Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 698: The Diamondbacks Do it Again

Episode Date: June 23, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about prosecuting the Cardinals and the Royals’ All-Star tally, then talk about the Diamondbacks’ perplexing Bronson Arroyo trade.

Good afternoon and welcome to episode 698 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Gretland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Yo. Anything to discuss? Sure, a few things. Okay. All right.

Anything to discuss? Sure, a few things. Okay. All right. There's a little note in one of the articles on the Astros hack that noted that four Cardinals employees have hired defense attorneys, criminal defense attorneys. And I wanted to ask you whether you think this is appropriate, not them hiring attorneys, I mean, of course, but there's sort of always been a rule that if you like assault a human being, they don't press charges as long as you assault him in a baseball way. You know, like they've never come after a guy for throwing a projectile at another person's head like it. I think there's very, very, very rare exceptions like that thing in hockey one time.

very, very rare exceptions like that thing in hockey one time. But generally speaking, it has been determined that crimes committed in pursuit of a baseball victory are for some reason, perhaps a good reason, perhaps not, exempt from the justice system. And so I wondered what you, how you feel about this being in the actual real criminal justice system is there any reason that this should be a crime do you think well other than that it technically is one i know but i mean it was so many so many potential crimes are considered not crimes because they happen in sports right yeah that's true some well some level physical aggression is accepted, but this is so divorced from that. This is front office people sitting at a computer, and it's looking for a competitive advantage, whereas the things that we're talking about, guys hitting other guys with baseballs, I guess you could say there's an advantage to it if it intimidates your opponents, but it's also just a corrective thing.

It's just there's no advantage gained by the team. If anything, it hurts the team. That's counter evidence. Yeah, I see. These guys are doing this specifically because they're trying to make, I mean, again, like as we've talked about, it doesn't really seem like this was about a competitive advantage necessarily. Maybe, who knows. But I mean, punching a guy in a brawl, for instance, is more divorced from the competitive angle of the game if it is indeed the competitive angle of the game

that justifies crimes on the field so so first of all i guess why do you what do you think is the the reason for carving out an exemption for some criminal acts done in sport well there has to be some exemption where you can have players killing each other because... No, I'm saying the exemption... No, I'm asking the exemption, the basic exemption, that you never see a guy get charged for punching another guy on a football field. Why does that exemption exist? Or, you know, boxing. Boxing is only punching other guys.

That's somewhat different, though. I mean... It's not the entire basis of sport of baseball. That is sanctioned fighting. But baseball fighting is not sanctioned in fact it's against the rules and if you do it in baseball you get punished so it's clearly specifically outlawed by the sport itself and yet the legal justice system has determined that it is not their business what happens in baseball even if it's even if it's off topic, even if it's clearly reminiscent of other crimes that get prosecuted. Yeah, it's like a violence antitrust exemption.

Yeah, so what is the reason for that exemption, do you think? We like baseball. We like to see it happen. I don't know. I've thought of it at times like it's basically assault. It's throwing a baseball really hard at some other person in a way that could really hurt that person. And a lot of times it is literally assault. After a brawl, when Johnny Cueto is punching and kicking guys, that's not even baseball related. There's no baseball involved there. He's punching and kicking people. It's no longer like, oh, well, what is the intent like he punched and kicked them and that's against the rule i guess it's partially that we understand that they all know the risk and accept the risk

by being on the baseball field this is something that has always happened in baseball if you're a baseball player you know that you are accepting the risk that someone's gonna hit you with a pitch because of some other thing that happened whether you did someone's gonna hit you with a pitch because of some other thing that happened whether you did it or not hit you with a punch like don't even think about the pitch hit you with a punch someone might punch you pitch is worse pitch is scarier i know but there's not like what what is the difference between a punch why does the why does the justice system not treat a punch as a punch because a punch is specifically i mean there there is every day thousands of people are

prosecuted for throwing punches at people they're mad at yeah and and so why does a punch get excluded i don't even need to get clever and ask about the the pitch with intent just the punch why is a punch exempt because everyone's culpable everyone does it everyone accepts that it could happen to them no one presses charges if someone pressed charges maybe it would be it could be prosecuted you don't need to press charges for something to be prosecuted though i suppose not and i don't know that i mean there's a there's probably i don't know if anybody's done the scientific inquiry into this but do you think that there is more punching in baseball per capita than there is in like a biker bar or something maybe i don't know i would guess that there's not and yet if

you punch someone in a biker bar and the cop sees you, he might arrest you for unlawful conduct, for assault, for disturbing the peace, for whatever. And so you wouldn't go, oh, well, everybody who goes into a bar knows that you could get punched. I mean everybody who walks down the street knows you could get punched. That stupid knockout thing that everybody was freaking out a couple of years ago right like where people just were getting punched randomly on the sidewalk remember that yeah it's not like you'd be like oh well you knew going on the sidewalk that you might get punched but you don't you don't know that's a weird thing you don't know on the sidewalk that someone might punch you the huge majority of major leagueball players make it through their career without getting punched in a game.

It's hard to determine who's responsible in most baseball punches. Yeah, but everyone's punching. Like, when punches happen, it's a brawl. There's, like, everyone is, it's a mass behind home plate, and everyone is pushing and pulling and punching. And it's, everyone is equally at fault usually not always there are cases where it's very clear that someone did something that went beyond i thought there are usually not that many people throwing punches but i mean if a guy charges the mound uh it's pretty clear who charged the mound yeah but he charged the mound because he thought the other guy started it so it's i don't

know i'm not calling for them to get look then i'm not calling i'm not calling for them to be prosecuted in or anything like that i'm trying to figure out the the logical reason that we've come up with this rule so that i can see if it applies to using your old boss's password to to play hijinks and raising it's just because we accept that baseball is very competitive and the stakes are high and there's a lot of pressure and we enjoy watching it. And this has always been part of the game. And there's just a societal exemption for baseball because of that. Okay, so I'm going to then say that everything you just said,

other than societal exemption, applies to the quote-unquote hack, right? It's a competitive environment. We enjoy the gamesmanship of front office activities. We see the front office as an extension of the team. And there is a – what was the last one you said? What was the last one you said? Oh, there is a history of this, which is stealing signs and otherwise trying to spy on a team or capture intelligence about another team. So I would say that all that also applies here.

Yeah, that's true. The situation is as described. I think that I would consider this to be, it feels to me as a non-expert, non-legal, non-informed person, it feels to me like weirdly overreaching for the government to be doing this. And I'm not typically the guy who accuses the government of overreaching for everything they do when it comes to baseball. I find if Congress wants to do hearings that usually is fine with me but uh in this case it really really doesn't feel like the sort of crime that like some like assistant gm or whatever should go to jail for and i don't think there's any chance that they're going to go to jail for so So why is the FBI investigating this? It feels like baseball's realm and that baseball should be the one investigating it. It's hard to say with this. I mean, it's just, I guess, that whatever exemption that we apply to the players

doesn't apply to front office people who wear suits and sit in an office and aren't on the field. And there's no mechanism to police this behavior like a fastball in the ribs unless you want front office people to start punching each other, which would be bad. In baseball, it's determined that a fastball in the ribs to a teammate counts as a fastball in the ribs. And so you could you could throw if you

wanted to you could throw it the cardinals you know best player and the message i'm sure would get through i mean he's the front office people don't want the players to hate them that's a pretty that's true their thing so uh and you know there's all sorts of ways that you could the baseball can punish. I mean they don't need to go to jail. They shouldn't go to jail. You must admit or you must agree. Everybody listening to this agrees, right?

No jail for the Cardinals 4, right? No jail. Most people listening to this just probably want to send Cardinals to jail for no reason. I will literally – if any of them isinals to jail for no reason i will i will literally if any of them is going to jail i strap yourself to the prison gates no i will i swear right here right now i will literally build a make a picket or whatever a sign you know like a sign like a picket sign and i will march through the streets of the town I live in for two hours. Okay.

I'll be there to chronicle it. All right. All right. No jail time for the Cardinal Four. I don't know if there are four, but I'm saying it right now. T-shirts, right. Send these letters and emails and tweets to your congressmen. Let's keep them out of jail and

and let's let's have some perspective on this that's all i'm saying and i'm pro-prosecuting for assault on a field i mean this is so much more than like jail is awful ben nobody should go to jail yeah they go to white collar jail go to jail for people who hack into other people's ground controls you know what they do to white-collar jail. Go to jail for people who hack into other people's ground controls. You know what they do to cardinals in prison? It's rough. Yeah. All right, what else?

We got an email about the Royals' all-star voting from Jason, who claims to have some inside insight. And so he gave us a little bit of background. Do you mind if I just read it? Nope. All right. Under the bullet point, the cause, Jason writes, you all were looking for a reason or a team-led effort to get out the vote.

As far as I can tell, it's been a pretty grassroots effort, and here's how it played out. Myself and my peers among the Royals diaspora have never known a willing Royals team winning. That's an autocorrect, a winning Royals team and are genuinely excited about the prospect of forgetting Ken Harvey, all-star. The Royals haven't had a starting position player since Jermaine Dye in 2000. So enthusiasm was high. The early vote tallies reflected this, which led to a ton of national media stories to the effect of,

you all better get out and vote or the Royals are going to have six All-Stars. This led me and a few of my fellow Royals pals to think this novel and actually get online to vote. Then more stories cascaded and more KC fans took it as a badge of honor or a challenge to defend the vote. I am, however, disgusted, disgusted that so many of them are voting for Omar Infante. I believe Colon the better option for the Royals at second base. Can you, but you only get one. Isn't there only one option unless you do a write-in? You can only vote for one player, you mean?

No, I mean the team can only nominate one guy for the ballot. So there's, Colon would presumably not be the ballot at second base. But, write him in. Rios' tally is also a disgrace to the fan base. The novelty of it all at first seemed that all the Royals deserving to be in the conversation were dominating the voting. Gordon, Kane, Moose, Perez, Alcides, etc. Does that sound like a reasonable narrative for how this all happened?

Well, when we first talked about it, I said that maybe Royals fans just cared more about this for various reasons because they've been bad for a long time and there's a lot of excitement about the team when the team gets good. So to an extent, I'm still suspicious because of the volume of the votes and the ease with which you can circumvent the, I don't even want to call them limits or protections really. There essentially are no limits or protections. So it is somewhat easily exploitable, it would seem.

And when you have Kansas City or the surrounding areas outvoting the rest of the entire country, it raises some flags. Yeah, right. flags yeah right so the the basically the idea is that they were more enthusiastic at first within a fairly you know fairly reasonable and then uh that kind of got a lot of attention i still i don't know i mean it's an it's a little bit of a lucky year that for instance there's not a good shortstop candidate and so um so lcd sesca bar might plausibly happened without some structured or whatever effort, it seems to me, right? I mean, Kendries Morales is not a beloved figure

in KC history. He's having a significantly worse year than some of his competition. And so... Yeah, well, he's a royal. Everyone, clearly, that is the thing these players have in common, so maybe it doesn't really matter how you're doing. It's just a support-all-royals movement,

but it's suspicious. And then as far as the the the royals fan base this is a little bit of insight about kansas city uh and i kind of i sort of dismissed your your hypothesis that maybe royals fans are just really excited and have a lot of fervor as a group but he says the cardinals often get grief for their best fans in baseball shtick, but what gets lost is the absolutely insufferable nature of Kansas University fans. They rep their team harder than anyone. Even in Seattle, where I live, I see more KU gear than any team, aside from UW and Washington State, even more than Oregon and Oregon State. I believe their overzealous desire to be associated with anything of national relevance

has manifested itself in the All-Star balloting. Also, I believe KC is known to have a great fan base it was just dormant for so long exhibit a when casey hosted the all-star game they sold out the futures game and will myers got a standing ovation before his first ab the postseason was pretty raucous i'm not sure if the disproportionate number of excellent national baseball writers who are royals fans has anything to do with this but that's another topic and yeah the Royals also uh when they host the all-star game had that whole like booing Robbie Cano thing I mean they are they they can gather uh as a as a group and make some noise so uh more I guess it is more likely that it would be from the Royals fans than like the Indians fans or some other small market teams fans yeah that makes sense do I have anything else I can't believe you took Puig over Kershaw

we haven't talked about that in the ESPN franchise player draft I mean I get it it's a pitcher but like what how many guys would you take over Kershaw Pu Puig. There's like one. I mean who was remaining in the draft. So you would have taken no other position player over him? I was thinking about Nolan Arenado, but probably that's it.

Trout and Harper were picked and I don't remember who else was picked. I was picking what, 8 eighth or something. Did you have any clear method for weighing the risk of taking a pitcher, particularly in an event that loses relevance the next day? So if you get hurt two years from now, you don't actually have to suffer for it? Not really. Your starting a franchise was the conceit of this thing, and so I figured that Puig might zero if you're starting a franchise but

it was mostly the position player pitcher thing Dan Simborski did a stats a zips based breakdown of what the picks who made the best picks or who made the worst picks or whatever and I was picking eighth and he had Puig sixth as you as he should have been picked sixth. And Kershaw, I think he had third. So I'm happy with Puig. You're always afraid that Kershaw is hurt, right? You're perpetually afraid that he's hurt. I know, but that's like a lovable goof that I have. It's been wrong for five years.

But it could be right. At some point, it's not, it's been wrong for five years. But it could be right. At some point, it's not impossible. Yeah, sure, but he's not. He's never, he's not hurt. Like, I'm not thinking he's going to get hurt. I, my, my thing is that he, is that I think he has been hurt for three years and it's just taking a really long time to manifest.

That's, that's what's stupid about me. I think that he had, like it was the plantar fasciitis from like three years ago. Yeah, you had to put the back thing last year. Yeah, and so I see, like every once in a while I see these tiny little hints that I think are the manifestation of the injury finally showing up, but it's not.

It's a joke. Well, it's sort of a joke. I'm sort of a joke. Okay. So we are going to just briefly talk about the Diamondbacks trade from over the weekend. And we didn't talk about it yesterday, and I wasn't really planning to talk about it yesterday

because it seemed like it had a simple explanation that has now become more complicated so the diamondbacks traded bronson arroyo and their first round pick from last year tuki toussaint who is the 16th overall the most marginal major leaguers slash AAA infielder imaginable. And he's also hurt. So that was essentially nothing, but they got salary relief. They got like $14 million of Bronson Arroyo off the books. And Arroyo is coming back from Tommy John surgery last July. He's still having elbow pain. He may or may not pitch this year. And if he does, he'll still be Bronson Arroyo.

So this was what seemed like a straight up salary dump. It seemed like the Diamondbacks were just trading a prospect to get rid of Bronson Arroyo. And so it seemed like it must be an ownership mandated move, or at least I wasn't ready to jump all over Dave Stewart or Tony La Russa and say, oh, what a stupid move, because it seemed like the sort of thing that would have come from above and been imposed on the baseball people. above and been imposed on the baseball people. But today, Tuesday, we have some comments from La Russa that seem to suggest otherwise. He says that the Diamondbacks didn't want to wait for Toussaint to develop. They want to win now. They want to add a couple of pieces. They're a lot closer than most people think, and they needed

to do this to get financial flexibility so that they could upgrade at this trade deadline and potentially make the playoffs. So if we are accepting that at face value and we're not guessing that he was ordered to come up with some baseball justification of this move so that it wouldn't be seen as purely a salary dump then he's not saying it's not a salary dump he's saying that it's a salary dump that enables a salary addition so yeah i never i never i never assumed it had to be from ownership i I mean, presumably, I mean, he could have just wanted to make a move either now or in the future. And, you know, he knows he's got a budget and you want to find room in that budget somehow. And so he did the wrong thing to make room in that budget. Right. That was how I kind of took it.

And I guess that's what it what it seems to be. So we we we've talked about diamondbacks trades in the past everyone has talked about diamondbacks trades they have a history of giving up on guys quickly or so it seems they've made a bunch of deals not all of them have worked out terribly but seemed very questionable at the time and some have still seemed very questionable now whether it was trading trevor bauer trading justin upton trading adam eaton trading i don't know matt davidson for or addison reed for uh they got addison reed for matt davidson that probably wasn't one of the the most hated ones and add Edison Reed is now in AAA.

There have been a whole sequence of these moves where the Diamondbacks just seem to give up on someone who was a big prospect or a star, and just didn't, they didn't think that he fit in their culture or on their roster for whatever reason, and they seem to sell low. And this has been kind of the defining trait of the Diamondbacks front office over the last few years and still continues to be, even though the Diamondbacks front office has been overhauled and Kevin Towers is no longer there. And this may be, I mean, do we,

do you think that there is anything to what Larissa is saying? Like, are we underrating the Diamondbacks? Does this make any sort of sense? Heavens no. It makes way less sense. Yeah. It seemed like this was a kind of a miscalculation in the value of a top prospect. You feel like, and maybe we're wrong, but you sort of feel like, like well you ought to be able to sell quote unquote

sell a pretty good prospect for more than they did if they wanted to just sell a prospect and get money probably they could have even done better is what people are sort of thinking i mean it's all it's all just asset uh asset pricing when it comes down to it and so if they thought he was an asset that was worth X dollars and they wanted to cash that out and take the money and spend it somewhere else, uh, it's cold, but it's,

you know, how we assess pretty much all these moves, whether we use that kind of crass language or not. And I think everybody is basically saying, well, yeah, but he's worth more than that. I mean,

we sort of have a general sense of what a prospect is worth and probably worth more than they got for him. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, we sort of have a general sense of what a prospect is worth and probably worth more than they got for him, right? Well, yeah, I mean, he's not like a top 10 guy. He didn't even make the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 this year. He was 71st on Baseball America's list. He was 98th on MLB.com's list. I don't know about other lists, but he's 19. He's in A ball. He's a pitcher.

So he's fairly far away, and he's a pitcher, and he's not regarded as future ace necessarily. necessarily so that i mean when you i'm trying to remember all the the studies about what a prospect is worth at various tiers of the baseball america list or whatever list but when you get down to like the the lower quartile of the list for pitchers those guys aren't sure things those guys aren't the most valuable assets in baseball necessarily. So I don't know how much is he worth more than $14 million? I mean, probably. I think so. draftee became free agents and those guys got 10 million dollars in 1996 which is still the biggest bonus given to an amateur draftee so if those guys were worth 10 million as free agents almost 20 years ago then you would think that a first round pick from last year who hasn't become a bust or anything would be worth more than 14 million in 2015. Yeah, and Dave Cameron has pointed out, and other people have pointed out, Ben Badler

pointed out that there are other recent international signees that are fairly, the consensus is that they're worse prospects than Toussaint, and they cost more. So like the Angels signed Roberto Baldequin, who is probably a worse player, a prospect than Toussaint, and they spent $13 million on him. And the Diamondbacks signed Yohan Lopez, who also rated lower than Toussaint by all the prospect rankings this year. And with taxes, they paid him $16 million. And both of those guys, I believe, I could double-check the ages, but both of those guys also cost them the flexibility to sign international free agents for the next two years because of the penalty for going over your pool, right? So as well as the money,

there's opportunity costs. And so just based on those, you sort of would conclude that the market for him would, or the cost for him would have to probably be more. Although he's not a free agent. Tucson is not a free agent. The other guys are free agents. Well, he's not a free agent,

so you don't have to pay him more. But the question is what somebody would pay him. And if somebody would pay those guys more than the Diamondbacks essentially got for Toussaint, then presumably someone would pay him that. I mean, he essentially, if you have one team that controls him and is selling him to the highest bidder, then he is essentially a free agent and 29 teams can bid and say, here's what we'll give you. Now it has to, it's not quite so smooth a transaction because you have to figure out a way to make the contracts work because you can't just give cash. You probably wouldn't have approved a trade in which you just gave cash for him. And so they had to do this thing where Arroyo goes out and another prospect goes, you know, another player goes over.

So it's somewhat harder to find a fit, but not that much harder, I wouldn't think. So Dave Cameron ultimately concluded closer to $20 million. So that's, I mean, there's that. You could question whether the money is more valuable to the Diamondbacks right now than a prospect, given where they are in their competitive window. And that's, I guess, what La Russa is defending is that part of it. probably not although that's also as we've talked about in a lot of trades that gives them so little benefit of the doubt it implies that they just picked up you know the phone and made one call and we're like sounds good to me like oops and they probably didn't right no uh but anyway it looks like they got less for him than some other team might have paid or than they should have held out for two is larusa says that this is the perfect time to trade a prospect for cash,

and what we are now saying is that also that's very wrong. They're not a good team. They're not a particularly competitive team. Their playoff odds are they have about a 1 in 20 chance of playing in a series. Yeah, their playoff odds are at baseball perspective 7.3 percent at fangraphs 4.1 percent and those are including wild card yeah exactly so uh i mean good heavens the diamondbacks are terrible like the only way you could say this makes sense for the we're competitive now is if you're willing to say we're competitive now and we are going to be

really really really really really really really uncompetitive soon and so even though it's a huge long shot we just have absolutely no other way of building for the next few years so we might as well put everything into right now and was the trumbo the trumbo trade feels like it was maybe i don't know i it's hard to it's hard to value trumbo and wellington castillo but that feels like a four later move that feels like a we're not competitive now kind of move doesn't it yeah and that well that move seemed well i don't know not i mean the diamonds didn't really have a catcher this year they right you know they started the season with Tuffy Ghostwitch, so not. I mean, they could use a catcher. Yeah, that's true.

And I didn't mind that trade. I mean, the first Mark Trumbo trade was perplexing, but the second Mark Trumbo trade was fine. I don't mind it. I'm just wondering whether it fits into LaRusso's narrative about what the Diamondbacks are doing this year. Because it feels like it's – I think – I mean, I'd have to really think about it, but it feels like more value later than this year for that move.

But it's a good move. I like that move too. Yeah, that was fine. So if that was sort of a sign that, oh, maybe the Diamondbacks are not making crazy moves anymore, it didn't last very long. And I'm kind of happy that there is a team like this, because I keep thinking that there's going to be a year when there are no teams like this

because teams seem to keep getting smarter. The vast majority of teams, we can't mock anymore. They're just too smart. They don't say anything stupid. They don't seem to do anything that's clearly stupid. They talk like we talk when they talk at all and there's no fun in that. Maybe it's better. Maybe it's a better game. Maybe it's a more entertaining product. But

there's some value in snark for fans. And it seems like there's always a team that deserves the snark. And I wonder how long that will last. Right now, they're, you know, like the Royals used to be that team. They now they're you know like the royals used to be that team they're not that team anymore the pirates used to be that team they're not that team anymore there are a lot of teams that fit into that box at one point that no longer do because they are different people well and we still have the diamondbacks we still have the phillies maybe we're moving to a world where which would probably be better where we snark about individual moves on their merits instead of knee-jerk snarking about the team themselves.

And I think it was a step forward that we spent much of the offseason wondering what in the world the Rays were doing, and for part of it, wondering what in the world the A's were doing instead of just going, you know, make fun of the Phillies and laud the smart teams. It's not really like that anymore. Now we can make fun of the Phillies and laud the smart teams. It's not really like that anymore. Now we can make fun of everybody. Yeah, and the Diamondbacks...

While being humble about the fact that we have no idea what they're doing and that a lot of the moves that we like turn out horrible and vice versa. And the Diamondbacks have turned over largely since they drafted Tucson, so the GM who was there is no longer there. The scouting director who drafted him is no longer there. It's the same farm director, but there's been a lot of change.

And maybe they just don't like Toussaint as much as the regime that drafted him did. And maybe they don't believe in him. But the thing with the Diamondbacks has always been that it seems like they could at least take advantage of the fact that other people believe in these players. They seem to give up on players that they no longer think are going to turn out to be good. But meanwhile, the consensus still seems to be that they are going to be good and you'd think they could get a return for them that would be appropriate for a player who's going to be good. But they always just seem to make that reflexive move, just get them out of there instead of waiting and maximizing the return. Anyway, it's another weird Diamondbacks trade.

I don't know where it ranks on the hierarchy of Diamondbacks trades, but it's up there. And it maybe is a reminder that ownership matters. And it maybe is a reminder that ownership matters. We don't usually talk about like a team president or an owner's hiring ability. We always focus on the GM or maybe a team president who used to be a GM. And it kind of matters that you have someone who hires a good person for those roles. someone who hires a good person for those roles and if you get rid of kevin towers and you just hire a couple other people who seem to have a similar approach or make similarly strange moves then you haven't really improved ownership matters so jason says of the prosecution of

non-prosecution of sports violence i I don't think there is a carve out, certainly not in criminal law. It's just that culturally it's not prosecuted. Civil law, suit for assault, there might be some assumption of risk to overcome. But I think it's again, mainly cultural, why nobody ever sues. And I've got an economist article here that I'm going to read you. Boxing is extreme. Competitors win by hurting each other, but other contact sports and those using dangerous implements such as bats and hard balls can also injure and kill. The death of Philip Hughes in November

in cricket was a sad example. Though he died after a rock-hard fist-sized object was thrown toward him, no one was prosecuted. As a batsman playing cricket, he fell victim to an accident, not a crime. But playing sport is not licensed for anarchy. Murder on the football pitch is still murder. But rather than passing clear laws, common law countries have set the boundaries of the carve-out for sports via prosecutorial discretion and a few close-call cases.

Those boundaries can shift with social norms. Sometimes they're extended. Norway has just ended its ban on professional boxing, for instance. But in most countries, they are likely to narrow with potentially large consequences. Players, teams, and leagues could find themselves legally liable for injuries once regarded as routine, and if the public turns away from dangerous games, huge industries, such as football, could vanish. The basic principle that makes violence in sports legal is consent. Anyway, the point is sort of that more prosecutions might come

as we get a little more sensitive to them and that precedent might fade away, and maybe that is what is leading to it. Yeah, well, just the institutional risks that players face have now kind of become criminalized, right? Like concussions, head injuries, those used to just be accepted as part of the game, but now players have successfully extracted penalties from the leagues

for not protecting them from those things. So you could see that eventually extending to just regular fisticuffs. One last thing about La Russa, I noted, i think at the time last november he said he would be heartbroken if the diamondbacks didn't finish over 500 and the diamondbacks are now 34 and 35 so maybe he is just trying to avoid heartbreak we can all sympathize with that he needs to make the diamondbacks two games better in order to avoid being heartbroken that's worth that's why tony lorris's heart is worth a former 16th overall pick so the the thing about it is that they are they're now going to trade more prospects this this hit this is

suggesting that they're now going to trade more prospects in order to take on players who cost money and that will make them not good enough to make the postseason so in fact what we have seen is that they have sold tucson in order to enable them to trade other prospects away yep all for a uh all for a run at a postseason that while i err on the side of go for it uh In this case, I can't. They're very – no. They're not very bad. They're a 500 – almost 500 team. But they're very unlikely to make it.

Yes. They are not a good team. No, they are not. And they are not in a – they remain in a division that they would rather not be in. And Pittsburgh and Chicago have set the wild card bar very high right now. It's just not going to happen. No. Okay.

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