Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 986: The CBA Said What?

Episode Date: December 6, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about pitch limits, an MLB.com headline, and news about Rich Hill and Shohei Otani, then discuss the implications of several of the new CBA’s most noteworthy changes.

I tried and tried to know it, but just can't seem to let me down. You drive a hard bargain. You drive a hard bargain. Good morning and welcome to episode 986 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. Brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello.

I want to read you a passage about a pitcher, an athletics pitcher. So get ready for that. You ready? I'm ready. All right. This season in both leagues, there were only three pitchers who appeared in more innings than him, and all of them were far older than he. This last is the point, of course. Young pitchers' arms are so

fragile, so easily susceptible to permanent injury, that many clubs have various self-imposed rules to protect them. One team limits its youngsters to a maximum of 100 pitches per game. Another does not allow its pitchers to learn the slider until they're at AAA, and presumably in their 20s. He turned 22 last July, and his left arm just might be the most valuable natural asset to turn up in the majors in a decade. He has powerful legs, and thus throws without effort or strain. He has excellent control and thus does not waste many pitches. The true balance sheet and final assessment of his first season may not be known for another year or two. Which athletics pitcher am I talking about? Rich Hill. No. Barry Zito.

No. Mark Mulder. No. Is that a hundred pitch limit, so it seems like it probably can't be that long ago. I don't know. I'm gathering that you don't know. That's right. It's Vita Blue. Oh, all right. Yeah. That's longer than I would have thought that any team had 100 pitch limit.

Me too. This whole passage to me felt like something that I would not have read at any point before 1997, at least. But it was written in 1971. It also, it goes on, in these and other ways, he reminds me at times of another left-hander, Jerry Kuzman, who pitched in 263 innings in his brilliant first full season at the age of 24, and has never since been able to throw a decent fastball. Well, young pitchers are eager and forever anxious to get out there and fire. It is the management that decides when to call on them. So that was interesting to me because of the time period.

It also made me think about Jeff Zimmerman's piece in the Hardball Times Annual that is just out now, which I don't know if you have read or seen, but he sort of fact- fact checks one of Scott Boris's arm health studies, which is quoted in Jeff Passan's book, The Arm, and finds that Scott Boris uses questionable statistical principles in order to make a point. And Jeff wonders aloud why, because he doesn't think that any GM would necessarily accept these conclusions without doing his own research and presumably finding the same holes in the logic that Jeff Zimmerman found. And he concludes, I think, reasonably and rightly, that the audience of this study is not the general manager. It is the pitcher himself,

that this is Scott Boris's way of getting his players to take some agency in how their own arms are used. And that this is really about scaring Steven Strasberg straight, rather than trying to convince Steven Strasberg's boss necessarily of anything. So I thought that was really interesting. It's a good essay by Jeff Zimmerman. Yeah, I have my copy of that book, but have not had time to dig into it yet. But it's one of my favorites every year. I particularly enjoyed Eno Saris on rubbing mud. I love rubbing mud. And Mike Petriello on catcher arm strength, which I learned a lot about. Since I got you here, Catcher arm strength, which I learned a lot about. Since I got you here, how hard do you think is the hardest average miles per hour of a catcher's arm to second base?

Like 85-ish? Yeah, it's 86. Any guess who it is? Is it Christian Bettencourt? It's Vita Blue. Oh, is it? Christian Bettencourt would be. I don't think he qualified for the table. He might have, but he had the highest peak.

Right? It is Gary Sanchez. Yeah, 86 miles an hour. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Shall I mention the headline that a listener named Henry sent us yesterday? I do not know what you're referring to.

It's an MLB.com headline, and it's on a Richard Justice story. I do not know what you're referring to. pronounce this see it's a rudolph the red-nosed reindeer pun or it's supposed to be it's rain here games add some very shiny pros with a exclamation point at the end of it but games is gms because talking about gms so it's really rain here gms add some very shiny pros except gm happens to be i guess a way that you could also abbreviate games. And so even if you say it as games, it's not really how the song goes because it's just had a very shiny nose, add some very shiny prose. It's a stretch. And I think it's probably the worst MLB.com headline I've ever seen And by worst I mean I guess you could consider it best But if MLB.com is going for intentionally funny because they're such a stretch headlines

Then this would be the best ever I like add some very shiny prose Yeah, I guess that part, if it were just that part. This reminds me a little bit of a joke, the punchline of which was, rude officer Ed knows reindeer. A very long, it is a shaggy, it's sort of a shaggy dog joke that ends with rude officer Ed knows reindeer. Uh-huh, yeah.

All right. I think I got that from the years that I spent going to vacation in a cabin that had nothing but Reader's Digest. Okay. Let's talk about the CBA. All right. Nothing about Rich Hill. What's there to say? It's done. 48 everyone is tweeting And posting about what our Or your final prediction Or not really prediction But what you would pay him was It was like 3 And 50 something 60 something At one point

The peak when we did the comps And more or less stopped Adjusting every day I think our peak was 3 and 63 And then as of I think we did a post-season, after the season one, in which I think we said 3-51 or 3-54. So the Dodgers pretty much caught up to what I would give. I still think it's a little bit of a bargain and I would definitely make that move. And I'm somewhat ashamed of the other 29 teams

that wouldn't. I mean, as you know, Dave Cameron wrote it up. And as Dave writes, you don't get no risk for $50 million. You know, it's not like there are a bunch of players signing for under $50 million that are sure things. And, you know, I'd rather have him than I would have ever had, rather had, you know, Ubaldo Jimenez, I think, for $50 million, or Irvin Santana, who got $50 million, or Matt Garza, who got $50 million, or Ricky Nolasco, who got, you know, close to $50 million. So, you know, it doesn't, I don't know if people are surprised or impressed by how much he got, but it seems nice to me. It seems like a good deal.

Yeah, right. And in other popular Effectively Wild player news, Jeff Passan reported that it looks like Shohei Otani will be posted following this upcoming season, following 2017, so he could be in the majors in 2018. Yeah, I don't get it, I don't get it. I don't get it. Why they're waiting? No, because they just passed,

I mean, well, they just agreed to a collective bargaining agreement that makes him like more or less ineligible for this, right? Yeah. I don't understand. I don't understand how this works. Like one day it's... There's some sort of loophole,

but I don't know what it is. I see. Passon says that his sources have told him that there are potential ways around the limit on spending for under 25 players like Otani. So I don't know what that would be, but... Loopholes are always good for athletics. But in this case, I approve the loophole. Sure.

All right. So we're going to talk about a few of the things in the collective bargaining agreement. You've heard probably a lot about all of them, but you have not heard from Ben. So I'm going to say some of these things that are going to change, and we'll talk about what we think about them. All right? Okay. All right. So, Ben, what do you think of the 10-day disabled list?

I like it. I think it's—I haven't really considered the full implications for how it could be exploited and what nefarious ways one could use it. But I think, in general, the idea, the stated intent of it is good. And obviously, everyone had been talking about whether there would be fewer games in the regular season that didn't happen but there will be more off days there will be shorter dl stints and that seems like a good thing it doesn't really favor either players or ownership it seems like it's generally a good thing for the game if guys who are hurt but not so hurt can get on the DL and get some rest and not hurt themselves more and not try to play through pain and pretend that nothing's wrong with them.

So yeah, I guess the risk is that it opens up shenanigans because a lot of the contours of a season are within 10-day periods. And so if, for instance, you know that you have maybe two off days in an eight-day span and you want to skip your fifth starter, well, now you can make up a reason for him to get on the disabled list and do a four-man rotation, taking advantage of those off days and add a, you know, what is de facto 26th man to your roster. If you know that you're going to play interleague play and you have a DH who will be superfluous in, uh, a national league ballpark, you could make up a reason for him to be on the disabled list.

And maybe you'd have, uh, at least six of those days, you wouldn't need to worry about him. And if a 10 day does 10 day includes an off day, right? Off day counts. It's not 15 game. It's 15 day. And so, uh, you might even be able to squeeze eight of those 10 days in which you don't need them and then have a, again, a de facto 26 man. I guess I don't really care if they do that, but I presume maybe that is why, that is one reason. When I was a kid, it was 15 day and then I think 21 day. And I think if you were on the 15 day, you had to come back at 15 days that you couldn't go 16. If I'm remembering this right. I don't know why I'm bringing that up. But I'm trying

to think of how the 10 day disabled list is going to be used to make a mockery of the sport. Because we are like, we talked, you've written about this. Adam Sobsey has written about this. It was the sort of the premise of the last play index we did. Teams are transaction crazy now in a way that they were not before. Like when we talked about there's been a 14, I think, 14% uptick in the number of teams since 1988. And yet a 40% uptick in the number of players that play in the majors every year because teams love to transact. every year because teams love to transact. And the 10-day DL, I wonder if this was something that GMs requested because they just wanted to be able to fiddle more. Yeah, it's one of those, I mean, there are always unintended consequences in CBAs, but often you can't see them ahead of time or you might not even realize that there's a

potential for an unintended consequence. This is a case where you just read about it and you go, oh, well, someone's going to take advantage of that. And I'm sure that people who were in the room negotiating were not unaware of that possibility. And maybe they just decided that the good outweighs the bad. I don't know. Yeah, and the good is obvious. I mean, there are two good reasons for it. You don't want people playing hurt. You don't want to have incentives for them to have to play. When they're not 100%, we do not want to see hamstring strains

turn into hamstring tears and so on. And if a person, a player, a player who's fun to watch and who sells tickets is available, is healthy enough to come back, you don't want them to be stuck on the disabled list for three more games. And so those two goods are probably clear enough that there's no need to worry about it. But yes, there are going to be shenanigans here. Yeah. All right. Let's see. No longer will the all-star game serve as the determinant of home field advantage in the world series i'm curious what you think of the replacement system which is best record happy with it uh it seems it's the it's the most obvious and um sort of clearest reasoned replacement i do you

worry about the fact that it could so i wrote a piece that nobody's read yet. You haven't read yet. That should be up sometime soon about the value of home field advantage in the world series and how significant it really is, even though you could make a case that it isn't significant, it is significant or it has been significant. And for most of baseball history, they treated it as insignificant. So insignificant, they did not even have to come up with a logical way of handing it out. It was just something you inherited by your good luck. And there was no real effort into fixing that for a century. And when Bud Selig had the chance to fix it, he chose instead to use that to fix the All-Star game unsuccessfully, because he didn't

particularly, I don't think, care about home field advantage in the World Series either. He thought that it was a small thing, rarely necessary, rarely invoked. But in fact, I think the home field advantage in the World Series has had a big effect. Anyway, so the random way of doing it, which is originally every other year, which was probably better than the All-Star Game method, because at least it wasn't absurd. The every other year, which was probably better than the All-Star Game method, because at least it wasn't absurd. Every other year, at least in a sense, it was fair because it was objective. It was a coin flip. In fact, they literally did it by coin flip for some years, which I think everybody agrees that coin flips are fair, if not totally just. They're fair. And with the way that they are going to do it, where it goes to best record, it seems like you have a system that is masquerading

as fair, but in fact carries with it a real serious bias that can tilt things. And that bias is to the team in the worst league. So the Cubs, for instance, would have won it this year. Maybe they were a better team than the Indians. Maybe they deserved it. They won a lot more games than the Indians. But the National League is hot garbage. They had a 450 winning percentage in interleague play. They would have been collectively a fourth or fifth place team in the American League if we were to believe that hundreds of interleague games and really thousands over the last decade are significant. So in that sense, you aren't actually giving it to the team that quote unquote earned it, although you are giving it to the team that looks like it quote unquote earned it. And maybe that's the point.

And you're giving it in the same way that you're giving it in the rest of the playoffs. Yeah, but that, if you're in the same league, then the difference between, I mean, I know that there is a, there can be, especially on the extremes, there can be real differences in the quality of opponent you face within the same league, but mostly it's not. Like, you know, mostly you're playing all the same teams, just in different proportion. I would imagine that the gap in strength of opponent is relatively small. The NL and the AL is a huge difference and has been for many years. And that difference covers 140 of the games each of you play.

So in that sense, it maybe seems like a problem. On the other hand, even after a decade of this, I still think this is going to be a blip in history. I don't see any reason why the next 25 years should be continued AL dominance in interleague play. And my first alternative to this would be give it to whichever league wins interleague play. You won the harder league. And that seems like a pretty good way of handing out home field advantage to me, especially in a year where the difference is so clear as it has been so clear. But I don't know that that works when the leagues kind of reach equilibrium again. And you're talking about a couple games of interleague play deciding who gets home field advantage in the World Series. In that scenario, winning more games makes a lot more sense

and is probably a lot more just. Yeah, and I mean, what if you end up with the Cubs versus whatever, like a wildcard team that won 86 games or something? Yes, the wildcard team was in the better league, but it's still not the better team. Yeah, and any solution that I would come up with on my own if i were inventing the sport involving you know adjusted record for strength of schedule is like a non-starter yeah exactly like nobody's nobody is gonna accept that beyond uh this this

phone call right here yeah so you you're never to get it perfect because perfect involves acronyms. And so maybe this is the best. I'm perfectly content with this. Again, if the sport existed for me and eight of my friends, it's not how I would do it. But recognizing the size of the audience and the different levels of interest in getting it exactly perfectly right, it seems like a good solution. All right, the qualifying offer system. Are you capable of explaining it? No. It really is interesting because it seems like the teeth have been taken out of it a lot. That if you have a Kyle Loesch this year, there are only going to be a small handful of teams that are going to be discouraged from signing him in the sense that like if you're a luxury tax

team and you sign a free agent for more i think i'm not going to get any of this right but for more than 50 million dollars then you lose a second and a fifth round pick which isn't a first round pick but is like kind of close to a first round pick so there these few teams that are over the luxury tax couple few they will maybe be discouraged from signing the next kylos everybody else is losing not that valuable of a pick to the degree that i think almost any player who merits a qualifying offer these days and particularly who would get paid more than 50 million dollars the third round pick you lose or whatever would be considered a rounding error and not not discouraging at all i don't i don't exactly in sense, know what this is for. Like, I don't know.

I no longer know why they do this. I never, I mean, I always knew why they did it. And it seemed like a dumb system that was not very effective. But I don't even really even know what the philosophical underpinning of it is anymore. It doesn't really seem like it's going to, like as it's been, if the point was to suppress player mobility, there are all sorts of problems with the old system, the most recent system that didn't suppress player mobility or player salary. But to the extent that it did do that, it affected two or three players out of 800 a year. And it just didn't really seem like worth having this in a contract, but at least

they were saving some money. I don't know that there is a single dollar that doesn't get spent on players next year because of this. And the complexity of it is so like, there's now like, there's like eight tiers going on at once, which just feels like I don't know what I'm worried that that makes it right for. But maybe there's I don't know, maybe there are like unintended loopholes or unintended, like kind of almost marginal tax rates for different players where it will create unequal systems, depending on whether you lose a play or not. systems, depending on whether you lose a play or not. Maybe it's complex in an effort to fix that because the old system was so weird. How if you were a bottom 10 team, signing a free agent costs you nothing. Whereas if you were the 11th worst team in baseball, signing a free agent cost you more than if you were the 30th worst team in baseball. I mean, that was a disaster of a situation. Maybe this clears it up, but I can't decide whether, okay, let me just put it this way. I can't decide whether the fact that

this is an unruly complicated complex system represents a system that is on the brink of collapse and that this is just its final dying gasp. Or if it means that this is going to be like so complicated that you can't even have a clean discussion about it and it will become just another weird thing in the CBA that we quit being able to argue over because we don't even know what it does. Yeah, I don't like it because I might at some point have to try to figure it out. It's like, it really is like trying to analyze Chase Utley's contract extension. He is like trying to analyze Chase Utley's contract extension.

Yeah, it's Michael Bauman and his ringer response to the CBA. Just he tried to explain it and it was taking paragraphs to do. And then he just deleted them and linked to the text so that people could read it if they wanted to, because it's just not interesting and not comprehensible. So I think it's that. I think it could be, I think Jeff Passan might've suggested that it was like, it was, you know, the last hour and everyone had been up for a day straight or, you know, working on this for a week straight and they were just trying to hammer out some sort of system. And it ended up with this like Rube Goldberg-like kind of contraption here and that maybe it's just a product of extreme exhaustion. And I think it's more of the last gasp thing. I think probably

someone said, why don't we just do away with this altogether? And then someone got a little uneasy and, oh, we can't, then we'll have completely unrestricted free agency for people who are in their free agency years. And that, I don't know, just some lingering unease about that going back to the 70s or whatever when everyone was worried that this would ruin baseball. And some negotiator said, no, we have to have something. something we have to at least maintain our toehold here so that if we want to do some other system in the future we don't have to have a heavier lift to get it back in there so maybe we're one cba away from this being completely wiped clean this feels like the result of one of those arguments you get into with somebody who just uh will not like, he just will not lose an argument. And the argument gets progressively more narrow and tangential as he picks apart single words

in whatever sentence you just said until you're hopelessly complex, off topic, and you being tired of it, go, yeah, okay, fine. And he thinks he won. And he's got a napkin tying the JFK assassination to the cucumber industry. So the international draft, Jeff Passan's piece ably captures the drama of the debate or of the negotiation. The international draft is not here. There is no international draft. In part, it seems because a bunch of Dominican players came and said, no draft, you can't have a draft. And it seemed like the players union was standing up to the league in solidarity with their underpaid 16-year-old future brethren. And then they end up with a system that seems maybe unambiguously worse for players in which there are hard caps. They are really like fairly low hard caps. I mean, we're talking, there are

teams that have been spending 30, $40 million on international free agents over the past couple of winters. This has 5.75 million is the biggest bonus pool that anybody will have. And the most they can acquire in extra bonus pool money brings them up to about 10 million. So it seems like there's going to be a lot less money being spent. Meanwhile, all the flaws of the old system in which players who are, you know, 12, 13 years old are under the sway of a very Wild Westian system down there will survive. So is this like, I don't know enough to say this, but my first reaction to reading the account was that this is like maybe the most, the shamefullest moment of the players union in terms of selling out non 40 man guys. Yeah. Except like, it seems like they didn't want

to write, like they, they tried not to, or they made some sort of show of not having the draft at least. So I don't know whether it was just bad negotiating and that like they got so fixated on no draft, no draft, that when MLB conceded, okay, no draft, and then they just thought they won and then they were okay with this even worse solution. I don't know why you would like, you know, fly in those players and make a big show about no draft and then go for a worse system on purpose. It doesn't really make sense, right? So I don't know how to explain it other than just not being in the room and who knows what was asked for and who said what, but it's bad. Not only is it bad for international players and amateur players in areas where that money is often very vital, but it also just sets a bad precedent in general to have a cap on anything.

Caps are something that the Players Association always resists for good reason. So I don't know why you would drop your guard even here and say it's okay. Yeah, it seems like the explanation is either that the negotiation, well, yeah, either the negotiation was unsuccessful, that they lost, or that maybe there was more going to the players than, you know, we appreciate. And so maybe they did leverage this to get other things. Or maybe as Jeff sort of hints at with, with, with one sentence that he says, maybe this was less about benefiting the players themselves, getting them more money and more about preserving

the culture of, you know of pre-bonus baseball down there, that it was a way of preserving the industry that readies these players for July 2nd, and that it's more about maintaining sovereignty, national sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, maintaining sovereignty, national sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, instead of ceding it to Major League Baseball, which might actually be, maybe in the long-term calculus, that might be the right thing to do, if not for the fact that there will probably be a draft in five years.

Anyway, but if they were able to fend off a draft forever, then that might actually be to the long-term good of players down there. Even that statement is arguable, though, or maybe controversial. It seems to me that this is now a system that some teams are definitely going to cheat at. This feels to me like setting it up to be like college sports, where there's a lot of money under the table. like setting it up to be like college sports where there's a lot of money under the table. And there's only two ways that that wouldn't happen. One is if the culture of baseball front offices and the people themselves who staff front offices have so much integrity and so much professional ethics that they would never dream of doing it. Two is that the penalties for getting caught would be so severe that they don't do it. And the penalties to me don't seem very strong. Jeff writes of the penalties, while this isn't

exactly a death penalty, a new rule allowing Commissioner Rob Manfred to hammer teams that cheat internationally has serious teeth. Manfred can take away up to 50 of a team's international bonus allotment for the remainder of the contract which a doesn't seem that severe if you don't think you're going to get caught and b gets progressively less severe as the contract right progresses i mean sure if you get caught this year that affects four years of your bonus pool. But what happens in year four when there's only one year left and the system's not going to survive much longer after that anyway? And there's no real reason to fear those teeth.

So I don't know if I expect there to be a lot of scandals about money under the table, but I have a hard time thinking that of 30 teams who are probably all going to be suspicious of each other, I think that other teams are all cheating, that at least one doesn't take the leap and go full on blue chips on this system. Yeah, you'd think so. All right, last thing I want to talk about quickly,

and I got to go stir my beans, is the season starting. Sounds like a euphemism for something. It's a euphemism for black bean cooking. Four days early. The season's going to start four days early so that there can be more off days. And, of course, there are kind of limits on how early the season can start and how late it can end because of weather and because baseball is a national sport played in a lot of cold weather climates. And so I want to ask you hypothetically, though, imagine a world, Ben, where there was no weather consideration, that everybody played in a dome or everybody played in, you know, San Diego weather.

What would ideally be the length of the calendar? Not the season. We're keeping it 162 games. But what would your ideal calendar be? When would the season start? When would it end? Basically, would you rather have a much longer season where you have baseball 10 and a half months a year, or would you rather have an everyday season where there are no off days? And as much as possible, let's try to think about this as how we would feel 10 years from now when we got used to it so that the shock of losing our April to September calendar is not so big. We would obviously accustom ourselves to whatever calendar baseball gave us.

Yeah, well, of course, there's some argument for year round, no offseason, no time without baseball. There are a lot of fans who would like that idea. And I mean, it wouldn't even really, you could have games every day and still have baseball every day all year, right? You could just, I mean, as it is, baseball takes up more than half the year. So just have, what, would you have three off days a week or something? And you could go all year, basically. Totally could. So, I mean, and then you get benefits and fatigue and get guys rest. But you don't get the off season to get guys healthy.

No, that's true. But I don't know that fans care. I mean, yeah, I don't know that, like, would you just kill pitchers doing this? I don't know. Or would pitchers accustom themselves to pitching less often but pitching year round? Is that worse? Is it much more beneficial to have a long period of inactivity? I don't know. Lots of pitchers throw over the winter anyway.

So not sure about the health ramifications, but from a spectator standpoint, got a pretty good argument for that, I would say. And I don't know whether the fact that sports that theoretically could do this already do not. Whether the fact that sports that theoretically could do this already do not. Basketball and hockey are played indoors and their seasons are about the same length as baseball's. I don't know whether that's because baseball predated them and they kind of went along with what was already there. Or whether there is something about that length of time that is just the longest we can sustain our interest in something. It might also be partly about competing against other sports. Yeah, right, sure.

So maybe there'd be a decline in ratings just because it would feel like, and it would literally be like, baseball was always on. And it already feels like that sometimes, but now it would actually be true. There would not be a day of the year when there wasn't baseball if you didn't want there to be. So maybe that would just discount the product too much, even though it's not more games. It's the same amount of baseball, but it's always there. And it's, I don't know. I think if you had asked me this when I was 10, I would have said for sure, give me the year-round baseball. Oh, I'm the opposite.

If you'd asked me when I was 10, I would have needed a Giants game every day. And I know that if I asked my dad, he would say every day that baseball would suck if there was – I mean, off days are brutal to him already. would suck if there was, I mean, off days are brutal to him already. However, since I don't watch one team anymore and you could have baseball games on every day and that's all I want, I want to have baseball games. It's much different for me now. Yeah, I guess that's true. I don't know. Like my dad is not going to, my dad is not going to watch the Mets and the Nationals. So it doesn't matter to him if there are 14 games on but maybe he would though in the system maybe this is maybe this is the way to get baseball away from the local regional game is maybe you have it year round and if you want baseball on

that day you have no choice but to watch some other team that could be you'd really have to for him at least you'd have to make uh national uh you'd have to make radio broadcasts nationally available you know easily and i guess they already are if you have a phone and you have an app so maybe that is maybe that's solved he would not say that he is interested in that but maybe he would be yeah i think when i was young i dreaded the offseason more than I do now just because there was sort of less in my life. Baseball was like a bigger percentage of my entertainment value and just everything that was going on in my life, so I missed it even more when it wasn't there. year round although yeah i would have been sorry to lose the day in day out nature of it while it is there but that's a trade-off that i think i'd probably be willing to make for no five months without baseball so yeah sure are you happy or sad about the four days i'm pretty indifferent no you have to have a strong emotion ben I've already I've already taken the indifferent position

So you now have to argue extreme passion No I'm happy just say happy or sad Yeah I guess I'm happy Alright I do hate rain delays though Actually I don't think I'm happy I don't like rain delays Okay

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