Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 787: He Knows if Your Hall of Fame Ballot Has Been Bad or Good

Episode Date: December 21, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Ryan Thibodaux about what he’s learned from his effort to track Hall of Fame ballots.

Help me get down, I can make it, help me get down, help me get down, I can make it, help me get down, if I only knew the answer. And if all our days are numbered, then why do I keep counting? Good morning and welcome to episode 787 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey Ben. Hello. And also joined by Ryan Thibodeau. Hi Ryan, how are you? Hey guys. Special guest, Ryan Thibodeau. Many of you have seen his recent output getting a lot of play. Ryan is the guy who runs the Hall of Fame ballot tracker on the internet. And he's also on Twitter at not Mr. Tibbs. So you're not the first

person who's done this. No, I'm not. But you are just the best. You are setting new records for responses. How many responses, how many ballots did you collect last year, either by publicly published ballots or that the writers themselves responded to your reporting, your inquiries? Yeah. So last year, well, the end of February, I had 329 ballots out of the 549 that were cast. So that was 59.93% of all the ballots. I added one, my 330th, just a couple of weeks ago, a voter gave me his ballot from last year. So I climbed over the 60% mark, which was very exciting, even though nobody seemed to care except for me. And so this is interesting to different people for different reasons. It's interesting just in a general sense, if you want to kind of follow along and see how likely it is that Jeff Bagwell

or Sean Casey is going to get elected. It's also interesting if you want to write about the voters themselves and what sorts of tendencies they have. And I've done this. I just did this recently. And Ben, who was it that wrote about, was it Louis Paulus? I can't remember. Who was it who wrote about the non-public ballots and what we can learn from people who don't publish based on- Yeah, the bias in the public and the private. Yeah, it was Louis. Yeah, exactly. And so there's all sorts of interesting ways that once you get the breakdown of everybody's ballots, or at least 60% of ballots, you can start to learn a lot about the public and about the voters and about players themselves. And it's very interesting. And I think we're all grateful that you do this, Ryan.

Anyway, so that's why we have you on here. Do you have any kind of ritual when you get one? Do you like shoot off finger guns or your keyboard or something? You know, it always feels, I feel like for every ballot that, that, you know, is released by somebody, I'm staring at the computer screen waiting for one for an hour. So there is a definite sense of like accomplishment when I see something pop up on Twitter or, you know, one of my RSS feeds or something. I will pump my fist occasionally. Yeah. And you're not, you're not just waiting for it to come to you. You're going out and getting

these ballots. You're pumping the sources for info. That's, that's probably the thing that I've brought to this, uh, that wasn't done before is I'm completely shameless about, uh, emailing and tweeting and, uh, Facebook friending and, you know, anything I can possibly do to get a hold of voters, I'm willing to do it. So I think that's been a major part of the tracker success. So of the, you know, 500 or so voters, how many will you contact? This year, probably in some way or another, maybe 300. There's always a large group that I don't really have to bother with because I, you know, they're going to share their ballot. I know where they're going to share their ballot.

I have a general idea when they're going to share their ballot. So I don't really have to worry about them. Maybe two hundred and fifty or three hundred or so. I'll send an email or tweet or Facebook message or something. So the the news hook is that the voter, the electorate this year is not the same as it has been in years past. That the Hall of Fame has, as you call it, as other people have called it, purged some of their voters from the rolls because, well, I'm going to ask you to explain it. But based on what you've been able to deduce and what you've heard, roughly how many people are no longer allowed to vote? And what do we know about why they're not allowed to vote? Okay, so a few months back, the Hall of Fame announced, apparently much to the surprise of everybody in the BBWA, that any voter who had not actively

covered baseball in the last 10 years would no longer be able to vote. Previously, it was once you had been in the BBWA for 10 years, you had a lifetime vote regardless of if you stopped covering sports or baseball or anything. So they made this announcement. Initially, it looked like it was going to be something like 130, 120, 130 voters that were going to be purged. Jay Jaffe did some research just last week, and he found out that the actual number of purged voters was 90. So 90 guys and girls have lost their ballot this year. Additionally, there are five voters who unfortunately have passed away. So we know that 95 voters who voted last year will not be voting this year.

And so just as every year, a few people will get their 10 years of BBWA membership and join the voters, every year from now on, we will also see some voters fall off because this 10-year rule will be in effect and it will just constantly be churning, right? Correct. So normally we can look at, if we were to look at these ballot trackers, your ballot tracker, or before you, Leo Kitties, or didn't Keith Law used to do this? I don't know about Keith. The other one I know of is Darren Viola, who does the- Oh, right. Yeah.

The gizmo at Baseball Think Factory. He's been doing it for years and years. So those are the main ones that I know of. I'm pretty sure Keith did, but that was a long time ago. So, you know, one way of looking at the results is to go, okay, well, how do they, how is, you know, Jeff Bagwell doing this year compared to last year? And then even better would be to say, how is Jeff Bagwell doing this year compared to the same voters that we know last year? But in this case, we actually have 90 people who we don't know necessarily how they voted last year. In most cases, very few of the purged voters were already in your ballot tracker last year, as I understand it. And so we don't actually know.

It's a much more of a moving target this year than I think it has ever been before. You can tell me if that's wrong, but assuming that is right, what have you been able to surmise or what do you think you're able to surmise about the 90? Yeah, it really is up in the air. I've been tracking the purged as well as the deceased voters. There was only one who had a public ballot last year. And then I also have a list of voters that I'm just sort of assuming are purged, even though I haven't been able to confirm it just based on, you know, biographical information that's out there. You know, they retired from the newspaper business in 1979 or whatever, then I'm just assuming that they're not going to be voting this year.

So among all of those categories, the confirmed to be purged, the presumed to be purged, and the deceased, I have 27 public ballots last year out of 95. And the differences that you see between those and the actual results last year are not as striking as I think some people think they might be. People sort of assume that everybody who didn't share their ballot has some, you know, two person ballot. And one of those people is Randy Wynn. Right. But, you know, Bagwell was on 52 percent of these 27 public ballots from purge voters last year, as opposed to 55 percent, you know, his actual total. There are some bigger differences, though. Piazza, right at just about 70% actual vote. These purged voters only voted for him 55%. Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, some of these guys will see 5% to 10% increases because of this. But that's only a third of the purged voters. The other 60 or so, honestly, I just have no idea. We don't know how they voted last year. We don't know how they would have voted this year. So like you said, it really is a moving target. It's very up in the air. These probably are, I mean, well, we sort of almost know for a fact that these voters are less

likely to announce their ballots publicly because they're not currently writing about baseball or covering baseball by definition. So Louie, I forget, Ben, do you remember what Louie found about the, uh, about the bias of the non-published, uh, ballot? I think he found that the private ones definitely skewed more towards old school kind of candidates or less saber friendly candidates. That was definitely one of his conclusions. Okay. By the way, I have, uh, I am not crazy. I have found Keith Law's hall of fame ballot counter from 2007 in which, uh, in which he, uh, he was able to, uh, corral 75, which at the time was probably a record. Wow. What's the motivation for you? Is it wanting to know who's going to get in before the actual players get in? Or is it more of a transparency issue? Yeah, it probably started as a, you know, I started following Leo Kitty's tracker as well as

the Gizmo five or six years ago. And to be honest, I didn't much care about the Hall of Fame any more than any other casual fan would before that, which is probably why I didn't know about Keith's tracker. Leo started getting busy. And so I started trying to just help out a little bit, rounding up some things here and there. And it just became fun. It's fun to email people and talk to people about their ballots. And I was surprised how often people were willing to talk about it and write about it. So now I just enjoy doing it. It's a nice way to spend the off season for me. You know, in Oakland, the hot stove isn't, isn't, is usually pretty depressing. So I have to figure out something else to do with my time. Yeah. When I, uh, when I'm, when I'm reporting, I always assume that everybody that I ask to talk to me hates me and doesn't

have any interest at all in talking to me. And so I'm always kind of inspired and surprised by how many reporters seem to really like what you're doing. And like they're encouraging you, they're like somebody was saying what a great, you retweeted I forget who, but a couple days ago, somebody talking about what a great thing you're doing and all that. Do you get many of the opposite of the people who don't just blow you off, but tell you off? That has literally happened twice, I think, where somebody literally told me off. Most of the time, if somebody, you know, there's plenty of people who just don't want to share their ballot for whatever reason. And they'll just say that, you know, nicely to me. And sometimes I ask again the next year just for fun. but they, you know, most of

them are very polite, but yeah, just a couple of times where it's, you know, somebody accused me of being the NSA or something. Okay. So do, uh, do you have any who get mad at you after you retweet their list and then they end up getting the wrath of the internet sicked on them? I know that that is not your intention and you tell people, please be nice. But surely when somebody puts out their ballot, and it has, you know, Jeff Kent, but not Barry Bonds or something, then people get mad, right? And do they ever get mad at you? I get the ats, which is usually not fun. Oh, don't you? Yeah. Don't you hate that? Yeah, no, that's something I've actually sort of changed. I used to, you know, retweet and include the handle of the voter almost every time. I do it much more selectively now.

And if somebody has a ballot that I think might generate a lot of comments, I'll just specifically ask them, like, do you want me to not include your handle on this? So people at least have to go through the effort to find you. So usually I have permission to use a handle if I do these days. By the way, the other conclusion that Louis Paulus drew when he did his public versus private analysis was that the private voters were much more likely to leave off a no doubt candidate from their ballots. So private voters were more than twice as likely not to vote for Randy Johnson last year, and more than six times as likely not to vote for Pedro Martinez. So those must be the just no first ballot blanket Hall of Fame policy voters. It's kind of easier

to get away with if you can do it privately and don't have to draw the ire of the internet. year to get away with if you can do it privately and don't have to draw the ire of the internet. So would you guys guess that both of you, would you guys guess that they are not publishing their ballot because they are ashamed to be the one guy leaving off Randy Johnson or Pedro Martinez? Or would you just guess that there's a correlation between the guy who doesn't really cover the game anymore and therefore has very few people looking at him and therefore maybe pays very little attention to our Pedro Martinez fun facts and simply truly doesn't believe that it's worth voting for Pedro Martinez. I would guess it's a little bit of both, but probably a good chunk of those people probably would have voted for those players if they had not been able to stay private. You think so? You think that the privacy is giving

them the freedom to have bad votes? Yeah, I think that's part of it. Interesting. Yeah, I completely agree with Ben. Huh. So would you be thrilled, Ryan, if all of these were made public and they put you out of business? I think it's going to happen someday. I look forward to it. Yeah. You know, already in the last couple of years, they used to not release a list of who voted even, but they started doing that, I think, two years ago. It might have just been last year, actually. So you can go to the BBWA website and look at the list of all 549 people who voted. the ballots on their website of people who agree to have their ballots on there. So last year, there were a couple hundred ballots on BBWA. And I think there's a lot of voters within the BBWA who think everybody should be accountable or at least share their ballot publicly. So I don't think we're more than a few years off from seeing all ballots being public anyway. And I'll happily step aside when that happens. Now, if you guys though are basically saying that you think that people are

freer to vote their conscience, freer to vote what they truly believe the right ballot to be if they do not have the scrutiny of the Twitter mob. So isn't it, I mean, isn't it kind of better that they're free to vote the way they want to and not be scared out of voting i mean clearly these are bad votes like that is a bad vote to vote against randy johnson you are a bad person with a bad ballot and you should not probably be allowed to vote however if you are allowed to vote i do kind of want you to vote the way that you truly believe and not be like bullied into voting for a guy that you don't want to be in there right i would say that the transparency kind of is helping them overcome their baser instincts this sounds very condescending but it does but i would say that

because it's not that they don't think those players are deserving of being in there. It's that they have this mental block, this protest vote against first time players being in there. So in the second year, they would vote for them. They think they're worthy of being in there. So we're just helping them past this mental block. I love the idea that, you know, you start your baseball career as a rookie and then you get, you know, experience. Then you become a veteran and then you retire. But once you get in the Hall of Fame, career as a rookie, and then you get experience, and then you become a veteran, and then you retire. But once you get in the Hall of Fame,

you're a rookie again. And all of a sudden, the anti-rookie buy it. Like, oh, well, he's a rookie. He needs to get a little experience before I trust him in the Hall of Fame. Who knows what he'll do? He hasn't been retired that long.

Maybe he'll make a fool of everybody. You got to be a veteran hall of fame candidate before you're really a hall of famer it's a weird thing so all right so um in your results to date you have 78 ballots ken griffey jr has 78 votes i saw an article maybe yesterday or so uh citing this and saying will ken griffey jr be the first unanimous candidate? And the answer is clear and convincingly no, right? Correct. Okay. Now, is it perhaps though, with the purged voters, slightly more possible? And maybe it is actually yes? I just can't, I can't imagine him being unanimous. I could,

I could see him challenging Seaver's record. What is Seaver's record? How many people thought Tom Seaver was in the Hall of Famer? Seaver got 425 out of 430 votes, or 98.83% when he was elected. So if you go with my number, my estimate of 450 ballots being cast this year, Griffey would need 445 to break the record. So five people would not vote for him. That I can't honestly imagine that even happening, especially because, you know, you're going to have a handful of voters, I think, again, this year, casting a strategic ballot, where they feel like 12, 13, 15 players are worthy. And they're worried about, I don't know, Billy Wagner getting less than 5%. And so they don't vote for Griffey and put

Billy Wagner on their ballot. You know, Mike Berardino was the first person to publicly do that last year. That was actually the 79th ballot that I had last year. I'm at 78 right now. So, you know, I could certainly see a couple of those happening again. There's still going to be more than 100 non-public ballots, more than likely, and who knows what any of those are going to be. So I certainly don't think he's going to be unanimous. He might get close to Seaver's record, but that even seems unlikely to me. So last year, though, there were clearly more than 10 deserving candidates, I think, in almost everybody's eyes. I don't know that that's the case this year. I mean, only

one real no doubter, and that's Griffey, joined. Hoffman is, to some people, a Hall of Famer and to others not. But you've got, you know, one and a half candidates taking the spot of four. And I know like Jeff Passan wrote his ballot out, and he only used nine of the spots. And I feel like it was a pretty saber orthodox ballot. So I don't really feel like there is necessarily a crunch. So in the 78, have you seen any evidence whatsoever that you can tell of those 78 of anybody voting strategically this year? Not strategically so far, no. And I agree with you. I mean, it's already pretty clear. Last year at this time through 80 ballots, the average

number of votes per ballot was about 9.15. And right now we're currently at 8.54. So there's been a big dip already in the average ballot size. Most players aren't losing any votes. People are sort of continuing with who they voted for last year and adding Griffey and maybe one or two other first-time candidates. A lot of players are gaining a lot of votes because I think the ballot is less crowded. And so voters are able to add their 11th and 12th and 13th that they weren't able to vote for last year. So there's over, you know, on my sheet, green cells indicate a gained vote and there's over 70 of those and just 10 red cells, which is a lost vote versus the same voter last year. Oh, wow. Now I need to figure out who lost votes.

Well, that's actually an interesting thing is so that, like I said, there are 10 lost votes on my sheet. Five of them are Curt Schilling. So half the lost votes this year are all Curt Schilling. And as you might imagine, the internet has had some ideas about why that might be. Richard Justice switched from yes on Bonds and Clemens to no on Bonds and Clemens. That's interesting. Yeah, it's kind of a weird one. I hasn't yet. He usually does. He tweeted a picture of his ballot and literally said nothing and didn't say anything else on Twitter the rest of the day. So don't know why. So the hypothesis is that Schilling is being punished for being kind of a bigot? I haven't seen a better explanation than that, especially when you consider that nobody else is really losing any votes. Yeah, you're right.

So Mussina lost one, Reigns lost one, Bonds and Clemens each lost one, Edgar lost one, and that's the entire story so far as I can tell. That's it. All right. And then meanwhile, Jeff Bagwell is plus 12, which is like a ton, right? I mean, one out of six people didn't vote for him last year and did vote for him this year. That's in addition to, you know, all the people who did vote for him last year. So he is now at 83% on your 78 public ballots. He is also not going to be elected, correct? Well, I certainly

would have said that a few weeks ago, if he keeps up this pace, which, you know, that's unlikely too, but if he happens to keep up this pace, then he would be sitting right at 75%. But is it safe to assume that everybody we like will have higher results on your ballots than on the total ballots? That's sort of as I've always been disappointed when the day comes, because it seems like all like everybody who's up at around 75%

or in that range, get ends up getting fewer votes than I thought they would. And then like Lee Smith is the one guy who gets more. Right, exactly. Yeah, I think, I think almost everybody will do better than they did last year. I mean, you look at Edgar Martinez, he's plus 14 already, which is insane. Last year, through the entire pre-announcement period, I had 150 ballots or so, 170 ballots. The best anyone did was plus 16. That was Mike Messina. And already, Edgar plus 14, Bagwell plus 12, Messina plus 10 again this year, Trammell plus 10 in his last year. I think voters just have are feeling like they have a lot more room on their ballots and still aren't even filling the 10 slots.

So I think I think you're right. So do you have any big error bar projections right now other than Griffey? Are you calling any precincts for Piazza? No, I mean, I try not to do that. I spent all of last year trying to talk Mets Twitter off the ledge. They were all certain after, you know, we had 100 ballots or so that Piazza was going to be in because he was, you know, over 85% or so. But when you looked at the rate of votes that he was actually gaining, it was just the same people voting for him again.

And we didn't know, you know, what the people who didn't vote for him were going to do. And, you know, many of them obviously didn't vote for him. I think he should, he should pretty easily get in this year. I think, uh, especially he's already picked up, you know, six votes. He doesn't need to do much better than that, you know, every 75 ballots or so. And that's not even taken into account, you know, what the purge, you know, what effect that will have. And that should certainly help him too. So, um, I'd be surprised if, if he wasn't the next year. I feel like there's a large portion of voters that look around and go, well, who's getting voted into the Hall of Fame? I'm voting for that guy. And Piazza was so close already that I would think he would have anyway. Bagwell is a little more surprising because he wasn't quite that close and he had had an extra year of eligibility and he had actually

gone down from one year to the next. I don't remember if last year he went down, but this is, I think his fourth year, right? Or is it maybe even more? This is his sixth year. His sixth year. Okay. And so he has not been rising. He has in some years gone down, but now he's up. I mean, this is like a much, much bigger leap for him. like we talked about plus 12. So he's close. He's interesting. Tim Raines is close. He's plus six this year and is now at 80% of your public ballots. So he's very interesting.

And I kind of feel like both of those guys are preparing us to feel let down the day that it happens. Probably so this year. I think for both of them, if they get above 65% this year, then we can start looking at next year, especially for Raines. For Raines, because that's his last. Last ballot. Yeah. And if you look at Trammell this year, Trammell's never gotten above 30%, I don't think. But he's gained in his last year on the ballot, 10 votes already. He's at 47% through 78 ballots, and he only had 25% in the actual results last year.

So if you factor in a sort of, you know, last year on the ballot bump for Raines, if he can be anywhere, you know, over 65% this year, he'd be in pretty good shape for next year. So a couple years ago, even last year, really, we were hearing about this incredible glut of candidates because of, you know, the steroids, uh, protest voters, uh, who were refusing to clear the ballot of guys like Bonds and, uh, and, uh, Clemens most notably, but others as well. And, uh, it looked like, I mean, there were, there were columns being written forecasting, you know, the 2016, 2017 classes where there'd be like 18 or 19 really good qualified candidates. And as we mentioned this this year there's arguably not a glut.

Maybe there is, but arguably there's not. And Griffey's going to get removed from the ballot, of course. And it looks like I think Piazza is too. And McGuire's reaching his last year. And Trammell's reaching his last year. And those guys will get something like 300 votes between them as well. Is the glut over, in your opinion? I mean, do you sort of think that that was all a scary thing that we talked about, but in fact, cleared itself out pretty easily when the four people, what, seven people

in the last two years elected? Yeah, it's true. I think it's certainly less this year. I mean, you've got some more big time candidates coming next year and candidates who are probably going to be hanging around on the ballot for a long time. Manny Ramirez, Ivan Rodriguez both have, you know, PED ties or speculation. So those guys, you know, might end up being Bonds Clemens types who are going to be on the ballot for 10 years, getting their 30 or 40 or 50 percent or whatever it is. So I think those those types of guys are just going to keep piling up on the ballot. Yeah, it's it's tough to say. I bet Pudge gets first ballot and then it becomes harder for people to justify not voting for some of these other guys after that.

You don't think Pudge will get the same steroid suspicion? I don't. I bet. He'll get the Bagwell Piazza treatment. I think he will. I would. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. I mean, if I bet he'll get the Bagwell Piazza treatment. I think he will. I would, I don't know. It'd be interesting to see. I mean, if you think he will, and if Ryan thinks he will, then I'm outnumbered and I'll reconsider, but I would bet first ballot for Pudge. Well, I can, I can say a couple of things about that. One, I think it would be, if Piazza does get in this year, it will be interesting to see what effect that has on guys like Bagwell, if Bagwell

isn't elected this year, and Pudge and guys who are just, you know, there are suspicions and not any failed tests or anything like that. But also, I mean, I've talked to one voter who is really, the Pudge question is a big one. And because this voter doesn't typically vote for anybody who's had any, you know, ties to PEDs, but the voter is absolutely certain that Pudge showed up to spring training one year, just completely bulked out. And there's no doubt in this voter's mind that Pudge used steroids that off season. So I, you know, like Ben said, I think there are going to be a lot of voters who have the Bagwell and Piazza treatment. And will Larry Walker, if the ballot ever gets clear enough, will Larry Walker ever get more

than 10%? Because I mean, he has gained zero so far. It's so odd that, you know, Mussina is plus 10 and all these guys, Edgar's plus 14. And Larry Walker, who is a, you know, a very deserving war candidate has gained zero thus far. It's odd that Larry Walker, who is a very deserving war candidate, has gained zero thus far. It's odd that Larry Walker has not picked up any of this. That may not actually be true. I only track the pluses and minus for certain candidates. It's labor intensive. And for players who don't usually gain much from year to year, I don't really bother with it.

And unfortunately, Walker is one of those guys. I just don't track it. Because like you said, he's going to get 10 or 15% probably every year, unless something big changes. So I don't know if he's gained or lost yet. He's at 10.3% right now. He got 11.8% last year. So there's probably not a whole lot happening there. Famously, famously lazy Ryan. Yeah, seriously. And Jim Edmonds has one vote on your 78 public ballots, the same as Garrett Anderson. Well, it's the same voter too.

Same voter. Huh? Oh, angels, angels rider. Ah, well, I guess that makes sense. But you would think that Jim Edmonds would pick up a few because he deserves some. Yeah, it went from, you know, I had that ballot almost a month ago or over a month ago, it looks like. And it started as, you know, everybody laughing at that ballot. And then I've seen a couple articles, you know, in the last few days, you know, saying, thank God for this one ballot that has Jim Edmonds on it.

So still laughing. It's not a good ballot. All right. Anything else, Ben? Well, have you disclosed your own ballot or do you recuse yourself from the process? Yeah, I keep myself out of that one. That's very admirable. You do though. If you read you closely enough, you can sort of see the eye roll every once in a while. I'm honored to be read closely by you, Sam.

All right. Well, I appreciate your effort in doing this. I appreciate your precision and your willingness to take everything to two decimal places, even when you're on a podcast. I really, really appreciate the extra precision that that gives us. the extra precision that that gives us. And if you want to see Ryan's ballot tracker, just follow him on Twitter at not Mr. Tibbs, T-I-B-B-S, and he'll link to his tracker right there in his Twitter profile. Or you can email him if you see an unattended Hall of Fame ballot lying around suspiciously on the subway or something, unclaimed.

You can tell Ryan about it at ryan at bbhoftracker.com. Thanks a lot, Ryan. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Okay, so you can send us some emails for later this week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. Support our sponsor, the Play Index at baseballreference.com. Use the coupon code BP. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we'll be back tomorrow.

And if you were to ask me who I'd promote, Jefferson has my vote. I'm watching Miss Universe highlights. Oh, you are? I didn't expect that to happen today. I am too. I was watching live before the mistake. Whoa, whoa. I was in before you guys.

Ben, whoa. I would not have expected that. I was really invested in Miss Philippines, and Jesse and I both thought she was going to win for sure. And then we were shocked, and then we turned off the TV right after Miss Columbia was crowned. And so we didn't even see until later. It had to be on purpose, right? As a publicity stunt or something? You wouldn't think so.

That's pretty cruel to Miss Columbia. I like that he went on to tweet an apology to both of them and called her Miss Philippians. And misspelled Columbia. And then spelled Columbia wrong. Isn't that a Bible book? Philippians is, yeah. It's a letter from Paul to the church at Philippi. Sure. Does Trump still own Miss Universe?

No. Yeah. He sold it. Perez Hilton took a shot at him during the show. Ben, you. I was all over it. There's no good wife tonight. Wait, what?

Yeah, sorry. No good wife until January 10th. Oh, hang on. I'll be right back, you guys. Oh, no. He's ending it all.