Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 927: The Twins Without Terry Ryan

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Rich Hill and the Jonny Gomes White House snub, then discuss the Twins’ firing of GM Terry Ryan.

But you know what? Sometimes a guy can be effectively wild. Effectively wild is uncomfortable for a lot of hitters. Something slow has sparked up in me Dog cries for a master and sparks are swirling faster Good morning and welcome to episode 927 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our supporters on Patreon.

I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hello, Ben. How are you? All right. Great. Anything you wanted to chat about? Well, there was a tweet from Peter Gammons that we tweeted. I was, yeah.

Well, that's great too because it's, the tweet to those who didn't see it is Billy Bean, colon, quotation. Rich Hill is the best pitcher in the league right now, period. We would have no problem making him a qualifying offer, end quote, end tweet. And really, to get Rich Hill and right now in the same tweet feels like fan service in a way. Yes, that's right. right now in the same tweet feels like fan service in a way yes it's like it's really like john snow and and sansa being back in the same place or something boy that dog is sad yeah sad dog relax okay sad dog all right so yeah so that that happened that's a great tweet that's a great quote.

Yeah. Of course, Billy Bean has ulterior motives here with the trade deadline fast approaching and Rich Hill, one of the most attractive commodities available. But, you know, it's a legitimate case that you can make. It's not that huge a stretch to say that Rich Hill is the best pitcher in the American League. Right now. Right now. say that Rich Hill is the best pitcher in the American League right now right now by the way we've never talked about this but in the league used to be in the league meant in his dog is so sad I don't know what I don't know how to make it happy she's too dumb to make happy she's just a dog all right another room it could go to to be said no me and the dog are both trapped in this room that's the that's why that's why it's sad and that's why you're sad. We both have to be.

So it used to be that the league meant the league, the AL or the NL. And I think somewhere along the line, we started using the league to refer to all of Major League Baseball, which I think is appropriate now. The leagues have no really relevant distinction between them. So it's a decent shorthand to say he's the best pitcher in the league. It feels a little less, I don't know, something about saying the best pitcher in baseball feels a little too much like when football announcers say that's a good football move

or he's a good football player. It seems sort of obvious. So I don't really like using in baseball. And so I do use the league. Do you think Billy Bean,y bean doesn't mean in the majors though right he's just referring to the al here probably right yeah it must be i don't think uh i think nl has kershaw and so that instantly invalidates any any other comparison but i think he's probably referring to the actual league and so the right now situation is interesting because if it, again,

the thing about right now is that it allows you to take a flexible approach to the time period. So right now could be 10, you know, these 10 minutes, or it could be this year, or it could be, you know, the best pitcher pitching today. And I think clearly you would say that the best pitcher in the American League, if you took out right now, you would say the best pitcher in the American League is probably Chris Sale, right? Yes. And so then I don't know how big a time period Billy Bean is promising that Rich Hill will be the best pitcher in the American League. But yeah, you can make the case. It's a fine case to make.

I believe it more than – the biggest threat, in fact, to Rich Hill – any right now that includes Rich Hill is going to be so narrowly drawn that the biggest threat is actually probably not Chris Sale but Matt Shoemaker. And so I guess I'll just transition real quick to a slightly different banter today. But Matt Shoemaker had another great start. He threw a complete game. He struck out 13. I don't think he walked anybody.

And over his last 11 starts now, he has a 2.36 ERA, a 2.27 FIP. He has 88 strikeouts and nine walks in 76 innings. And if you compare him to Jake Arrieta's last 11 starts, for instance, they're basically identical except that Arrieta has walked 22 more batters. Everything else is pretty much exactly the same. So he's Jake Arrieta without bad luck and with 22 fewer walks. And he might be the best pitcher in baseball right now. The great thing about Matt Shoemaker is that his ERA plus is now still 99.

Even with this, he has an ERA plus of 99 for the season. So his next start will presumably get him to be an above average pitcher for the season. But he is currently still below average. Yeah, got to be very bad to be the best pitcher in the league for a month or so or however long. Two months. Yeah. And still be a below average pitcher on the season. It's impressive badness to start the season. Yeah. So I personally don't think that Billy Bean, you're right that he has an incentive to pump up his guy

and also to make it well known that they plan to make him a qualifying offer so that everybody knows that they have some leverage in keeping him because they'll presumably get a draft pick. I believe that Billy Bean is not lying about his assessment of Rich Hill. And I don't believe he's lying about the qualifying offer, although I do think that he made this quote so that it could be known that he's going to make the qualifying offer. And I would bet that he would have said this quote

regardless of whether he actually planned to. I think this is out there to make it clear that Rich Hill is worth at least a draft pick to the A's in case anybody was worrying that they were so cheap that they Hill is worth at least a draft pick to the A's in case anybody was worrying that they were so cheap that they wouldn't even make him a qualifying offer. But I don't think Billy Bean lies about players very much. I think he lies less than most GMs. And I think that he actually believes that right now, Rich Hill is the best pitcher in the league. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure whether he believes it or not. But I mean, if he had to,

the way that you judge the right now is what? If you had to have someone start your must-win game today. So would Rich Hill be the starter if Billy Bean could pick from any starter in the major leagues to win tonight? In the AL. In the AL, yes. I don't know that I believe that, but it's certainly close enough that it's not an outlandish thing to say. If he is in the conversation for that spot, then, of course, you might as well say he's the best because you're the guy who has him. And you want to pump up his ego and you want to pump up his value.

But it's not a crazy case to make, which is in itself crazy. Yeah, this was pre-Blister too. So that's relevant. Ah, okay. All right. Did you see that Johnny Gomes is not going to the White House? I did, yes. So Ken Rosenthal reported that the Royals are not able to bring everyone in their party, in their extended posse to the White House for the traditional post-World Series celebration. And Johnny Combs is being excluded because he was not a full-season Royal last year. And he was also not on the post-season roster, although he was traveling with the team and giving them invaluable tips from the bench. But he's not thrilled about it. And if you believe that Johnny Combs' mere presence helps teams win, then he deserves to be there.

Yeah. And so this is not a story that I considered very interesting when I saw the headline and did not expect to talk about. And then I clicked on whatever it was, and then that was just some news aggregation that then linked to Ken Rosenthal's original piece. And really, this piece more than maybe almost anything else shows just how good Ken Rosenthal is. Because this was not an article that I cared about or thought there was much nuance to at all. I mean, I assumed, well, they're too crowded. There's not enough room. And this guy who played 12 games for them and didn't make the postseason roster, while he might seem like he has some emotional tug, it's not actually that interesting and

whatever. But Ken Rosenthal has so many good details in this kind of like, you know, sort of throwaway article topic that I learned a lot. I think I learned a lot about, well, I learned a lot about the visit to the White House. I learned a lot about Johnny Gomes. I learned a lot about team organizational hierarchies. There's a lot in here. So my favorite details in here, it's not favorite. Favorite's not the right thing, but among the things that I would say that I learned, 700 World Series rings were ordered for the Royals. So they have a 25-man roster, and then 675 other people got World Series rings. That was interesting to me.

Among the people who are not going, okay, so ownership representatives, team vice presidents, assistant GMs are all going. However, scouting director, not going. That's sort of kind of blew me away that a scouting director wouldn't go. Professional scouting director, not going. Director of baseball ops, not going. Team physician, not going. My favorite quote from Johnny Gomes is, I'm not trying to throw an egg on anyone's face, but a lot of people are asking me, Hey, are you going to wear that American flag jacket?

Is Obama going to ask you to make that speech again? A lot of people are asking Johnny Gomes. If Obama is going to ask him to make that speech again, a lot of people are asking him that. Hey, do you think that Obama's going to ask you to make that speech again. A lot of people are asking that. Hey, do you think that Obama's going to ask you to make that speech again? I love that. Yeah.

Imagine how disappointed the president's going to be when the royals show up and Johnny Gumbs is not there to make that speech. He's like, I was going to ask him to make that speech again. That's what always happens. You go to the White House and the president asks somebody to make a speech again. Just's what always happens. You go to the White House and the president asks somebody to make a speech again. This is a normal White House thing.

Let's see. He has been texting the Royals regularly since May about going, which is sort of heartbreaking. But here's the thing, though. Here's, I think, the most important thing. Each person who is invited, including players, the ownership representatives, team VPs, assistant GMs, broadcasters, etc. Each person invited is allowed to bring one guest. It seems like a real test of whether the Royals really believe what they spread about Johnny Gomes. Whether one invites him, right? It's so easy. Like they don't

all have wives. And some probably, yeah, maybe they don't know. Some of them don't have wives or girlfriends. And I think that if you really believe in Johnny Gomes, somebody should step up and invite him as a guest. Yeah, I actually sort of tripped over that line when I was reading because the whole article is about how there's a limited number of spots and you can't bring everyone and then everyone gets a plus one. Yeah. That's not very restrictive at all. No, like team vice president shouldn't get a plus one, in my opinion.

If you don't bring Johnny Gomes, if you're not bringing the scouting director, the team vice president should not be able to bring his nephew, in my opinion. Yeah, I think I agree. I don't know whether anyone should get a plus one, but if everyone gets a plus one, then you'd think that for one person, Johnny Gomes would be that guy. I wouldn't. I mean, it's for any individual person. I mean, this is a really cool thing. It's once in a lifetime for most people. So obviously you want to bring your kid or you want to bring your wife or whatever. So that's understandable if you do that instead of Johnny Gomes.

But yeah, you'd think that someone there. I mean, not that I would want any one person to be peer pressured by the rest of the royals to not bring their, I don't know, their best friend from childhood or something and bring Johnny Gomes instead. But I'm surprised that no one made that decision. Would you guess, this hasn't happened, right? So would you guess that Johnny Gomes will end up there? So when are they going? Thursday. Pretty soon. I mean, if he's been texting the Royals since May, then this is not a new thing. But maybe there were players who didn't know about this.

And so now it's bigger news. Ken Rosenthal wrote about it. Maybe it's more visibility. So I'll say yes. I'll say someone cracks and brings Johnny Gomes. You really got to feel for Royals traveling secretary Jeff Davenport because Gomes said he texted Davenport in May, reiterated his interest with several follow-up texts. On Friday, Gomes said Davenport informed him the list for the trip was full. And we've all been there where you have this email that you are like you're hoping that maybe the world will end before you're forced to respond to it.

like you're hoping that maybe the world will end before you're forced to respond to it and the follow-ups just keep coming and everyone makes you feel worse and worse because you haven't dealt with it and now you're gonna have to deal with it and you're gonna have to break this poor guy's heart and you know traveling secretary it's not like traveling secretary is a cool job but it's not like he's the the gm of the organization He doesn't expect to have to break Johnny Gomes' heart. Like, you don't get into that business, traveling secretary business, so that you can stomp on Johnny Gomes. And he just was never expecting to have to, I think, make that call. And for months, he had to live with the knowledge that he was going to have to make this decision. This decision that just so that we're clear the stakes of it, Gomes said, I've been sent down, I've been non-tendered, but this is the worst news of my professional baseball career. And yet elsewhere in the article, he essentially says it's not that important to him.

He essentially says it's not that important to him. Like when he was talking about how he might miss it if he was playing in Japan because he started the season in Japan. And he said he thought about the Royals trip to the White House even while he was overseas. And then he says it wasn't maybe a top five reason for me to leave Japan. But one of the first things that hit my mind once I signed the contract to go to Japan was, oh shit, I'm going to miss the White House trip. So it wasn't a big reason behind his going there. And it wasn't a reason why he decided not to go there because he did go there. So it wasn't that important to him at that point. Well, I think though that that contradiction is what makes Johnny Gomes such a great clubhouse guy. I don't think that it is necessarily a contradiction. It is. Well, so with Johnny Gomes, I think the thing that

makes him so important to a clubhouse or that is seen as so important is that he is able to both motivate his team into this intensity, like to get them to feel like this game is so important that we've we've got to go out there and conquer uh the world like we like you he gets you fired up he gets you intense but then on the other hand he keeps everything so loose by sort of reminding you in the back of your mind the subtext of all of it is we're chill, we're loose. None of this really matters. If you fail, we're all still going to love you. We're all going to be brothers, so on and so forth. So managing to compartmentalize both the extreme stakes of something and the extreme irrelevance of something, that is Johnny Gomes in the clubhouse. That is life.

And so I actually, I also stumbled on that contradiction and that but i think it makes perfect sense when you uh step back now it's also possible though that he's getting it backwards and that you you've got to you've got to get revved up for the thing that matters but then also remember it doesn't matter but if you get revved up for the thing that doesn't matter and anyway forget i said that johnny gomes is perfect i'm not even gonna get into the possibility that he's doing it wrong okay all right ben any other banter or should we go on to the subject at hand well are we talking about the twins no but you know what let's forget my subject at hand let's do that one tomorrow

let's talk about the twins good idea okay that's a better one and now i've got a topic for tomorrow all ready to go tell me all right let's talk about the twins this is newsy this is topical we started recording a little later than usual today and in the interim the twins fired terry ryan which is fairly big news in baseball circles because the twins fired someone which which alone is pretty unusual. And of course, we're a couple of weeks before the trade deadline, which is not normally when you see GMs get changed. Often it's right at the end of a season or over the offseason.

It's the least intrusive then. You have the fewest plates spinning. But the Twins are changing Terry Terry Ryan who has been in their organization Forever The press release about how they are Making this change Acknowledges that he joined the organization As a player in 1972

And of course he's been an executive For many years He was the GM initially From 1994 to 2011 And then Bill Smith Took over and Terry Ryan was his special assistant. And then Terry Ryan took over again in 2011 when Smith was, I believe, not fired, right? He was just demoted or reassigned because that's what the twins tend to do. They have the same people every year and maybe they shuffle them around a little

bit and maybe they hire a couple more here and there. But basically, if you are higher up in the Twins front office, you've been there for decades. Yeah. And his replacement, his interim replacement, that's a key adjective here, is his right-hand man. And it'll be very interesting to see. I mean, this is the future of the Twins the twin. Look, given the fact that twins don't get fired and that twins don't get replaced, whoever they ultimately hire is probably going to be there for 35 years. And so this is in a sense, very significant. So I don't know if, I don't know if it's been reported whether the interim is, is a really a really crucial distinction here. I feel like interims in baseball tend to become permanent more than in other fields, but maybe that's just

anecdotal. But if they replace him with another assistant GM from the twin system, it's not that big of a shift, right? I mean, they've done that before maybe, and it didn't really change anything. And then Terry Ryan ended up coming back. If they end up bringing in somebody who is going to want to have his whole regime, then everything we know about the twins is undone. Yeah. And I don't think the interim replacement tells us anything about their plans. Maybe by the time you're listening to this, for all I know, people may have reported more. There might be more details about what the future plans are. But the fact that they appointed an interim person who was the assistant GM doesn't suggest anything to me. I think even if they were planning on going outside the organization and doing a full overhaul, they would still appoint an interim person either for the rest

of the season or certainly for the time being with the trade deadline coming up. And you can't really do the full weeks long or months long GM search and many, many interviews. It's hard to do that in season while you're also running the team and while many people are tied up with their current teams and not looking for a job. And so that doesn't mean anything to me. So I think it's quite likely that there would be a new GM search from outside the organization. And if there is, then, of course, that person is going to bring in their own people. And so, you know, that's probably not a great omen for anyone who works for the Twins right now.

But obviously it's understandable why you would make this move. Terry Ryan, I think it's fair to say, is still respected. And obviously he's been in the game forever. And he has had some success in the past with the Twins, but has not had any lately. And the Twins before him, or kind of in the interregnum, did not have any success. And so they're 33 and 58 right now. That probably overstates how terrible they are currently, but they're pretty terrible. So you can understand why they finally got to the breaking point.

Yeah, the timing is very odd. You could make the case that having a bad GM in place for the most important time of the year is a bad idea. So if you've lost faith in your GM, you don't necessarily want him to be the one who is in charge of selling off pieces at the trade deadline. On the other hand, it's not like the twins have learned anything about Terry Ryan over the last three months or nine months. And it's hard to, I guess in a sense, they couldn't very well fire him probably last offseason because he was coming off a good season on the surface.

But I don't know. It's hard for me to think that anything that they learned in the last nine months, just because the Twins are very bad this year, it's hard for me to think that anything they learned in the last nine months created a sense of urgency so great that they had to so dramatically shift directions in the middle of the trade deadline. It really feels like you could have waited until September 1st. until September 1st. Yeah, it does seem like that. I mean, if as you say, right, I mean, maybe they really wanted to fire him for whatever reason over the winter, but they couldn't because the Twins had just had a good season and exceeded expectations. And so now enough time has passed that they can do so without making anyone mad because the Twins are terrible. But you're right. I don't know why it needs to be done now as opposed to a few months from now unless there was something about the direction he wanted to take the team

at the deadline that ownership thought would lead to problems down the road. I don't know what direction that could be. It's not as if Terry you know, Terry Rand was going to be a buyer at the trade deadline or something and like trade all their prospects to make a second half run. I don't think that is possible. So it's hard to see exactly what the disagreement could have been. Like, maybe if he wanted to trade just all of their remaining veterans, not that they really have a whole lot of guys who would bring back much, I wouldn't think,

but maybe he wanted to do more of a teardown and ownership thought that that didn't make sense, that they're closer than that, that they don't need to do that. I don't know. There just, there isn't really that much on the team that you'd think would make sense to sell and certainly doesn would make sense to sell and certainly

doesn't make sense to buy. So I don't know what huge disagreement about the second half direction of the twins there could have been. Yeah. And maybe that is also the reason why you just go ahead and do it now. Because like Lehman ran down the pieces that they have to trade this deadline. down the pieces that they have to trade this deadline. And yeah, pretty much anybody who isn't under 26 should be available. But the most high profile names, veteran names, are Joe Maurer, Glenn Perkins, and Phil Hughes. None of those are really realistic to trade. At this point, Maurer has a full no trade clause. And so he's not getting traded, presumably. Perkins and Hughes are both injured, and so they're not getting traded. And so he's not getting traded, presumably. Perkins and Hughes are both injured, and so they're not getting traded. And so it just sort of worked out that this trade deadline was

already going to be unusually quiet for them. And so the players that they will be looking to move are not that interesting. Irvin Santana, Brian Dozier, Trevor Plouffe, Eduardo Nunez, Kurt Suzuki. It's important that you maximize what you get for those pieces, but this is not probably where you're going to get the foundation for the next great twins team. You're basically going to be picking up a few little pieces here, shedding a few dollars here and there. And, you know, maybe there was a determination that for all of Terry Ryan's skills as a general manager, as a manager, as a leader, maybe his ability to get trades done wasn't deemed an important part of his skill set anyway. As we know, a lot of trades happen, the conversations about trades happen a level down or by other people in the organization,

and then they eventually get to the GM. So, you know, certainly I would imagine Rob Antony, the interim has, you know, been involved in trade deadlines, is capable of assessing Irvin Santana's value, has access to all the same information that Terry Ryan would have had. It's not like he's having to learn a new organization. And so, yeah, probably there's very little downside to making the move now. I don't know if there's upside. The timing is just off enough that it makes you wonder whether there is interesting backstory in an organization that has essentially never had interesting backstory.

The Twins are the team that you least expect to read the great front office backstory tell-all at the end of the year. But the timing is odd enough that you wonder if this did come out of some sort of weird ultimatum or conversation about direction that ended up getting very heated or something like that. Who knows?

Anthony, by the way, Parker Hagerman tweeted excerpts from a Q&A that he did with Rob Antony six years ago. And they're interesting. They're kind of, you know, I don't think either of us thinks that there's only one model for a GM or that GM has to fit a specific philosophy in this day and age. They're all pretty, pretty well, they all have their own different skill sets and philosophies. But that said, they're interesting answers. Would you rather sign a guy with a high RBI total or a high slugging percentage? The answer was the high RBI total, which is not a great answer. I don't know if that's a deal-breaking answer, but there's also an extended answer about assessing a

pitcher using his wins, which is who knows why GMs answer the way that they do or assistant GMs answer the way they do. But it's certainly not an indication that they've hired one of the types of GM candidates that we're used to seeing. Right. And if they do decide to go out of house, can you say outhouse? I don't know. If they decide to go outhouse, then I think it's not a terrible job, right? It's not an unappealing opportunity. If you get to interview for this job and you get to bring in your own people, it's not like a hopeless case. Of course, it's not a huge market and not great attendance and it's Minnesota. I mean, there are certain disadvantages that you're always going to face there. But talent-wise,

it's not a terrible position to be in. They have guys like Kepler and Buxton and Sano and Berrios and there's enough there that you could you could envision a couple years down the road you've got a productive core that's cost controlled and and also like it just seems like they've done things so wrong in certain ways for so long that it wouldn't be that hard to improve it's almost like if you're going from a sub-replacement player at a certain position, all you have to do to get better is be average, and that's a big improvement. And it's kind of the same with the Twins.

I mean, their pitching approach over the last several seasons is really just incomprehensible. I mean, just the lack of strikeouts is crazy, and paired with their terrible defense that they've had at points over that run, it just never really made sense why you would want to build a team that way, given what we know about how lack of contact be a good thing too. They were just so diametrically opposed to the trend that every other team seems to be following with good effect that really if you just stop them kind of going in reverse and just have them in neutral, forget about going forward, that would help.

I mean, that seems like something anyone could accomplish. So it's almost like replacing Matt Williams in Washington this year. You know, like almost anyone who did that was probably going to be manager of the year just by virtue of not being Matt Williams. Maybe it's not quite that drastic here, but it's sort of similar. It could be. I mean, Matt Williams was just one guy. Matt Williams was not staffing many tiers of an organization with people that he deemed philosophically in line with him. And so it is possible that you're 100% right.

It is also possible that it's the opposite and that you've got dozens of coaches and various front office people that all essentially either need to be retrained or replaced. And it could be that it's more like having, you know, a car that you're trying to get a particular smell out of. It might be more persistent than you think. And I don't know how long until the twins quit having the same sort of institutional knowledge that they always had, which maybe isn't a bad thing. I mean, there might be pluses to the way that they did things as well. It might not be the case that everything about that philosophy is wrong or about the way that they coached and the way that they develop players was wrong. But I would guess that a new GM is going to realize that given the level of organizational consistency that has been the norm for the twins, it is going to be either harder to change the approach

of the people who work there or actually harder to fire people. Like there's probably a lot of, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot more kind of expectation of organizational loyalty because of how many people have been there for how long, for so long. Yeah. You'd definitely have to make sure about that. If you were a hotshot GM candidate and you were coming in to interview for this job, you'd almost be interviewing ownership as much as they would be interviewing you because you'd want to be sure that you were actually going to have free reign to replace people and bring in people. And not that we're saying, you know, everyone who works for the twins should be let go, but you'd want to have the freedom to decide that for yourself. So definitely that would be a concern for anyone interviewing for that job. Yeah. I wouldn't particularly relish going to that organization, I don't think,

except for the fact that, again, it is an organization that has been loyal. And you would, if they gave, look, no manager, literally no manager has ever had a longer leash than Ron Gardenhier had. Like no, as Aaron Gleeman wrote, I think it was Aaron wrote in a BP annual essay a few years ago, might have been Ken Funk, might not have been, who knows, that no manager in a non-expansion situation had ever had a longer run of awfulness without getting fired as Ron Gardner. He had the longest leash in history.

And Terry Ryan, by basically any measure of looking at it, had an extremely long leash too. The twins have been awful for a decade. And obviously Terry Ryan wasn't there for all of it, but his hand-picked successor was. And while I think that Terry Ryan is... I'll get to this, but while Terry Ryan brings good things as well with his managerial style, I imagine, I think that in most cities, in most organizations, we would definitely have expected that guy to have been fired longer ago than he was, much longer ago than he was. And so if you're thinking about taking that job as a GM,

in one sense, it's really good. And I've sort of felt that way with Paul Mulder when Paul Mulder got hired too. It'd be fun to take over an organization that you know isn't the Marlins, that isn't going to fire you because you only won 83 games in your third year. And so that would be the plus side. So that would be the plus side. Now, I don't know if you have any way of answering this, but if Terry Ryan took over, if Terry Ryan was hired by your favorite team,

not as a GM, but just as part of a front office, do you think that that would be something that would be a punchline? Do you think that your favorite team's fan blogs would be groaning? Do you think we would be making fun of him? Or does Terry Ryan leave this with his reputation pretty well intact and, uh, maybe not going to be a GM again, but could be, um, a, you know, baseball, I don't know, still be a successful baseball

lifer from here on out in some role. Yeah. I don't think he's ever sunk to the punchline level. I mean, this is not like a Ruben Amaro sort of situation where just everyone kind of reflexively makes fun of him or even maybe Kevin Towers by the end of his tenure. And he was someone who was respected and successful for a while, but then lost that respect. And in his case, I think it was not only because his team started to struggle, but because he just talked so much, and a lot of the things he said didn't sound that great. So Ryan, I think, was successful early on, and so we got to know him first as a good GM who was good at player development

and building this team without a big payroll, and they were very successful. And so that was our initial impression of him. And he doesn't talk all that much. He's not coming out and, you know, saying things like Dave Stewart or Ruben Amaro would say. So I don't think he has spoiled his reputation. So if my team hired him as a scouting person or special assistant or whatever, I would probably not be overjoyed. But I think that was fine. I'm sure he has plenty to offer in that kind of role. Yeah, I think I'd be happy.

I think I'd be happy enough. He, at least as far as we can tell from where we sit out here, he seems like a guy who has been in the industry a long time and didn't make enemies which is admirable in its own kind of way and so bottom line will Terry Ryan be an employee of the Dodgers in the next sometime sometime in the next three years do you think yeah they've got to add what is he they've what, six former GMs or something like that? So I'll say no, but I would not at all be surprised if that was where he ended up. Okay. All right. I think that's all the Terry Ryan talk we can muster. Yep.

So obviously we will not know really the outcome of this story for a while. And our opinion of this will change dramatically depending on whether they decide to make the interim full time or whether they decide to actually start interviewing people. But not news I expected to see today. All right. So that is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five listeners who have already pledged their support are Canard Pack, Ross Bikoreks, James O'Donnell, Bennett Akin, and Bryce Stevenson. Thank you. on Amazon and Goodreads. Please also leave a review for the podcast on iTunes. You can subscribe and rate and view there.

And you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index at baseballreference.com using the coupon code BP when you sign up. And you can contact us by email at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will talk to you tomorrow. They say you can't take it with you But I think that they're wrong Cause all I know is I woke up this morning

And something big is gone Yeah, there's a sad dog in my room. It's the saddest dog. Yeah, it's not that sad. It is a dog with sadness, but it's not the saddest dog, I promise.