Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2526: How Ballpark Sound Got Both Better and Worse

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley announce an upcoming livestream and then react to the semi-surprising sale of the Angels by Arte Moreno to Stan Kroenke, considering the significance of the sale price, the outlook for the franchise, the legacies of Moreno and Mike Trout, and what the sale might portend for CBA talks. Then (43:16), in the wake of recent reporting and discussion about the volume level at games, they talk to stadium acoustics expert Jack Wrightson of design firm WJHW about how stadium sound systems are simulated and constructed, how they’ve evolved, the sonic environments of baseball and other sports, how team preferences and practices vary, fan noise vs. PA noise, sound on the field vs. sound in the stands, why ballparks are sometimes too loud, and much more, plus (1:37:59) a few postscript follow-ups. Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio interstitial: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Patreon registration Link to FG on the Angels sale Link to The Athletic sale article 1 Link to The Athletic sale article 2 Link to Trout quotes Link to mayor quotes Link to 2023 attendance Link to 2026 attendance Link to Moreno on fan preferences Link to Kroenke wiki Link to Moreno wiki Link to Paine on Moreno Link to new Angels park item Link to froyo fraud article Link to sale-price bubble analysis Link to WJHW “about” page Link to WJHW ballparks page Link to Jack’s WJHW bio Link to latest loudness article Link to loudness article 2 Link to loudness article 3 Link to loudness article 4 Link to loudness article 5 Link to sound level meter wiki Link to loudness wars wiki Link to Langs post 1 Link to Langs post 2 Link to EW on Yandy and ABS Link to Tango on Yandy Link to Tango on the Rays Link to more Tango on the Rays Link to Jade on Skubal Link to new Plot Hole or Not Hole  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

Anything is fair game, even key case dirty pants. And maybe if you're lucky, we'll co-call by the chance. You never know precisely where it's going to go. By definition, effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 25, 26 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of FanGraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lindbergh, the ringer Ben. in a post-Ardy Moreno world.

Oh, yes, I have much to say about that world in a moment. But at the top, we want to tease a live stream that we are doing this weekend for our Patreon supporters. Yes. We promised a regular season live stream for the first time ever this year as part of our restructuring. And there's not a lot of regular season left. So we are seizing the moment.

And this Saturday, we will be live streaming for our Patreon people. our patrons, some might say, on Saturday. This is Philly's Braves. We are going to be yapping during. And this is a 605 Eastern start. It's a long weekend in the U.S. Hopefully people will be available if they care to join. You can sign up now and still be on board.

Just join any tier and you can get access to this live stream, which will be conducted in the Discord group, as always. you can just hang out, listen to us while the game's going on, chat with us, have us answer your questions, et cetera. And I'm sorry that we're missing Friday, because Friday is a truly sexy starting pitcher matchup. I teased a couple of weeks ago that we were going to have this showdown of Chris Sale and Jacob Mizorowski. Well, this Friday, there is a showdown between Chris Sale and an actual lefty, Christopher Sanchez. So that's exciting. But I will be doing some travel on Friday.

Probably a lot of people will be doing some travel on Friday with the long weekend. And we want to give people a little more notice as well. So Saturday, we will settle for Zach Wheeler going for the Phillies and Martin Perez going for Atlanta, which is, I mean, sorry, no offense to Martin Perez, but a little less exciting perhaps than Chris Sale. But nonetheless, there are playoff implications to this series as we speak. the Phillies are just three games behind the Braves. They could make things interesting in that division race. Regardless, could be a playoff preview, playoff teams, a lot of interesting storylines and players to talk about. So we hope that you will sign up if you are not already a Patriotransporter.

Of course, we do multiple playoff live streams. We do. So if you sign up now for September, the tail end of September, then you can also just stay as supporter and get access to the couple of playoff live streams. that we will do, but this will just wet your appetite for those. So this Saturday, 605 Eastern 305 Pacific, Braves, Philly's Patreon Discord group, be there with us. It will be fun. We look forward to it. We also look forward to an interview that we will be conducting on this episode.

We've talked a ton lately about the noise level in ballparks, and there has been a lot written about it lately, and we have lamented it. and we've also wondered about it. And so we're wondering no more because we went straight to A-Source, an expert source, one of the leaders in the field. And we will be talking to Jack Ritzen,

who is the director at WJHW, which is a leading company that for decades has done design work for sports stadia and MLB ballparks and acoustics and audio video technological systems and solutions has worked on from the sound of it most MLB ballparks. And so Jack knows of what he speaks

and can clarify a lot of this to us. Why is it so loud in a lot of ballparks? And just how does sound design work at sporting events? It's actually quite interesting. We have already discussed this with Jack and I even like listening to the sound of his voice. And we learned a lot from this conversation as I hope everyone else will too.

And I think this will, explain how much thought goes into the soundscape at sporting events and also how sometimes things can go wrong from a sonic perspective. And perhaps the noise levels are a little beyond what we would like or even what Jack would like. And it does kind of come down to a ballpark by ballpark team by team basis. So we'll have a lengthy, substantial, edifying conversation that will set us all straight on sound at games. But before all that, we do have to discuss

one Artie Moreno, soon to be former MLB owner, because we have a stealth franchise sale. This kind of took us by surprise a little bit because Artie had dangled the angels a few years ago and had openly put them on the market and seemed not to find the offer he was looking for or had second thoughts and cold feet

and decide to hang on to the team. Didn't even know that it was still on the market in an active sense, but we have a sale. And who else bought the Angels? But Stan Cronkey, probably the number one person you would maybe suspect, I guess, because he already owns every other sports team. So why not add an MVP team to the collection? So, yeah, the Artie era is almost over. Wow. I am thrilled for Angels fans.

I will say not to make this about me, but to briefly make it about me, I don't know how I feel about going from as a Tempe taxpayer helping to fund Artie Moreno's spring training operation to being a Tempe taxpayer who's also a Seahawks fan helping to fund the Rams owner's spring training operation. It's not the worst arrangement as these things go, honestly. But good business to be in having a baseball team. We should talk about both the Angels piece of this, which is the most directly relevant, but also sort of try to read some of the tea leaves here because my first thought when I heard the news was not, wow, by Artie. That was my second thought. My first thought was, huh, sure seems like people still think this is a good business to be getting into. Do it?

Or to be getting out of, I guess, if you want to interpret it that way. But I wouldn't. So, yes. Yeah, I mean, we can definitely talk about the financials here to the extent that we are aware of them. This is a $4 billion sale price, which just barely trumps the recently concluded Padres sale, another California team changing hands here, which reminds me very much of when Scott Boris or some other agent will clearly. try to tack on just a little extra to a player's contract, just so they can say that it's a record contract.

Not that a tenth of a billion dollars is a rounding error or anything, but it's just, is it a coincidence that this was for and the Padre's sale was 3.9? I kind of doubt it. I think everyone always likes to say that it is unprecedented. It's a record sale or valuation. So the Padres sale held that title for a matter of weeks, I suppose, before this one comes in here. And Cronky, of course, owns really a name a league, and he owns a team in it.

So especially in North America, but not exclusively. So, yeah, the Rams of the NFL, the Nuggets of the NBA, the avalanche of the NHL, MLS, he has a team, the Colorado Rapids, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League. Arsenal, of course, of the Premier League, could have led with that maybe. English Women's Super League. WFC. He has a team everywhere. In some cases, in fact, they have to resort to kind of accounting trickery because he owns too many teams because the Nuggets and Avalanche, technically the owner is his wife and Walton, Cronke, of the Waltons, the Walmart fortune, of course, right? Because there are NFL rules that forbid team owners from having

teams in other markets. So it's a couple's affair, right? Anyway, that's a, uh, where a lot of his fortune comes from the Walton fortune, but then also real estate development. So he has a huge portfolio of sports franchises, and I guess MLB was the one bobble missing from his Big Four collection. And Artie cashes out. This is what he bought the team mid-2003, I think, that went through for $183 million, right?

And despite his best efforts, obviously, the asset has appreciated. And of course, there's always opportunity cost. If you're a rich person, you could invest in any number of things that would have compounding returns and you could just put it in the market and it would have been a lot and inflation and all the rest of it. So it's not quite as remunerative as it might seem like based on those surface numbers. But Artie's doing just fine, even though he was one of the worst owners in MLB. That sale price doesn't even take into consideration profits he might have realized over the course of his ownership, right?

Yeah. So you're right that there's expense and obviously he went through stretches where he was really leading the charge for big payrolls outside of the sort of major markets we associate with that. But he did quite well for himself here. I do find it interesting that he got to a point where he was. was just ready to be done. Is this the only one of the teams with a concentrated cell, the team effort that we have actually seen go to sale? Yeah, it is, right? Because obviously, the A's haven't changed hands. Bob nutting is still nutting away. It did feel like the fan dissatisfaction had sort of reached a boiling point this year and was

much more public and consistent, perhaps emboldened. perhaps emboldened by the efforts of other fan bases to try to make their displeasure with their ownership group known. This is going to be fascinating, you know. The new owner is not one that has shied away from investing money in his various clubs, which doesn't mean that that will continue forever. And, you know, as Ben Clemens noted, and here I'm skipping ahead a little bit, sorry, this is just the most interesting part of it.

Because the Angels as like a baseball team, you know, this is a momentous thing and is going to be important and also isn't going to change their immediate fortunes all that much, right? Like the degree of work that that franchise has to do to revitalize itself and sort of catch up to some of the franchises around the league that we think of as being sort of marquee teams. They have they have a lot of work to do, you know, whether they have access to big payroll or not, they're behind in a number of ways. So it's also interesting to me that right before this sale got announced, like the day before they, the team announced sort of some really significant restructurings up and down the org, which changes to their scouting

department in their front office. And it's like, oh, is any of that going to hold? Like, you're a new owner coming in. The degree to which this changes anything for them in, say, 2027 or maybe 2028 to cite our next normal anticipated league year. I don't know that it really does. It's going to take some time for them to hire new people and install new systems and do internal assessments of the prospects they do have. How many of them could fare better under a regime with better player development. There's all sorts of real baseball work absent the payroll question.

that this club has to do. But it's interesting to me that, you know, a guy who has exposure primarily to capped leagues wants to get into this business, which, you know, maybe, maybe that's an indication that he thinks that the league will prevail in its battle against the union this offseason and he's getting in at a time when those franchise values will continue to explode. Or maybe like we can look around at the sales that have happened in. in the last, you know, two years and appreciate that for all the leagues sort of hemming and crying about the state of franchise values,

all of these teams have sold for way more than was anticipated based on, say, what Forbes has as their estimates. And, you know, some of them have been big marquee franchise has been noted the infusion of capital from Apollo as a minority stake into the Yankees, which far exceeded this majority stake. But, you know, not all of them,

the literal angels just set a majority stake franchise sort of record and that's for a club that is laughing stock might be too strong but not by much. So it's a fascinating sort of move both for what it means for, I keep wanting to say Los Angeles, but maybe the first thing he'll do

is change it back to Anaheim. Like embrace it, you know? I wonder. Embrace where you're from, you know? And the one hand, if you can convince people that it really is a Los Angeles team, then I guess maybe that makes it more valuable. You can't, you can't, you can't do that.

You can't do that. Disney is right there. Yeah, it is largely a fiction. It's just, yeah, I saw people comparing the sale to other sales in major markets like that or lumping in Anaheim with L.A., and despite the branding, I don't think we can quite do that. Now, you could look at, say, the Minnesota Timberwolves just sold it. a $4.5 billion valuation.

And here are the Angels for $4 billion. If you want to say the owners are making money hand over fist, but think they could make money hand over other body parts, I don't know, even more money if they got a capital league. Well, that might be true. Maybe they would get even more appreciation, but they are doing just fine, I think, even if you do want to compare across sports like that. And looking at Artie's return here. And, of course, he just did not cover himself.

in glory. It's not like a sidler situation where Peter Sadler really just turned that franchise around and invested more in it. And Artie, of course, he wasn't one of the biggest cheapskates in MLB when it came to the player payroll. And it was more an issue of how he spent that money or how his lieutenants spent that money. Sometimes it was tough to tell which was which. But at least early on, he had a decent reputation. And yeah, the Angels were coming off of their 2002 title, though they weren't great the year that he bought the team. And they continued to be competitive for the first decade or so of his ownership.

And then a lot of the big deals went south and Hamilton and pooholes and all the rest. And then he did become kind of a cheapo when it came to investing in other important aspects of the franchise, whether it was minor league nutrition and player development and sending broadcasters on the road or Spanish language broadcast, just everything you could think of. There was always some sort of nickel and diming going on there. In addition to all the meddling, and he was notorious for stepping into engineer moves

or prevent people from making moves. And then all the even more unsavory stuff, of course, the whole Tyler Skaggs affair, and that case, and then the FBI investigation of the deal with Angel Stadium and the parking lots and everything that led to, to the mayor of Anaheim resigning. Don't forget the fro, yo. Yeah, I mean, there was so much, right, that set Artie's tenure apart. Actually, I saw that the new mayor, the current mayor, not the one

who resigned, did express some hope that the name would change. She said, Orange County is its own unique fan base and the residents of Anaheim have been behind this team in good times and in bad. Call me superstitious. But if the only time you won a World Series is when you have Anaheim in your name, it's probably time to start rethinking calling us Los Angeles. And also, the only time they won a World Series is before, already bought the team. Maybe that's not a complete coincidence either. He did nothing really to make this a successful organization other than footing some bills early on. And yet, he's walking away with $4 billion to show for it. So there's really no way that you can fail as an MLB owner. Failure is all relative, even if you failed a

maximize your return, you're still doing just fine. Yep. It's a good business to be in. And, you know, that isn't to say that, like, the future is completely set or that there aren't challenges. Like, the changing broadcast landscape still presents headwinds and all that stuff. But time and again, lately, we are getting examples of folks with a lot of business acumen being like, this is a business that I want to be in. And here we are with new, with new ownership. I want to wonder if he'll fix the lights at Diablo. I know they can't play night games at Tempe Diablo because the lights aren't up to MLB standard.

Maybe that'll be his first order of business. We're just going to hear so many more stories about how bad things were with Artie. That's the other part of this that I'm not, I'm not reveling in because I do want to say that, like, you know, there's a lot about the angel situation that has been kind of darkly funny over the years and like the lights being bad at Tempe Diablo. was one of them and the froyo. Look, I'm never going to forget the froyo. The froyo. Remember when they got defrauded by a fake French friot company? Say that five times fast.

But there were like bad human baseball costs, some of which you just highlighted to this organization's time. Not all of those are directly Artie Moreno's fault, to be clear, but did happen under his leadership. And I imagine that we are going to get a weird blend. a strange soup of like very funny and also like actually sad stories. Or it's just like, this is how you wanted to run a club that employs human beings that have to eat and pay rent. Like, really, dude? So there's that. But we're going to have some stories now you guys.

But we're going to hear some stories. Finally, the dirt will come out about Artie Marino. Had such a spotless. Sam Blum's going to get back on the Angels Beach. It's going to have so many tips. What else is going to do? Sam has never entirely left the Angels Beat. He's wide-ranging, for sure.

He's done a lot of other excellent stories, but he still keeps a toe in the Angels saga. So I do think even though you're right, it would be tough to turn around the Angels overnight. I think it's got to be good news because Crunky is going to be seemingly the richest MLB owner, even wealthier than Steve Cohen. Now, I don't know.

You can't trust Forbes valuation. of billionaires and we're talking about 23 billion versus 24 it's all imaginary money at that point it's all on paper and who the heck knows right there's wiggle room to be had margin for error abounds yes but he he's very rich even by billionaire standards even by sports owner standards yeah and his teams have had a lot of success and recent

success i mean they've won championships in just about every league that he owns teams in and uh he's a billionaire there's a lot you could dislike about him. On a personal level or professional level, he was involved in the whole European Super League saga a few years ago that crashed and burned. He tends not to be very visible despite owning every franchise.

You know, people call him silent stand, right? Because he just doesn't give interviews that often. Neither did Artie, for that matter. And when he did, you kind of got a sense of why he tended to stay quiet or at least why maybe that actually benefited him. But there's already some buzz about a new ballpark. Angel Stadium is one of the oldest and not one of the nicest. And so that could help just investing in the roster again,

because they have had some hesitation when it comes to spending toward the top of the market lately. Not that they've been running among the lowest payrolls, but they usually haven't been the high bidders for the most desirable free agents lately, maybe because Moreno had been burned by some of the investments that didn't work out in the past. And obviously, the farm system has been a smoking crater for much of the latter part of his tenure. And he'll just always be attached to you had Trout and Otani and you could not make the playoffs. And you could mostly not field competitive teams with those two.

even if the actual years when they were both healthy and fully operational were more limited than you'd think, still, that's certainly a stain on your record. So getting a guy like that who has a ton of money to spend, has a track record of spending, not that fans of all of his teams, I'm sure Nuggets fans would have some choice words about Stan Cronkey. But nonetheless, guy's 79 years old and has tons of money and probably is in it to win it in the near to medium-term future, right? This isn't like a long-term kind of asset for him, most likely. I mean, you never know. Billionaires, they might be. My grandma was like, she got a new roof and it came with a 30-year warranty and she's like,

so a lifetime warranty then. Right. No. Billionaires, you never know what they might be doing when it comes to life extension and injecting the blood of the young or who knows what they think. Maybe they think they'll never die. But no, probably, maybe he'll have sort of an Illich-esque, Illich senior, not the current Illich desire. Yeah, Mike, not Chris, desire to win. Not that the Tigers did win under Mike Illich, but they won. They didn't win the World Series, but they won a lot of other games. They were a good team. They were a competitive baseball team. Exactly. Right. So that can only bode well, I think. And again, Artie has set the bar.

pretty low. So it's not hard to be better than he was. And I would just like to remind him that, like, you know, you have this vast portfolio of sports teams. And if you think, can I call him, Stan? Can I, is that too familiar if I call him Stan? Stan, I just want you to think that if, think about it. And if you decide that Aaron Donald playing for the Angels rather than the Rams is the way you need to go to revitalize that franchise, look, people are going to doubt you. But you're so smart, you know, you're just like such a smart man. Just put him out there. He could catch probably, right? Like, he's so strong. Betty Hayden a home run. This is about me being terrified of the Rams defensive line. I just, I know that you're, you're not in the weeds on that. And it's like many weeks away for me in the NFL schedule,

but I do think about it at 3 a.m. Yep. Yep. So we'll see what this means for the Angels capacity to recruit top talent and good leadership. And will John Moseilak, be more likely to stay on or will Kronky want to bring in someone else? And yeah, how quickly can they rebuild? Do they try to take the quick E path and just invest in free agents and try to get good quickly? Or do they do some sort of tear down, which Artie was always reluctant to do, which in a sense was to his credit to an extent that he didn't want to be bad and terrible. And usually the angels weren't until recently. They had never really bottomed out.

They'd never been truly terrible. They'd never lost 100 games. Now they have. But, you know, for a while there, they were kind of respectably bad. And I wonder whether that will change quickly or whether it'll be more of a, well, not a long-term project, but let's not totally rush and botch this. So we'll see. We'll probably be able to tell fairly quickly or we could if this would be a normal offseason.

And of course, this transaction probably won't close and be completed until I think the first quarter of next year is the estimate. So there might be a little handover period where you can immediately tell what the difference is. But it is still a landmark day. And one more notoriously terrible owner out of the mix in MLB, I guess that can't be a big. bad thing. And the other time when already made headlines when he did give one of his rare interviews, and we talked about this then, when he said that winning was not in the top five for Angels fans. Remember, he was saying they want affordability, they want safety, they want a good experience at the ballpark. And of course, that didn't play well, but he had a point to some

extent, I guess. Not that there aren't Angels fans who would really want to win, but we talked about this before, how the angel's attendance seems extremely insensitive to the results of the team. And we've marveled at this before, and we've talked about it before. And it seems to be because of the location and the proximity to Disney. And it just draws some looky-lose and you're in the area and, hey, why not go to a ballgame? And so, despite the team being terrible for some time and kind of terrible in a just hopeless, depressing way, at least for the past couple years, their attendance really hasn't slipped at all. It's just, it's mystifying.

It used to be better, though. They used to be like a top 10 attendance team, and now they're comfortably outside of that. It's true, yeah, in very recent years. Very recent years. But it took a long time for that attendance to atrophy. Yeah, and even comparing, say, 2023, when they still had Otani in an MVP season, and even though they weren't good, They were at least in quasi-contention. They were close enough that they actually added at the deadline,

and then they did that whole waiver maneuver, right? But, you know, they weren't entirely, totally out of it. That year, with Otani and all the rest of it, they had 32,600 fans per game, which was 12th in MLB. This year, no Otani, no real competitive aspirations that anyone would have believed. Their 13th in MLB at 32,000 3,000 3,000. They're down fewer than 300 fans per game, despite no Otani, no real hopes of being good, an additional couple years of being bad and hopeless. It's just, I guess maybe that says something about why the team would sell for $4 billion.

I mean, it seems like there's some revenue there that's pretty baked in where even with one of the worst owners and worst teams in recent years, they still did. did decently. I mean, how many teams could just subtract Shohei Otani a huge draw and continue to be bad and not feel that at all, really, when it comes to ticket sales? The mouse plays, man. That's the thing about it. It's the mouse. It's not all the mouse, but the mouse doesn't hurt. Or maybe it's all Mike Trout. Maybe it's all just Mike Trout. What does Mike Trout think about this?

Well, I can tell you, because he was asked. And this was one of my first thoughts, okay, does this mean that maybe finally Trout could turn the page? If he does have some personal loyalty to Artie Moreno, which he seemed to, then might the franchise changing owners be the license, the permission structure for Trout to say, okay, I stuck it out long enough. I can go to the Phillies or something if they'll have me. No, it doesn't sound like his commitment to the Angels has weakened at all. He was asked about this, whether he has any desire to leave the angels or whether he'd be asking Cronky for a trade. He said, not at all. I got four years left on my deal.

He said, I'm excited. He said, the track record, it's there, referring to Cronkey's other teams. So super excited to meet him and talk to him and get to know him a little bit and see where it goes. The only negative thing he said in reference to Moreno, he was asked about. that and he said, I mean, you kind of felt that way it was needed that it was, it was time for Arty to move on maybe. He then said, I know, strong words, harsh words from Mike Trout. You know, you joke, but like, yeah.

Yeah. He did then say, no hard feelings to Artie, but just in case, walk that back of it. But I'm super excited. The guys are excited. There's a good vibe around the clubhouse, vibe around the stadium. We love a vibe. Yeah, you look at the track record. I know one thing that's going to be on Crokey's mind is to get to the World Series,

win a championship as a player. It makes you feel good to have that and to feel that. And there's no reason to think that he's had that or felt that for the past few years, but still he has remained resolutely an angel. Doesn't sound like that's going to change. Of course, these could just be his public comments and his personal stance might be different. But, yeah, if you were starting to think, ah, he's having a somewhat bounced back. season, new owner, maybe they'll want a fresh start, maybe he'll be more open to it.

It doesn't exactly sound like it. Yeah, it doesn't look like it. You actually did use the phrase, fresh start too, multiple times. Just a fresh start and a new mindset, maybe just to change them things. It's obviously been frustrating the last I don't know how many years it's been. Neither do I. I've lost track, Trouty. But just to hear the news like this, I'm super excited to have this change.

You know what would be a really fresh start, different team, new team, new travel. It would be nice if they could get good again in the four years he has left on that deal, and he would be vindicated for staying, and he would have done it the hard way. It would be a real sentimental, full-circle moment for him to return to the playoffs in Anaheim. But regardless, nothing can break that bond between Trout and the Angels, that unshakable loyalty that he seems to have, which on some level I sort of respect. And it really does stand in stark contrast to the whole player empowerment. era in other sports and just trying to find your way to the most advantageous situation and the

the rings culture and just trying to win at all costs. And of course, he would say he really wants to win, but he doesn't want to win so much that he's eager or even willing to leave the angels. And I guess he's just comfortable there. He's an angel for life. So I don't know why he seems to feel some special loyalty to the angels exactly, but I guess if he's happy, He doesn't want to uproot his family. Fine. I do think it will affect his legacy to some extent. Not that it's his fault that the angels have been bad all this time,

but there are people who will hold it against him and will say, well, he obviously didn't want to win enough or he would have worked his way out of there because he probably could have or still could push his way out if he really wanted to. And as much as he might say winning World Series is his priority, it's not his sole priority or even number one necessarily. So if you want to fault him for that, I suppose you could. I guess, but I think we should resist having an overly narrow understanding of what sort of player empowerment might mean. Because like you get to have a lot of things sort of in the mix in terms of what's important to you.

I think you're right that there is like a more ruthless version of him that has been playing on a different team for the last seven years, you know, however long. but that doesn't seem to be the dominant part of his personality. I know that he hasn't gotten a ring. Like he's made some good money out of the bargain, you know. And I know he and his wife have like, young family is this golf course in New Jersey. I think the breaking point will come if Stan is like, you have to put this Rams jersey on.

And he's like, he'll be like literally over my no trade clause, you know, not my devoid, but my no trade clause. Again, like if Aaron Donald, like is Aaron Donald? the key to unlocking all of this for them. I just think that it's worth trying for like a season. And it's going to take a little while for him to like get used to baseball. So he should probably start like right now, you know? Like it's just starting now.

Just like. Yeah. And he wants to play. He wants to keep playing. It's a lot easier to do in baseball and football. I'm just saying I'm just like offering what I think are constructive suggestions to a really good athlete, you know? Just here to help. Well, the numbers.

Keep going up. Some are suggesting that maybe sports ownership's a bubble, that these valuations that keep escalating are not really backed in the NBA, for instance, by revenue. And at some point, it becomes decoupled from how much money you're making and getting back from these things because it's just a small number of people who can afford to buy teams. And it's just, it's a feather in your cap. And rich people want to show off that they are a franchise. owners. And so there is this perception that, oh, you can always get out without losing anything, because there will always be someone who comes along and pays that number. Winners' curse, all you have to do is find someone who will pay more than you paid for it. And at least to this point in recent history, that hasn't been hard. But, yeah, with some of the changes to the broadcast model and all the rest, perhaps the bottom falls out or less alarmistly, maybe the number just stops going up. The

trend line flattens out a little bit. I could imagine that happening. Of course, MLB owners are hoping, well, we'll have a salary cap and then profit. So can we read the tea leaves at all? You just alluded to this, but the fact that we see the sale on the eve of the CBA expiring and the big labor battle that is shaping up. So you could say that the owners who sold, maybe that suggests that they are not confident that they're going to win that showdown and get a salary cap because if they did and their franchises skyrocketed even further in value, well, then it would be worth holding. If you thought that MLB was going to have a salary cap a year from now, then this would be a bad time to get out because you could just wait and sell for even more at that point when you

have the player payroll control and cost certainty and all the rest of it. I guess you could also say, well, there are willing and eager. buyers here and maybe they want to get into it because they think they're buying low somehow, even though they're spending multiple billions of dollars and that this asset will appreciate because they will buy into what is about to be a sour cap system. Or I guess you could say, well, maybe Moreno didn't have the stomach for a long work stoppage and a lockout and potentially a strike at some point. And if you think you're going to lose a season or a big chunk of a season and that may be

long term, that'll affect your broadcast contracts and what you're making. Maybe this would be a good time to get out, get out while the getting's good before suddenly baseball is not riding high and thriving the way that it is right now. So I guess it's a little bit of a Rorschach test and maybe it could kind of confirm your pre-existing beliefs about how things are going to go. But I do tend to lean more toward the, if they thought there was going to be a knockdown, drag out, cancel an entire season, then probably there would not be people lining up to purchase a team at this moment. So that's my interpretation. It's not as if this was some pre-lockout fire sale slashing the price, bargain basement, all sales final, everything must go.

I tend to agree. I tend to agree with that. We'll see. whether that plays out and we will see whether the Angels playoff drought, which is the longest in MLB, whether Kronky and whomever he empowers to make the decisions can actually snap that streak. Yeah, I know. You think it doesn't seem that long, but it does. Remember how young Mike Trout was when he got his one and only very brief October exposure or playoff exposure at least? So, yeah. But now you never know because very often it's clear that a team is on the market and we're all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And here, not really. Of course, it was a team that was recently known to be on the market. But if the angels could suddenly sell without any word of that leaking before the final report, then in theory, I guess it could happen anywhere. Maybe the nationals who were said to be on the market and then pulled back. Maybe they're still having background conversations. I guess once you've signaled your willingness or interest, then other billionaires know that you're at least persuadable and that they could come in with a strong offer and entice you to sell. Yeah. It's just, it is really shocking to me that there wasn't any sort of telegraphing of it more recent.

I mean, the announcement just sort of dropped and it was like, oh, okay. Artie, he did seem to like baseball, which it only goes so far because there are some owners that, You get the sense that they're doing it purely as an investment or to be able to brag about it and to boost their stature. And then there are others who really do care about baseball and like it. It goes only so far because ultimately fans care less about whether you like baseball and love the team. Sort of in a Jerry Reinsdorf sense. Well, he might really like baseball. But White Sox fans haven't always liked baseball when he has been in.

charge, though they're liking it a bit more right now. But already didn't seem like the sort maybe even was slightly reluctant to sell because he did like baseball and like being a baseball owner. But boy, he just wasn't very good at it. I'm sorry. Sorry, Mr. Marino. So yeah, that's the end of that era or it's about to be. So that's landmark milestone news. And who's next? Who's left? Who else is on the Mount Rushmore of bad owners that get sell the team chance. I guess you've got Bob Nutting, of course. Fisher, Fisher, of course. Dick Montfort and the Rockies are sort of in a similar boat of people like to go to Rocky's games, even when the Rockies are not that great a product. And also, maybe they have reformed and

turned over a new leaf with new leadership. But they're owners who are sort of personally reprehensible more so than others. And then there are those who are just terrible stewards of their teams and sometimes both. But I guess fans probably would rather have ultimately, because, you know, if you're a fan, most fans care most about whether the team is winning or not. And probably all sports owners, they have some sort of blood on their hands, if not literally, at least figuratively, there's some sort of skeleton in the closet and maybe it's not even in the closet.

So as long as you win, as long as you deliver on that level, fans will tend to. to tolerate you, if not warmly embrace you. It's when there are personal foibles and shortcomings and transgressions and you mismanaged the team. That's when the chorus really gets louder. It's funny because, like, on the one hand, I think often fans and owners are working at cross purposes because, like, given their druthers, I think most fans would prefer to never think about an owner ever at all.

And I think most owners would like to be thought of as beloved and invested. and a lot of the time when fans do have occasion to have a really strong opinion about their owner, the owner finds themselves disappointing. So I go, but I wanted you to love me and you're mad at me instead. So it is a funny kind of a, it's a funny sort of thing. And sometimes you go really bonkers and you want a particular player and then you circumvent the cap and Pablo Tori finds out. And then you lose like a billion first round draft picks and have to pay a big fine. This is like the least interesting sports news that broke today because the Clippers investigation broke what we were recording.

I know. I just saw that. Okay. Well, I guess speaking of course is getting louder. We could get to our guest because we do have other banter, but we have a podcast coming tomorrow. So we can talk about maybe Catelle Marté and some of the intriguing prospect call-ups that have happened in recent days. But let us talk first. about sound at ballparks and why it's sometimes too loud. Effectively wild, it's war with a smile. Effectively wild, it's the good stuff, it's baseball nerd stuff, we hope you'll stick around for a while. I'll effectively wild, effectively wild, effectively wild, is a consulting and design firm based in Carrollton, Texas

that specializes in technological systems and solutions for venues, infrastructure, and major events, such as Major League Baseball games, though not limited to those, we are joined now by Wrightson himself, the man who puts the first W in WJHW, director and principal, Jack Wrightson, who has almost 50 years of acoustics experience. Jack, welcome. Thank you. You're coming in loud and clear, and I'd expect no less from a man of your expertise, though you did apologize as soon as you said hello for using only the built-in computer microphone and I'm sure as an acoustics expert that probably pains you. Yes, and, you know, in our office,

there's all kinds of interesting setups for doing conference calls with a rather expensive microphones and other things and stuff like that. But I've decided to put my audio expenditures and other locations. Yes, that's understandable. We're not, uh, paying as much as your typical professional sports clients or anything for that matter. So I get it. So we want to ask about how baseball compares to other sports, but we will focus on baseball as we are a baseball podcast. So to give people some sense of your experience and WJWs, could you talk a little bit

about the ballpark projects that the company has been involved in over the years and that you personally have had some input on? Well, I mean, I'd have to dig up a list to be accurate about it. But it's, I mean, suffice to say, we've done either new construction or substantial renovation work on, you know, close to 30 of the MLB ballparks over the years, over the decades. That also extends other sports. I've worked on 28 of the 30 NBA arenas. And in MLB, I've probably worked on about half of that number on the baseball side. And in the NFL and the NHL, market shares a little bit less than that, but still pretty comfortable.

So we're proud of that track record. And it obviously gives you, as Ben mentioned, a real point of comparison in terms of sort of what the ideal sonic environment for each of those sports might be. And I'm curious how your process differs when you're looking at. a ballpark versus an NFL stadium or an arena where an NBA team would play, are you going in and showing teams? Here's what we've done for other clubs and those other clubs or other MLB teams, or are you making cross-sport comparisons as they're trying to find the optimal sort of sonic register for their park? Well, let's back up and put this a little bit in context. And I'm not avoiding the question. I'm going to get to it. And that is, when we, when we

taught, when people talk about sound at ballpark stadiums and arenas, there's often confusion between, you know, crowd noise and, um, and the sound system. And then also I went to a concert at this stadium and the sound was terrible or the sound was great. And, and why is that? And when we talk about crowd noise, that's a whole other subject we can get into later and I don't want to be labor at this point. You know, the crowd noise is, is totally independent of the sound system. And if you go to see a concert in these buildings, there's a 99.9% chance that the sound system you're listening to is not part of the building. It came along with a touring performer and as part of their sound company as part of just like they're staging and rigging and everything else that they do

that's traveling with them. And so people don't always understand and make that distinction and stuff like that. So to go to your question to start out with, let's talk about the permanent house sound system for these venues, which I think is where you were going to start. out, Meg. Generally, we don't make that kind of comparisons. The sports like to stay within their reference of their sport and their stadium type. And as you know, now that we've gone away in most part from the multi-purpose round stadiums of the 70s and early 80s, you know, the baseball stadiums and the football stadiums are different shapes. We have ones that are indoors and ones that are outdoors. Some of them are convertible with moving roofs and, you know, in the arena. We

are much smaller and they're different environment. They tend to hold many more concerts. Sticking with MLB for the moment, most of the comparisons are internal to MLB. So all the executives and the game presentation people have been to many other stadiums. They create their opinions and their standards and they say, this is what we want to accomplish. This is a building I like. This is a building I didn't like. Part of our job is the tease out, you know, what's the root cause of those likes and dislikes. And then start from there and try to develop a situation where we can deliver them what they're looking for.

And obviously, budget and construction, time, schedule, everything else, all those real-world practicalities also come into account. You know, when it comes to baseball, baseball is fundamentally different from every other sport in that, A, you're not allowed to play sound while the ball is in play. you can't have moving images. You can't play the sound system while the ball is in play. Anyone who's been to an MLB game that's paid attention to it, notices sometimes the music or whatever will cut off in sort of an awkward, sharp way.

And that's because they're paying very of attention. Once the pitcher gets ready, it's silent time. And so that's just a baseball tradition, and that's a rule of the game. And they don't do that. So if we figure out, just for the sake of discussion, and this is probably too short a period. We have a two-hour-long baseball game. The amount of time that the sound system is actually playing during that two hours

is a smaller percentage than any other sport, hockey being the next lowest one after that, just because the hockey aesthetic is such that they're not cranking it all the time, like say they are at a basketball game. So MLB is a little bit different that way. So it's really, really important that the sound system works and conveys the message and the information that they want, during those limited times.

You know, mostly, you know, we've got the walk-up music for the batters. We've got the between-inning breaks and all the other stuff. We've got the home run celebrations and things like that. We've got the sending off the pitcher that just got knocked out of the game. So there's a lot of bits that the game presentation people work very hard on to do it to provide maximum entertainment. So, you know, sort of our journey with baseball stadiums goes back to the late 80s. and this was one of the topics that Bena talked about was, you know, how do you decide what configuration that the loudspeaker system takes?

The vast majority of ballparks prior to that time had a big bunch of speakers in the outfield, and the big bunch of speakers blasted it off to the entire stadium. That can actually work pretty well, but there's a couple of problems. We've got, you know, long reflections, which can turn in echoes off of building surfaces, because sound is traveling so far, then when he reflects off the surface, it then travels again so far. The other problem that people were concerned with

is that when I'm hearing a sound, which originated 400, 600 feet away from me, if I'm sitting behind home plate, that's a half-second delay or more in what's going on. So if I have a talking head up on the video screen, and this wasn't a problem before we had video screen, but it's just a talking head up on the video screen, then we don't have synchronization between what the lips are doing and what the sound is saying.

So there was a desire to try to solve that problem, and you can solve it partially with video delay, but you can solve it better by putting the loudspeakers closer to the people. Now, the real reason why this different configuration started was in Candlestick Park, which was the first place this happened in the modern era, they wanted to put a, video screen, the only place the loudspeakers could go. And you recall, Candlestick Park had turned itself, you know, with the arrival of the 49ers, it turned itself into a multi-purpose stadium and basically closed off one end, the outfield. So it was one of these awkward shapes with a classic baseball v, you know, behind home plate. And then that just rounded thing that went around the

outfield, you know, with all seats for football. And there was no place other than to put it on a giant structure to put a video sport. So when the video display needed to get bigger, the question was, what do we do with this? Where do we put this stuff now? And so we came in and we did an analysis of the building. We said, well, you know, the geometry of this building is such that we're able to put lots of little speakers pointing it at the people. And the speakers will be much closer. to the spectators. And so that delay period gets much, much shorter. Doesn't make the lip sync problem entirely go away, but it dramatically improves it.

And those of a certain age will remember this week in baseball, which many, many, many, Mamo teams played before the game during BP and everything. And that was one that had lots of talking heads in it. And so that was sort of the gold standard of, well, does this work? does it not work? And so, you know, Candlestick Park ended up being sort of a poster file to that. The next one we did was the old Bush Stadium. And because it had this big canopy over it, we were able to put a lot of the speakers up in the canopy and actually get down to the seats in the first rows from up on top of the canopy. It increased the delay a little bit, but it worked very, very well.

And when other teams saw what was going on with those buildings and listened to it, they said, you know, there's something to this. Could we do this in our building as well? And not every building has a good geometry for it. So, for example, there's a famous example with the ballpark for the Diamondbacks in Phoenix. And I'm expressing it that way because I don't remember what the naming rights was at the time that's happened. It's changed so many times. But it started out with a distributed system, one that we hadn't designed.

We did not do the original construction. We just did renovations there. And then we, but what happened with the geometry and the structure and the way that the roof opens, the speakers, the distributed speakers, the lots of little loudspeakers could not be put in the right place and it never worked all that well. So when they went to do the renovation, they went back out to the outfield and just the nature of that building was there was a place to put it on either side of the big video display. And so that one actually went back to an outfield cluster, a single point source system. outfield, it changed. Another building, which has gone through, you know, three sets of these that they really wanted to have distributed speakers, but because of the structure, the geometry of the building, a distributed system would never work well. I mean, some of the seats would be great,

but other ones not so good at Dodger Stadium. And so Dodger Stadium has remained, you know, with different iterations of it based on the work they've done out in the outfield with the outfield buildings and center field and things, it's remained as a point source system for it pretty much its entire history. Now, that said, all these buildings have overhanging seating sections. So, you know, you're in the lower deck and you're at the back of it and there's maybe a club or a sweet level up above you. And it's overhanging it. You're back there in a little cave. And it's common to have those have filled distributed speaker systems for a couple of reasons. one is that you don't have line of sight to that big opt-field cluster,

which means that you're not hearing it very well, sort of like listening around a corner, which we can all experience in our homes and other environments. And then the other one is that the noise level is higher in those zones in there, because the sound from the people, the spectators, gets trapped in that area, it doesn't escape off to the sky, and those are actually noisier. And those areas can be, you know, 4 to 6 dB louder, just on general, you know, the hubbub of the crowd as opposed to cheering even, that you need to

lift the sound level up there a little bit to make it loud enough to get over that sound. Not unlike if you're driving down the road in your car and you're listening to the radio, you get on the freeway, you're going a lot faster even with the windows closed. You want to turn the radio up because you've got more background noise and you're trying to get over it. So we've got more background noise in those areas, so it's nice to be able to me have those additional speakers in there to make those adjustments. That's sort of a long-winded intro with this sort of this topic, but...

It's a complex one, yeah. But hopefully it sort of gives you some background, and so now I'm going to stop going on and ask you if that made sense and what follow-ups you have to that. Yeah, well, speaking of candlestick, I was thinking that because when you were talking about touring musical acts and rock concerts

and going back before your time to the Beatles days, right, where the Beatles, last concert on that famous 1966 tour was at Candlestick, and of course they played Chase Stadium. And so back then it was not typical for a rock band to play in a ballpark, and that was before the shift from point source systems to distributed systems. And so often nobody could hear them, which was partly because of the screaming fans and the Beatlemania,

but also because they were just piping them in through the ballpark PA, right? And it was just maybe this wall of speakers somewhere out in center field. So now, if you go to a modern park, and as you're saying, it varies and it's case by case, and it's different depending on whether it's an older park that was retrofitted or a newly designed park. But with a distributed system, is the goal, at least, is the ideal that you basically have surround sounds, that it's sort of an omnipresent soundscape and that these speakers are wired up everywhere so that wherever you're sitting, you're getting kind of a consistent sound? Yeah, well, you brought up two points there. And A, yes, you're trying to provide a consistent sound everywhere. I mean, everything else being equal, the loudspeakers that's close to you typically sounds better. And I think that's everyone's experienced that once again in their own everyday life. And so we're trying to get the loudspeakers closer. We're trying to get them closer so we don't have that synchronization problem with a video display. But we also have to find a place to put them. If you put them on the face of a level, well, maybe there's an LED ribbon board there. And how do we deal with that. If we tuck it underneath, maybe it's a sightline issue that we have to worry about. And sometimes when you put it underneath, you're so close to the near people compared to the far people within the zone that that speaker is trying to provide sound to or coverage,

that the level difference is enough that you're either not loud enough for the far away people or you're tearing the hair off of the people that are close by. Once again, you get far more complaints of too loud than too quiet. So with the number one complaint being I can't understand and sometimes too quiet as part of I can't understand. Sure. So, you know, so the number one complaint is not that the music sounds bad or it's not bass-heavy enough. It's, I can't understand. So the first job is to figure out what gives us the maximum speech intelligibility.

There's sort of that issue too. But you have an advantage once you have a distributed system to go to the second half of that question. And that is what we've started to do, and it didn't start out this way, but it's one of these things that becomes obvious once you start thinking about it, and clearly you brought it up. So you can start doing a couple of things.

The first step is you wire left right, left right, right, to give you a little bit of a dimensionality to it, a stereo effect. And then the other thing that we've done in several ballparks, which is a little bit more sophisticated in that, that each of the speakers is addressable, in pairs or individually, and so that we can start doing things, we can start moving the images all the way around. So, for example, I can, if I have something on a ribbon board that goes

around the ballpark, I can make the sound follow it. Okay, so I can zoom it around, I can do this, I can make it come from one side, I can make it come from the other side, I can ping pong things back and forth. That's all possible. There's probably eight to ten between MLB and NFL stadiums that can do that. The unfortunate part of it is there's a certain overhead burden of having to create audio content that will allow you to do that. And the accompanying LED graphics that make the whole thing work in a multi-sensory way. So you don't see it too much. For example, the Denver Broncos have a galloping herd of horses that they can run around the state. They started out with that when they got that sound system and they're still doing it and that may be the only effect that they have

that does that. Because it's a non-trivial enterprise to build those sound files that, multi-channel sound files, even though there's electronic devices that can do the sort of sequencing and address it around for you, that doesn't have to be built into the audio file or done manually. You mentioned that one of the complaints that you're cognizant of is that people feel that it can be too loud at some of these ballparks. It is often too loud. it does make me feel like I am aging faster than I want to. And I'm curious first, like sort of how you guys think about balancing optimizing the audio. I think some of what we're experiencing as too loud. It sounds like it's just us being able to hear clearly in a way that

we maybe previously hadn't because of suboptimal speaker distributions and whatnot. But it does also feel like just the raw decibel level is a lot higher than it used to be. So I'm curious sort of how you think about the experience of sitting in a ballpark and hearing these different audio features coming in and out and how it can enhance or potentially detract from the fan experience because we want to be able to hear the PA. And so much of the animation and different ballpark effects are additive. They're very cool and they give exciting information. They pump up the crowd. But there are times when it feels very loud. So I'm curious how do you think about that experience. Let's talk about that for a second. You know, there's a number of things.

Sometimes the people running the sound system are unfortunately behind glass. And they really don't know how loud it is. And that's sort of an unfortunate architectural situation. And it's hard to get them out where they can actually hear what's going on and stuff like that. And that's a constant design challenge. Let's just call it the operation as not as optimal as it could be in terms of. And you want to change the levels with the course of the event. So if things get really exciting, you do want to pump it up. Right. If it's pregame, and baseball has a long pregame compared to everyone else, you want to have the walk-in be a very conversational level. You don't want to be sitting there with your friends and family talking about the game and other things that are going on and be and just be obliterated by the

sound system an hour before the game. So there's a certain level of sensitivity that most of the operators have, but sometimes that falls apart. Sometimes it's, you know, and I always refer to this as the 20-something marketing person that keeps telling that operator to pump it up, pump it up, get the crowd excited. Get the crowd excited. Well, there's only so much you can do with the, with a video and the audio to pump up the crowd. The game is what really needs to pump them up. Right. And so, you know, when it gets going, When a game gets going, the crowd will get going too. But, you know, obviously that's their job that makes us exciting.

And sometimes they get a little over-eager, let's say, about that stuff. And sometimes the systems aren't well-adjusted. So if it's well-designed, the levels will be, you know, plus or minus three or four dba across the entire fixed seating area. And if it's well-designed and well-adjusted, it'll do that. But these things, one of the problems with the distributed system, is more parts means more problems. So there's more things to fail. There's more things to drift.

And what some ballparks don't do is they don't do the regular oil changes, so to speak. They just drive the car until it dies. And so what happens, we had things where speakers break and you don't, I can't understand anything the reason why because the speaker pointed at me as broken and it didn't get fixed. We've run across that in all sorts of venues, anything from MLB stadiums to horse racing tracks. you know, and sometimes things don't get adjusted properly or, you know, someone did the equivalent of either on the computer or whatever, knocking the knob and turning something up that didn't want to be turned up. So there's a certain amount of diligence, and we always recommend that the ballparks as part of their preseason checks at everything,

sort of taking the stadium out of mothballs every spring and getting it going, that one of the things they do is they go and check this. And you really need to walk the stadium and check every single one of the loudspeakers to do it properly. And so once, you know, you can just, it's like maintenance for anything else. Some people do a better job of it than others. Yeah, I did want to ask about this, not that you're trying to pass the buck or evade responsibility for a place potentially being too loud, but the relationship between the company that recommends or installs the speaker system and then the client, the team that uses it, is it once you deliver the system sort of out of your hands and, the team can then maybe take your guidance or not or say, no, we want more, we want louder, let's pump it up, because ultimately you're not the ones behind the board, right, running the levels. Yeah, and so there's an operational issue, and one of the things we've explained to people is not in like a race car.

You could have the finest race car, but if your driver is not any good, you're not going to win the race. It's the same thing with operations. And so, you know, and some people hire well, and some people hire well, and some, Some people don't hire well. Some people put emphasis on it. The other thing that happens, and this is a little bit of an MLB problem, is that there are so many games. And if you're an audio guy, the game is pretty slow because you may be doing nothing for minutes at a time at a really long at bad. Less so in the pitch clock era, but still relative to other sports sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah, but the sort of live wire act of doing this stuff that you would have sort of ends up being a little bit boring for them, and they sort of lose concentration sometimes. And that's a constant battle in baseball that we've seen with the operators. And having these guys stay engaged and on their toes, you know, over the course of the game, over the course of 80-plus game season.

Have you had the experience then, not to throw any particular clients or ballparks under the bus, but maybe you attend a game at a stadium or a ballpark where you have installed the system or consulted on it, and you find it to be, loud or suboptimal and there's nothing much you can do about it.

Yeah, I mean, other than report what we report and measure what we found, yes. Right. And but there is a semi-famous story, which the venue will remain nameless, where the guy and when his assistant were playing chess during the games. Oh, gosh. So that just sort of tells you the level of attention that was going on here. When you enter this process, and I guess this would vary depending on if it's an existence, or maybe you're brought in from the ground floor to design a sound system literally when a new

park construction project is happening. What tools are you bringing to bear here to sort of simulate what will this sound like? Is it a fully modeled thing where you have the construction and you're taking into account just the materials and the layout and what the acoustics will be like so that you can sort of simulate what this will sound like before it's actually a Yes, yes, and yes. So here's how this works. There's everything that's done architecture these days is done with 3D modeling and it has been for quite some time. And we take that model and import it into a special acoustics and loudspeaker configuration model. So we can load in what the materials are. We can load in the accurate architectural dimensions of the building.

we have files that have been created by the manufacturers in their labs that tell you how the loudspeakers work. You know, how wide does it spray sound? Does that width change at different frequencies are the highs narrower and the lows wider? You know, the same thing. You know, how does it spray sound out vertically? And we literally place all the loudspeakers virtually using those files in it. and we create a model. The first step in the model is to look at the seating planes and say,

okay, it's really loud here, it's really quiet there, something's wrong. Wrong loudspeaker, wrong location, wrong aiming of the box. It's tilted too far down. It's not tilted enough. It's not twisted the right way to point at the right direction. Once you do that and you say, you know, this is starting to look pretty good. And we also not only just look at what the coverage is, but we also look at what the time arrivals are.

So when I have, especially with the distributed system, if I have lots of loudspeakers, there may be one or two loudspeakers that are supposed to be pointed at my seating location inside the ballpark. But the other ones aren't that far away. We can only control sound. It's not a spotlight. Right. Instead of a fine point brush, it's kind of a paintbrush on the canvas rather than a tiny little horsehair brush. What we want to do is configure this that the sound that's too far away is sufficiently low. lower at my seating location than the sound that's pointed right at me that I don't notice it.

And we have certain rules about how many decibels down at that location, the size that are far away. And the reason why you were really hard about that is when you have lots of multiple arrivals, it smears the sound. Even before it starts becoming a discrete echo, boom, boom, boom, boom, that you can just, you know, you can hear it coming twice. It starts smearing the sound. and there's other words we can use it, but we have these multiple arrivals. And that degrades the intelligibility.

I guess it's not entirely unlike you're in a podcast studio with multiple mics and you worry about bleed, right? Where one mic is or one person is bleeding into the other mic and you're getting. Yes, that's a perfect analogy. The big difference being now I start moving the mics 50 feet apart. Right. Okay. And it really starts coming in differently, right? Well, Meg and I are most of the continent apart.

So, but it's a little bit different. We're not in the same. Yeah, but you understand my point. And so it scales a little bit differently. And one of the things that people don't realize that sound moves so much slower than the speed of light, that things that scale one way visually, they don't scale equally successfully in audio land.

To go back to the modeling, so once we have all that stuff and we get to a place where, you know, the graphs of the charts and the heat map, so to speak, of the loudness and all the stuff look good. Then what we do is we do a convolution, and we have recordings of baseball stadium announcers straight from the microphone. So it's a nice, clean recording,

and we can play that through the computer model, and we can pick out what seat we want to listen to it in. So that's called oralization. And so what we do is then we can move around to different locations and say, okay, well, we know this spot's going to be good, because it's really strong. Then we go into the more marginal areas where we might have trouble placing a loudspeaker

and say, well, does that still work? And so what we can do for the clients that are interested in having these demonstrations, we can say, okay, here's where it sounds great, here's where it doesn't sound as great, here's how we can improve where it doesn't sound great if you will allow us to do X. You know, use a bigger speaker,

put a speaker in a different place, do something like that. And like everything else in life, there's compromises have to get made. In our world, if we get 95% of those six seats, hitting an appropriate intelligibility standard, which we can measure with instruments, you know, after completion, and we use those measurements to help us with the fine-tuning and adjustments of the system to maximize for intelligibility, because like I said, intelligibility is job number one. It's what thing you get the most complaints about, so we

optimize for that. And so we can do that. But that's kind of the process. From our world, There's the design, the documentation of it. You hire the contractor to install the design. And then afterwards, you do the setup. And when you do the setup, you find things maybe that weren't wired properly. That needs to be fixed and all the stuff. Sometimes it can be a long process if there's a lot of things like that to fix. But you're adjusting.

Not only the highs and lows, the treble and the base control on the front panel, but you're also controlling loudness. and you're, you know, adjusting delays on the speakers to make this thing coalesce and be as coherent in every seat as the best you can. And once again, these days we can measure that. So we end up with a history or a document which basically says when we left after doing this initial setup, here's what all the intelligibility measurements are in all these seats. And it's not necessarily you every single seat because they turn right next each other is the time of the same. and you sort of do, you know, by seating sections.

And then you can come back later and say, oh, it's not working as well. Why is that? Right. And so one of the things to go back to our earlier conversation was sometimes things get out of whack and they don't get fixed. So, you know, and that's good. But we've had projects where people say, you know, our sound system will work. We think we need a new sound system. We come back in and we say, I'd love designing a new sound system, but let's fix this one first.

And sometimes that works so well, much to our business, sugar in. They say, yeah, this is great. We don't need a new sound system. And you say, dang, I was hoping to do that. I was going to say, you're probably working against your own self-interest there sometimes. Yeah, but it's the right thing to do for the customer. You know, obviously, I would imagine that, like, the in-stadium experience is key and is going to occupy your sort of attention and be the top priority. I am curious if you ever get feedback or have to think about sort of how the... Literal feedback or figuratively. Yeah. How the in-stadium sound experience can bleed from a broadcast perspective, right? Because I think

we've all had the experience of sort of clicking around to different games. And the amount of in-stadium audio that you might be hearing from, say, the field mics can be wildly different. Sometimes all you're getting really is, you know, the, the music. and the sound effects, sometimes you can hear that one guy who's really mad at the way that an at bat is unfolding. So do you ever do any work to try to think about how to optimize how those audio experiences might interact with one another? We do, but there's a limited amount we can do about it. Sure. So most of the field mics are parabolic mics.

And as you've seen, no doubt, on TV and watch it live, there's the parabolic mics are used behind home plate. and then on the outside of the dugouts are pretty common way of picking a field sound. And it depends on whether, you know, where those are pointed, where the sounds a bit. So your worst case scenario for the broadcast announcers and those field mics is when you have an outfield cluster. If you think about that, all of that stuff is sort of pointed right at the press box and it's pointed right at those field mics. and so there may be a correlation when you're watching that's between the ones that still have the outfield clusters and the ones that have a more distributed system where the sound's actually coming from the other direction. So the broadcasters like the distributed systems because they don't hear the sound system near as much as if it's an outfield cluster. Gotcha.

That was one of the things when we did Bush Stadium. Jack Buck was like, this is great. You know, so, you know, I can't hear it anymore. It's not, it doesn't mess me up. there's sort of that issue. And then it depends on where they have the mics and stuff like that as well. But generally, you know, with the distributed system, it's not as big a problem, but it also depends on, like I said, where things are mounted. And I wondered because this distributed system set up, it's so targeted. And as you said, you can simulate how the experience will sound from a specific seat.

One of the justifications that the people with teams that have been accused of maybe turning it up a little too loud. Sometimes they say, well, the players want it louder, and the players sometimes say, it's quiet here on the field. And so I wondered about that because I assume that you're tuning the sounding experience mostly for the fans, right? And, you know, the tens of thousands of people in the park. And there are, what, at most a dozen or so players on the field in an MLB game. And so that makes some sense, I think. But then the players, obviously, they have some say and sway. And if they want it louder and there aren't speakers that are sort of pointed at them directly, then that leads to everyone else redlining because the volume level is raised for them. So I wondered about that.

Is it actually sort of comparatively quiet on the fields by design? It absolutely is. It's not necessarily by design, but that's the way it ends up. a byproduct of the design. Yeah, because think about it, if I'm at first base and I'm blasting sound and towards first base and I'm trying to get it out towards second base, that sounds going to carry and it's going to turn into the echo for the people sitting behind third base. So we're trying not to have a cross all the way across the field and end up being an echo. So we don't have that Lou Gehrig being the luckiest man in the world effect.

And so we try to keep it in the seats, not on the field. Also, if you're in the dugout, you're shielded by the dugout lid. So, you know, so you're not hearing much. Now, that's great for internal communication, but it's not great for hearing what's going on. So there's two ways we've addressed that problem. There are many ballparks where, you know, we have lots of signs, lots of other stuff, camera wells and other places. We will add speakers down on the field that are directed from the on-deck circle, all down through the home plate to the other on-deck circle, and sometimes it's just target home plate. And that's so the players can hear their walk-up music, and they can hear what's going on.

And when they get insominated, the players seem to really like it for exactly the reasons you mentioned. That seems to be when they care most about. The other thing they care about is they care about the sound during BP. And so they're out on a field, they're playing cash, they're doing stuff out there and things like that. They like to hear the sound too. And so we do have some situations where we have added supplemental speakers so they do stuff in the outfield. And we did one design, and it was for the Mets, where we actually did a hybrid system where that system, they've always had a distributed system there. And we were talking about redoing the distributed system.

And we also said, you know, let's also put in an outfield cluster for a couple of reasons. And we said, first of all, the players are going to love you for doing it because during BP and I like that. Because we can just turn that on for BP and turn the other one off. And it sort of bleeds in at a low, comfortable level for the rest of the crowd. I'm not worried about intelligibility. It's just really background. The other thing that we were talking about doing is we can concentrate the sound as coming from the video board, because we were talking about hanging concert style line arrays on either side of the video board, that we can also make things very directional just for the video board. So if I'm doing a big explosion, I'm doing something else, it changes the physical characteristics, the spatial characteristics going on, rather than having something coming from behind me and seeing a seat.

Now it's boom, directing all my two. mentioned back at the video board. We're really hoping that, you know, in the course of all the work that they're doing season after season on that stadium with the current ownership, that that gets implemented because I think it's something that would dramatically allow the game presentation improve over what it is now, as well as being satisfying for the players during batting practice. And do you consult on crowd noise as well, even if that's not something you can directly affect via installations and speakers, but I assume that you're simulating that to some extent and would have to do with the construction of the stadium and maybe

how enclosed it is and that sort of thing because there are some parks where when the crowd is loud, the crowd is really loud, right? And, you know, all else being equal, attendance being the same. It just seems like the sound really reverberate. And that can be in a welcome way where you really get that adrenaline rush. And so I wonder whether that is part of your process. Yeah. There's across all sports, there's a a category of reputation for the building, which is that building's loud. Yeah. And what people, especially owners, would like to believe, is that it's loud because of the building.

In reality, it's loud because the fans are loud. We can sort of look at this empirically and say to ourselves, so places where they, in MLB, they tend not to keep score on crowd noise. Football is the one that really keeps score. Yeah. And to a lesser extent, the arena sports. and we've made the measurements of the crowd noise and stuff like this and done these things and we've done the mathematical models and the 3D models and all the stuff of how things

reflect and all that stuff and you create instead of having loudspeakers you create lots of lots of sources that are that are humans in the seats to study this and you study it the same and the same modeling techniques that you would for loudspeakers and what as it turns out is that currently the you know the ones they are battling for the loudest NFL stadiums that generally bounces back and forth between Kansas City and Seattle. And I'll throw in a little aside here that the numbers that they report would be causing hearing damage left and right for all those people if they experienced it very long. So there's a little bit of be careful of what you wish for. Yeah.

I'm a Seahawks fan and a season ticket holder, and I can tell you that there are times where it is an unpleasantly loud experience, despite how hotly we are about how loud looming field is. Right. And it's an open-air stadium, right? Yeah. And Kansas City is even more open because it doesn't have the big sideline canopies. That's right. So when you actually do the analysis and you look at it, the reflections off of the building, and in Kansas City, there are no reflections off of the building to speak of, not very much, that are so far away that sound loses energy as it travels over distance. everyone knows if you're far away from someone, they're not as loud when they're yelling as they are when they're right up in your ear.

And it goes up to the surface like in Seattle. It goes up to the canopy. It comes on back. And well, that's traveling, you know, several hundred feet if you're down in the lower bowl. And by the time the guy sitting next to you yells, and it goes up to the canopy, it comes back. It's not near as loud as that three feet he is next to you.

So if you just think about it in terms of, we don't even have to do the arithmetic on this, it's all those sound sources that are very close to you nearby, they are determining how loud it actually is at your seat. So in reality, what people should be saying is that's not a loud building. They should be saying, that's a loud crowd. No, quite seriously. I mean, the science of it is such that it's a really loud crowd and not a loud building.

And when you look at the old, you know, why was the old Denver Stadium, Bronco Stadium, we had such much better reputation of being a loud crowd than the new building. It's not that new anymore, but when we talk about all mile high versus the current stadium at Esco. Because Denver's not in the conversation anymore, you know, for the loudest MLB stadium. So there are things we can do. So I talked earlier about if I'm under an overhang, it's louder. If I have small spaces, it's louder. If I'm in the upper deck of a baseball stadium and I have a canopy up there, it can be louder up there. And the building is making the different

there. Under the overhang, it's making a difference there. But out in the open, when you're not, you know, don't have one of these nearby surfaces over the top, it's really those people around you that are creating that crowd noise for you. And hopefully I've explained that in a way that that sort of makes these, you know, the proximity of the sound sources to the listener, you know, sort of apparent and it's sort of intuitively obvious why it's the crowd and not the building. It reminds me a little bit of the loudness wars in music, right? People talk about the 90s and the CD mastering and it was just a competition to make

everything louder and then you go back and listen to some of those albums and everything is just compressed and there's clipping and even if it's an album I like it's almost unlistnable now, you know? Yeah and that was true of radio as well. Right. They wanted people with your scan in the dial, you wanted to station

to stand out and they highly compressed that so the higher the average sound level is louder. Yeah, but then be careful what you wish for especially if you're talking about a a three-hour game instead of a three-minute track. And there are people sometimes, people who write about the noise level in stadia, they'll maybe bring a sound level meter, and they'll just show that it registers some

decibel level, and they'll say, oh, this is like standing next to an airplane engine or something, right? And this could actually damage your hearing. I assume you're also probably hoping that the sound is somewhat contained inside the stadium because you don't want too much noise pollution in the surrounding area, especially if it's in a city in a downtown or something, right? But do you or does the team always sort of in the process of simulating things check, okay, this is not going to get to a dangerous decibel level,

at least not in a sustained way? So for the sound systems, we limit them at sort of the OSHA maximum. And so there's, you know, what you don't want to do is if you're an operator or the owner of the building, and these lawsuits have happened. You don't want to get in a lawsuit where someone is claiming hearing damage. Yeah. And you'll notice that back when they had paper tickets for concerts,

a lot of them said on the back, they basically had an express waiver that says, you know, this is a very, very loud event. You may experience hearing damage, and by accepting this ticket, you wave all, you know, take the liability office. Right. It's like if you're listening to something on your phone

and you raise the volume, you might get a message about this might be dangerous. Exactly, exactly, you know. I have good in your headphones, so I try not to pump it up too loud because it's kind of noise canceling in effect, but I still get that warning from time to time. Yeah, no, and for the obvious reasons is they're, you know,

A, they're trying to shirt reliability, and they're also, you know, and to be more charitable about it, they're trying to, you know, look after you. And so when we set up the sound system, we limit them to a level which is, I wouldn't say lawsuit proof, but it's not, you know, we don't want to deliver a product where someone could use it in a reasonably expected way that would run into something where someone would say, that is higher than OSHA allowed levels, obviously, by de facto,

you committed a problem here. And so, so, yes, we are very cognizant. We explain people to that, that, you know, there's a certain, like, and we've never had anyone to push back on that. when we explain it to them in those terms and we explain to them what standards we're applying and things like that, we've never had any pushback. They're like, yeah, it's loud. Even though someone will say, well, the crowd noise is actually louder than that in order to be intelligible.

You need to be XDB higher than that crowd noise. And to come back to that as a voice, if they wanted to hear what you were saying, they would shut up. They're having too much fun yelling. Just let them yell. I'm just saying, I don't want to be overly glib about it. But, I mean, think of your own experience. I mean, you really, you knew what happened. You knew it was a home run.

You knew it was a touchdown. You know, it was a, you know, the buzzer beater. I don't have to have someone tell me that. I'm having too much fun yelling with everyone around me. I can imagine that your expertise could have a whole multitude of applications. I'm curious, did you, when you were a student, did you know that this was the direction you wanted to go professionally? because I imagine that it's, you know, that every job is a job, and I'm sure it has its frustrations. But of all the ways to think about sound and acoustics, this has to be one of the cooler ones, right?

This has to be a good story to tell at family reunions. Did you know this is what you wanted to do? Absolutely not. Like many people, I went to school. I was very, very interested in the sound. I mean, the vast majority of people in our business are at one point in their lives where musicians are very interested in music and stuff like that. And so they had just an interest in sound, period. You know, why do things sound that way? Why do they do this?

You know, and then so I ended up, you know, I ended up doing my independent study as an undergraduate in acoustical issues and went to graduate school for that. actually dropped out of my PhD program after three years to take a job in the real world because I really wanted to do applied work and, you know, the academic life wasn't, I decided it wasn't for me. You know, so it was, obviously, it was more about, you know, theaters and noise control and that's at the beginning. But we had the opportunity to start doing sports facilities, being up someone who's someone of a sports fan myself and a few others were like, this is cool, let's jump into

We like these buildings. We just pursued it because we enjoyed it so much, right? As you said, it's a cool job. It's fun. You know, I can't tell you how many sporting and other events I've been to in concerts and things like that. You know, not that you get jaded, but it's like, yeah, this is how this works. And the fascinating thing is you get to learn how these industries work. You get to learn, you may not learn that much about the game, but you sure learn a lot about the buildings and how they work and how the organizations work and what's important to them.

them. And what's good about that is when you understand what their concerns are, what their goals are, what they worry about, it helps you do a better job in terms of addressing those in the small little area of the building that you're working on. So understanding their world helps you do a better job. And that's part of the fun too. And sports stadium acoustic consultant, that probably wasn't really a job when you were entering the field. field, at least not in the sense that it is now, because it was just, you know, get some loud speakers, stick them in center, call it a day. You know, it's become to the point where when I started in the business, the sound system

of sports facility was just a standard voice-only PA system, and if it made some noise, you were happy. Interestingly, you know how we started out talking about how the sound system plays less of the percentage of the event in an MLB game than it does it in the other three major sports. Yeah. MLB led the way in transitioning to high-quality sound. And not surprisingly, MLB sort of led the way in video boards and stadiums as well. So one of the things that's interesting is that it was important to, you know, the owners and operators of MLB stadiums and teams that they provide a better fan experience.

And I think the video and the audio, you know, they play off each other. You know, improvements in one makes you want to have improvements in the other. You know, sort of like home theater. You know, it's not just my TV with a little bit of speaker anymore. Now I need to have a better experience. I need good sound to go along with a good picture and vice versa. So NLB actually sort of led the way in that area. Yeah, it's funny.

I wouldn't consider myself a full-on audio file, but I feel fancy with my 7.1 system at home and my separate sono setup and now I'm feeling inadequate talking to you and you're dealing with hundreds of speakers set up. Oh, you know, fewer speakers generally sound better. So I'm especially in your house. So if you've got a 7-1 system that you like, then I'd say you're doing just fine. Okay. That's good. I'm glad I got the rights and seal of approval there. So lastly, maybe then, since you've worked on so many systems, maybe every sound system is like one of your children and you couldn't possibly choose a favorite.

But is there a first among equals? Is there a ballpark that you worked on? Or even that you didn't work on, I guess, that you go to and you just bathe in the sound and you think, ah, this is a really great sounding setup. I guess even beyond sports, if there's a particular event venue or concert place that you love. But, yeah, you know, give us a sense of where you think maybe the best soundscapes in sports are if you can choose.

Oh, you know, so much of it is a function of what you feed it and how you operate it. That's hard to say. I mean, I would take a good functioning mediocre system that was run really, really well over the one that had the best hardware, but it wasn't run well. And what happens is the best sounding ones are the ones where they take the care to do that. So for example, here's an example we run into all the time. Audio for video. Sometimes people will be showing a video of the players doing a charitable event, and they're using a handheld, the E&G camera, microphone on there.

It's in a high school gym or something, it's a very reverberant space. They don't process that audio. They don't re-record it and stuff like that. They just play it back over the big system in the big room, and it ends up being not very good. Even though the base sound, even though the game announcer, gets on, he sounds great, but the audio for video doesn't sound, sounds bad. And we'll have to explain to people that in there say, well, that sounds bad. The sound system's a problem. I said,

well, hold a second. What about the announcer? He sounded great. Well, yeah, he did. Well, how come one's bad and the other one's good? It's not the sound system. It's the content that you're feeding it. And so the very best operators listen to everything in the ballpark before they ever play it before a crowd. So I would have to say the ones that are really paying that close attention and doing the work and preparing audio files that really work well and stuff like that, those are always the best sounding ones. And then I'll also make the broad characterization. I would much rather listen to a sound system in an open-air stadium than I don't.

Just because of the reverberations and echoes and such? Yeah, yeah. And they're the most difficult environment we work in. Do you install dampening or something, some kind of, I don't know, tiles or something? We try, but when you think about the scale of it, So a typical dome stadium roof, we measure the area in acres, literally. And so let's say I'm spending $2 a square foot, which is a low number for an acoustical treatment up there.

That ends up being a lot of money when we start talking about an acre, four or five acres at $2 a square foot. So generally you don't have as much of that stuff as you need and people just live with it. Yeah. And I'm sure that there are some teams perhaps that don't take the sound as seriously. and even if they're getting a lot of public funding, if it comes down to cutting corners somewhere, maybe sound loses a little in the expense to your dismay.

Yeah, I mean, Toronto's got the best acoustical treatment of any of the Dome Stadium's in MLB. Okay. All right. Well, in conclusion, then, when the message goes up on the video board and it says, make some noise and everyone does, is it your professional opinion that at times it's a little too much

noise that maybe it's a tad too loud at certain games. If only because, thanks to your work in some cases, it doesn't need to be as loud because of the increased clarity, right? You know, if it's the crowd making the noise, I'm fine with it because that's what they came. They're having a good time, and that's what they came to do, and that's what it's all about. If they're trying to create the energy with a sound system and the crowd's not following along, maybe you picked the wrong time to try to juice them up. I mean, the crowd generally knows. The wisdom of crowd sort of applies in this case.

It's true. Yeah, you do have to take into account the leverage. If it's not a rally or a close game or anything, yeah, you can go back to that well one too many times. You have to save it for the actual exciting moments. I think we've all been there for that. Well, there are a few ballparks that could be in construction in the coming years. Maybe Kansas City. Maybe the Rays will have a new park. Maybe the new Angels owner sounds like maybe investing in a ballpark. Maybe they will call Jack Wrightson and WJW, and we were glad that we could call Jack Wrightson as well.

This was fascinating. Thanks so much, Jack. Glad to have been with you. Thanks for the opportunity I had fun. Well, thanks to Jack for the informative conversation. Glad we could sound him out, sound off in the comments. That will do it for today. Aside from a few follow-ups, it occurs to me belatedly that when we talked about the implications of Artie Moreno selling the team,

we did not consider what this would mean for Molly Jolly, the best-named Angels executive. We talked about what this might mean for John Moseilac. But what about the other Mo, Molly, Jolly, Jolly, inquiring minds want to know? Also talked on the outro the other day about that incredible Colton Couser catch. It was not just that the catch was good, but also the circumstances of the catch, preventing a walk-off and ending the game. And in case anyone was wondering,

and I'm virtually certain that some effectively wild listeners were Sports Info Solutions did report that Kouser was the third player to record a game-ending home run robbery on what would have been a walk-off homer since SIS started tracking robberies in 2004, after Ender Inciarte versus the Mets in 2007, and Mike Tockman versus the Cardinals in 2023. We had more debutante batter heroics, Johandi Morales of the Nationals, and Laceromontas of the Mariners had multi-hit games and home runs in their first MLB action. Montes wears number 99. That's always fun. And we got even more debutante-related fun facts. Montes, the first Mariners player with multiple hits in his MLB debut since Itchro Suzuki in 2001. That's actually extremely surprising that it's been 25 years since a Mariners hitter had multiple hits in his MLB debut. That stat was from Sarah Lang's, as is this one. With Johanty Morales and Lassarro Montes, there have now been 15 players to Homer in their MLB debuts this year. That's including Chase DeLotter in his first career race.

regular season game. That's the most in a season in MLB history, surpassing 2022 when there were 13. Fun. Also, on episode 2509, we discussed the fact that Yandi Diaz of the Reyes had not issued an ABS challenge this season and seemingly didn't intend to. We discussed whether he would actually stick to that resolution. He just finds it distracting. Well, he seems to remain firm in his convictions. Because on Monday, in a game against the Mets, the Reyes were down by one run with two outs and a runner on first, and he struck out looking and there were a couple of questionable calls in that plate appearance, at least one of which might have been overturned. And so he's taken some flack for not challenging in that situation.

If you're ever going to challenge, that seems like a good time. It's game ending. No reason not to give it a whirl. Tom Tango of MLB said on Twitter, there was no more ridiculous application of the ABS challenge than what Yandi did or did not do here. It's the very last pitch of the game. If it was a strike down the middle, you should challenge just so you don't have to think about it. Well, that's his whole thing. He doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to

think about challenging. And hey, he's a good hitter. If he thinks it would be so distracting for him to worry about whether to challenge or not that it might hurt him overall, well, he might be right. But in that situation, nothing to lose except the game. I do wonder whether the Reyes have talked to him about that. Tango actually just did some analysis that showed that the rays do not excel when it comes to challenging, which is partly, but not entirely on Yandi D.S. Tango also tweeted, the Rays are among the worst teams in baseball in ABS challenges. That's not what I would have expected coming into the season. You tend to think of the Rays as looking for every last edge.

Maybe they think the juice isn't worth the squeeze overall, but sure seems like it would have been in that situation. Finally, we talked about the Tarek Scouble espresso machine saga. I didn't know the make and model and price of the espresso machine that he took with him in the trade when he went from the Tigers to the Dodgers. As I said, when we talked about it, I didn't think it was a top-of-the-line model. But some Internet sleuths have done some sleuths have done some sleuths. and found a video which appears to be of said espresso machine.

I'll just tee up a clip from our excellent guest on episode 2489 Instagram star Jade Van Clay. So I'm professionally nosy and so I'm like, okay, I have to know what a pro athlete considers to be an expensive espresso machine. So I'm like, it's got to be out of this freaking world. So I found this video posted by the Tigers earlier this year. And if this is indeed the one in question, then I found the espresso machine. The Casa Brews Ultra Cafe Great Espresso with Precision LCD. Okay, let's play Price is Right.

Please lock in your guesses of how much you think this machine cost. Okay, ready? Three, two, one, $210. How much were you thinking? Because I was definitely thinking like five grand. I don't know anything about espresso. Well, I don't know much about espresso either,

but I would have taken the over on that price if you'd asked me when I first saw this story. And hey, he's still not obligated to leave it there. Team kind of lowballed him in arbitration. They lost. Maybe that worked to his benefit, but perhaps he and his wife haven't forgotten. Who knows? Doesn't seem like he holds any great grudge against the Tigers.

Would have been magnanimous to leave the espresso machine. But not only could his teammates afford to replace it, the Tigers could too. This reminds me a little bit of some squabbles I had with housemates in college, because I supplied the TV, the whole audio video set up and my video games and all the rest of it. And it was then kind of a community entertainment system. But there were times where everyone else was hogging the team. TV and I had to play something and then what do you do? Do you make a stink about it? Well, that's not nice. You can't kind of put it in this common area, but then commandeer it. But then what if your TV time is

restricted? We were working on a slightly tighter budget than the Tigers or Terrick Scoople, though. Speaking of budgets, you can help ours by supporting the podcast on Patreon. Well, you know, that was going to be my segue to the Patreon portion of this outro. But I do have one more small favor to ask. I did another episode of a series that I'm trying to get off the ground at the ringer called Plot Hole or Not Hole, where I interview a storyteller about a perceived plot hole in their work. Just go straight to the source, ask them if they think it qualifies as a plot hole, and if so, how it happened. Did the first one last year with Vince Gilligan about an episode of Breaking Bad. The second one is on Ocean's 11, the 2001 version of

Oceans 11 with its screenwriter Ted Griffin. Good number of people watched the first one, so I got to make a second one. I'd like to make a third one and many more, including a possible plot hole in a true blue baseball movie. So I hope you'll check it out. I'll link to it on the show page. Even if you don't want to watch the whole thing, even if you're not interested, just give me a courtesy click. Just open the page and close it. YouTube counts anything and everything as a view these days. It's just on YouTube for now, but hope it'll be a podcast at some point. I appreciate your support.

And speaking of support, I appreciate, you can support the podcast on Patreon and get yourself access to this weekend's Philly Atlanta live stream. We did consider waiting until the last weekend of the regular season and doing Diamondbacks podrace, but we couldn't guarantee that the stakes would still be so high then. Just go to patreon.com slash effectively wild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get yourself access to quite a few perks, including that live stream, as have the following five listeners, Sean O'Donoghue, Jackie, David Tillman, Todd Kaye, and Michael Schneckloff.

Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to exclusive live streams, as well as an unrestricted third episode of each week. That's coming up next time, too. Membership in our Discord group, monthly bonus episodes, personalized message, is prioritized email answers, shoutouts at the end of episodes, potential podcast appearances, Fangraphs, memberships, and more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash EffectivelyWild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site.

If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube music, and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild sub-edit at R-Sash Effectively Wild, and you can check the show notes in the podcast posted fan graphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today.

Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Effectively wild, it's the zombie runner, Bobby Shane's Bobbie Shams, Bobby Shams, Joey Menaces. Walk off three-run digger. Stop it.

Walk-off three-run shot. Oh, my God. Meg, he's the best player in baseball. Effectively wild.