Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 973: The Potential Lasts of 2016

Episode Date: November 7, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the attendance at the Cubs’ World Series celebration, then discuss several things we may (or may not) have seen for the last time during the 2016 season.

The days go by, a million little nights and days go by And I don't mind, parades go by So many beautiful parades go by Leave me behind Leave me behind of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. I have a question for you. Ask it. Did you see the crowd estimates, the crowd size estimates of the Cubs victory rally? Yeah, what was it, five million?

This is what they say. Yeah, the seventh largest gathering in human history, something like that. Well, they also say that. I think they actually had it in a tie, which is great. They couldn't get one more guy in there. It's a tie, Ben. It was a tie. It's exactly $5 million for both the Cubs World Series celebration and World Youth Day 1995.

Do you believe it? Can I believe $5 million? I mean, I was talking about that with my mom, I think, and she couldn't believe that there were actually 5 million people there because how many people live in Chicago? Well, I think it's... I mean, obviously people came from far and wide and the Cubs have a big fan base outside of the city.

But let me just interrupt you there for one thing because I lived in the city. But let me just interrupt you there for one thing because I lived in the city. I lived just south of San Francisco for the 2014 parade and I happened to actually be up in Northern California for the 2010. And so I was 15, 20-minute train ride away from the 2014 one and like maybe an hour, five-minute drive from the 2014 one and like a maybe an hour five minute drive from the 2010 one and did not consider for a second going into it it was it was i mean you you could not get into the city like the only person i know who made it there uh lived along the route otherwise that it was just

completely impossible to get in so while chicago metro area is much bigger and while sure there's Cubs fans from, you know, probably from as far as Denver, I just don't think you're driving into Chicago to go to this rally. I just, if it's anything like the ones that, and you know, San Francisco is a little bit of a different geography, but if it's anything like those, it quickly becomes restrictive. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't really watch video. I saw some pictures of what looked like a lot of people. I'm looking at a picture that looks like it is every bit as crowded as Coachella 2002.

Right, yeah. They looked like a big Stones concert or something. Yeah, which is now you're talking about you know upwards of 110 000 right i mean i don't know i'm sure where are the other 4.89 million i don't know we'll probably get angry emails from maybe every fans who were there and maybe personally but maybe every one of the people in this crowd is actually three children in a trench coat so then now we're talking about 330,000. But I don't believe, first of all, crowd estimates are always ludicrous.

I'm not saying that about this one. I'm still litigating this one. But like there was a great on the media segment maybe four or five years ago about how these crowd estimates are are created or how they come up with them and it's just completely they're they're like they're completely faked um and so you you should take all of these with uh as little seriousness as you possibly can yeah but this story says that it beat out the three and a half million people who went to Rod Stewart's 1994 concert in Rio. What? Yeah.

1994 Rod Stewart concert, three and a half million people? At least in that case, theoretically, someone might have been collecting tickets. Like if there were tickets collected, that is maybe a way I would take an estimate like this seriously. tickets collected that is the maybe a way i would take an estimate like this seriously but otherwise the other thing is like the number one is a pilgrimage in india i don't know anything about this pilgrimage in india so um maybe maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation but 30 million to this pilgrimage in india in 2013 and then it drops down to a festival in Iraq that had 17 million. And I'm just guessing that this pilgrimage in India is probably an annual thing. How come it spiked to 30 million?

And there's not another pilgrimage in India that is in the top 11? So I don't know. I'm skeptical. But I am very skeptical of this. I did not see any photographs of this parade that convinced me that there were on the order of eight times what they had in San Francisco or Kansas City. And while I think that they have a lot to be proud of with this parade, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was the biggest World Series parade in history and the biggest World Series rally in history. It would not surprise me at all, but I would not spread Fox 32 Chicago's report on Facebook. I believe it is as probably...

My guess is that this page was generated by teenagers in Macedonia to get clicks. Well, if you were there and you believe otherwise and you have some evidence to support that, email us and let us know why you think it was actually that many people. I love that this, by the way, the write-up of it, of this Fox 32 news piece is so great because the second paragraph is,

the Cubs celebration crowd even beat out the 3.5 million people who went to Rod Stewart's 1994 concert in rio as though everybody who clicked on this was like can't be more than rod stewart in rio in 94 though like you're scanning quickly to like your control f stewart that pilgrimage is every 12 years by the the way, if that changes your mind. Well, I'm glad you said that because, right, so that means that there was one in 2001. And I have a hard time thinking that they went 1,000% decade over decade on this. So to me, this is an incomplete, this speaks to an incomplete list anyway.

Yeah. I just don't, I don't, no way. No way. No chance. It's not 5 million people get out of here definitely need more more information citation needed all right i feel like my topic might be semi-time consuming so i'm gonna end my banter there you got anything no we can proceed all right so i wrote a piece for espn that came out Friday about what we're still staying alive for now. Basically the premise was that there's all these old people in Chicago who were just hanging on to see the Cubs win the world series.

And there were, there were, you know, there, while we were growing up, there were a few, well, there were at least two stories like that.

The Cubs and the Red Sox, where you heard about people whose dad just wanted to make it to see the Red Sox win the World Series, maybe even the White Sox as well. And so the question was, is there anything left that baseball can offer us in our lifetimes that would be worth putting off open-heart surgery to see or that would give us an incentive to stay alive to see. So I had a few of these things, things that we have never seen in our lifetimes, you and me, most people have never seen in our lifetimes. And it seemed like they probably are, you know, in a couple of cases are maybe not necessarily things that are likely to happen anytime soon.

And that if they did happen, in. And that if they did happen, in some cases, if they did happen, they might not even be that exciting. But, you know, a lifetime's a long time. If you're on a 50 or 60 year time timeline, you know, for instance, the Indians winning the World Series next year would not really be worth me staying alive for. I don't care that much. But, you know, 20 or 30 years of this more, maybe we have a more romantic view of the Indians, for instance, or whatever they're called by then, because they will probably not be called the Indians in 30 years. That's my guess. So anyway, so that was the premise, right? But I want to flip that around and ask not what might happen that we've never

seen before in our lifetimes that would be fun but what did happen in 2016 that we saw for the last time and so these can be things that maybe we saw only once or they can be things that we saw every week for the last 30 years but uh have been either slowly phased out of the game or are going to be abruptly phased out of the game or whatever for one for whatever reason these are things that we saw in 2016 but we think that in the next 50 years that's our timeline here 50 years we will not see again all right all right so i'm going to uh to ask you to tell me all of those things great that's the whole episode ben so i hope you brought some hope you can think of some that's not true i'm not i actually i asked right before we came on i asked uh i put this out on twitter got some very good responses i'm gonna go over those uh and get

your feeling on whether you think that they are in fact that um and whether they qualify but before i do that i want to just have 20 you know 12 12 to 20 seconds of silence while you ponder this and if to see if you think hmm Last Bartolo Cologne home run. Yeah. All right. Time's up. So the request that I put out was, what did we see in baseball this year Either for the first time or the millionth That you think we'll never see again

The broader the better So I've faved I've liked a bunch of these And I'll go through some of them And we can talk about them Alright so Runners regularly called out on instant replay reviews That show the runner came off the bag for a microsecond.

This has been something that Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, I believe has talked about how this is something that they'll look at. It doesn't necessarily seem like there's a huge amount of urgency coming out of Major League Baseball, but there's a, anytime a runner is called out now, it seems like we get announcers talking about it for a couple of minutes. It seems broadly unpopular among the announcer class. It is more, I would say more controversial or more, I guess, more evenly split among people that I follow. But there is a, there are a lot of people who like me consider it to be not an addition to the game, not game, not something that supplements the game in any particular way, and that it is something that would be better off resolved. So I believe that they will take a look at this in the offseason. Do you believe that there will be settled legislation

that gets around this problem and makes it so that runners are not called off for nanosecond diversions from the bag. I think it's doable. So I think it probably will be done, will be done this offseason. I'm not positive. I think it probably would have helped if there had been some really pivotal play in this postseason that had swung a game one way or the other based on that kind of call. That might have given people the impetus to do something about it the way that Buster Posey's injury or the Chase Utley slide did. I don't know whether we've quite had the equivalent of that, although obviously it's something that happens fairly often. So if I had to guess, I'd say we haven't quite seen the end of it yet, but we will.

I think that they will do something this year. I think it's done. I think it's done. Okay. I hope so. Yeah. Okay. Nonchalant attitude about an accused domestic violator, domestic violence violator winning World Series games.

violator, domestic violence violator, winning World Series games. Do you think that we've, I think we've obviously seen across all sports, including in baseball, a much more attempt to take seriously this crime and to have leagues really put measures in place to take it seriously, to punish players. And yet, I also feel like to some degree, the league's reaction to these accusations still lags behind the public's reaction to it, particularly the public that you and I interact most with, other writers, and so on. So it does seem to me that there is coming, well, that there is likely coming a point in the future where it becomes too toxic. And I don't exactly know what they'll do to fix that because it does seem like a lifetime ban for a first time violator is probably not going to be broadly accepted and is probably not fair. But do you think that there is, are we at a sort of a tipping point

where the momentum will shift heavily and something like Aroldis Chapman being in position to save the final game of the World Series and so on will be prevented by Major League Baseball rules or culture or team culture? I don't think so.

I think if the same thing happened next year, it might play out the same way. I mean, we saw the suspension and that was the first violation or the first time it was prosecuted under that rule or under the commissioner's authority to do something about it. And everyone said, oh, he's going to do something really harsh and he's going to set down a precedent. And I don't know, it was harsh compared to the usual suspensions we see for throwing a fastball at someone's head or something, but it could have been harsher and it wasn't because there were free agency implications there. And maybe the union would have pushed back if it had been

any more than it was. And so there were various reasons why it wasn't more severe. And as it turned out, he got traded for by the best team in baseball. And there was a lot of grumbling and disapproval and frowns. And yet he pitched for them down the stretch and he pitched for them in the playoffs and he pitched for them in game seven of the World Series. And we all thought it was the greatest game we'd ever seen. And the Cubs won the World Series and five million people showed up to the parade. So I don't think there's enough there to say that that's the end. That's it.

And now it will never be allowed to happen again because the cubs just did it and what were the ramifications for them really not much yeah a lot of talk and uh on the internet and it's i think uh it's easy to overestimate what percentage of baseball fans um are on our timelines uh and my guess is that the average baseball fan, sadly, is... I mean, Jose Reyes got a standing ovation in his first at-bat for the Mets. Oh my gosh, did he really? Yeah. Unbelievable.

I think the sad thing about this, the sad truth, is that I think that without very visible victims, it's hard to get a lot of people to pay attention to how horrific this behavior is, this crime is. And there's a lot of reasons that victims don't want to be that visible. And I don't exactly know how to convince large swaths of the sports viewing public how much scorn they should be heaping on these players. But I don't think that we're in a significantly different place than we were one year ago. I also don't think that it's quite, I don't know,

I'm not sure that I would consider it a nonchalant attitude this year, as the question or as the suggestion assumes. It's not quite nonchalant. I think that's probably the wrong adjective. It's not nearly chalant enough, though. Yeah, it's definitely a different place from where we were two years ago when there was no policy and no suspensions. So, I mean, there has been real movement, but yeah, I don't see anything very drastic happening immediately. in baseball who approaches Vin Scully's fame and universal belovedness, who will age into a sort of senior role in the game, a historical patriarchal role, whatever, in the game that will be so universally revered and admired that we have any retirement in baseball that can rival Vin Scully's in the next 50 years. Huh. What do you think people would have said about Vin Scully's chances of being that guy 50 years ago? 50 years was what, 60, 66. So Vin was a, I read, you know, I read a lot about Vin for one of the episodes that we did.

And by 66, Vin was considered a star, and he was widely admired. But I don't think that he was extremely well suited for. I think he was considered especially entertaining, especially adept at using every inch of that medium for the benefit of the consumer. And he was associated with many of the best parts of baseball. However, I think that even if he, I'm sort of estimating here, but I don't think that you would have bet on him making, you know, spending another 50 years in the game. And what, in what, how long did Vin have to go? You wouldn't have bet on him living this long, let alone being a great broadcaster the whole time. So what's the earliest Vin could have retired to go down, not just as a Hall of Fame broadcaster, but as almost a secular deity? I mean, I think of Vin Scully and Mr. Rogers as being like sort of tandems from a generation.

And they are just, they are so elevated above all other human beings in how universally they are considered good for humanity. And they, I don't know at what point Vin could have retired and had that locked down. I want to say, based on my awareness of Vince Scully, that it would have been around the turn of the century, maybe a little bit earlier. Yeah, it's hard for me to say. I wasn't really reading coverage of Vince Scully at that time, and I haven't really gone back to look. As did in your recent article when you in the article we're talking about i guess where you look to see when the cubs drought became a curse and when it attained all of its sort of mythology and oh you read it yeah and it was pretty touched it was a came out on a friday afternoon i wasn't sure if you'd read it I did and it was uh what you found like in the late

90s was when or sometime yeah mid 80s and the late 90s sometime yeah sometime between 84 and 97 is sort of when it was confirmed and I think that it was really it was it was in the years right after 84 is when I think that the notion of it as a curse, as something that actually defined a Cubs fan's life in a negative way, is when it really started to catch on. I don't think it was that way before that. So I don't know. Once Vin had gotten to 50 years maybe, maybe that would have done it. So around that time.

Okay, so to answer the question then. Yeah, so I'm trying to think of what, besides a broadcaster, what kind of person could attain that, and I guess it could be, I don't know, it couldn't be like Theo Epstein or someone who's very revered and respected, but I don't know that he could be beloved by all of the fans in Major League Baseball that way because I don't know, maybe if he became commissioner or something.

Yeah, commissioner. I think in a previous generation, the commissioner would be a position where that could happen, but I don't think it can anymore. I think that too many people are pro player now and a commissioner is too closely associated with the owner's business interests that I don't even think that we're going to have a hero commissioner really again. Yeah. In the same way that we might have. However, you say that he can't otherwise because, what, he only represents one team. But David Ortiz and Mariano Rivera, different things, players, but they represented one team and were universally beloved. Yeah, but you don't get to appreciate Epstein's work the way that you do those guys.

I mean, you don't see him. Well, he'll write a book. He'll write a book. It'll be a huge, huge, huge bestseller. Uh-huh. Yeah, if he writes a Vecas in Rec style book that's really great, then, yeah, I mean, maybe. And if he, he'd have to do something very visible. So I don't know what that would be if he became an owner and was like a lovable, just, I don't know, out of the box owner or something.

Maybe, maybe there's a way. Owner is an interesting route. Yeah, like if he became an eccentric owner or like an outspoken owner, there aren't as many of those anymore because there are a lot of corporate-owned teams. And so you don't have that kind of, you know, family-owned team and he gets passed down generations and, you know, there are all these characters involved. It's just much more business-like now. involved it's it's just much more business-like now so what if what if 20 you know 22 years from now he goes to cleveland and in his third year there there wins a world series and so he i mean the red socks the cubs and and i'm assuming now that in 22 years the indian breaking the indians drought is also considered a you know a heartwarming achievement that all of America gets behind. Yeah, I don't know.

Do you think he's beloved now? He's certainly respected, but is he beloved? I feel like he's just going on a bender after this World Series is a good thing for him, making him more lovable. But I don't know. I don't know if he's widely lovable enough. And I don't know if a broadcaster could do it because there are no one-man booths. So I don't know if you can stand out as much when you're working with a two- or three-man team or three-person team. Let me give you one that many people will roll their eyes at.

But what about – and again, we're on a crazy timeline here. What about if Grant Brisby just keeps doing this for 40 years? And he is Roger, you know, he is Roger Angel for this generation, this medium, or he is, you know, he's Vin Scully. Like Grant Brisby is not only incredibly funny, incredibly talented, but also pretty much universally liked. He's not offensive. He is a genuinely good and decent human being. And I think that radiates off of him. I mean, don't you, doesn't everybody get the sense that Grant is just a good person? Sure. Yeah. And so if Grant is doing this for 40 more years and just keeps getting better and reaches some sort of like legendary set, I mean, the thing about Angel is that he was writing for a very, you know, a relatively small, specific niche non-baseball audience. He was the greatest of all time. But how many people do you even like really know who know who he is? Pretty, pretty small.

Right. That's what I was gonna say is that you mentioned Angel and he's the greatest and everyone who knows him acknowledges that he's the greatest. But yeah, I mean, the average baseball fan, I don't think knows who Roger Angel is. So, but like, let's say that, let's say eight years from now, newspapers are gone, everything's digital and the New York Times hires Grant and Grant is the New York Times baseball writer for this medium for 30 years after that. Is it conceivable? Yeah. I mean, after that is it conceivable yeah i mean it's possible grant wouldn't have been my number one pick but now that you mentioned it sure um i don't know i'm just trying to think of a writer and i don't know what other what other writer i could really different writer over him but

i don't know that i would pick a writer but yeah like someone like someone like Henry Chadwick or something who was like, you know, a writer, but also a historian and a statistician and very influential. And he edited magazines and baseball guides forever. And he was known as like the father of baseball. But that was, you know, he died in 1908. And I'm not sure that a writer could attain the same prominence now just because no one needs a writer to tell them what happened in the game they can all see the game so I'm not sure that the bond between the fan and the writer is quite the same as it was when you were consuming baseball through the writer's words so maybe maybe, but I don't know. And we couldn't have like a Connie Mack style manager

who just manages for 50 years. So I was wondering if Joe Madden, I mean, Joe Madden is quirky. He's successful. Did I mention he's quirky? He got started late and there's already a little bit of backlash growing yeah i don't even know if joe madden's well liked now is he i mean sabermetric people kind of like him but

you know just like the typical fan care about joe madden yeah maybe not yeah yeah uh i mostly just wanted to change the subject so that all the people out there whose eyes rolled so far up into their heads for so long that now they can no longer breathe uh can unroll them uh all right jacoby ellsbury reaching on catcher's interference 12 times which is a record the single season record was eight before that i was it was weird i saw the thing i was i was looking for the exact number because i saw that some article that had him at like you know nine in july or whatever and i was looking for the final say and i found somebody a writer say so is this a skill i'd say no and that seems how do you how do you say that how could you possibly say that like there are like there are

like 12 catchers interferences across major Major League Baseball in a decade. And this dude just decides that he's going to do it. And he does it. It might be the clearest. I might believe that that is a more stable. What word am I looking for? I believe that that is a skill more than I believe that Andrelton Simmons' defense at shortstop is a skill. So yeah, it's a skill.

The question is, A, whether this is a skill that is so easily picked up that if one wants to throw tradition in the wind and go for it, he can simply do it and top Ellsbury. Two, whether Ellsbury himself is getting simply better at this and can get 13 next year he's getting close to the all-time career record so he might aspire to it and three is whether if the answer is yes to one or two whether major league baseball would allow it or whether it would just be seen as oh well they finally found this little glitch in the matrix we got to seal it off and nobody can ever do it again because it is not good for baseball

to have it easy to do this. It's not how anybody intended the batter pitcher matchup to be resolved on the regular. So clearly, if somebody was exploiting this as much as Ellsbury does regularly or multiple players were, I think it would be a quick lockdown in baseball. Yeah, I think maybe Ellsbury is almost grandfathered in. He's just this weird outlier who does this thing and it's like whatever, Andy Pettit's pickoff move or someone getting hit by tons of pitches or whatever it is. This is just his one weird trick that he uses to get on base. But if someone were to copy it and you could envision everyone starting to do this, then yeah, I think there would probably be a rule change that would prevent it.

So I think your only real hope is that Ellsbury does it again and he'd have to stay healthy again to do it, which is not something he does with that much regularity and how many did he have like the year before well the year before he was hurt but he had he had uh he had 11 in his career to date which i think was the active record i think there are like two guys as i recall two two guys in like the last like decade or 15 years who have done this. And I forget who the other one was. It was a Ray, somebody on the Rays and Ellsbury.

So he did it more than anybody else, but it was 11 in his career, I think. Or maybe it was 14 in his career. It was low teens at most in his career. So he got way, way better at it this year. Yeah. He beat the the previous single season record by 50 yeah so yeah i don't know i i wouldn't bet against him doing that again now that he has picked up this skill are you surprised nobody throws baseballs at his face

this seems like this seems like the place for unwritten rules to take care of it. Yeah, it does. I'm surprised. I think we'll just do two more. This one. Well, the, this was suggested a starter going over a hundred pitches, which I think is joke, but I'm going to rephrase it. A starter going over 130. Matt Moore threw 133 pitches in a start in August for the Giants. He was the only player to go over 125 all year,

which is kind of an amazing fact that snuck under the radar, I think. Before Matt Moore threw the 133 pitch outing, Chichi Gonzalez had 124, and that was it in four and two-thirds that's one of my favorite things that until until then the single start max for the season was a 22 year old prospect in a four and two-thirds inning outing which is like straight out of 1996 uh but nobody else threw 125 except for more who threw one 33. I'm not setting the limit at one 25 cause I'm sure someone will, but will anybody ever throw one 30 in a non no hit bid again?

And just to put this in perspective, uh, Matt Moore's one 33 is the most tied for the most in the last five years in a non no hitter. I think more, I guess it was a no hit bid for more. I think that he gave up a hit and they pulled him, right? Yeah. So it was a no hit bid. He did not get a no hitter. The three pit, the three outings that were more pitches in the previous five years were completed no hitters, but then Cole Hamels went 133 and Edinson Volquez went 133 in 2014 and 2012. But this is the first year ever that there was nobody who went 130 in a non-no-hit bid. It was the fewest 130 plus starts in history. Do you think 130 is now a hard cap? And do you think

we'll see another, I guess it's two questions. Do you think we'll ever see a 130 again? And do you think we'll ever see a 130 in a non-no hitter? Yeah, the latter seems pretty unlikely now. For a while there, the starters were not really losing a share of their innings. Like relievers were pitching fewer and fewer innings per appearance, but there were just more relief appearances, more guys in the bullpen, and starters were not really pitching fewer innings as a group. But this year they did by quite a bit, I think, and the percentage of innings pitched by relievers was the highest ever and then got even higher in the postseason and in the World Series, what everyone was pulled without throwing a pitch in the seventh

or something like that, all the starters. So I think it's definitely moving in that direction. I wouldn't really rule out it eventually at some point, maybe decades down the road, coming back in the other direction and everyone figuring out how to keep pitchers healthy enough for them to throw deep into games or something so that could certainly happen but yeah in 50 years you've really got to leave open the cyborg possibility right but in the short term unless there's like a major health breakthrough i'd say probably not for the no non--hitter and probably still for the no-hitter,

but it's got to be a dying breed. I will bet you a dollar right now that somebody goes 130 next year. In a non-no-hit attempt? In a non-no-hit attempt, yeah. All right. You're on. Good. All right.

Last one is your best reliever not pitching in an elimination game. We talked about this a few days ago, about whether we think that the Zach Britton debacle is the last such debacle. How convinced are you? We were both optimistic that it is, but how convinced are you? Yeah, I've been convinced of that before

when it actually happened and we did the podcast about it. We talked about how there have been these other glaring examples of it with Mike Matheny and we thought, how could anyone possibly keep doing this? And then it happens again. You should link to the Matheny episode because I had totally forgotten about that. And I was reminded of it after Britain. And that might be my favorite moment of you in podcast history, in our podcast history. I think I have episodes I like more, but I don't think I have episodes where I just liked listening to you more than that. It was an amazing episode, moment.

It was an amazing moment. Yeah, so it didn't happen again in the postseason, really, right? Well, there's not that many elimination games. No, no. But even like a moment when an important game even, it didn't really happen. So I don't know. The backlash was so resounding to that that I would think all the managers were paying some attention to that. And I know all the playoff managers were asked about it because it was in the transcripts of their press conferences the next day. And they all sort of expressed sympathy for

Showalter, but maybe they were also thinking, I won't do that if I get in that spot again. So I'll say, yeah, there won't be one that is that bad. At least it's a little different because it's Britain and he was like the most effective relief pitcher all year. So that made it even more glaring. And the fact that it was Baldo Jimenez coming in. So could there be a time when a less effective closer is not used and a more effective middle reliever is used? Yeah, maybe something like that But something that Just obviously crazy I don't know I don't think so Took you a long time

Yeah Alright that's all that's all I want to do Alright so we will end there You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com Effectively wild Five listeners who have already done so Adam Mayall, Corey Lack, Gene, Troy Clowder,

and Dominic Ronzani. Thank you. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to theonlyrulesithastowork.com for more information. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index at baseballreference.com We'll see you next time. and did a pretty comprehensive off-season preview, talked about the market, CBA, et cetera. You can contact me and Sam at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will be back'm so happy. I'm so happy.