Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2507: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Named

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s jury duty and his reaction to Meg and Craig’s pillow talk on the preceding episode. Then they discuss why All-Star Game pitching is overpowering, whether the Home Run Derby balls were juiced (and whether it matters), another earliest-ever Opening Day, MLB’s crackdown on teams’ boundary-pushing use of dugout iPads, Shohei Ohtani’s pitching pause, MLB app complaints, extensions for Chase Burns and Kyle Bradish, Luis Arraez as a prize of the trade deadline, and the funniest tech startups the Dodgers have seeded. Audio intro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to EW Episode 2506 Link to Kepner on the ASG Link to 2018 ASG box score Link to Heyman on Harper Link to Insta post with Harper quote Link to MLB HRD notes Link to longest Harper homers Link to longest Caminero homers Link to longest Contreras homers Link to exit speed responsibility Link to 2024 NBA ASG wiki Link to 2026 NBA ASG wiki Link to top-selling jerseys Link to Sheehan on the lack of stars Link to Paine on ASG philosophies Link to 2027 MLB schedule Link to EW season preview series wiki Link to World Cup expansion Link to March Madness expansion Link to Ohtani news Link to ulnar nerve entrapment Link to MLB app betting odds Link to latest FG app updates Link to The Athletic iPads report Link to Ben on front office encroachment Link to Ottavino clip Link to Dubuque on Burns Link to Bradish on Burns Link to MLBTR on Burns Link to Trent’s tweet about Burns Link to Burns pitch usage Link to MLB pitching WAR leaders Link to MLBTR on Bradish Link to sweepstakes wiki Link to sweeps week wiki Link to MLBTR on Arraez Link to Andrews on Arraez Link to BZZR article 1 Link to BZZR article 2 Link to BZZR article 3 Link to BZZR article 4 Link to FOIAball post Link to 2015 Dodgers investment news Link to 2016 Dodgers investment news Link to 2018 Dodgers investment news Link to R/GA companies page Link to Global Sports Venture Studio Link to Elysian Park companies page Link to 2023 Elysian Park article Link to Elysian Park wiki Link to Elysian Fields wiki Link to Gilbert/Creighton interview  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, take me to the diamond, lead me through the turnstile. Shower me with data that I never thought to compile. Now we're freely not a scorecard with a crack you got to smile. Hello and welcome to episode 2507 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fancrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello.

This is a rare, regular episode Sunday recording for us to avoid my ongoing jury duty. Dude. Because I have not yet fulfilled my obligation, as Carson Sustuli would say, to New York State. So we are recording while we can. And I can't say anything about my jury service as of yet. I am barred from doing so, but I'm sure I will have thoughts to share on the process on our Patreon pod at the end of the month. But we will see. I have not yet been impaneled, but I strongly suspect I am about to be.

So we will record when we can. Can you tell them that I am about to be very busy with the trade value series and that reliability of schedule would be nice? Honestly, it would not be the worst excuse that I heard anyone try to use to get out of this. And my problem is that I have too much integrity, Meg, to self-eliminate. Because when they tell you that it has to be a truly exceptional thing that you can't reschedule, that's impossible to reschedule, I really, I held myself to that standard. And I can't say that my fellow jury candidates did for the most part. So here I am, the sap, who is doing his duty for society and the people.

people of my fine state or probably I will be we will see yeah i mean look i think the jury service is a vital part of democracy and certainly i'd rather someone with the kind of thoughtfulness and dedication to all things that you exhibit be one of those people right don't you want me on your jury especially if you didn't do it don't you don't you want me on that wall or in that bench this is this is this is maybe why I'm about to end up serving on a jury for the second time during the run of this podcast, which is maybe says something about how long this podcast has been going on. Sure, sure. Maybe also says something about me. I don't know.

Maybe it also says that I just don't have any good excuses, I guess. Well, I have a good excuse. So, like, get on it. My podcast co-host is really busy this week. Therefore, she can't reschedule the trade value series. That's impossible. So she needs me. I have pods to do.

You have pods to do. And look, Ben, I always appreciate you and the work you do on the pod, your integrity is a person. I never appreciate it quite so much as when I am forced to confront trying to upload audio to the FTP server, which I do very infrequently because you never take days off despite me encouraging you to. And I might beat that drum a little less loudly going forward. Yeah, there's some behind the scenes.

admin that goes into getting these pods posted. Yes. But you managed it. Well, I assisted slightly. You assisted. Yeah. You were home by that and I was like, Ben, will you do it? I'll hit published though.

Yeah. But the episode itself went off well. And aside from your cavalier use of second half, I know it. You did acknowledge it. It's true. I did. Yes. Thank you.

I enjoyed your deadline discussion and your pillow. talk with Craig. And boy, I share some of your pillow opinions about the firmness and the lack thereof at hotels and about Craig's preference for cold pillows, though. Sure. The man has some pricey pillows. I mean, you were reaching for a pillow contract joke. You had to sign a pillow contract, a literal one to obtain the pillows that he uses. Maybe he's on to something because I just spend a fortune on making my room cold with a normal pillow. Maybe I could economize by having a normal room with a cold pillow. I don't know.

It's something to explore. I had thought of that. But you two definitely I felt personally attacked when you talked about the frequency of switching out your pillows because I'm definitely not doing that as often as you too. And I want to say two things about that. The first is that we got a very well-meaning email from one of our listeners that many pillows are washable. You can launder them so as to deal with the sort of microbial elements.

And that point is well taken. Also, I realized I said I was swapping them out every six months. And then you know how you have to confront the chores not done when you get home from a trip? Well, I was just swapping out the sheets on our bed, having gotten home from Pennsylvania. And I looked at the pillows and I was like, I'm not switching these out every six months. Why did I say that? That's not true. It's probably like a yearly exercise.

Part of the problem is like there's the cleanliness element. And boy, what a thing to have to think about, you know. Do you ever vacuum your mattress? Vacuum the mattress. I don't think so. No. Okay. So here's the thing.

You shouldn't now. I don't know how old your mattress is. But the fact that you've never done it means that the amount of detritus that you will be confronted with after doing it will make you feel. forever unclean. And I don't mean to suggest that you guys are unclean. It's just like we're on those beds all the time, man. People are inherently unclean. I mean, it's, yeah, we're sloppy sorts. It's why all the dust mites are going to town constantly there. But yeah, I was like, oh, boy,

these are grody. So there's the, there's the cleanliness and sort of microbial element, but also sometimes after a while, they resist fluffing, you know? They will no longer be fluffed. And so there's a life cycle to pillows in this household, which is you have your pillows. They're the sleeping pillows. And you're like, oh, boy, these pillows. And then after a while, they and not every six months. And I would never change them out if they were as expensive as Craig's good, golly. But then they get cycled back to the, like the support pillows.

You know, do you have like support pillows on your bed? It's like you have your pillows that your head is resting on while sleeping. And then there's like the secondary line of pillows behind that, not to be confused with throw pillows, which are purely decorative. You know, they're the pillows for like, if you're sitting up in bed reading and you need a little problem. Yeah, we have a surplus of pillows, yeah. Right. So like the bed pillows that have outlived their usefulness as sleeping pillows will then transition into the support pillow realm. And you might say, well, it isn't fluff.

Why is it a support pillow? It's good enough. It's good enough for that purpose, you know. Yeah. You can prop yourself up on it. You just don't want to sleep on it anymore. And then eventually you get to a point where you're like, thank you for your service pillows to the bulk trash you go.

Yeah, that's sort of the life cycle. And it is more than a six-month process. These pillows, I have not tried to wash, but maybe I will before I cycle them out. Anyway, that's pillows. Your cycles are maybe more rapid than mine. but you may be doing it right for all I know. We're washing, to be clear, but definitely, but not discarding quite as quickly, I think.

I think what the hotels are thinking maybe is that if you go with the not very supportive pillow, because I suppose some people have a preference for less firm pillows. Yeah, they don't understand it myself. But I guess maybe they think if they go too firm for the default, then the people who prefer non-firm will have no recourse. It's kind of like if you make it. super hot in a place. There's nothing you can do if you make it cold. At least someone could layer maybe. There is something you could do. Yeah, that's what men think. Yeah, I know.

And all the women are shivering and unable to work in the office. But theoretically, at least you can layer. And so you can kind of layer pillows too. But I find that that's mostly theoretical, too. That doesn't really work so well because I will be in a hotel. And okay, I guess I'll try two or three pillows and maybe it'll replicate the firmness that I prefer. But it doesn't really. You can have any number, infinite number of pillows, and it's never quite the same as having just one supportive one. Anyway. We sound like the princess and the pee and the pillow here,

so I will move on to baseball matters. I do have a couple closing thoughts on All-Star Week in the All-Star Games specifically. You kind of touched on this with Craig and alluded to it. It's become a kind of unwatchable product for many reasons. One is that it's just inherently a little less intriguing, these days because we are blessed. We are spoiled with access to stars at all times. And so the prospect of seeing all the stars playing against one another with one another is not quite as

compelling as it once was. And of course it wasn't quite all the stars this year, as Joshean noted, of the 20 guys on the most recent list of best-selling player jerseys from MLB. Only six of them were actually available to play in this year's all-star game. So, There were a lot of absences of actual stars. But of the stars who were there, were just not quite as intrigued by that prospect. But I think a big part of it is that the game itself, it's not that the players aren't trying because they are.

If anything, they're trying maybe leads to a less entertaining game. And you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Because the NBA, as Craig alluded to, was having all sorts of issues with the All-Star game because guys weren't playing that hard. And they were load managing and pacing themselves and nobody was playing defense. And so the last regular All-Star game that they tried in 2024, the score was 211 to 186. I mean, it was ridiculous.

It was a travesty. It looked nothing like real baseball. That's so funny. And they have... It probably didn't look like real baseball either. It definitely didn't look like real baseball. Yeah. But they've rectified that to some extent in the past couple of years.

They've had different formats and they've tried USA versus World. and they have a little mini round-robin tournament and they have a young USA team and an old USA team and that did restore some interests. You'd have a hard time staffing and rostering an old USA MLB team because the players just, they don't last as long as they did. The aging curve is kind of harsh these days.

But I think if they brought age or nationality into it, that would make the players care more and make fans care more than just AL versus NL because that basically is conferences at this point. There's just very little loyalty to a league or differentiation. And so people aren't compelled by AL versus NL bragging rights. We have yearly interleague. It goes on all year.

In addition to the World Series. So I do think maybe they will explore that. And maybe it'll feel like we have the WBC at home. It'll feel like a pale imitation of that. But I still think probably more people would tune in to see that. But the game itself, if anything, resembles real baseball to its detriment, maybe, in that it's this parade of relievers,

and it's kind of a caricature of itself. Right. Part of the problem is they want to get as many people into the game as possible, and of course every team has to have an All-Star representative, and I guess the idea there is fans will be more interested because they will want to tune in to see their guys. Yeah. But then when you have to get every pitcher into that game or just about,

there were 20 pitchers used. And it's just constant new guy coming in. And players who aren't all that famous or stars or memorable in many cases, just a whole lot of relievers and even the starters, they don't last long, right? So in the NBA, you had not enough defense. And really, in MLB, you have too much defense. Yeah. Because you just have max effort, one inning max guys just coming in one after the other. And there is the saying in baseball, good pitching beats good hitting.

And I don't really think that's particularly true. I think they kind of beat each other to some extent. When you have good pitchers facing good hitters, they'll both just be worse than their usual baseline. But in this case, I think good pitching does beat good hitting because no one ever gets to face the same pitcher twice. Because the batters are getting pulled. The pitchers are getting pulled even faster than that. So it's just an endless succession of. relievers or starters in relief going max effort and no one having any kind of familiarity or fatigue

coming into play. And so in that case, I think you do end up with low scoring games and you end up with what, 27 strikeouts in this game. We haven't had a high scoring all-star game since 2018, I think. 2018, which was 8 to 6. That was the last time, really, that it wasn't, I think, lower scoring than the average game in that. season. So I think that is working to its detriment, not just because you can't get used to who's on the field and look forward to seeing them again and up, you're there, and then you're gone. And some players are pulling out before it even starts. But I think it's because that reliever usage lends itself to not a whole lot of action. And then you just get a decisive swing or two

and you get Miguel Vargas going deep or something. And then as it turns out, that's kind of all you need to win the game. And it takes longer, and it's just not a great spectator experience. So that is, I guess, a manifestation of the game not meeting that much because part of why you have so many pitchers pitching is that no one pitcher wants to pitch that much, or at least their teams don't want them to pitch. So it is kind of a reflection of the apathy, but weirdly in baseball, it then does lead to even tougher defense than you're accustomed to seeing in a typical game. Yeah, I don't quite know the right solution to that because, you know, you, in theory, like, you don't want a bunch of soft tossing relievers out there just to try to juice the offensive production, but you also, I don't know, like, what are you going to do? Like, the best relievers look this way. And as we noted when I talk to Craig, like, even greater incentive and sort of possibility of them maxing out because they know they're only, they're probably not even going to go a whole.

whole inning unless you're just from Robleski where apparently you get to throw twice like i don't understand what that is about and so it's just a it's an odd it's an odd problem to solve maybe the solution is make the all-star game seven innings and the futures game nine innings you would like that i'm sure i would like that yeah well speaking of juicing offense that's the other thing i wanted to talk to you about because there was a mini controversy about the ball in the home run derby yeah and this is is not new, I suppose. People always suspect that the ball is juiced in the home run derby. Yeah. And John Heyman had an article for the New York Post where Bryce Harper is always just the man in the spotlight somehow. He said that the ball is juiced. He said, everybody knows it. He declined to say how he knows it,

but he said, I'm not going to answer that, but they're juiced. Everybody knows it. They do it every year. and an MLB spokesman denied that their juiced, said that the derby balls are no different from regular season balls, quote, the same ball, conditioned and stored like all the other balls. So I guess there are two questions here. Would anyone mind if the baseball was juiced? Is that bad? Should it be juiced if it's not?

And then what incentive does MLB have to deny that they are juiced if in fact Bryce Harper is right and we know Bryce Harper the man is right about everything and never believes in any sort of shoddy science or any kind of conspiracy theory so

got to take his word as gospel here and you'd think that the players might have some idea I guess of whether the ball is juiced potentially I was trying to look into this because Bryce Harper did hit a ball farther in the derby he hit one

482 feet. And his record, at least going back to the start of the stat cast era, 2015, is 473. So he did hit a ball harder or farther, at least, not harder, in the derby than he has in the past decade, basically, of actual games. The high mark was a junior Camerro 491 in the derby, and that's farther than he has ever hit one in the game, though, you know, he's still pretty early in his career. Wilson Contreras hit one that was 490 feet in the derby, though I think he has done that maybe in a game as well, so that's not unprecedented.

But you definitely do see balls hit farther in the derby than you do normally in the course of play. But is that conclusive? Does that prove anything? Because there are a lot of things that are unusual in the home run derby that could potentially be causing that. One of the balls is pink. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Actually, I guess Wilson Contreras also has not hit one that far in an actual game. Or no, he has. He hit one in the playoffs. That's it. I didn't have the right box checked. In 2017 NLCS game four, he hit one 491 feet, one foot farther than his high in this derby. So it is doable in real games.

But of course, 2017 was kind of juiced ball era, right? So maybe that doesn't prove anything either. So what do you think? Do you believe Bryce Harper that the ball is juiced? And if it is, do you care? I have no idea if it's juice. I don't. I cannot care.

Well, no, let me add a wrinkle to that. I think it would be nice if we just had transparency around this stuff from the league as sort of the default posture because there is so much suspicion and recrimination around the state of the ball. Why not, even in low stakes moments where it presumably doesn't matter even one goddamn, why not be transparent? You know, why not? Why not do it?

So there's that. But also, I don't think it matters. Very rarely do we have anyone in the field who doesn't have, like, impressive raw power and impressive game power for that matter. You have your odd, you know, mooky betses, right? Where you're doing it because your wife is like, this will be fun. And then you're like, is it, though?

You didn't have very many home runs. But I think that as long as the ball is consistent player to player, the odds, and of course there's variation player to player, just whether the balls reduced or not, because each one is hand-stitched. But, you know, if they are aiming for the same sort of, bounciness and liveliness. And they are doing that for everyone such that you can't say that it's unfair that, you know,

one player got a very juicy ball and one player got a very dead ball. Then I don't know that it matters. Like there's, to your point, such an unreality to the whole exercise. And as I said, I don't think there are very many guys up there who you're like, wow, that guy's not really a bopper. Why is he here? You know, even the guys you don't end up hitting very many home runs more often than not. You know, the bets of the world excluded are like guys who you think of as as real power hitters.

Like, you know, Ben Rice didn't have the best night, but that guy can sock a baseball. So I don't know that I care. I just, you know, Bryce, you could not be conspiratorial about something, buddy, and it would be okay. It would really just be fine to be like, I think it's probably pretty normal and exactly as advertised. I don't want to discourage people from having an inquisitive mind. but at a certain point you get answers to the questions and then, you know, it's probably okay to stop asking them as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's possible to explain why someone might hit a ball farther in the home run derby without resorting to juice ball just because it's the home run derby. They're trying to hit home runs. And also they're hitting off of batting practice, basically, which in a sense maybe makes it harder because there is some truth to the idea that the harder it comes in, the harder it goes out. Like the pitch velocity does supply some of the exit speed for the ball.

Not most of it, but a bit of it. So it is harder to hit a ball that is tossed to you softly a really long way. But they're trying to hit home runs and they're trying to hit the ball really far. And players were always say that they're not trying to hit home runs in regular games. And sometimes they are. I think they're definitely sometimes when guys are trying to win it with one swing for better or worse. But I think for the most part, they're not or they can't count on that because it's a fairly low probability event and they don't want a whiff and they want to get any kind of hit. And as we noted last week, like you hit a ball, a screamer in the gap.

That's just an out in the derby in a regular game. That's a great outcome. So they're totally selling out for power here. And I think that could help explain why the ball goes a bit farther, right? and they can anticipate basically just a straight ball down the middle, right? I mean, there are a lot of reasons why you could hit a ball farther. Now, I wouldn't put it past MLB, juicing the ball a bit to have a good show. That is maybe giving MLB a little too much credit,

assuming that they can do that or that Rawlings is able to calibrate that properly or set aside these are the juicier balls that we have tested or something. Right. How would they know? even testing the seam height. Yeah. I mean, they can maybe test it, but, you know, unless they're manufacturing a special home run derby batch with different parameters or something,

I don't know that I buy that they could do that with great precision. And I could imagine why if they did, they might not want to acknowledge it just because they don't want to entertain the idea that there is such a thing as a juiced ball that they have created. Right. Because if they even acknowledge that that exists and that they understand. and that they intentionally juiced a ball for the home run derby, they could say it's just an exhibition. It's a time when people just want to see the ball hit far, which is true.

But I think that would only deepen the suspicion that, well, they can make these balls if they want to. Maybe they made them for actual games, or maybe there was a mistake, and they switched up some of the actual juice balls with regular balls. So they probably wouldn't even want to acknowledge that if they did it, though I am all for transparency, as you are and think we would have a lot fewer suspicions about the ball if they had been

fully open about this from the start and had tested everything from the start. I don't know that I would necessarily want the balls to be juiced or special for the derby, because I do think part of the thrill is just that these are regular balls, but look how far these people can make them go. Because if you do start making it sort of funny money, silly savannah banana style, like we're going to take this further away from typical baseball. I don't know. Maybe people would like that. There are people who sometimes suggest they should have metal bats.

Like it should just be about hitting the ball as far as you possibly can. But I do think that the thrill of that would wear off. As we said, like three hours of guys swinging for the fences gets a bit tedious as it is. And then if we know that it's easier for them to do that, then I don't know. Like if someone hits the ball out of the ballpark, but we know that. the ball made it easier for them to do that? Is it actually more impressive after the first majestic drive? I'm not really sure.

That's fair. I just can't get that exercised about the whole thing as part of the problem. But I think that, like I said, they should be transparent about it. And the answers they give publicly should comport with a reality of the ball on the ground. So not that the balls are on the ground very much. Or in the air. Yeah. So I do think that their default posture should.

be one of honesty. I appreciate the skepticism or, you know, the sort of instinct toward it for a lot of people given the lack of that transparency in the past. I'd be curious if other players have the sense that it's like so juice. Like he just, he says it so casually. Like, well, everybody knows this is happening? It's like, do they? Does everybody know that it's happening? Is it actually happening? What, how much of your blood is inside your body, buddy? Where? Where's your blood at, you know? You always have to question that when it comes to. You always have to wonder.

Right mind. How oxidated or. How oxidated is? How is it? How much blood at the time? Yeah. Was he anemic? Yeah, what was happening exactly physically with him at that moment.

But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it is a widespread suspicion. But I don't know. I tend to think they're probably just the regular balls and it's an unusual setting with weird conditions that maybe leads to. Some ball's going far. Yeah. Strange incentives, big boppers. You know, it takes place in the height of the summer. So it's hot, swampy.

Oh, Ben, some of those days. Boy, and then the smoke, I tell you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the smoke's been bad. It's affected actual baseball, obviously. But now you're back in the dry heat. So that's nice for you, I guess. Yeah, we never have bad air quality in the valley.

That's right. So we have a couple picture extensions to talk about. We have a schedule reveal, an aspirational schedule reveal, I suppose. We also, speaking of strange incentives, we had a report from Enosaris of the Athletic about a memo that was sent by MLB to teams, cracking down on some behavior that teams have been up to with their dugout iPads. And this was obviously of interest to me. This memo was issued more than a month ago, according to the report, but it just took effect for the start of the, well, the restart of the season after the All-Star Break. And basically what it comes down to is that teams had been pushing the boundaries when it comes to the allowable use of those iPad dugouts.

So these were first introduced a decade ago in 2020. 2016. And then their use was regulated somewhat in 2020 after the banging scheme and sign stealing scandals. But teams have been pushing the envelope a little lately because there is a custom tab, or there was, there has been. There are three tabs that you're able to access on these iPads, because they're supposed to be locked down because you're not supposed to be using real-time electronic communication. Right. And so it's supposed to be. be kind of a wild garden here. You get these league-issued iPads, but they strictly monitor what's on them. And so you have one tab, which just gives you the stat-cast data and the video angles,

and that's what you see players watching after they get back to the bench or whatever. They're going to see where a pitch was. They want to see their swing. And then there's a second tab with ABS information, new for this year, I suppose. And then there's this third custom tab. And as, you know, wrote it housed each team's specialized data akin to information found in old school paper-filled binders. Examples include matchup info, defensive positioning, and player tendencies, which teams argued were necessities. So it used to be that teams would print out these big binders with all this data and match-up info and recommendations for the coaching staff. I used to help put those together when I was in baseball ops interned back in the day. and many times they would just be ignored

and they would sit there in the corner at that time. But now teams consult these things. And they're supposed to just be able to access static information, anything that you would have before first pitch. And if you're going beyond that, well, then you're maybe playing with fire a little bit. And so what it sounds like teams were doing is that they were using things that you could update in real time and, you know, writes that it was AI, that it was even generative AI, that some teams

were inputting information from the ongoing game so that you could say have the model anticipate the next pitch that would be thrown or recommend the next pitch that would be thrown. And this goes hand in hand with the trend toward pitch calling from the dugout that we have discussed, that I have bemoaned. And that seems to have been part of the motivation for. for this crackdown, right? Is it discomfort with that practice? Right.

And it seems like maybe some teams, instead of just having coaches call pitches from the dugout based on whatever intel was available to them before the game and their own wiles and know-how, they were maybe plugging pitch data into these iPads in real time and having these models update to tell them what to throw. And I don't know exactly how widespread this was. it seems like several teams were maybe experimenting with something like that.

Former Mets reliever Adam Adamadovino came out and said that the Mets were doing this, though he hasn't been with the Mets for a couple of years. I assume he's hearing about this second or third or fourth hand and seems like he has a bit of a bone to pick with that organization. But according to him, Steve Cohen was spending hundreds of thousands on whatever this model was. I assume it's not entirely clear from the story. And teams have obviously been cagey about this. details of what they were doing. I assume this is not generative AI. This is not just like a chatbot. This is not, you know, hey, chat GPT or even Claude or whatever, what pitch should I throw.

I assume it's based on some sort of machine learning model. And that maybe there was an interface that was kind of like a chat bot kind of, you know, based on that data. So I doubt it's, you know, teams were doing what what someone at home might do. when they're consulting Gen A.I. Or something, a chat bot on this stuff. So it's probably a bit more sophisticated than that might make it sound. And frankly, it's probably a decent use of that kind of data. Like I could imagine that a model that's able to draw on all that information and tendencies

and everything and crunch that stuff in real time would maybe provide some sort of edge here. So I don't know, you know, if it's pure generative. AI. It could just give you garbage or it could hallucinate or something. But I'm guessing there was a more solid grounding than that. But who really knows? But one way or another, MLB stepped in to say, don't do that, basically. And so they're supposed to have limited access to apps and to have the league monitor and review those apps. And this is probably crossing the line of what the league rules suggest it should be allowable. And you could imagine it. It could get to the point of becoming a bigger scandal.

And so the league is trying to step in and nip that in the butt. Yeah. And I don't mean to take issue with the way that it's characterized in the Pistarino's reporting. I do find myself sort of frustrated when we're having these conversations that there's like a little bit of like term in precision sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. With what what do we mean when we're saying AI because teams have been using machine learning as a way to do analysis. for years now. This is not like a new. It wasn't like they were like, oh, chat GPT, cool, right? Like the use of machine learning particularly to do like to feed a bunch of video and be able to

discern things about mechanics and pitch shapes and what have you. Like that's been. Yeah. Teams tipping. Yeah. Right. For a long time. And one can imagine potentially nefarious applications of that technology if deployed in real time. Right. So I can appreciate. why the league would have a vested interest in trying to keep all this stuff sort of buttoned up. But because we might mean different things when we're saying like AI or generated AI, like it sometimes is a little difficult to parse like what exactly these applications are doing. I guess, you know, people who have a better handle on this stuff from a technical perspective

might be able to guess at it. And certainly like, I don't know, some of these models I think require like a great deal of computing power. I don't know that they're necessarily going to lend themselves to like an app on an iPad. But I don't know. This is where my lack of technical sophistication kind of reveals itself. But I think that there are parts of this that I find interesting. First, like, we don't like the pitch-calling stuff for a couple of different reasons, most of which are concentrated around sort of losing the art of catcher defense and the, you know, sort of skill and value that that brings. I think that it's interesting that part of, it seems like part of the concern on the league's part

isn't just that there's like a potential for malfeasance or cheating here, although I, you know, if I'm the league, I'm going to be hyper aware of that possibility given the banging scheme. But also like there does seem to be sort of an unstated philosophical preference for the human expertise of the manager and the coach in this situation, right? and that that should have primacy in this environment. And some of that, you know, I don't know that they're sitting there going like, because human beings should have jobs and we value labor. Like I don't know that that we can take it so far as a value statement on the league's part,

but there is seemingly a stated preference here that managers and coaches should be managing and coaching. And that players should have to do some stuff on their own too. So I like moments like this because whether they mean to or not, we do kind of get a statement of the preferred philosophy and aesthetic of the game from the league. I always find it funny and I understand why they do it, but it's always funny when they're like, we're really worried about the potential for this stuff, but you get a month to update your processes. And, you know, that seems fair, right? if the determination, and it sounds like from the piece, this was the league's determination that no one was like, you know,

really crossing a line into something that required discipline and no discipline was issued here, well, yeah, you want to give people a minute to sort of update their processes so that they're not caught flat-footed, but it is always a funny artifact of this stuff. I also am fascinated by your ability to like action this stuff in real time. It does feel like there is,

a sort of an upper bound to the usefulness of it, right? Like, you have to be able to keep pace in a game. And so being able to say, ah, well, you know, the, the machine learning is like assessing this guy's stance and real, I don't know that this is exactly what's happening, but like, let's, let's pick the thing that would potentially concern the league the most. The machine learning is analyzing video in real time. And so you should throw your splitter. Like, how do you action that, you know? How is that being communicated to, you? say the catcher so that he can call it over pitchcom, you have a clock. So I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am curious sort of how bad could it actually

get given the limitation of like having to play baseball, you know? But also, as we know, sometimes he's just like bang on a trash can and you say that's good enough. So yeah. So I'm sort of heartened that MLB stepped in here, even if it was to corral any potential for cheating or try to reduce a competitive advantage or something, it does align with my preferences. Right. Evidently, the memo said that teams were in many cases installing these custom apps that expanded

the use of the iPads beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches. So it is kind of the robo manager hypothetical that we have entertained on the podcast previously. I wonder whether this trend toward dugout pitch calling or pitch suggestion, which the article mentions that as many as six teams maybe are now trying that out. I wonder how much of that was predicated on this, whether teams would be doing that anyway or whether part of their motivation for doing that was that they had these models that they thought they could exploit. So if they get slapped on the wrist and told that they can't do this anymore, will that take some of the wind out of the, the sales of that trend.

I don't know. I could imagine pitch calling still benefiting from people who are not actually in the game and who can rely on data, even if it's static data that they were given before the game began and have been instructed in some things by front office analysts, let's say. I could imagine them maybe being better at that in some cases than people who are in the thick of things on the field, but maybe not so much if they're just relying. on their own wits in the moment as opposed to some model telling them what to do.

So that would be good. It's kind of like MLB immediately stepped in to tell the brewers that they could not signal to their batters when they were allowed to challenge or their players in general. And that was good because the whole idea there was players have to make this decision themselves. And it's sort of a snap judgment. And they can be coached up beforehand

and told, hey, here's the situation. and maybe you should think about challenging or not challenge or here's how you should think of the probability there. But that's tough to do in the moment and you're not allowed to consult with anyone. And when the brewers tried to have a system where they would put up a card to say, hey, this is a green light, red light.

MLB said, no, you can't do that. Players are on their own. So I'm kind of glad that the league stepped in here for whatever reason and maybe it's multiple motivations. But does anyone want that? I'm not questioning that it could be efficacious to have a model that is able to draw on this enormous database in real time that that could just process that information and make a recommendation that would be better than the human brain could manage. But does anyone want that? It's not even now a coach who's one degree removed from the field, but is still maybe a baseball person and in uniform and a human flesh and blood person making.

a decision if we're getting another degree removal from that and it's getting even more abstracted from the players performing and now it's just this model that is fed info from the front office that is just telling you what to pitch and then you, to go back to that word, just execute the machine's recommendation. I just, it's not super visible to us, I guess, from a spectator perspective. You wouldn't necessarily know. When John Brebria was on, I asked him how pitches were being called when he made his debut for the Rockies and he wasn't even sure. You know, the signals were being passed to him through pitchcom and he wasn't even sure if his catcher was getting recommendations from the bench. So watching from afar as a fan, you might not

know if the pitcher or catcher is calling those pitches or a coach or manager is or a model on an iPad is. And so maybe it's cursed by knowing too much that it sort of spoils things. for me if I know that this is how it's happening. It's like, you know, pay no attention to the iPad behind the curtain or something. But I don't like that. I don't know that anyone would really like that. I understand that it could be a competitive advantage, but I just don't really want baseball to work that way where everything a player is doing on the field aside from the actual physical act, all the planning, all the preparation, the whole mental psychological side of things, or a lot of it at least is being dictated by a bot, basically.

That's even as a data-driven guy who appreciates Saberetrics and the value and all of this stuff, I just, I find that's quite off-putting. I agree. I think that it also just feels, you know, I don't want to say that there's no sort of insight that can be gleaned from these things. And I think that having, you know, big sophisticated models that help to inform your strategy and can answer questions with more data at their disposal than, you know, the individual experience of a given coach or manager. I'm not opposed to that.

And that's the reality on the ground for teams now, right, that they are using big data sets and big models to help inform sort of their approach to strategy. But I don't want to discount the value of all the information that's jammed in a lifelong baseball person's brain either, right? And that I know that there have been times in the game's history that we look back on and say, oh, like the lack of sophistication here is kind of shocking given, you know, what we know now and how our ability to sort of put numbers to things has altered our understanding of value and optimal strategy and what have you. But I think you can, one, go to. too far in sort of overstating the the necessary sophistication or difficulty of some of these

things. Like at the end of the day, it is just baseball. And you can discount the ability of human beings to be sort of intellectually nimble in those moments and bring, you know, a lot of experience and knowledge to bear in a way that allows them to have a positive impact on the outcome of, on the field. So I'm mindful of the fact to that. that in situations like this, like where we are confronting either new technology or in the case of some of this stuff, maybe just like a new application of technology that has been in use for a long time, we get to decide sort of what the boundaries of that use can be. And sometimes the reason we're making those decisions isn't because they are perfectly optimal, right? Sometimes

it's because we have a preference that people should have to figure this out in the moment without the aid of a hyper-sophisticated model, right? That you can do all of this work in advance and figure out what you think the right approach is, and then you have to go do. And that means adapting in real time to new information. And I think it's okay for us to say, you know, the ability of, individual people to do that in the moment to react to, okay, we thought that the right way to attack this lineup for our starter tonight was this mix of pitches, but oh no, like, he doesn't

have feel for that secondary. So we have to adapt. We have to figure it out in the moment. And I think saying, hey, bring all that information to bear, but you got to sort it yourself. like that's okay for us to decide is of a higher priority in terms of our understanding of how the game should unfolds than it being a perfectly optimized set of decisions. And sometimes when we talk about the application of new technology, everybody just acts like it's gravity, right? Like, oh, of course you have to do it this way. No, we made that stuff. That's all the generative AI boosters. Right.

It's like it's a fait accompli. this is inevitable, so you better get on board. Right. And I think that if at the end of the day we decide, well, that's the best way to do it, you know, that might be something that we have to live with even though we don't like it. But we're making decisions. We're all making decisions together. And we can decide we don't like that. And that's fine.

It doesn't have to be perfectly optimal. So. And one of the holes in the idea that it would be better to have the pitches called from the dugout is that you don't know how the pitches are behaving that day or at least you don't know the pitchers feel for them. Right. And maybe you can't plug the pictures feel for them into the iPad model even. And these are often phrased as suggestions

as opposed to mandates that there is still some autonomy for the players involved. And I think that's true to an extent. Sure. I question if you're a young player, let's say, how much freedom you actually feel to make your own decisions if this is kind of the team policy. Right.

But they frame it that way, both because it's easier to sell, and because you do want to allow some leeway for, well, yeah, usually this is a good pitch, but today I just don't have my feel for it. And I think if they are doing this, if they have been updating in real time, that does remove one of the objections to this. Not that you can necessarily quantify the feel, but you could quantify the pitch performance at least. And you could tell, okay, his command is off today or his movement is off or he's not getting as many RPM or whatever on this pitch this day or the speed is down.

If you could plug that into the model, then in theory, at least, it could account for that. So I'm glad that MLB said, hey, not so fast with this stuff. Yeah. Okay. So another thing MLB said is that opening day next year, or opening night, at least, on Netflix, is even earlier than it was this year, which was already a record, putting aside. series that started internationally, even earlier. But putting aside those showcase series,

this is going to be the earliest opening day, opening night ever a day earlier than it was this year, which was already the earliest. And I know that people are already saying we don't know that there will be a season at all. And if there is a season, what are the odds that it will start perfectly on time? I understand all of that. I've even seen some people suggesting that they're pushing. this earlier to increase leverage or something. I kind of doubt that because, I don't know, like, this is the trend.

It's getting earlier every year, really. It was super early this year, too. And I don't know that that's a big part of the motivation here. But it does make me wonder just how early can we go here? Like, it's just, it's weird to think of regular season, baseball, domestic on March 24th. I mean, this is, this is spring training time. This is when we're supposed to still be. wrapping up our season preview pods.

So won't anyone think of the exhaustive season preview series, podcasters out there? I don't know what we're going to do about that next year with this early start and all the uncertainty about whether the season will start. I guess, well, we did figure out a way sort of to do it last time there was a lockout. As an aside, do you feel like you have, this is like unrelated mostly, but do you feel like you have a clear memory of your approach to that year? because I know we did stuff. We did a season preview series.

We wrote positional power rankings. I don't know if I just like blacked out for a month and a half. I have no. Dan Zimborski. It was a tumultuous time. Yeah. Dan Zimborski was asking me the other day. Perfectly reasonable question to be clear.

This is not a criticism of Dan. But he asked me whether we were going to book Winters. meetings hoping for like the most optimistic, you know, resolution, which would allow us to have winter meetings. And I have no memory of what we did last time. I don't remember if we booked hotels or not. I mean, I don't know. I was like, Dan couldn't rightly tell you what we did. Yeah. And it's funny because they always release information around like the media hotel during the World Series. And I don't remember what they did that year either. Like did they Did they even have us book?

Don't know. Yeah, I think in 2020, when COVID arrived, we had started. We just knew there wouldn't be winter meetings. Yeah, well, we had, oh, well, I'm thinking of the season preview series. We had started it and with the regular format. And then I think we just paused it and interrupted it and then resumed it when we learned when the abbreviated season was going to start. We were in multi-cohost mode at that time, too. So my recollection is muddled further by the fact that I don't.

think I was doing all of those. That's right. Some of them Sam was doing. 2020, I believe what we did was an abbreviated version where we just did division-based previews. Oh, that's, it seems like a real. Because there was such a short time between the lockout being lifted and the start of the season that we just couldn't plan for it.

So maybe we'll have to do something like that again, which would be a shame. Or we could just be optimists and assume that there will be a full or foolish season. And then won't we look silly if there's not. or that will forever be a monument to the season that we lost or that was curtailed, I guess. Anyway, we have time to figure that out. But the season as announced, it's so early. And we've talked about this before and documented how it keeps shifting earlier and earlier and earlier. And it's weird because I remember baseball being an April thing and opening day being in April.

And sometimes it used to be even like mid to late April in earlier eras. and there were fewer teams and fewer games in some of those eras and everything. But, boy, it almost feels unnatural to have the season start that early in March. And then I think, what, the final day of the regular season would be September 26th, I believe. So it's just time shifting the whole season. Yeah. And I guess there are some benefits. I mean, what with the climate warming and just days getting hotter,

I guess it's not the worst thing in the world for the season to start sooner because it'll probably be just as warm as it used to be in mid-April in late March, right? So maybe that makes some sort of sense. And maybe they're just laying the groundwork for further playoff expansion because the early year to start the season. Yeah, that's, I guess that's probably a big part of the, I mean, that's a big reason why it has already shifted this far is that more playoff rounds, more playoff teams. And probably they have designs on even more playoff expansion at some point. Yeah. How early could it go? It's just...

How early can it go? It's weird. I'm all for shorter off seasons, to be clear. I mean, that's the benefit, I guess, is, hey, the regular season starts one day earlier. That's one less day without real baseball, or at least real Major League Baseball. So that's good, I guess. But it does feel odd. maybe it won't feel odd to people who become fans in this era and that's just the norm.

So maybe this is just us dating from an earlier era thinking that this is odd. It's just so early. Here's my concern. First of all, I take your point about the effect of climate change on the game, although what we have seen so far, at least, is that you just end up with a lot of really cold and really rainy opening series, particularly for teams in the Upper Midwest. It feels too early. It feels, I understand shifting it a little bit earlier out of necessity due to playoff expansion.

And I suspect that the potential for further expansion is one of the main motivators here. I do want to take seriously the idea that this is a negotiating tactic on the part of the league. And I suppose there's some marginal benefit to that. But I am skeptical that it is the main tactic here just because of how much earlier into the year we are shifting at this point. I'm doubtful that one, you know, one week is really going to be the maker break between getting a deal done versus not given how last time kind of unfolded. But I'm sure that there's some marginal amount of pressure that can be applied that might be pushing them to go earlier. I take this very personally. Yeah, you have a lot of prep to do for the season.

It's so much work. And what do you, what do my, I mean, here's, here's the, the upshot for our listeners. My bold predictions are about to get so dumb, you know, they're just about to get even dumber than they were. I feel like I tip too far into boldness this time around. It was a worthwhile effort, but ultimately isn't going to serve me well. They're just going to be completely exhaustion-brained by the time we roll around to them. This, this go, if we get what we wanted, I joked about this on blue sky, but I was like, oh, I hope we We don't lose games.

And then the monkey's paw curled. And it was like, how about a March 24th opening day, lady? What are you talking about? What is happening? What do you mean? What do you mean? That's too early. People will barely be home from spring training.

Will the truck have had time to go home for some of these teams? Will the trucks have reached their various destinations? Yeah, I know. And there's a lot of other sports that goes on in March. You're overlapping with a lot of March. with a lot of March madness, obviously, at this point. And some years you have the WBC, which also interferes with people's preparation for the season. And so there's a lot going on there.

What are you doing? It's just creeping earlier and earlier and earlier. I don't care for it. So I think that they should push it back. Oh, it's been fine. It's been fine. No one's complaining. People are still complaining about the weather being cold when they do it, you know, a week later.

Sure. Yeah. What do you? You're always going to have some snow games. And then MLB is not alone in its expansion and playoff expansion. Obviously, there's always talk of that with March Madness. There's talk of that with the World Cup. There's talk of that everywhere.

So those things are going to go on even longer and overlap with MLB more. But, yeah, this is a long-term trend, but it's getting extreme. But again, it's perhaps aspirational to think that there will actually be regular season baseball played on March 24th. Yeah, I think that if we want to engage with reality rather than what the league, the league has to put out a schedule, this is the time of year that they do it, like, I remember, but in all likelihood, I think we'll end up with the best case scenario is we end up with a pretty normally scheduled opening day and we only lose a week and are able to kind of get back on track such that we open when we typically do. Yeah, maybe they're just building in an earlier start time anticipating that it will actually start. later and then it will look more normal when it starts kind of in a regular, regular time historically, traditionally. Maybe.

Yeah. Okay. By the way, some sort of downer news about Shohei Otani that just broke while we were recording this, which is that he is not going to be pitching for the foreseeable future that he was scheduled to start this coming Wednesday. Of course, he had his knee not drained, I guess, but lubricated in the Sunday before the All-Star break. And so he has had his pitching push back. But now it's been pushed back further.

And it's not a day-to-day thing, according to Dave Roberts. Like he's going to pitch at some point, presumably, but they are giving him more of a break, which is a bummer for me, because as I mentioned, Jesse and I are taking Sloan to her first baseball game of any kind, really, other than watching me play softball or something next weekend when the Dodgers are in town to play the Mets. And I thought I had been clever and that we were going to see a show, Hey, Otani pitching, appearance, but that will now not be the case. He'll still play. He'll still do H. Yeah.

That's the thing. Whenever there's some dire prognosis for Shohe Otani as a pitcher, it's like, but don't worry, he's in the lineup. He's leading off and deaching and then, like, hits a home run. It's a home run immediately after whatever that negative piece comes out. So, yeah, it's not good, especially because I feel like we're kind of on a knife's edge with the two-way play where maybe one more serious injury. I'm thinking specifically of an arm injury, so I don't know if a knee, a nagging knee injury.

And I don't know if this is something where he might have to have another knee surgery after the season or something. Part of this is just the Dodgers pacing their players because they want them to be ready for October. They have a 12-game lead in the division. And I'm sure Otani's disappointed because obviously he wants to win a Cy Young, but given Mizorowski and Sanchez, et cetera, that would be tough to do anyway. I guess it also makes it more feasible for Pete Crowe Armstrong to make a real bid for NL MVP if he is able to keep up his offensive pace. And they have to prioritize the health of their rotation and they wanted to round into form in the playoffs. And I'm sure they want him to be pitching in the playoffs. So these games just don't matter as much to the Dodgers.

So I'm sure it matters to Otani and to the people who paid exorbitant prices to take their daughter to their first big league game that might coincide with a Shohei Otani pitching appearance. Sorry, bud. Anyway, hopefully he will be back on the mound at some point this season because he's been pretty impressive there. Yeah. It was always funny. It's like when any other pitcher is sidelined, that's that. With Otani, don't worry, he'll still be playing. He'll still be slugging.

But he just won't be doing his two-way thing. I find it funny that this procedure is apparently referred to as lubricating the knee. Yeah. I did, I mean, normally you're trying to pull. normally with injuries there's stuff in the joint that shouldn't be there sometimes it's the shape

of lima beans or at least the size of them sometimes it's you know it's other fluid you like you can get fluid in your joints in a way that is detrimental right

but his is like does that mean that like bone is rubbing on bone or something like lubricate what does that there must be something like that

what does it mean Ben yeah also lubricating the knee what is he the tin man you know like Yeah, I'm just, I'm just, one of those oil, the cylindrical oil. Yeah, one of those little oil cans and it's like, brit, br, br, br, brer, and then he's like, oh, I'm, I'm good to go again. Yeah.

Anyway, I hope his joints are adequately lubricated, but not over-lubricated. I would like to be able to lubricate the joints in my hands. I'm worried I'm, I'm worried I'm developing some arthritis in my hands a little bit. It's the sort of thing, I'm going to be old for a minute here. Do you ever have the experience where you realize, speaking of pillows, that you, like, slept on a hand funny and then it's, like, busted for a day. Do you ever have that experience? I feel like I have to be, like, purposeful with the placement of my hands before I go to sleep. Because if I, if I sleep with them, like, balled up at all, or, like, if I sleep on them, then I wake up the next day.

And I'm like, oh, I got, I got creaky bones. Yeah. Jesse had that recently just because of, yeah, her sleeping. posture and working posture and that can be tough. It's not necessarily a carpal tunnel, but you could get like a cubital tunnel or something. I had something like this too where you can get it. You know, it's an occupational hazard of writing and editing and maybe even broadcasting, but there are certain poses and if you have your elbow resting on something, it can compress a nerve. And then, yeah, I was having kind of, I think I spoke about this on the podcast or

the bonus pods at some point, I had like an ulnar nerve entrapment or something going on where it was kind of like a tingling feeling in my fingers that has subsided fortunately after some time. But yeah, you have to be careful about those kinds of things. And then I feel like, and then I'm like, I'll like sit there and like like rub like lotion. Yeah. And, oh, man. I don't know about this getting old thing, Ben, you know? Like the work trips have like a more obvious deleterious effect on my body than they used to.

Yeah, especially because of those hazardous pillows and showerheads. I'm just saying, like, you know, what's up? Another thing I resent is that I was reading this story, this MLB.com story about Otani. And MLB is doing this thing now where when I click on an MLB.com story on my phone, it launches in the MLB app. Yes. Yes. I don't want it in the app. I want it.

Right. I just want to read the story. I've talked about this on bonus pods where I'm someone who resents apps being foisted on me. I'll use apps if I need them. But in general, if I can just go to a site and a browser or something, that's perfectly fine. I don't need a dedicated app cluttering up my phone or launching something or taking up resources. And obviously I have the MLB app and it's a good app in a long. lot of ways and I use it regularly for things that I want to use it for, but I don't need to launch

an app. You don't need it for everything. It's there if you want it. It's like there's a fancraft's app. If you want to use the fancraft app to read stories, you can. But you don't have to. Better every day as an side of the app. Yeah, a lot of work going on.

Every single day, I go in there and I'm like, boy, Sean really knows what he's doing. Yeah. But I would be miffed if I tried to click on a Fangraph's post and was taken to the app against my will. And that doesn't happen. So I don't care for this. I'm sure MLB is just, I don't know if you don't have the app installed, does it prompt you to download the app?

I don't know. Maybe they're just trying to juice their counts of users or something. But if you do have the app, then it's definitely imposed upon you. I don't know if there's a setting that you can use to disable this. Hopefully, maybe. I don't resent this quite as much as the fact that the MLB app is now also displaying betting odds. Uh-huh. That at least is optional.

You can turn it off. But, yeah, for now, right? But that's a new innovation that I don't care for. I know this has already been a thing in the NHL app, I think, and, you know, maybe online. But now we're being asked whether we want that displaying. I do not. I do not. Yeah.

Anyway. Anyway. So, Shohei Otani signed long term. A couple other pitchers who are now newly signed long term. Chase Burns of the Cincinnati Reds and Kyle Braddish. all the Baltimore Orioles. So Burns signed last week a seven-year extension. It's $105 million total, which I think it's the fourth biggest contract in Reds franchise history. The three above it also extensions. And this was the biggest for a pitcher with his service time, right,

with fewer than four years of Major League service. And he has a lot fewer than four years of Major League service. And according to our pal Trent Rosecrans, the contract signing was slightly delayed because Reds GM pop quiz, who's the Reds GM? I bet if you're listening and you're not a Reds fan, you may have a hard time calling his name to mind. It's Bradmer. He spilled coffee on the contract and they had to print a new one, which seems like a metaphor for something, but crisis averted. And then Kyle Braddish, who is more veteran, more established, he signed a five-year extension for $90 million. So that'll keep him under contract with the Orioles or whoever has possession of that contract

through 2031. And Burns is maybe the more interesting one here because it's kind of in line with the trend towards young players signing long-term extensions that we talked about last week with JJ Weatherholt and all the others. So as usual, we haven't had a ton of great. opportunities to talk about the Reds this year. But Chase Burns has provided many of them because he's great. Patrick DeBueck and his write-up of this deal at Baseball Perspectus wrote, even beyond the results, the Reds have never really evoked a compelling reason for caring

about the Reds beyond, we're here and so are you, which is, I mean, frankly, it's no lies detected there. This is where the meme of effectively wild not talking about the Reds came from. But Chase Burns is worth talking about, at least. And I do feel bad for him being overshadowed a bit by the Miz and Sanchez and even some of the excellent AL guys, Cam Schlittler, Dylan Sees, etc. Skeens, whoever else. Like, you know, he's a mere 13th in pitching war MLB wide this year. But, boy, he has been fantastic, which has not been a big surprise if you looked at his stuff and his peripherals prior to this year. Because, like, last year he had a 4.57 ERA, but a 2.65 FIP.

If anything, his peripherals were superior last year. Yes, they were better last year than they were this year. And he was throwing even harder last year. He's sitting 98 now to be there. He's pretty impressive and he is just 23. So to the extent that any pitcher is someone to build around, I guess it would be Burns or someone like him. Because a lot of these early career extensions that we've been talking about have been for position players. which is not a surprise.

They are a little less breakable and more dependable. Yeah, that part of it makes this interesting to me less because I think Chase Burns is not worthy of a deal like this. I think, you know, if anything, as Baumann argued when he wrote it up for us, like he seems like he's leaving money on the table here. But I find it interesting given the size of this deal in, not just in absolute terms, but certainly in Reds adjusted terms, that they would choose. to have that kind of a commitment to a pitcher.

You might think that they would try to work this game with one of their poor position players. But I also think that when you have a guy of Burns' talent locked down for seven years, there's something to that for pitchers that I think actually gives you comfort because it's like, well, sure, maybe, and I hope that this does not come to pass for Chase Burns,

but like, hey, maybe he blows out and you lose a year, well, okay, you still get. you have six more, right? Being able to keep him sort of in the fold for that amount of time gives you some amount of comfort that you are going to get good years out of him, even if you lose some to injury. But yeah, Chase Burns is great. He was an exhilarating prospect. I think he's been an exhilarating big leaguer. It's been really exciting to watch him take a step forward from a certainly earned runs perspective. You're right to say that his peripherals were actually a bit better last year. But I think that he's a pretty interesting guy and has, we probably haven't seen

the best version of Chase Burns yet, even. I think it's just always exciting when a franchise that doesn't have a history of spending big, and to Patrick's point, is often present more than it is competitive, is committing to a guy long term who they think is going to be an important part of their fortunes, even in a year where they are, I think, disappointing. Right. Like they have not been able to build so far on their playoff appearance from last year. And they've, you know, they've obviously dealt with some injury. And so there's, you know, there's stuff that helps to explain it. But yeah, they got off to a good start. They had an excellent April, but there was some smoking mirrors going on there. And I think they have the worst record in baseball after April. So. Yeah. So for them to in a year where things are kind of falling apart for them say, yeah, but we think we're going to contend and do it soon. And we want this guy to be a big part of that. I think is exciting. So good for, good for Chase Burns, good for the Reds. I continue to have sort of background anxiety about what the effect of all of these young guys getting pulled out of Arb is going to be for what those salaries look like. So I do think that there is like a longer term sort of labor question to be monitoring here because obviously Chase Burns won't be available as a comp for for other pitchers who come up behind him. But I'm never going to begrudge a guy being a $100 million error, you know, Like, that's, I think that you're well past the point of being too, too concerned about leaving money on the table. I think he, I think we can argue that he definitely did leave money on the table.

But also, he could blow out tomorrow or stink or whatever. So, you know. Yeah. And he was under team control for quite some time anyway because he's young. And, yeah, it would have been, his arbears would have taken him through 2031, which is Braddish is now under team control. through 2031 after the extension. I think he had two years of team control remaining prior to his deal. Burns had many.

And so now this deal, which starts next season, runs through 2033 for him. And then neither of these deals has anything complicated, I guess, no deferrals, no options. Yeah, they're delightfully straightforward. Yeah. So that's nice for people who have to talk and write about him. Yeah. Yeah, I think. So what you were alluding to there about,

maybe we haven't seen the best of Burns. He is a two-pitch pitcher at this point. Right. He's basically four-seamer slider, and clearly that's been enough for him. He'll throw in an occasional change up, or, you know, I guess he technically has thrown something classified as a curveball on rare occasions. But it's not like the hitters are exactly forcing him to expand his repertoire exactly, but that has been in vogue to throw more and more pitches if you are a starting pitcher these days. So maybe at some point he will refine one of those secondary offerings, and that may make him even better.

I don't know. With pitchers, the aging curve speed-wise is often just sort of a linear line down. Right. I hope gradually. But maybe if he is able to perfect some of those other offerings and show hitters that, then that would be good because his strikeout rate is still healthy, but is down a bit. and he's benefited some from a low babbip this year and had a high babbip last year.

So it wouldn't hurt. It would behoove him probably to have a third pitch, at least, that he could count on. I can imagine Chase Burns and his representatives looking around at, say, the trajectory of Spencer Strider's career for exactly the reasons you're talking about and being like, let's lock in this money. Why don't we? Yeah. You know, like there does seem to be, he's protecting downside risk for himself here, even maybe more than you typically. see with these early extensions where when it goes sideways on you and the repertoire is that limited, at least as it's currently constituted, you can be exposed very, very quickly.

It is funny that there has been that trend toward wider arsenals and more expansive pitch pallets at a time when you're not expected to go deep into games. And so you don't actually have to hold something in reserve to show hitters the third or fourth time you face them in the game because you're probably not going to. It helps you go deep. in games if you can give guys different looks, but if you're not even expected to, Chase Burns has average 5.7 innings pitch per start as a very effective starter this year. So it's not like he's going super deep anyway. And would he go any deeper if he did have a great third offering? I mean, probably not very much, right? So maybe it's less essential than it used to be,

even as it's easier to cultivate and pitch design those additional offerings. So that's why everyone's doing it, but maybe there's even less need to do it in some cases. Until you really need it, though, right? I mean, this is the thing about it. Because if, you know, if the fastball velo declines further, if you lose good movement on the secondary, like it can, I want Spencer Strider to be good at baseball rather than feeling like a cautionary tale because increasingly that's what it feels like. Yeah, I hope that's not the case.

But, yeah. So I guess the question is, what do the Reds really have, though, right now? Because so their previous, there are three bigger extensions and contracts in the past, Joey Vado, Ken Griffey Jr., 26 years ago, and Homer Bailey. Right. Right. So you look at them now, they have Burns, they have Ellie. Right.

But they also have one of the worst offenses in baseball, if not the worst. It's basically it's Ellie, Sal Stewart, who has been good since his hot start, but not as hot as he was during his hot start. And then you have sort of the what? J.J. Bladay is doing what kind of out of nowhere season? But the core there, they've had a devil of a time developing hitters. They really have. And so maybe Stewart is something. Ellie is obviously something.

They have Hunter Green. They have the makings of a. really strong rotation. But a lot of those guys at any given time are injured or unavailable. And they don't have a ton of money coming off the books after this year. And they don't spend a ton of money to begin with. And they're already sort of spending a lot for them. And then they're locked into, say, Brian Hayes for the next four years, or at least he's under contract. Right. And then they have this whole group of guys, this sort of lost generation of hitters who looked really promising and then failed to launch for whatever reason.

I know Reds fans have thought that the Reds have been too old school in their hitting approach. And then also they have jerked some guys around positionally speaking at times too. So I don't know. Like they're coming off that last second buzzer beating playoff appearance that didn't last very long last year. And they sort of snuck in as the Mets collapsed. And are they really close to the next one? It's tough to tell. Right.

I've felt pretty bullish about the Reds at times in recent years. But then there has been this stagnation or just injuries on the part of a lot of their starters. And now I don't really know what's there. I don't know. Are they going to be good during the term that Chase Burns just signed for? I have no idea. Yeah. It's an odd spot.

They do have some prospect talent. but it is a pretty light farm system and it'll get lighter when you account for graduations because Sal Stewart has graduated from prospect eligibility. They have Alfredo Dunno down on the farm who were quite high on, but also, yeah, it's not like they have, you know, a super deep group of young Big League Ready guys who you know are going to be game-changing for them. If I had to guess what they hoped was going to happen here was that some of the injured dudes would sort of sort themselves out and present themselves to be healthy and good again, right? And that

hasn't really come to pass in quite the way you would have maybe hoped for. I don't know that it was reasonable to expect that, but it does seem like that was part of the approach here, right? That they were like, well, you know, surely Spencer Steer and Friedel and, you know, Aohenio Suarez has been kind of a dud and Cabrayan Hayes, you know, we can just like, that guy can't hit. He just, everybody, we always want him, we want him to. Yeah. We want him to. Yeah. We want him to hit. hit and then the thing is he doesn't, Ben. No, he doesn't. They have some money coming off.

Like, at least A. Oh, Honey, it was like a one-year deal. So that didn't work, but it made sense to try. And, you know, you're not going to be saddled with an 82 WRC plus forever. So, I don't know. It's an odd. You're right, though. It's an odd group. There's a lot of need.

There aren't necessarily obvious internal candidates to reinforce the weak spots. And you do have to think that. they're going to come up against the upper bound of their payroll at some point here. So I don't know, you know. And it's funny because it's like, it's not like their payroll isn't crazy in league adjusted terms. And they're, you know, almost $100 million away from the first luxury tax threshold. But also it's the Reds. So what are our expectations of what they're going to commit from a payroll perspective?

Yeah. By the way, I was thinking of your deadline talk with. Craig and who's available and who's not and which teams are going to be sellers and all of that. I am pretty fascinated to see where Louisa Ries goes because he seems like a pretty clear candidate to be traded. You would think that, yeah. And the Giants clearly in the, we will be trading guys away more so than trading for them.

And he's a prize, you know? Yeah. Louisa Rice has already surpassed his previous single season high in FanGrafts War. He is, and we've talked about the reasons for that. He's bounced back offensively, but also is now good at defense after putting in a lot of work with Ron Washington. And he's a guy who's moved around a lot and has been traded a bunch. And there's probably going to be another trade on tap for him. So I just, I find him very fun as a spectator.

And it seems like people like him in the clubhouse and everything. But he's a real, you know, when he's been dealt before, it's always been sort of his, his fame outstripped his value. But now, no. Now he's actually going to be one of the most valuable players available, assuming that he can continue to play good defense away from Ron Washington and that that tutelage, just whatever wisdom he is gleaned, does not depart when he departs. Someone's going to want Louisa Rice, I think.

He's going to be a real deadline prize. So I will be watching the Louisa Rice sweepstakes with great interest as well. So the other, I think we can legitimately almost call him a sweepstakes now, not even ironically. He's a very desirable player. Do you think that that reference has the cachet that it once did? Oh, sweepstakes? Sweepstakes, yeah. Maybe not.

If you were to ask a young person, what they think of a sweepstakes, would they have a cultural touchstone for that? Maybe, maybe not. Yeah, I guess we don't do sweepstakes so much. We don't do sweeps week so much. Yeah. Yeah. We have lost that. Well, Ed McMahon's dead now, so that might be part of it. Yeah. It's part of our cultural memory along with mid-April starts to this season.

The other extension for Kyle Bradish, who is 29, even though he has not been established for that long, he got a little bit of a late start. And like Burns has had some injury issues. I mean, he's had injury issues like Shane Baz, who was the other Orioles righte extended earlier this year. Burns just had a flexor strain last year. I don't want to make too much of that. So it's interesting. Everyone wanted the Orioles to spend last off-season, and then they did. But then a lot of people, including us, were like, well, not quite like that, though. And everyone has been urging the Orioles to extend players, too.

And now they are, but it's still kind of like, oh, we didn't mean that exactly. Not that there's anything wrong with extending your off-de-earned. injured starting pitchers too. Sure. But it's not exactly Adley, right? Or Gunner or the guys that were seen as the cornerstones or potential cornerstones of the franchise. So Kyle Bradish has been nails lately. He's been fantastic.

And they were counting on him to be a top of the line, top of the rotation starter, which he was after he returned last year. And it seemed like, well, maybe that's a lot to expect him to replicate that. And he got off to a bit of a rough start, but he has really been on a role. So, you know, good pitcher. But, again, 29 in extensive injury history. So is that really a guy that you can build around? But I guess the Orioles have had all sorts of trouble filling out a rotation. And so they figure, well, let's lock down this guy.

So, you know, he did have a couple years of team control remaining. So you are accepting considerable risk and uncertainty here about the state of his health and arm two years from now. So in theory, they're getting some sort of discount from that, I suppose. So I don't know. You know, we talked about the Orioles very recently and about how they, even though they've played a bit better since that conversation, I think, do kind of seem to be caught in between a little bit, both in the playoff picture this year, long term. What do they actually have with this core? I guess there are some similarities, some commonalities between the Reds and the Orioles, like this promising generation of position player prospects who graduated and then maybe took some steps back or failed to flourish.

So I don't know exactly what the Orioles have, but they do have Kyle Bradish through 2031. I don't just like this on its own. I just continue to find their broader approach. roster building to be kind of confounding. Because you're not, this doesn't, I mean, I guess it changes things sort of long term for them insofar as like, hey, you can

count on having a Kyle Braddish now, but it doesn't change the long term sort of trajectory of the franchise in any appreciable way, I don't think. Right? Like, he was sort of table stakes. What else? What else? What else do you have for me? What do

who else do you have for us? You know, who else do you have for yourselves? I do think we're starting to learn something about the approach that these guys have to thinking about the pitching question, which is like they'd rather trade for than pay necessarily, right? I think we can look to the way that they've chosen to reinforce their roster over time. No, they might trade for and then pay, but, you know, they're not really dipping into the high end of free agency. They'll add the crisp assets of the world, right? but generally, like, they'd rather trade for guys and then if they are excited about them, extend them.

And that's fine if you're pitching development apparatus is churning out guys, but that, we don't quite gotten there, you know? And some of that hasn't been their fault. Like, some of the guys that they were the most excited about and for good reason got hurt. But also, they always seem surprised by injuries. It's like, maybe you should be faulted a little because your planning seems to be predicated on perfection, which you've never experienced. Right? So I don't dislike it. I like Kyle Brash. I think he's a good pitcher. I think wanting him around makes a ton of sense. I don't think that it's such an exorbitant amount of

money that you're like really hamstring yourself, but also, again, what else do you got? What else do you have for me? And what? Yeah. Yeah. The end of that deal is pretty rich. Like that part of it, I'm like, wow, $28 million in 2031. But who knows what my class will even be their jam by then? So what is you care? It's probably true. Yeah. Yeah.

And I guess maybe the time to take a team to task for not signing more extensions is not when they signed someone to an extension. It's okay. It's a step. It's a move in the right direction. But, yeah, they are almost taking kind of like Epstein-era Cubs where it's like we'll develop all the position players and the hitters in-house. And then in theory we will acquire pitchers one way or another.

And the Orioles have certainly attempted to develop pitchers internally. And the Astros under the same of the same executives had some success doing that. Of course, in an earlier era, it's more competitive now because the Astros were, well, putting aside anything nefarious they were doing. They were first-movers, early adopters of a lot of that. But I think that makes sense in theory because you do want to build around hitters. I think all else being equal, I would rather have the foundation of my farm system be hitters. So that's good. But then you do have to go get pitchers and good pitchers.

And the Orioles look, they did get burns and they've made some other moves, but maybe not enough. And the Cubs had all sorts of issues because they just, the cupboard was bare. they were unable to develop anyone really internally. And so, yeah, you can go sign John Lester, but they just never did enough and they just didn't develop any pitching. And that played some part in that potential dynasty, not becoming one, not that winning one World Series

for the Cubs was small beans or something that mission accomplished largely. But still. So if the Orioles are building around hitters, well, first of all, you need to find pitching somewhere. but also you need those hitters to continue to be good. And I guess the Cubs ran into that issue with some of their hitters too, and the Orioles certainly are too.

So ultimately, if they don't get enough of those homegrown hitters straightened out and really being the bedrock of a productive offense, then it's going to be tough for them to contend and fulfill their promise one way or another. And also, there aren't going to be as many guys whom you would want to have under contract long-term. So, yeah, they're sort of stuck, you know, they're two games out of a playoff spot as we speak, but who isn't in the American League? Yeah, I guess that's true. Okay. And the last thing, I was thinking about funny names for tech companies, you know, because I was reading about how the Rangers just are switching streamers to a company called buzzer. It is how you pronounce it.

But of course, with any kind of tech-adjacent company, they're all allergic to vowels for some reason. So you just have to remove all the vowels. It's BZZR. Poob has it for you. Buzzer has it for you if you're the Rangers and at least some of their games now are streaming on this new platform called Buzzer.

And so, you know, some people are upset about that. They have multiple ways to watch games because that's the case with everyone these days. You have to watch seven different networks and streaming services if you want to watch all your team's games. And the Rangers are swapping Victory Plus for Buzzer with no notice here just sort of mid-season. So some fans are upset about that and, oh, I paid for this,

and now I have to do that, and where do I even find this thing? And also, at least temporarily, Buzzer was presenting games with a Twitch. style real-time chat on the screen. So, like, as you're watching Rangers games, you're seeing other viewers and Rangers fans, like posting messages on the side of the screen, which people were not sure whether you could disable that

or opt out of that. And so this is hell. Why would I want to be subjected? I guess the idea is, it'll be like a hangout. It'll be like a sports bar. But no, I mean, first of all, hopefully they're moderating that thing,

or it's going to be the worst. stuff you've ever seen. Oh, no. I would not enhance my experience, my viewing experience personally. So it's been a bit of a bumpy changeover to buzzer. And I hope that the at least mandatory real-time Twitch chat while you're watching a game, I mean, this is stuff that, like, if people have looked up illicit streams at any point, which, you know, not that I'm saying that I have or would ever endorse such a thing,

I am an MLB TV subscriber, sir. But often those sort of shady sites will have something like that, some kind of interface where people are saying stuff or at least like bots are or who knows. So I hope that doesn't catch on. But I was thinking about names like buzzer because I was reading about the Dodgers tech incubator, tech accelerator, Dodgers associated VC investing arm. at a newsletter called FOIA, that's FOIA, as in Freedom of Information Act. And FOIA, which is written by David Kavucci, it typically concerns college sports. And the whole idea is like, let's look at these public documents, which you can often get for college programs and find out how much they're paying for things and or people and expose some of this stuff that's usually behind the scenes. but there was a baseball post earlier this month,

or at least loosely baseball adjacent, because it was talking about how much college sports programs spend on laundry detergent because they spend a fortune on this stuff, which you can understand because, you know, players get dirty, uniforms get dirty. They have to have all that stuff looking crisp and clean. And so, you know, it's industrial strength

and industrial quality and quantity. And they're using this. stuff, at least some of them, using this stuff called Renegade, Sweat, X, Max, odor defense with nano-vasive technology. It's high-tech laundry detergent. And, you know, they're getting, like, giant drums of this stuff and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it over the

course of a season. And this related to the Dodgers, because Renegade is something that the Dodgers invested in because it was a startup. And this is like more than 10 years ago. This is like 2014-ish. The Dodgers partnered with this advertising agency called RGA to launch an incubator for startups, which were sort of sports adjacent, you know, operating at the intersection of technology and sports. And then it expanded from there. And they launched this thing called Global Sports Venture Studios, which is partly RGA, this advertising agency, and the Dodgers. And so the connection was that, hey, the Dodgers are doing this thing that maybe most other

teams aren't doing. Not saying that most teams could not afford to do something like this, but Mark Walter, Dodgers owner, you know, they're VC people, right? And if anything, like the Dodgers, they have more money. they have more resources and institutional advantages, but they're also quite good at maximizing those advantages, I think, and using their money to make even more money. And so I don't know that the other 29 teams don't have some sort of investment arm

or that they couldn't. These are all billionaires, right? And so they probably could do this. But maybe they don't come from that world or they're not as in bed with those kinds of companies, right? venture capital and everything. And so they have applied that and used some of the Dodgers financial medal and might and Walters as well to seed all of these tech sports startups.

And they've been doing this for a while. And who knows how much money they've made from this. So I was corresponding with David, the author of FOIA ball, because I was trying to see like the complete list of companies that the Dodgers have invested in. because this global sports venture thing e-mig that the Dodgers and RGA have been investing in, there's a full list, a portfolio of companies that's like almost 200 of them on that website. And some of them, a lot of like pet companies and things that sound like jokes, they sound like fake 30 rock kind of tech companies and like dystopian stuff

and the weirdest names you could ever imagine. And I was thinking, man, there's so many of these, like, maybe we do a full episode draft of, like, weird companies that the Dodgers have invested in. But before I proposed that, I did check with the Dodgers to say, like, have the Dodgers invested in all of these companies that are listed on this website? Would that be accurate? And no, in fact, it appears that the Dodgers have not invested in all of the, like, you know, disrupting dog food or whatever companies. But they did point me to this other website, this other investing arm which grew out of this initiative and also goes back years called Elysian Park. Okay. Presumably named after Elysian Park, the actual park in L.A. and neighborhood where Dodger Stadium is located.

Though, as a non-L.A. native, when I first saw that, I thought of Elysian Fields in Hoboken, the famous grounds where many teams play. played in the 19th century, including a lot of teams from Brooklyn, former home of the Dodgers, except that almost all the games that were played at Elysian Fields were amateur baseball games. As I talked to Thomas Gilbert about recently when I had him on to discuss his book about James Creighton, this is the furthest thing from amateur baseball. This is the antithesis of amateur. This is a professional money-making venture through and through. But there is a list, Elysian Park, and this is the sort of Guggenheim-Walter Dodgers adjacent, mostly sports-related tech startup companies.

And if you go to Elysianpark.Ventures, and I will link to this, there is a list of companies that they have invested in, some of which have been spun off or acquired or whatever, more than 70 of them. And I sent you this list, and I asked you to just skim through it to look for any funny names, your favorite, funny, stereotypical, company kind of names. And I'd say that full list that the Dodgers didn't invest in all of them, even funnier, even weirder.

And I will link to that too for people to peruse at their leisure. But these, these 72, I think, companies that are currently listed on this page, all that have accepted some money from the Dodgers, maybe returned some money to the Dodgers, like Renegade, the high-tech laundry disruptor or whatever, has paid dividends for the Dodgers as well. So anything stand out to you. And there are some companies here that everyone would know and some that no one ever would have heard of and some that are pretty surprising to be here. But there's definitely a handful that feel like some sort of, you know, Silicon Valley, the sitcom, if you were coming up with a joke name for some kind of tech sports company that

this is what you would choose. Yeah. Okay. So I have a couple here. Yeah. The first is Fitter, which is spelled F-I-T-T-R. Fitter is a leading tech-enabled community-first health and fitness platform that connects millions of users with hundreds of certified coaches and nutritionists in India to help them lead a healthy and fit life. Yeah, interesting. In India, is that because they work cheaper there? Well, and it's like, is the target audience for Fitter folks in India? Because, you know, huge population.

Sure, yeah. Presumably interested in community-based solutions to health and whatever. And of course, fitter. They didn't drop the I to their credit. No. So they're not that allergic to all vowels. They just, they did drop the E though. E.

Yeah. They'll make you fitter, but no E. Yeah. Then we have, I think it's supposed to read as gamers, but it is spelled G-A-M-U-R-S. Yes. And it's all caps. The gamers group is the leading e-sports media network and a growing contender in the entertainment space.

Yes. I've never heard of you before now, so I'm skeptical. As a gamer with an E, I have heard of gamers with a U. And yet it is very e-sports related, but also kind of like acquiring websites and kind of turning them into content mills kind of sort of stuff, lots of layoffs and quotas and bad working conditions and, you know. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah.

So there's, yeah, it's fun. Like there's some companies that seem worthy and good here. And then there's some that are quite dystopian and bad. But yeah. Then we have, and this is not too few vowels, but arguably too many. We have Jupiter, which is J-O-O-P-I-T-E-R. Jupiter is a digital first auction house and content platform founded by Frall Williams, building a space for today's collectors, curators, and creators.

Yep. Jupiter. Everybody doesn't need to be a creator, okay? Like, I don't understand. It's a consumer-based economy, and you want everyone to be creating things. What's up with that? You know, like, let people just. Some people can just be consumers.

It's okay. Yeah. I mean, surely you want everyone to fall into at least that category, but you want them to be creators to. Sometimes people just are tired at the end of the day. Then there's, this one I'm confused by Love B? Yes. I was wondering about this one too. Yeah.

It's one volleyball league for youth, for pro. What? For life. Yeah. For pro? Yeah. I don't know how it's for youth and for pro. Yeah.

Are they pro youth volleyball players? Also, wouldn't it be for pros? I guess there's a youth component but also a professional component. Also, is it supposed to be love pronounced love be? I don't know. Yeah. The logo. I think it stands for League one volleyball, but I don't know if like, like, is loved to be.

Unintelligible. And also the logo, the B is melting weirdly. Right. This is the part of it that's so confusing. Yeah, the L-O-V look like regular font or just capital letters. And then half of the B looks like it's in the same type script. But then the other part of the B is like ascending from the B somehow so that you can't actually. I wasn't sure whether it was a B at first.

Right. I'm not sure. Is it supposed to look like an E because they want you to think it's love? but then it's love, but it's love. Right. And it's confusing because for a lot of these

where the font of the logo might be introducing confusion about what it's supposed to say, the company name is then restated in the little description of what it is,

but not in the case of this. Oh, I missed two that were funny to me earlier. One is Factory Lab, F-T-R-Y, Lab. L-A is capitalized because it is an LA-based footwear prototyping lab and venture studio.

Yes. Yes. It's F-C-T-R-Y. Why? Is it like, is the idea that we're so efficient that we don't need the A and the O because you can just say it and it's, I mean, really, it would be like factory. Right. But it's like, you know, we're disrupting whatever, LA-based footwear, and so we're disrupting

spelling as well. We just, l-lab. Vowels optional. Yeah. And then the other one I wanted to know is right before that one in this list. And it's fanaply, I guess. Finaply. Yeah, NFT stuff.

F-A-N-A-P-L-Y. NFTs. Remember NFTs? That was hilarious. People were like, well, they were going to be the best. And I was like, I think this is pretend. And then it seems like it's mostly been pretend, you know? Yep.

Yep. Yeah. And there are a lot on here. Some that you would know, like sports tech stuff, like Diamond Kinnetics. or, you know, other things that provide data that probably has been cited on the podcast at some point. Synergy's on here. Synergy Sports, yeah, pitch vision, which is a cricket company. Yeah, but there's, I like drive box, which is, yeah, it's a mobile golf simulator that offers lessons, practice sessions, virtual golf, and private events.

But it's a Y, V, it's D-R-Y-E-E-E. B-O-X. So it can't just be drive, like a golf drive. It has to be drive, D-R-Y-V-E, for whatever reason. But there is stuff on here like Draft Kings. The Dodgers or this arm of the Dodgers invested many millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars into draft kings, which, you know, no conflict of interest there, I guess. But it's just, anyway, this is one of the things when people complain about the Dodgers and their resources and everything. They do have this whole investment arm, which, again, it's not as if only the Dodgers could do this. And there may very well be other teams and franchises that are doing this.

But they are beyond baseball, just a big business in a lot of ways. And so people don't even realize the money that they are spending and the rewards they are reaping from this sort of stuff, this kind of baseball adjacent side business that they're going. There's another one steazy. Steasy. I could give people a million guesses, and they'd probably never guess that steazy creates online dance classes with the world's best instructors. Steasy. Steasy.

Yeah, which sounds sleazy, or I don't know if it's supposed to be a play on like stees, like style or I don't know what that has to do with dancing, but makes my skin crawl a little. There's also one called Tap with three P's, TAPPP, which helps media consumer products and sports wagering clients drive customer acquisitions, transactions, engagement, and retention. Whatever that means. What does that mean? I don't know. And I don't want to know. There's a lot of word salad happening here, a lot of business speak. And also, yes, some surprising one.

You message me when you notice that UCB uprights citizens brigades. The comedy company is on here. I don't know what that has to do with sports or all this other tech adjacent stuff. But yeah, some surprises. Anyway. Maybe they're there to teach the baseball players how to be genuinely funny. Yeah. Did we think about that?

Did we consider that as a possibility? They have some work to do. If so, I don't know that they have done so. But I rented on a recent bonus pot about how all the logos are blue, all the apps are blue. Everything on all of these on this website for Elysian Park. Everything is blue. Every single, I guess maybe if you go to the actual companies, all their actual logos aren't blue, I don't know, I didn't check. But on this website, every single thing is blue.

So, yeah, there's a ton of blue when it comes to tech. But maybe that's Dodgers, though it doesn't look like Dodger blue to me. So if that's what they were going for, I'm not sure. Yeah, it's a different blue. It's a different blue. Okay. Well, before we feel blue about all of this, we can stop yapping. That will do it for today.

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And you can check the show notes in the podcast posts at Fangraphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we've cited today. Thanks to Shane McKean for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with an episode soon-ish. I can't record from the courthouse, but we will do our best to bring you another episode soon. a wall. Funstrap on my head will then listen to people talk.

I want to hear about baseball with new ones and puffian stats. Yeah, yeah. Don't want to hear about pitcher wins or about gambling eyes. Only want to hear about my child have the viticles. And the texture of the hair on the arm going out of one's eyes. Rose, give me a fakely wild. Give me, give me, give me a fake to be wild. This is the fact of the wild.