Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 733: The Response to the Players’ Response to the Papelbon-Harper Brawl

Episode Date: September 28, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the changing structure of front offices, then discuss what former players are saying about the brawl between Jonathan Papelbon and Bryce Harper.

I'm screaming like hounds in the heat of the chase. All the colors of the rainbow flood my face. I lift right off into space. I can see the future. It's a real dark place. Choked out. Choked out. Choked out. Choked out. Choked out. Choked out. Good morning and welcome to episode 733 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 of Grantland. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you?

Running out all my pop-ups today. Well, we're going to talk about that. I figured. Do you have anything else you want to talk about first? uh do you have anything else you want to talk about first scott lobber of the boston herald tweeted that dave dombrowski had a list of 30 names for general manager so we discussed last week that the brewers had 40 something names red sox only had 30 names not quite as they didn't have a i guess they didn't have a head hunting firm helping them out yeah it's those last 14 where you find the gems.

And ended up going with the internal candidate, unless you consider Frank Wren to be the product of this, I guess. Well, it's getting murky, right? It's getting hard to say what positions are what we typically think of as the positions because Dave Dombrowski is the president, but it was also tweeted that Mike Hazen, the new general manager, said the role of general manager will be a little bit different with Dave. Dave is going to be making the decisions in the end. So I don't know whether GM is evolving into glorified assistant GM and president is just a more impressive sounding, higher paying GM job now. But it seems to be moving that way. I mentioned the other day that I was reading the Sandy Alderson book, Baseball Maverick. And I didn't realize this, but the position of general manager used to be murky in a different way.

I guess maybe because general managers, I don't know, didn't do as much, maybe. But when he started with the A's, the general manager of the A's was technically Billy Martin, the manager, who was also the manager. Yeah, well, Bobby Cox was a GM. While he was a manager, he was a GM before he became manager. Whitey Herzog, I think, was a GM and a manager. Interesting. So Sandy Alderson, who was doing much of the general managing, or probably was doing all of the general managing or whatever,

was just called general counsel at the time. He became GM a little later on paper. But yeah, so I wonder if... No, I don't wonder anything. Okay. I have no wondering about that. That's it. That inspires no wonderment.

So anyway, yeah, there are no GMs left. Who do we... I remember maybe, I don't know, 10 years ago, 9 years ago, impressing a friend by being able to recite all 30 baseball general managers, which was... Baseball's all about impressing people. Yeah, in 2004-ish, 2003-ish, it was probably around then. It might have been slightly earlier. GMs weren't quite celebrities the way they are now.

And then we had the GM era where everybody knew all the GMs except the Marlins GM for the most part. And now we're coming out of the GM era and going into the conglomerate front office era where you don't really know who the GM is.

For instance, Rizzo is the Nationals GM but not by title. But there's nobody under him who, in the Red Sox case, you have a GM, and then you have the guy who was just a GM somewhere else, and who is still probably the GM. Like Dombrowski is the GM, right?

Even though that's not his title. That's essentially what Hazen said. Yeah, so in that case, you a guy who has is a gm but has a bunch of gms under him and one of those gms gets to be called gm while he gets a better title yeah and then you have the rizzo where he is the gm but he doesn't have a bunch of gms under him he just gets the title the elevated title to have the elevated title i guess, I guess. Do we care who's GM now? I guess we do. I guess every time you add another name to this, it dilutes the accountability on anybody. And that's maybe not a great thing.

I mean, there's advantages to having smart people who can distribute the labor amongst themselves and bring great ideas to the table. So that's probably a net positive. But anytime you dilute the accountability, there's some problems there too. It's the Dodgers model, I guess. I haven't really read much about the division of power or labor in the Dodgers front office, other than the fact that everyone is a former GM. I haven't really read much about where the lines are drawn and who is actually acting GM and who just has the title of GM. It's annoying for writers, not that that's a

problem for most people, but whenever I'm writing about the Cubs or something, I'll say, you know, Jed Hoyer, GM. Because it used to be that we could just ascribe the moves to one person and we could just say Hoyer did this and Hoyer did that, but now it's Epstein did this, or maybe it's both of them or who really knows, but that's not a problem that most people really have to worry about. So I don't know, as long as it's clear to the people on the team and it's clear to people on other teams who they're supposed to be talking to, I guess it doesn't matter. Well, it matters if you're an owner. And I would imagine that to some degree, it's not totally clear who is succeeding and failing within a

front office anymore. It's probably harder to define who's doing a good job. It's become, I don't know if it's become, but it's probably become like a lot of offices where it's probably harder to define who's doing a good job. It's become, I don't know if it's become, but it's probably become like a lot of offices where it's a little easier to hide and a little harder to stand out. Yeah, I guess that's true. If you have like an assistant GM who's in charge of arbitration and contracts

and another one who's in charge of the stats department and another one who's in charge of scouting or something like that, then you always know which one to blame and everyone knows what they're supposed to do. I don't know. I'm sure it works just fine in some places and in other places could be confusing. Yeah, it probably isn't an issue, but, and in fact, it might even go the other way. I mean, you look at, for instance, Frank Wren, who everybody had a very high regard for him as a baseball man. And then he became a GM and he probably did a lot of really good things. And then B.J. Upton was unaccountably worse than anybody could have ever imagined. And

other things happened, too. But and so then Frank Wren got fired. And so if you ask most people about Frank Wren, they probably think of him as that guy who led the Braves into the tank and was kind of a failure. And that's probably not Frank Wren at all. Frank Wren remains probably a really smart guy who obviously the Red Sox think is a really smart guy and they wanted him on their team. And so maybe having one person that everything gets pinned on and blamed on is actually kind of very badly misleading. And maybe it's better to get away from that. It's better for Frank Wren, at least, to get away from that. Maybe it makes it less likely for an unqualified person to end up making all the decisions just

because you don't get like the Peter Principle thing where a guy just keeps getting promoted until he's GM. And once he's GMm he has the power to ruin everything whereas now maybe you get promoted but you're first among equals or one of equals or it's hard to say who who is ahead of anyone else and maybe it's harder for a person to screw everything up this way you know what a terrible sporkle would be you get all You get all 30 GMs in the league, however that is decided. But let's say you get the guy that everybody associates as the GM or the top guy, whatever. And then the person has to fill in their title. Yeah, that would be pretty bad.

It would be pretty bad. Please nobody make that and send it to me. I'm not, I'm not requesting this. It's horrible. It sounded even worse when I said it out loud. And I proceeded that by saying it was going to be bad. All right. Anything else?

Nope. All right. So let's talk about the Bryce Harper thing. And it's always hard. I wasn't really talking about that. It's always hard. I think it's hard for us to talk about the Bryce Harper thing, knowing that we're not friends with either of these players,

unless you are. There are things about you that I learn sometimes. I don't know if you have a calf contest with one of these players. If I did, I would lose. And also, I don't know, there's all sorts of reasons it's hard to talk about this sort of thing. But still, we persevere. And so.

I feel like this one is less hard than the typical one. Well, I wanted to talk about CJ Netkowski's piece mostly. Okay. Because your first reaction is probably my first reaction, which is a little bit of a progression of thoughts. But, boy, I hate Papelal bond uh boy it's silly when grown-ups fight in public uh and i violently i sure do hate jonathan papal bond uh and uh i'm not like that you know like i think there's a point where your brain thinks, well, I'm not like that. I'm a, I'm a grown up too, alongside these people. And I don't behave that way. And I find it

somewhat or completely foreign to me to see them behaving that way. And therefore I conclude that Jonathan Papelbon is a bad person. Yeah, or at least the person you probably wouldn't want to be around. Yeah. So that's probably the first reaction or something along those lines is the first reaction that a lot of people have. And the reaction yesterday, Sunday, on my Twitter feed was pretty unanimous that Papabon's a jerk, that he behaved wrongly, that he should probably be released, that at the very least he shouldn't have been pitching 20 minutes later or whatever. And that Bryce Harper in this situation is somewhere between a neutral party with maybe a little bit of blame because he is a well-known

egotist or a neutral party with who skews a little bit toward the positive because he's such a great ball player and we like to watch him and he's entertaining and enjoyable. And he was doing, as far as we could tell, virtually nothing there. So then C.J. Nitkowski writes this piece that everybody has read by now in which he argues that we are all very unobjective in our assessments of these players, that we went into this with a preconceived notion

of Papelbon being a bad guy, and that we don't really understand clubhouse dynamics in a way that makes our opinions meaningful in any way, and we should probably listen to people who do. And in this case, that refers to players themselves. And so Nick Kowski pulled a dozen players, current and former. They were unanimously on Papelbon's side, I guess. Some of them were saying that he executed his vision wrong, that he should have done this behind closed doors, that he shouldn't have done it right after a pop-up. But nobody backed Bryce Harper more than they backed Papelbon.

And from this, C.J. Nickkowski, who it should be noted, is a very good writer and seems to be a very smart ex-baseball player who doesn't generally peddle the usual cliches about the right way to behave, and so therefore his point of view, I think, should be taken seriously, is that we shouldn't judge a baseball dugout the same way that we judge our own offices, and that, in fact, Bryce Harper probably got something like he deserved, and Jonathan Papelbon was doing something like a role that is respected in the dugout. Fair summary?

Yes. Okay, so I wanted to, rather than just talk about how we feel, again, because it's not that interesting, I wanted to go down each of these players' anonymous quotes about the situation and see what you thought of them. Okay. So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. 14. All right. Okay. First one. Pat did what should have been done three years ago.

Veteran players should be doing this across the league. So this is essentially saying that there is an epidemic of young players not running out pop-ups and that Harper has been getting away with this for three years because nobody else stood up to him. Factually, I think that this has some issues, one of which is that this has been done to Harper, not this specifically, but Harper has been called out for his lack of hustle on such plays. And the fact that somebody should have done it three years ago, to me, is kind of makes, it sort of undercuts its own point. Harper is now a veteran, right? He is, he is no longer a young player because he was around three years ago. He is a veteran player. And I think that to some degree, it's very odd to see him treated like a young player or like a rookie in this situation. Yeah, well, he's 22. And so when you have someone,

Papelbon's 34. And so there is a big age and experience gap. I wouldn't necessarily say there's a wisdom gap in this particular case. But you can see why someone would still think of Harper that way. But he's been around for quite a while now. And he also happens to be one of the top two players in baseball, you know, the best player in the league at this point. And not that that necessarily means he should get a pass for anything he does, although that is inevitably the way baseball works, the way any business works. Your most valuable person gets a little bit more leeway in certain respects than other people do. But I don't think there is a epidemic of young players not running out balls in play. I think if you went back to any previous era in baseball,

you would find exactly the same quotes about that era's young players not hustling or not taking the game seriously or whatever it is. And to some extent, I suppose that's true. And every new generation of players does have to be instructed or reprimanded from time to time. And maybe that's valuable and an important lesson for them to learn. But I don't think that this is any different than it ever was. Yeah, I think a lot of veteran players actually have this narrative of their own careers where they were insufferable as young people. And they went through this same process of being criticized by veterans, perhaps in ways that we would consider unfair. And then they matured because of it

and therefore they have to help other players mature. And I think that for the most part, it's a lie that they tell themselves. I don't think they generally are mature. They might have learned some of the codes of conduct this way, but I don't really think that Jonathan Papelbon has matured so much as maybe he's, I don't really think that Jonathan Papelbon has matured so much as maybe he's, I don't know, learned a little bit of the way that you're expected to behave in order to avoid getting

policed this way. But anyway, veteran players should be doing this across the league. I don't see, I mean, this is, the idea behind this is that, like I said, there's an epidemic of non-hustle and that young players are just getting away with murder out there. And in fact, young players are better, as you've written, better than they've ever been in history at baseballing. can tell there's very little increase that i'm aware of in young players behaving in a way that is even deemed inappropriate by clubhouses like even if i find this stuff silly it's not like there's just this constant flow of stories coming out of clubhouses about how young people are toxic in any way that no it's anything you hear about how well coached they are to deal with the media and how polished they are because they've been taught early and they're more professional than young players were in the past yeah okay right intentions horrible timing by pap i wonder whether there's a

correlation between people who call him pap in these responses and people who've played with him or like him or know him well. I wondered that too. It doesn't seem to be a correlation between people who call him pap and how pro-pap they were. It seems like there's very pro-pap and there's mildly pro-pap and there's very pro-pap-a-bon and there's mildly pro-Papelbon. I don't see a correlation there, but yeah, a lot of people call him Pap. They sure do. Right Intentions, Horrible Timing by Pap. It seems to me that if you

are defending a veteran for knowing the right way to behave and your argument is that he was right to police a player, but he did it in all the wrong ways in this case aren't you saying that he doesn't actually have any credibility for policing the way people behave yeah he needs an even older player he does choke him i yeah i hope raul

labanez was just floating around the clubhouse after the game to tell him the right way to pull Papelbon aside and tell him the right way to pull a player aside. I'm also skeptical of the right intentions. I think that this sort of thing could be done with the right intentions. If, if a young player is not hustling, an older player could have the right intentions and say something to him, preferably in private and without physically attacking him. But I'm sort of skeptical that that's the case here. It seems like there was maybe some bad blood already because of the comment Harper made last week when Papelbon hit Manny Machado in a very obvious instance of headhunting. And Harper, instead of no commenting or supporting his teammate, said something about how it's pretty tired and how

he's probably going to get hit now, which, as I think CJ mentioned in his piece, was sort of a initial violation of the keep everything in the clubhouse mentality. And so it seems like Papelbon probably had it out for Harper because of that and maybe was looking for a reason to go after him. Yes, I'm glad you pointed that out because it is held up as to some degree a defense of Papelbon that Harper had done this thing first. But then that totally negates the right intentions aspect of this. You're basically saying, well, Harper pissed him off first, and then it becomes not about teaching a veteran counseling a young player on how to hustle, but it's very clearly Papelbon essentially looking for a reason to get on Harper and to get his, you know, to, it's a revenge fantasy, right? And so, so then the intentions are, are not right at all. Right. So keep that in mind. And I mean, obviously not every player said this, only one player said this, but keep that in mind for every person who talks late in, in any of these other quotes about the

importance of hustling when it is clear that this has nothing to do with hustling. Yeah. This is not about him not running out of pop-up at all. This is completely about him calling out a veteran in public and or not wanting to hit an opponent and take his own lump in return if it comes to that when the opponent shows you up. That's what it's about. All right. I would have done the same thing if I were Papelbon. I don't know what the context is of or what this guy was thinking when he said this, but as somewhat of an aside, it feels to me like there were two acts here. One is yelling at the guy when he was coming back in the dugout for not hustling or whatever,

and then the other is when he talked back, lunging at him and grabbing him by the throat and trying to choke him. And I just don't think anyone is pro-choking. I feel like everybody who wants to either defend Pap or not defend Bryce Harper is talking about the talking and pretending that the choking didn't happen. Whereas most of us are talking about the choking. It's the choking is what we're asking you about. I'm not, if Papelbon had jawed at Harper and Harper had jawed back

and then Papelbon had rolled his eyes and said, young people today, that would have been like a six a like a six tweet event yeah not did jaw back he didn't he jawed back de-escalate the situation but he also didn't make the first move he right he well he jawed back which is you know if you're young that's a its own crime you don't jaw back but he didn't lunge and choke a person so anyway i would have done the same thing if I were Papapon. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say, I don't think this person would have. Very few dugout chokings. And if young people around the league are in need of veteran counsel, you'd

expect to see a lot more choking if this were the way that people thought it should be handled. So I'm just going to go ahead and say that I think this is a non-sincere sentiment that this player has expressed. All right. Bryce is a great player. He's a true superstar, but he's not above playing the game the right way. I'm glad someone finally told him that. And I'm going to go ahead and read another one in accordance with that one.

As much as I hate to say it, Albert,bert pappy and miggy have earned the right not to run out every ball partly age respect and risk of injury harper is 22 he hasn't earned it all right so this is these two contradict themselves to some degree yes true one person says true superstars can do this they are above playing the game the right way if they're old enough. Right. But it seems to me that the more important thing from these is that there is a deference to veterans not hustling. Yeah. The guy does make a valid point, which I don't know if you were about to say that maybe the risk for veteran players is higher, that there's more of a downside

to them hustling. For instance, Albert Pujols, who can't physically hustle if he wants to at this point. So you can understand why it would be a safer idea for him not to sprint than it might be for someone who's 22. Yes, the injury part, the risk of injury is the one part of this that makes some sense and you can draw a valid distinction for. However, the age and respect part of it, I think, are very interesting because you're essentially saying the right way to play is that you run balls out, but veterans don't have to run balls out and veterans know the right way to play. So therefore, you would conclude from this bit of logic that in fact running balls out is not the right way to play. If veterans don't have to do this and choose not to do this, then that seems like kind

of like they're saying it's okay. Like I don't know where this idea that hustling balls is in hustling on these balls is incredibly important comes from if in fact the veterans don't think it's important for them now again the injury aspect of it is a factor and if that's the entire argument then maybe fine but it sort of feels like you know parents from you I learned it from watching you dad you. You know, that old drug PSA. The dad really walked into that one. He did. You'd think he'd have anticipated that response.

Yeah, he would have. The dad probably thought that the son didn't know he was doing drugs. The dad probably thought that he was being somewhat clandestine in his drug use and probably didn't realize that he was setting this bad example. Now, this PSA is not quite the same thing, I would say, because I think pretty much everyone agrees that 10-year-olds doing drugs is bad. And so the point of this is, hey, parents, don't do drugs if your kids are going to do drugs when they see you do it. However, in the Bryce Harper situation, it's more like, it'd be like if you were yelling at a kid for eating crackers and he's like, but you eat crackers. And then you're like, yeah, because I'm a grownup. Well, maybe the point of

that is crackers are okay, right? Everybody's pro crackers, it turns out. and so we can reassess our priorities when we realize that the in fact crackers never hurt anybody so anyway that's a thing that i thought about this all right we all know how harper has behaved since he got called up but when you're at that level why would you not run that's a total non sequitur right can we just that makes no sense it's not the first time exclamation point and why did his manager take him out of the game after the scuffle question mark exclamation point question mark i think it's supposed to say why did his manager not take him out of the game well no i think you take him out of the game it's not clear what happened he left the game but matt williams wouldn't say why he left the game he He said it wasn't related to the running, but he didn't explain any further than that.

It's possible that Harper just took himself out of the game and Williams didn't want to say that. It's possible that he took him out of the game. I don't know. No one really knows as far as I know. But I think he's saying that he thinks Williams did take him out of the game and that he's saying that's evidence that Williams thinks he did something wrong. All right. You saw Pap say you should run it out, which is 100% true. I get Harper is frustrated about the at-bat and result, but still he's got to run it out. And I don't think the

whole Pap hitting Machado the other day and Harper saying what he did helped the whole thing. Pap was probably just waiting for something to happen so he could criticize Harper. If somebody else said you need to run it out, I don't think the whole thing would have happened. Every word in that is very sensible. I'm not totally sure that this guy actually has an opinion because he just described the situation very accurately. And from that is all the facts. There are all the facts perfectly laid out right there and you can draw whatever you want. So I'm going to say thank you, sir. Yeah. Well, can we just talk about the running it out? Or are we?

I mean, so A, he did run it out. He wasn't running at full speed, but he didn't, you know, walk down the line and turn and never make it to the bag. He made it to the bag. If Francoeur had dropped that ball in left field, Harper would have been safe at first. Frank Gore had dropped that ball in left field, Harper would have been safe at first. And given how shallow it was and Frank Gore's arm and all the rest, I doubt that he had any sort of realistic shot to make it to second, even if he had busted it, busted out of the box and the ball had been dropped. I emailed Baseball Info Solutions to ask what the out probability of a ball where Harper hit that ball with the hang time that he hit that ball with was.

And they told me it was 100 percent, which they said, you know, that's based on several years of similar batted balls. And that doesn't mean that there has literally never been a ball that has dropped, but rounds. Yeah, it rounds up from, you know, 99.5 or whatever. So it's incredibly rare for a ball to drop in that spot. If a ball had dropped in that spot, I don't know that he would have missed out on a base that he could have gotten otherwise. There's also the fact that the Nationals had been eliminated i guess that's not an excuse or a good rationale but they weren't you know playing for a playoff spot or something it's late in the season lots of other guys got days off and he was still in there and harper has a whole past of hurting

himself running into things which uh at the time you know people said he should stop running into things, which at the time, you know, people said he should stop running into things. Maybe he should take it a little bit easier. And that seems to have worked out fairly well for him. So yeah, we mentioned that last time we talked about Harper's hustling controversies, we mentioned at the time that when he came up, he was actually criticized for being too hustly. He was like Johnny Juco out there there running running around like uh like everybody was watching right uh which they were and i get the feeling that that rubbed baseball players the wrong way that he was sprinting to first on walks and yeah everything harper has ever done has rubbed rubbed baseball players the wrong way He shows up on these most overrated polls or most disliked

or whatever it is. And I don't know whether it's just envy, the fact that he's so good at such a young age, or whether it's just that he's confident and he's not the typical soft-spoken rookie. I mean, he hasn't, you know, when he was in the minor leagues and people were writing things about what a problem he was and potential clubhouse cancer and all of that, that I don't think has turned out to be true at all. He has maybe rubbed people the wrong way because they don't like his hairdo or whatever, but that's about as serious as it's gotten as far as we know. All right, let's see. As a teammate, you always feel you have the right to say something to someone if you feel it's wrong or hurts the club right after the pop-up is not the best time to call out a hitter. I have not been around baseball teams that much,

but I've been around baseball teams more now than I had last time we talked about Harper. As I was writing my post about Harper, I had to restrain myself from telling Stomper stories well I'm gonna I'm not gonna tell a Stomper story so much as one thing I learned from the Stompers or being around the Stompers is that pitchers are constantly talking about what hitters did in in a critical way and hitters don't do this nearly as much, but about themselves or about the pitchers for the most part that I know of. But pitchers are always sitting around, you know, they're waiting for their next game, their next start, whatever. And they're always criticizing players for swinging at this pitch or not hustling. And mostly they do it under their breath or to each other as

baseball players mostly do almost all of their criticizing. But there are also a lot of cases where a pitcher would like say something to a hitter and it always felt out of place. It always rubbed the hitter the wrong way. And frankly, I think that as a teammate, you don't always have the right to say something to someone. If you're a pitcher, you should probably not talk to hitters about the way they do their job. I think that if this had come from Jason Wirth, even if all the details were the same, my guess is that Harper doesn't react quite so strongly. My guess is that there's probably a little bit more internal logic to whatever he does. And in fact,

just a guy who's been on the team for more than two months, that too. I mean, yeah, there's just something weird about a closer telling a hitter how to run out balls. Like has Jonathan Papelbon ever run out a ball in his life? Would anybody expect him to,

if Jonathan Papelbon were batting, would you expect him to hustle? Like how does he know where the line is as a as a closer equivalent is you wouldn't expect him to not cover first base or something so I don't know whether he has ever not done that well I'm I'm not so much saying that Papelbon doesn't have also instances where he needs to hustle. It's just that all questions of hustle are slightly gray. You don't, for instance, there's another quote here. I agree with Pap calling Harper out.

Hustling and continuous work ethic creates champions. Well, okay, that sounds really good. But should Papelbon have been doing like leg presses in the middle of the game because that's continuous work ethic? Should he, like, I mean, what's Papelbon have been doing like leg presses in the middle of the game because that's continuous work ethic? Should he like, I mean, what's Papelbon doing? Just sitting there like a lazy dude on the dugout railing? I mean, shouldn't he be hustling? Shouldn't he be out doing, you know, like running laps so that he's stronger and shows more work ethic? So clearly there is a limit to hustling and continuous work ethic. It's not literally continuous work

ethic. It's not literally that Harper should have sprinted to first at as though he were trying to beat out a double play. Probably, I don't think anybody would say he shouldn't he shouldn't have. I mean, well, there's not a better example than sprinting to first on that fly ball. Nobody sprints at a dead sprint trying to get you know, a four second time to first on that fly ball nobody sprints at a dead sprint trying to get you know a four second time to first on a fly ball to left field and so all of these are slightly gray they're either very gray or slightly gray and uh so it's probably not right for papelbon to weigh in on the grays that a hitter faces as far as hustling goes um but also never had a professional at bat but pitchers and hitters

are barely even on the same team like they wear the same uniform they're on the same bus but their jobs are they they're grouped so differently because their jobs are differently that they all hate each other hitters hate the pitchers and the pitchers hate the hitters and the bullpen and the starters are all practically different teams too and it's not really coming from harper's teammate the same way that it would be if it was coming from jason worth or ryan zimmerman is what i'm saying so papelbon and like you say he's been there two months he's a he's a mercenary well he's not a mercenary but he's a hired gun who has no long relationship with anybody and has already been in a somewhat public feud. So it's clearly the wrong guy.

Even if the timing and the intent were fine, it's the wrong guy to do it. And it's just the wrong target. I mean, maybe you could say that he's the right target and that if you want to send a message that it's not okay, then you pick the best player and the highest profile player and that sends the message most effectively. the best player and the highest profile player and that sends the message most effectively but if we're talking about what creates champions well hitting 41 home runs with a 467 on base percentage creates champions like the Bryce Harper not running on a pop-up is like 500th on the list of reasons that the Nationals are not making the playoffs this year. He has outperformed everyone. So it's just a strange person to criticize really anything about.

Yeah, Adam Kilgore, the great Adam Kilgore, just published his take on this. And so I'm kind of reading that as well. Yeah, he notes what you just noted. One insane thing is that Harper did run out that pop-up. He muttered in frustration, tossed his bat, shook his head, and trotted down the line. He reached the base. In game 155 of a mathematically dead season, that constitutes running it out. That counts.

That counts, that is, unless you're looking for a reason to vilify Harper. And so, yeah, anyway. Last one is the craziest one because it was such a hackneyed attempt at being clever. He quit on his team after the fight just like he does on pop-ups, which I don't even know. What do you mean he quit on his team after the fight? I guess he means if Harper did remove himself from the game, which was not totally clear.

Yeah, I would be, if somebody came after me on my team, I would absolutely walk out of that stadium. Like I would be I would be shaken up. I would be emotional. I would be angry. I would be adrenalized. And for the good of my own well-being and just because I wouldn't be able to handle all the stimulus, I would walk out. I just walk out. I'd just walk out. As opposed to going back to the mound and giving up the two-run homer

and other base runners and losing the game, as Papelbon did. Yeah. So anyway, I assume that Jonathan Papelbon is a somewhat better person than I give him credit for, and I assume that Bryce Harper is, to some people and in some ways, completely intolerable. So I don't Bryce Harper is to some people and in some ways completely intolerable. So I don't want to get too into the personalities and assume that I know anything about them. But to me, it seems like if you wanted to pick a case to show veteran leadership and to show youthful lack of ambition or whatever, it seems to me that all the facts are wrong here this is just the wrong test case for your for a pro veteran stance and i i try to be more open to the pro veteran stance than i used to be because i do think that baseball players policing

the game is somewhere between admirable and inevitable anyway. And so you might as well just accept it. But I just feel like in this case, they just picked the wrong defendant, you know? Well, just look at the way that the Nationals reacted after this game. If all of these former players are right, that Papelbon was on the right side of this and everyone would have done the same thing, then the Nationals wouldn't have, if he wouldn't have apologized as he did, he wouldn't have had a closed door meeting with

the manager and come out and said, I should have done it differently and I shouldn't have been the one doing it. The manager should have been the one doing it. And Matt Williams wouldn't have said that he was livid once he saw it and that it was unacceptable and that if he had known about it he wouldn't have put Papelbon in again for the 9th. So the message that these people are sending themselves is inconsistent with the idea that everything was completely kosher here and the whole like Matt Williams thing is a separate issue how he possibly could have not known what went on and worse not inquired about what went on before he made decisions about who should be in the game and what he was going to say to the press after the game given that two of his coaches were the

people holding Papelbon back that doesn't make any sense either but the point is that whether he was just doing a really bad job or just pretending to have done something differently than he did he understands that something in you know bad happened that he wouldn't have allowed or approved of so unless you think he's just caving to the public pressure from bloggers who don't understand the game, then it seems like he understands the game in the clubhouse and he doesn't think this was an acceptable action. I think that there are a lot of places where that we don't even see where there is a right way to play the game. And that it is important that veterans teach young players the right way to play the game because you don't want your

managers and your coaches to have to do all the parenting or the the mentoring and like really there are tons and tons and tons of cases that even they don't even necessarily realize they're teaching them the right way to play the game but you learn how to read the room you learn how to have a feel for the situation you learn how to be to not be an obstacle to your teammates. You learn how to not be annoying. You also learn how to kind of polish your game in very specific ways that are important. And the way that veterans, you know, do this by so-called policing the game is probably useful and has tons and tons of positive results for a team, for individual

players, for the whole sport. And I'm sure there are young players who become mature players and great players specifically because veterans were looking out for places where they could, you know, help these players improve and mature. That's all good. But there's also a way that all of this is, especially in the way that these players defend Papelbon, that all of this looks suspiciously like an attempt to make the game safe for veterans and unsafe for young people. And if the underlying premise of all of this stuff is for veterans to protect their own social standing at the top of this sport, it's pretty lame. And I think that's why we tend to react the way we do at these stupid examples of veteran so-called mentoring. Agreed. Okay.

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