them were happy to get some of that stuff off their chest in terms of talking about it.

You know, and in talking to them, they had such, I was, I'm not saying worried, but I was wondering, you know, how much, I felt like so much of the Angel's argument was just not very credible, you know, so much of what they argued. It's just, I sat through the trial. I know of what was true, and I know a lot of the evidence, and I know a lot of the information here, and I've known it for months and years in some cases, and I, and the Angels were not putting on a credible argument. in many areas. And I was wondering how the jury was going to look at that. If they were going to kind of eat some of it up, if they were going to understand that. I mean, they did not have the benefit of sitting there listening to the sidebars. They did not have the benefit of reading through depositions as I did. So, you know, they were working at a different plane of, you know, of understanding to some extent. But I was impressed at how they kind of understood every element

of that they were paying attention. This was a jury that was paying attention that, you know, really understood the evidence and spoke about it really clearly. So I think that some of them were relieved to not have to, you know, make that judgment. And, you know, it's, the only way I can describe the scene after in court was just like, like everybody seemed kind of relieved. I mean, a lot of the Angels lawyers kind of stuck around to listen to some of the jurors, but, you know, they weren't there too long. And, you know, John Carpino, the Angels president was there, at least for when the settlement was official. but it was, you know, mostly just the plaintiff side there and mostly just the jurors after that. And I guess one of the nasty things about a proceeding like this inherently is that the team in defending itself has to cast aspersions on Skaggs himself, right?

They probably don't have to, but yeah. Well, yeah, that's kind of what I was going to ask you, I guess, you know, the team's defending itself, did it do that within the bounds of propriety, or did you feel like they went too far or farther than they had to? in, you know, condemning Skaggs' character, or, you know, part of it is that to try to reduce the damages, you have to make it seem like Skaggs wasn't that good, right, or wouldn't have made that much money if he had survived. It's not totally unlike the arbitration process, I guess, where, you know, that leads to bad blood when sometimes the player is in the room listening to the team talk about their flaws, right? And that's just kind of, that's part and parcel with that process. But that's what I wanted to know. Did they go too far?

when it came to how they talked about skaggs? I guess I would answer it this way. They have to decide for themselves, is it worth it? Because I would argue it isn't. I would argue that getting up there and telling the world that this picture was really bad, this guy was reckless, you know, a bad person. I mean, you know, I don't know if they ever used those words a bad person, but the implication throughout the entire thing, is it worth it?

I don't know. I mean, that, you know, you have the right to defend your, I mean, listen, if you're going to defend this lawsuit fully, see why that was the strategy. They came to a settlement, I would argue, that I think if they had looked inward from the beginning and seen that they bore certain responsibilities for this, this wouldn't have been necessary. Listen, I had a hard time with that part of it, because it's like, you know, this, and

Daniel Dukka, who is the Skag's lawyer, I think, kind of sums it up well. And his closing argument when he said that, you know, that the version of Tyler Skaggs their painting is just not one that anybody saw or sees or believes or know. It's not a person that people know. I never met Tyler Skaggs. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you on everything. I think that there were, he was a flawed person just like anybody. I think he had his issues at times in his life. But they were trying to paint Tyler as someone that had had a horrible drug addiction from 2011 to 2019 when he died. There was no evidence, no evidence that Tyler Skaggs was abusing drugs from 2014 to to at least the beginning

of 2017. So, you know, this, it just, and the judge was routinely, you know, calling them calling out that argument is not very credible either, and just not allowing certain evidence in because she felt like it was compounding other evidence because there just wasn't any evidence that he was actually a drug abuser for those like three to four years. And that's an important element.

Was he continuous losing? Because I think the Skaggs side was arguing, well, you know, he was maybe a drug addict in 2011 through 2013, but at the time of his death, this was someone that was using pills to, you know, address pain to maybe, you know,

probably wasn't doing everything the right way, but it was, you know, not necessarily a full-blown, you know, uncontrollable addiction. And I don't know. You have Dan Duquette getting up there arguing that he wasn't valuable as a pitcher. They're completely taking his statistics out of context, saying that he was on the decline of his career when he was on the exact opposite. He was the best pitcher on the handles at the time, and he was on track for about a 2.2 war season, had just finished off a 1.8 war season. You know, he was going to hit free agency, I believe, at 28 or beginning 29. You know, so he was hitting it at the right time.

Like, this is a guy that I think would have easily earned what the plaintiff. I actually thought the plaintiffs were a little conservative in what they had asked for on his future earnings. And I felt like, you know, 90 to 100 would have been very reasonable for, you know, a left-handed pitcher who was, you know, on the upward trajectory of his career, because that is what he was. He was not on the down swing. You know, he might have gotten there at some point, but he wasn't at that point. What came to light in Trout's testimony and any other players? Because that's a strange position to be in, I guess, as a first. former teammate and friend of Skaggs and then also an employee and representative of the Angels

organization. You reference the pimple incidents, which again, it's just sad and kind of gross and just tragic on a whole lot of levels. This was essentially a clubhouse dare, right, that Trout talked about that they had, I guess, Kay had sort of put them up to it for money, like Ida Pimple off his back. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but Trout said, like, he was not cognizant of the depths of the problem that Kay was experienced at that time. He wasn't, you know, trying to profit from the guy's addiction. And when he learned more, then that sort of stuff stopped. And he offered to pay for his help.

I mean, he offered a pay for his rehab, too. So, I mean, you know, listen, I mean, I think this is embarrassing. This whole thing was a little embarrassing for Mike Trout. I mean, the pimple's obviously not, you know, not ideal. And, you know, you're also talking about Mike Trout at that time, you know, like 24, 25 years. I mean, it's a different time in his life. I don't get kids, you know, it's tough. You know, the thing I come back to with Trout is less about his testimony and more about,

you know, Mike Trout is, there is nothing at Angel Stadium commemorating Tyler Skaggs. And I think that was something that Grace McNamee, one of the PR people testified about. It's something that bothered her. But Mike Trout has a little shrine next to his locker of all these photos of him and Skaggs together, all these like little mementos from their friendship. I mean, they lived together in the minor leagues. They were drafted the same year. You know, they became really close.

So this was a close friend of his, and I wonder how he views this. You know, if how closely he's followed this, it's probably something it's worth asking him about at some point when, you know, we get back in front of him. Because, you know, this is someone that he felt close to. And, you know, then people representing his organization are kind of making this case. Now, it's not that easy. He's not that simple. He's also close with a lot of the other people that are in the organization. that testified, like Tim Meade and Tom Taylor, who are, you know, obviously to maybe testify

more on behalf of the defense at that point. So it's a complicated situation. I thought it was interesting that Trout had his own counsel. He did not utilize Angels counsel, which I think allowed him to, you know, speak a little bit more freely. I mean, he's someone that, he's not losing his job, right? He's on a contract. So he was able to be a little bit more honest, I felt like, and, you know, kind of talk about being aware of Kay's drug addiction, which is not something other, employees really acknowledged too openly, you know, I have a hard time like giving Trout too much crap for some of the stuff that came out because I just, I think you look back at those things in the context of everything we know and it looks worse, like the pimple stuff, and

the Angels Clubhouse obviously had its issues. That's no, there's no doubt about that. But, you know, it's also, it's so easy to look back and kind of judged in hindsight. And of all the things we've learned in this trial, that's one of the least problematic, my opinion. It sucks. It's not good. And it's, you know, those types of dares definitely shouldn't happen. I would put that on the line of hazing. But it's, there was obviously reasons it was happening. And once Trapp realized those, at least according to all the evidence, we know, he was, he was, he handled it properly. Yeah. Sort of a sensational story, but, but also kind of a side show, I guess. So I've seen people question, why did the angels persist in this case? Why

not spare themselves three months of legal fees, plus airing all this dirty laundry, plus looking bad in any number of ways when it turned out that they were just going to settle and presumably pay some hefty amount in the settlement. And, you know, of course, you can't come to the same terms before the whole trial plays out. That changes the leverage and expectations and everything. But certainly seems, I mean, I don't know whether Skaggs' family, how receptive they would have been to an offer before this all has. happened, but if they could do it over again, do you think the angels would do this differently? And is it a failure of self-evaluation that they even took things this far?

I think, you know, self-evalue, yeah, I think to some extent, I mean, there's other elements that I think are kind of playing a role, like the insurance companies, you know, they have to authorize, like, their portion of the money, there are different insurance companies that all have kind of different levels of money that they can authorize to be part of a settlement. And so I think, you know, the initial settlement offers were, were quite low because the, like, the second block of insurance wasn't going to cover anything. Now, that being said, already could have come out and said, hey, I am willing to pay out of pocket for this and to settle this. And I certainly think the Skagside was open to a settlement from the very beginning, you know, I mean, they didn't want to get up there and be grilled about their, their, you know, what they knew. You know, their son, their husband.

I mean, it was uncomfortable for them. I mean, this was a difficult thing. And, you know, I mean, in closing arguments to the Angels lawyer, Todd Theodora, argued that Debbie Hetman, Tyler's mom provided false testimony when, you know, that's just not how I looked at it. But, you know, it's, I don't think anybody wanted to have that happen. And so this would have very easily made sense to settle. And again, as I said earlier, I think that if you're the Angels, it's looking inward to some extent and recognizing that you do have some responsibility here. You might not agree that it's the level of responsibility or the dollar amount. or whatever it is you end up coming to.

But clearly Eric Kay had an addiction. Clearly people were aware of that addiction. And the policies of the team clearly weren't followed. So if they were, like, looking inward at the evidence and being honest with themselves, I think they would have seen that there was at least some responsibility here. And I think a settlement would have made some sense. As a reporter, I mean, I can appreciate the fact that a lot of interesting things happened in this trial that gave us a real window into the team and the way it operates.

and, you know, you could argue that some of these secrets coming out, I think, are a good thing. And hopefully, hopefully, the end result is that this never happens again, that nothing like it even comes close to happening again. And I'm not saying it's going to be the exact same situation the next time, but, you know, following your policies are important. You know, I think that, you know, there's always room for nuance, but nuance was taken to an extreme here with how they handled Eric Kay. And that was a mistake. And I think that that is a lesson to be taken from this that maybe wouldn't have if it hadn't all been tested. to an open court and written about and, you know, all of the things that happened. But, you know, yeah, I think everyone would have benefited from maybe having this taken care of

earlier, particularly the witnesses and the family. I mean, you know, I don't know about Artie or not. It already kind of gets off on this, right? He showed up on the first day of the trial for opening statements. But, you know, this is his team and he really was kind of shielded from testifying or from the accountability element of everything. Yeah, and I've seen people say why would Skaggs' family want to settle on the verge of a victory seemingly and I guess a few reasons one you never know a hundred percent

which way a jury is going to go and also there could have been appeals right and this could have stretched on forever and put you through even more of the emotional ringer and presumably they were pretty pleased with the terms of the settlement and maybe didn't think that they could do

all that much better so I certainly understand that from their perspective and hopefully for everyone's sake this kind of closes the book on the legal proceedings. It doesn't necessarily close the book, though, when it comes to Major League Baseball and any punishment the Angels might face. And this was one interesting thing that came out of this, is that the Angels VP for Human Resources testified that the team had worked with MLB to address Kay's addiction and that the team was

complying with MLB policy, and MLB has denied that, right? And so now that this has worked its way through the court, all this information goes to MLB, and MLB has to decide whether to hand down some additional punishment to the Angels and probably a league that is not pleased about being roped into this in some way. So what happens next? You know, I tend to, like, this is just my opinion. I tend to think that the settlement, you know, you talked about the benefits of the settlement for the family and for everyone involved, but I do think one of the things that

might happen as a result of that is it's hard for me to imagine that major league baseball is going i mean i don't know you never know is going to kind of take a proactive approach here given that this was a confidential settlement which means anything could have happened uh means that it could have been zero dollars right like so they they don't they kind of shielded from having to do anything in my opinion now that being said you mentioned debor johnston and that was for major league baseball to have come out and and refuted the testimony was i thought significant and then that came out court. I enjoyed having my name on the written record there, which was fun because we were, that was from our article. But, you know, it's, that was crazy. I mean, that testimony was just

false, right? Like, you know, and then you hear the Angel's lawyer going and throughout the rest of the trial saying, that's not what she said, that's not what she said. And it was, it was what she said. I read the transcript of it. She said that the team worked with major league baseball. He said that he was tested under MLB's policy, said that they communicated with MLB investigator named Moira Weinberg, all these things were just, you know, either wrong or not within the scope of the time frame that, you know, we were working with it to understand this case. So that MLB element of it is fascinating. I'm sure that they'd love to do something, but it's also, you know, you have to understand the dynamics here. And it's, you know, especially as you head into what is going to be a complicated negotiation for the upcoming CBA and already always being kind of a thorn in this league sign with that stuff, if I'm not mistaken. taken. So, you know, I don't know what will happen. You'd like to think in the right world that MLB is going to be taking an impartial and fully accountable approach and reading through all the testimony and deciding to, you know, levy whatever they think is appropriate. But it's also,

you understand the dynamics between the owners and the commissioner and I think the settlement kind of giving a window into maybe they don't have to do something now that it's kind of been litigated out of court theoretically, I guess technically, even though all of that happened in court. I don't know what will happen, but, you know, I think the conduct is there for them to review that and, you know, at the very least, address kind of this idea that they were operating within the MLB's guidelines when it came to treating Eric K, which I don't think the jurors bought that for a second from talking with them. Yeah, if only the terms of the settlement forced Artie Moreno to sell the team. Probably no such luck. So, yeah,

You referenced this earlier. I were just wondering if there's anything else positive that could come out of this aside from the Skaggs family getting paid. And I know that MLB already tweet its quote-unquote drugs of abuse policy after Skaggs's death. And I think before 2020, there was no random testing for opiates and other recreational drugs. And now there's testing and the results lead to potential treatment and hopefully forestall another incident like this. And you hope that the angels will learn from this, you know, probably the exact same situation won't arise, one would hope, but hopefully they put their processes in place or at least adhere to their own policies. Do you think that there's anything league-wide ramifications that could come from just wanting to avoid another situation like this? Or is it just kind of a team-by-team?

You trust that they will do the right thing and follow what they're supposed to do. I mean, the thing I come back to is, like, what could more could the league have done here? I mean, I really, you know, and I'm not sitting here going to defend everything that the league does because that's not how I feel. But, I mean, in this particular situation, and, you know, Rusty Harden and the Skag's lawyer said this after the thing happened today. Like, MLB is not responsible for this. Like, they set up a pretty good system of, you know, having a drug policy oversight committee. Their policies, as I continuously heard throughout this trial, made a lot of sense to me in terms of how you have to report how there are. There's intervention programs. There's testing programs. There are ways to make it so even if you report somebody, they're not necessarily going to face like getting fired or arrested or whatever. There's ways to address this that seem to make a lot of sense through MLB's policies. The only thing that wasn't done here was that process. The process is good. I don't know what else they could have done. You know, instead of like, unless anything short of like actively drug testing your employees every couple months, which I don't think that would

even be legal. So to me, I don't think there is anything to really change on that front. I think that team, if anything, hopefully, this just is a reminder to everybody that when you see this happening, you're not helping the person by not reporting it, right? You're not helping anybody by letting this continue on. You know, I think that if I had to get in Tim Mead and Tom Taylor's head, and, you know, I'm only going based on the evidence. Their testimony kind of refuted some of the things that happened. But based on what I believe happened here, I think that they thought they were doing right by Eric and operating with nuance. And I can appreciate that and I can respect that, but it got to a point where something needed to happen. And I think that hopefully the next time

something needs to happen, whenever that is and to whoever that is and whatever team or wherever it is in the league, there isn't it. There is a better way to address it. And somebody can think back to this whole situation and, you know, do better. Well, thank you for your tireless work covering this case and hope that you can get some rest and spend a little less time in court going forward. You know, I don't mind court. So we'll see. But thank you so much for having me. And, you know, this is a nice way to kind of decompress from everything. And honestly, just kind of get my thoughts out there. Because I've, throughout this whole thing, I've tried to, like, not really express my opinion too much in any capacity. You know, you're sitting there. You're thinking

these things. But, you know, now that it's over, now that it's been written, you know, I think I kind of wanted to share, you know, my perspective on things. And so I'm super happy that you had me on. So thank you. Okay, we'll be back soon with a transaction roundup and more, and I'll remind everyone that we are soliciting submissions for stories we missed about each and every team in 2025. We'll be collecting and recapping those in the last week of the year, so keep them coming, anything interesting that you think we may not have discussed this year,

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Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes in the podcast posted fan graphs 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. We'll be back with one more episode before Christmas, so we will talk to you then. Take me to the diamond, lead me through the turnstile, shower me with data that I never thought to comply. Now a scorecard with a crackerjacket of smile that did pay while.