Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 725: Why Don’t Bad Teams Tank in September?

Episode Date: September 15, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss Yoenis Cespedes’ MVP case and contract, then talk about why bad teams don’t try to lose in September.

I give up, I'm through with trying. I give up, I'm through with your lying. I give up, I'm through with you. I give up, I've done all I can do. Good morning and welcome to episode 725 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg. Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you? All right. Okay.

Didn't sound great. No. You sounded like you were trying to get to the end of this. We always are. If that's the case, I can help you out trying to get to the end of this. We always are. If that's the case, I can help you out. We can end it right now. No, we've tried and failed to do this topic once, so we're going to do it today. All right, so Ben, do you have any banter? Yeah, I guess I do.

I just wanted to ask you if you thought there was a real risk of a recency bias contract for UNS Cespedes. Jeff Passan wrote a thing about some off-season free agents and whether they've helped themselves or hurt themselves. And he spoke to some sources and they all think that the deal for Cespedes will begin at $125 million or end up in the $160 million range, which, as Jeff writes, is a staggering figure for someone who the last two seasons posted on base percentages of 294 and 301. Baseball, like so many other avenues in life, cannot help but fall into the recency bias trap. Do you think that it will fall into that trap? I think that if he were to sign his contract today, perhaps, but I feel like the memory tends to die pretty quickly. And I think ultimately most teams that are pursuing him

are going to look at whatever version of war their front office generates, and they're going to see that number, and that number is going to overwhelm any particular recency. Now, the highest war is going to be the last one, and so maybe that will affect their offers somewhat. If he had these exact same four years but in a different order, then certainly he would get less, but that's appropriate. That's how it should be. I think that he was already a very good player. The 301 on base percentage, for instance, is one way of phrasing his 2014 season. Another way is to say he was a 4.1 war player, if you believe the defensive metrics. And this year, he's also very good, but he's a six-win player. He's not reinventing the sport or anything like that. He's, for instance,

worse than Lorenzo Cain, if you believe war. And my guess is that he will get overpaid somewhat because of the profile of player he is. I think he'll get paid more than he would have somewhat reasonably because he has demonstrated an ability to do some things in center field, which I probably didn't really necessarily believe before this year or before he was traded. And so that'll help him justifiably. But unless it becomes a situation where the Mets are bidding against themselves in some way to pursue like a PR score a PR win no I don't really expect it I mean thinking back on it so who are in fact you know the answer to this because we talked about it not that long ago but who are the uh the the other two great league switch half seasons in recent history they're mark to share a manny ramirez oh uh

is that a league switcher yeah yeah he did a league switch but then the dodgers basically said we're going to outbid everybody and there wasn't even a public negotiation really like mananny Ramirez just waited until finally they offered him a crazy number right so that was that was probably the situation like that maybe some would like the cesspitous thing to be like well he's done all this with New York New York needs to sign a guy to show that they're a legit team just like the Dodgers sort of did at the time uh with a legit owner and so they'll just do something crazy and it'll just be something crazy and it'll

just be a matter of waiting until they offer that. But yeah, Manny Ramirez is a good one. Mark Teixeira is one. And Teixeira was phenomenal with the Angels but not dramatically different than you would have expected. But then the other one is, unless I'm remembering this wrong, it's Carlos Beltran who went to the Astros, was essentially as good as Cespedes has been, even better probably than Cespedes has been, and then went into the postseason and had at the time what was maybe the greatest postseason in history. And if ever there was going to be a recency bias effect, it would have been that. And then Beltran got a very reasonable deal in my opinion and in fact probably underpaid relative to his stardom at the time uh and the what wasn't it that the yankees wouldn't go as like the yankees sort of passed on him because they he wanted to play for them he wanted to pay for them and he couldn't

get them bidding at the level that you would have expected and he got like what seven and 119 which is a lot but nothing out i mean beltron probably totally deserved that much and and maybe more and i mean that was the greatest postseason performance we'd ever seen from a guy who was undeniably a superstar and had produced something like four wins after the trade uh when he'd gone to the astros. So, I don't know, maybe Beltran just isn't as photogenic or whatever as Cespedes is. And maybe he was always four and a half wins with the Astros after he got traded. Maybe he was always going to be undervalued because people have never appreciated Carlos Beltran the way that they should have. But if that's any sort of a precedent,

it suggests that people forget about this stuff. And know cc sabathia another guy he got a he got a big deal after that trade but he probably got the same deal that he was gonna get a giant deal anyway yeah he was a 27 year old coming off of a cy young at age 26 who was you know having a great year well he wasn't having a great year with cleveland but he was still a great pitcher he's striking out a batter per nine he was going deep into games he was throwing shutouts he this guy was absolutely going to get a massive deal and then he has the greatest post-trade half season you know of our lifetimes or maybe since randy johnson with the astros and uh and gets you know a normal contract like he didn't get the clayton kershaw 300 million he got 160 or whatever with an opt-out

yeah and cespedes is gonna turn 30 during the playoffs so he doesn't seem like he's gonna be a i wouldn't expect that someone is gonna go crazy mean, it depends what he does in the playoffs, maybe a little bit. But if he wins an MVP award kind of out of nowhere, maybe that would help if it's one of those cases where the agent goes right to the owner and says, look how this guy turned around the Mets season and he won an MVP award and he was so clutch and so on and so forth. And maybe you could talk an owner into doing something silly. But I wouldn't imagine that that would have all that much effect on baseball people. The best counterargument to everything I just said is that Cespedes is an all-star level player, but he hasn't been a superstar level player. And those guys I named were superstars who got paid like they were worth but they were already superstars and maybe there's

just not that far you can push the ceiling whereas cesspitous might have kind of tiered himself into a new tier yeah that could be because i mean when he was traded he was i mean he was like the how like the eighth biggest name traded at the deadline or something like that. Like, it was a huge deadline. Lots of superstars or former superstars changed teams. And he was almost an afterthought. He was like a semi-big deal that happened at the last minute. And it was kind of like, OK, the Mets did something.

They got Cespedes. But it wasn't regarded as huge as it has been. So he has definitely raised his profile. I was trying to see if I could make the MVP argument make sense somehow. And there's really no great way to do it. Like, you could make, like, the just context MVP case, like if he had been super clutch and maybe Harper hadn't been, then maybe you could kind of make that case. You know, as long as it's called most valuable player instead of best player or something, you can make valuable mean many things. But even if you do that, Cespedes doesn't really it doesn't really benefit him

he's like he's like 32nd in WPA in the majors I don't know where he ranks in in the National League but even by that Harper is like sixth of anyone in baseball so that doesn't help so you really have to do the playoff team and you have to ascribe some ability to motivate other players and make other players hit better so it has to be a semi-mystical argument to get him there yeah i uh i wrote a long thing and then deleted it um about this uh so but i agree with you and there's also not really any real precedent for this, for getting MVP votes in this situation. It hasn't been the case that voters have decided that this was a worthwhile thing to do,

even when guys have been roughly as good as Cespedes and even when their teams made the playoffs. So, you know, the lack of... I always have this feeling. Whenever somebody does this star spangled banner the national anthem before a game and they do something a little different and it's awful every time i i think to myself if you if you if you're you might first start by asking if there's a reason nobody's ever done this before there's been a lot of anthems sung over the years yeah

and unless you're marvin gay or like if you're Marvin Gaye, you can do it. Like you can pull off whatever. But otherwise, you should think, why hasn't anybody ever done this before? And it's the same with MVP voting. If you have some sort of novel approach for determining who the MVP is, you might ask yourself why no one else has that approach. And if there's not any real precedent for it, then you're probably kind of nuts. And do you mean precedent as in guys traded at the deadline

and had a good second half or good end of the year? Like Beltran got no votes and Teixeira got no votes, and both of them were better or at least as good in the second half, and their teams made the playoffs, So that's not a factor. Uh, Sabathia, I, I know that there was this sort of same conversation about Sabathia at the time. Uh, and he didn't get a vote. I mean, if Sabathia didn't get a vote, Sabathia who spent half the year, like he got traded even earlier, he started 17 games and didn't get a single vote. So, you single vote so you know it just doesn't like there's not really a that's what i mean there's not really a precedent yeah let me let me check

manny but i mean you know somebody i'm even surprised because i would have bet anything that those guys would get down ballot consideration uh if nothing else right like you want to throw your symbolic vote to somebody like if you're going to give one to Jeremy Affel, why wouldn't you give one to Manny Ramirez who hit 400 over the course of, you know, 53 games and led his team to some, did they win? I don't remember if they won that year, but he did not get a single down ballot vote. They made the playoffs. Wait, hang on.

He did. He did. He finished fourth. Ah, okay. Yeah. So nevermind him. There's your precedent. Yeah yeah and that was 53 games that was 53 games yeah wow but he hit 400 hang on oh wait hang on ben yeah i've been misreading the uh baseball reference uh line like i've been reading the lines wrong.

So Sabathia actually did. He finished sixth. Now let me see how badly I can undo this exact argument. Let's see. Beltran finished 12th. And Mark Teixeira finished 20th. So, in fact, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to sing the national anthem. You do you

No one came close to winning Manny did Was he a close fourth? I don't know Let me see Manny hit 396 with a 500 on base and a

750 slugging almost Remember that? Yeah. That was great. He finished. He did not get a first place vote. That was the year that Pujols and Howard nearly tied, even though Pujols had seven more wins.

And Howard got 12 of 30 first place votes. And then Manny and Braun basically tied for third place. And Sabathia, actually, that was the same year. So Sabathia and Manny combined almost had as many votes as Pools and Howard. But, of course, that's because they got to take up two spots. Neither one got a first place vote. The other two first place votes that year,

this is great. Pujols, nine wins, 9.2 wins above replacement, gets 18 first place votes. Ryan Howard with the RBIs gets 12 first place votes. And then Bradledge gets two with his 1.95 ERA as a reliever and his 1.23 whip

as a reliever wow because every bullpen has one of those guys now yeah exactly that's that's like yeah that's a seventh inning guy yeah uh he uh how did he finish fourth inside young voting he must not have blown a save. That must have been one of those years where closer doesn't blow a save. All right. That concludes the banter. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Should we call Brad Lidge and ask him? We'll wait 50 years. Okay. That concludes the banter. So, Ben, I wanted to talk about an article that you wrote a few days ago for Grantland about the race for the first pick in the draft next year, which is to say the race for the worst overall record. And at the time you put odds, well, you didn't put odds, but you kind of handicapped. Handicapped means you put odds.

but odds but you uh you kind of handicapped handicap means you put odds um you figuratively handicapped i guess uh the chances of the marlins the braves and the phillies each finishing with the worst record but along the way you also mentioned something uh or showed something which i hadn't really realized which i knew that the al or the nl east is very bad this year what i didn't realize is how incredibly bad it was. There is, or there was at the time, at least no team in the division that had a winning record against the, uh, the rest of the league and all the other worst teams in the league had winning records against the NL East. And, uh, like even the, the Mets have a losing record against the rest of the league. And I mean, the Nationals who you think are bad

Are way worse when you consider that against the rest of the league They play like what like a 400 team Yeah I don't know what the updated numbers are But yes that definitely if you thought they were a disappointment before Then putting into perspective the fact that this is one of the worst divisions we've seen Maybe the worst division in a decade, that makes it even worse that they have failed to the extent that they have. And it makes the Braves and the Phillies even more clearly

among the worst teams that we've watched in a decade. I mean, they're both going to challenge 100 losses against this competition. It's pretty astounding. But at the time, it was a three-team race between the Marlins, the Braves, and the Phillies for the first overall pick. The Marlins have kind of pulled away for third worst record in baseball. Actually, they've passed the Reds and the Rockies, and they've tied the Oakland A's.

The Marlins were a couple games ahead of... When I wrote it, they were a couple games ahead of the Braves, who were a couple games ahead of the Phillies, so I didn't give the Marlins any real chance to do this. The Braves, meanwhile, were two games ahead of the Phillies at the time, and they have now tied the Phillies, and they have lost 24 of their last 27. Yes.

It is a... And the three that they won were against the phillies twice and the rockies once yeah so this has been a collapse for the ages and if you if you think of this as being good for their organization uh which i guess technically and kind of undeniably it probably is uh it has been one of the great septembers in history and late August in history. But what we wanted to talk about is why baseball doesn't have in-season tanking the way that we sort of think that basketball, for instance, or football do. And so the Braves, first, let's start by answering this question. The Braves have lost 24 of 27. Do you think that there's any agency in this losing streak

on their part? It seems hard to do, even if you were trying to do it, to lose that many games in that span of time. But no, there doesn't really seem to be any way in which they are intentionally tanking other than putting together a pretty bad team which hasn't really been good all year and and you know they maybe they were clearly aiming for 2017 or some future year when they made moves like the hayward trade or other trades since then, the Wood trade, whatever it was. I mean, they got guys back in those deals who could help right away. And so it wasn't a total Astros or Cubs situation, but they were, I think, pretty clearly getting worse. And they were coming off a year where they had another memorable collapse,

and they did away with Frank Wren and everything. So I think they were bad. A lot of people expected them to be bad. Maybe they were better than they were expected to be for much of the year, but there isn't really that much that separates the slightly better-than-expected Braves from the Braves who lose almost every game except an occasional game against another terrible team it's just it's the same team and it's just playing very poorly they are not benching their best hitter they are not benching their best starter although

Shelby Miller never ever wins anymore what is it 21 straight starts without a win or something but he hasn't actually pitched that poorly during that stretch. And more importantly, he has pitched if you were going to shut down. I mean, if you were trying to lose, the easiest thing to do, the most kind of easy to justify from any angle would be to just shut down your pitchers. And I'm sure we'll get to this. But they haven't they had they kept they brought hector olivera up um they don't so far as i know have better options in the minors who

they're obviously holding back up whistler and and he's been bad and in fact uh they uh on august 8th they uh they claimed michael bourne and Nick Swisher from the Indians. And that is kind of the day that it really went downhill. After that, they lost four of the next six and then the 24 of 27. And so really, it's even more impressive. It just doesn't quite look so clean to say they've lost 28 out of 33 uh starting with that day and so that day though they were the i mean i guess if you buy michael bourne and nick swisher as major leaguers uh they were and you should i mean they they're that's their perception they uh they were actually

kind of trying to improve kind of yeah i't know what the point of that move was really to what end I'm still not sure entirely but they it is not in any way clear to me that they

I've looked at some of the individual games and I've kind of tried to glance at their bullpen usage and all that sort of thing. And it is not, to me, clear that they're doing a single thing to try not to win. And, of course, every team who's not in it does try to do things that hurt their chances to win at the end of July or in August when they unload players who are costing them money and try to get prospects. But they're doing that. There's sort of a difference between making moves to improve your long-term outlook, which is what those things are, or to save yourself money, which is what those things are,

and making moves specifically to lose in pursuit of the number one overall pick. And it is the latter that I think I've never seen evidence of. And so I wonder why it is that we don't, because we do see teams very deliberately tank entire seasons, which feels to some degree more controversial. And yet we don't see teams tank month, the, you know,

the final month, even though they are more clearly out of the race by then uh i mean the braves are like literally out of it like literally mathematically out of it you kids not just a matter of going well we don't see ourselves being competitive they cannot possibly win anything and so um it seems like giving up and tanking at that point would actually be less controversial than telling your fans in nove where we just see ourselves as out of it and that's why we're going to be terrible this year. And the rewards for doing it are tangible. It's in fact probably more tangible than it used to be.

The way that the draft works now. Would you agree that the way that the draft works now incentivizes getting the number one pick more than it used to? I would agree. Yeah, because it used to be that you would get the number one pick and that would be really great because you could sign the best player available, which was good. And there is a big difference between number one picks and number two picks it's it's still baseball and drafting so it's not a sure thing by any means but the gap between number one and number two is bigger than the gap between any other spots as far as your expected

value because number one guys are they tend to be guys that everyone's really sure about or as sure as you can possibly be. And even getting to number two, it's often a large step down. Yeah, exactly. So it's always been beneficial. There's always been more incentive to go for number one over number two than to go for number two over number three or to go for number 20 over number 21 and all that. It's always been there because you could always get the best player or who you think is the best player. But now it's even more than that because not only do you have access to that player, have

the choice of getting that player, but you also get more bonus pool money, which gives you, in a lot of ways, a tremendous amount of leverage in this day and age to game the draft the way that you want to. You can pick a guy who you're going to, in most cases, be able to sign for less than his slot at number one, or in many cases, you can use that money to then negotiate with tough signs later on in the draft. You saw the way that the Astros intended to game out the Brady Aiken draft, where they were not only going to get probably the best player in the draft,

the consensus best player in the draft, but they were going to be able to use that money to get extra, basically first-round quality picks down the way. And you, in a lot of ways, have way more leverage in your negotiations with other players with lower-round picks than any other team has. And you kind of get to dictate the way that the draft works in a way that other teams don't necessarily get to when they're picking after you. Much more than I think it used to be where it was just like, okay, well, you take the first pick. The other thing is that it used to be that if the first pick overall was, say, Steven

Strasburg, well, you still had to be able to sign him, and he had a tremendous amount of leverage, and he could negotiate a $20 million deal or something crazy, or else go back to school, or else go pitch an indie ball for a year or whatever. But now with the hard slots kind of as they are, it's really not the case that that guy could negotiate beyond your means. You kind of have a lot clearer way of getting the guy as long as you're willing to pay him slot than you used to be. And so that's another way that the first overall pick. I mean, like we saw teams back in the day, like the Pirates, for instance, who would use that pick and still kind of go cheap or the Rays and still kind of go cheap because they were worried about not being able to sign their guy. I don't think the first overall pick is ever a signability issue anymore because there's just not any other option. That guy's

never going to find another guy, another team that's going to be able to pay him more than you'll be able to pay him. And so you kind of get the best guy. So all of which is just to say that the incentives are greater than they've ever been for tanking. If you wanted to tank, you'd also get the most international money, but I think that's a much smaller thing. All right. So there we go. That's the incentives. And yet we don't see it, for which I'm happy, but for which I'm also surprised. So Ben, why don't we see teams more clearly playing to lose in the final month? Well, aside from the natural aversion to losing and not wanting to be the worst team in baseball, which applies to other sports in which we do debatably see tanking.

The thing that I think makes baseball unique, well, maybe there are a couple of things. One, there's the fact that it's kind of hard to make a team bad or worse than it is. There's no real next level that you can go to to make your team bad that would be easy to pull off. It's not like there's some formation you could start using or you could start, I don't know, giving your star more minutes on the bench or something. There really isn't that much you can do other than just benching your best players, which would be a tough pill for those players to swallow for the most part. I think if you really had a concerted effort to bench your best players, there might be grievances with the players union. There would be an unhappy clubhouse,

I think, just because there's so much money at stake. And a lot of these guys have arbitration cases coming up and free agency is coming up and they have money riding on every single and every walk and every outcome that they could possibly get in a game and so they don't want to be benched and even just playing time, arbitration payment is based a lot on playing time so just getting into a game can make you more money in arbitration and then make you more money in every subsequent arbitration and free agency. So that's a big deal. And so I think you would need a lot of incentive to overcome that. And I'm not sure it's there in baseball because in baseball, it's just the payoff is so far in the future and sort of remote. I mean, can you name any of the top draft prospects for next year? I couldn't have before I wrote this article and asked Kylie McDaniel and Keith Law who the top draft prospects are for next year.

Because I'm a baseball writer and I don't pay that much attention to these things until I have to, which is to be generous next year. And even then, really, you could go years beyond that without necessarily knowing all the names of these guys. So they're like contemporary fiction. You don't even have to pay attention to them until we decide who the best ones are. So I think in a year like this, when there's no clear consensus, number one, like a Strasburg or a Harper who is head and shoulders above everyone else, it's just sort of shaping up to be like the 2015 draft where there were a few short stops that anyone probably could have taken one, two, or three, and no one would have really said anything about it. Shaping up to be similar without much separation. And so you're probably going to get a good player, but you're not necessarily going to get a much better player than you are with the second pick.

And even if you draft that guy and you sign that guy and he's good, you're talking about three more years down the road. So you're talking about know, you're talking about what five years from now maybe is when you might expect to actually be seeing something if your number one pick pays off. And that's, that's a long time on and say yeah that's why we're losing these games that's why our games are unwatchable now and tell your ownership yeah that's why we're not selling tickets to these games because we are intentionally losing that's just a pretty tough case to make and so you and there's no there's no like celebrity like college baseball players are not you know the the number one pick in next year's NBA draft or NFL draft are big celebrities. Everyone knows them, their household names before they're drafted. And so a fan of one of those teams that's tanking can say, can have like a concrete person.

It won't just be an expected war from that draft slot that they are looking forward to. It'll be an actual guy that they're watching every weekend on TV and can salivate over getting to watch him the next year because they might lose a game or two now. And that seems like a much easier sell. So you think that, and I'm not arguing this, but I'm asking that the um that a draft pick is more abstract than money that a billionaire doesn't have to spend on salaries this year and or a live-armed 20 year old venezuelan prospect pitcher who i probably hadn't heard of before i think a draft pick is more abstract than than those things yeah i think it's more abstract than a prospect because people pay attention to prospects now and to a lesser extent people pay attention to

amateur prospects too but that's like another level of hardcore slash uh keeper league insanity so i think without even knowing the name of the person that you were going to get, it's definitely more abstract. Yeah, I think you're basically right that the reason that you don't see tanking is that once you have your roster, once you have your team, like you can get rid of players. That is the way that a team can give up on a season is you get rid of players, you don't spend money on players, so you bank that money, and you trade all of them for future assets instead of present assets. But once you have a roster, once you give your manager a roster, there's not really

anything you can do, good or bad. You just kind of have to play. You can't tell them, hey, suck. Nobody's going to go out there and suck. And then you can't really bench guys because I think that as much as baseball players do hate baseball,

once they show up, they don't want to not play. And you probably can't send them home. I don't think it'd be reasonable to send your veterans home for the season. And so they're going to be there. They're going to want to play. And you can't tell them you know bunt every time let's lose fellas that would that would not go over well they're not going to

be there when the number one pick gets there for the most part so that's true too that's a good point and so the but the one thing you could do and i will end on this the one thing you could do that would actually make a lot of sense and that I'm not even sure I would argue with, even if the idea of tanking doesn't come into play one bit at all in your mindset, shutting down all of your pitchers basically, all of your pitchers of value once your season is lost, I think I could negotiate with you on that. Like that to me feels like we might get there. There's really no point using bullets that are not doing you any good. And I don't know that if the Braves shut down Shelby Miller right now, I would have a good argument against that.

argument against that uh other than that it's you know it's i mean it it's kind of it's kind of lame but it's not nearly as lame to me as keeping your prospects down for the first two months of the season even though they could help you it's not nearly as lame to me as giving up your entire season in november just because you think that you're that it's an uphill climb. And even those things, even though I consider them lame, I also consider them justifiable. And I don't have a strategic issue with them. I just think that it is my role and our role to shame teams that do such things for the good of our country. Anyway, shutting down your pitchers.

Do you think that in 5, 10, 30 years, it will be the norm for teams to essentially shut down guys, whether they're healthy or not, whether they're injury risks or not, whether they've hit an innings limit or not, once it's very clear that they're not going to be helping you get to the World Series this year? Yeah, I think that'll probably be more normal than it is now Because now we do see younger guys get shut down Who are maybe approaching their innings limit And maybe they would go a little further if their team was in it But it's not, so you shut them down and no one really blinks an eye But I could see it getting extended just slowly but surely Maybe like a certain age bracket would would have it happen first or guys who had an injury in their past and that would make it an easier sell and then it

would just slowly apply to more and more pitchers and suddenly it would be your ace who's always healthy and in the prime of his career and even he could could get heard and you could give plenty of examples of other pitchers like him who were going along and pitching really well and then all of a sudden they tore something and so you could you could have plenty of horror stories to deploy to sell it so i i could see that happening yeah Yeah, if we could all have a conversation about an ace pitcher getting shut down in the middle of a pennant race, it seems like it's not that far to have a conversation about an ace pitcher or a non-ace pitcher even getting shut down in the middle of a totally wasted September. And so that is kind of the one thing that I think a team could get away with

that would both actively cause them to lose while not necessarily drawing an immediate revolt by everybody. Anyway, I'm glad that there's not more avenues for tanking because I know that teams would do it and I know that they would be justified in doing it and I know that I would not like watching it and I would feel sad. So good job baseball for finding one place where you are not vulnerable to sheer profit motive. Right. All right. And the

NL East updated interdivisional record, their record against every other division and the American League also is 174 and 236, which is a 424 winning percentage. And that is the worst since the 2003 AL Central. So that's going back quite a ways. It's going back quite a ways. All right. So we will do emails, I think, tomorrow. So you should send us some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. You can continue your own conversations in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

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