Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 992: Baseball’s Most Underpaid Players

Episode Date: December 18, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to The Ringer’s Michael Baumann about his ranking of the 25 most underpaid players and how front-office salaries limit diversity.

I've got something now to think about. I'll work all day, but not to pay it out. Keep on working. Keep on working. Don't care if they say we are a dying race. I'd rather be here than any other place. Keep on working. Keep on working. Keep on working. Keep on working. Deep on working, deep on working of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hi. And also, podcasts are colliding, worlds are colliding, because my co-host on the Ringer MLB show is here, Michael Bauman. Hello, Michael. Hello. I feel weirdly out of place, like the mistress who has run into the wife at the supermarket or something. Yeah, it does sort of feel like that. Well, I've brought you here so that we could discuss Rogue One, a Star Wars story.

No, that's not true. Sam wouldn't enjoy that. You and I would enjoy that. Yeah, we can do that on our own podcast. Yeah, we're going to talk about baseball. So you wrote an article for our website, The Ringer, which is called The 25 Worst Contracts in Baseball. And this is not the article that everyone expects it to be when they see that headline. You kind of inverted the whole traditional structure, the power structure of the contracts,

and what does a good contract mean and what does a bad contract mean? And so your worst contracts are players who are underpaid. So how did you get this idea? Well, I've sort of got a pro-labor bent, I think would be a nice way to sort of understate my position on economic issues in general and in sports. And it just sort of hit me that we use very normative language to describe the exchange of money between worker and capitalist in sports. And even sort of labor-friendly people swallow and repeat this rhetoric. And it shows up that it flips philosophical switches, I guess, in your brain, and you can sort of find yourself repeating it in the real world without realizing it. So I decided to take a stand against the capitalist oppressor and instead of complaining about how Joey Votto is

going to make $20 million a year until the death of Western society, complain about the fact that Jose Altuve is being paid like a bad middle reliever when he was one of the 10 best players in baseball last year. It's interesting because you actually in espousing a sort of pro-socialist, anti-capitalist position there, and I have not, we'll get more into the list, but it seems to me like you're feeding into the main criticism of socialism itself, which is that once you've been paid a certain amount as a laborer, your desire to do exceptional work or to go above and beyond what you were being paid wilts. And you seem to be implying that Evan Longoria, for instance, who has agreed to play

baseball for money, is actually now being ripped off because he played better baseball and tried hard. And it seems to me that there's a certain clash of ideologies here that's maybe captured in the premise of this piece. Well, I think he was being ripped off only because he wasn't being paid for commensurate with the value of his labor. I mean, if we're going to zoom out and talk about this in the grand scheme of capital S socialism, then no, it's absolutely ridiculous that Mike Trout's going to make $34 million to play baseball next year while teachers or nurses or social workers get paid a thousandth of that, depending on if I did my arithmetic right. But this is sort of a

proxy war that we talk about good and bad in terms of how good it is for the team. So a phrase I keep coming back to is sports is a proxy for war and war is politics by any other means. So it isn't really about Evan Longoria. This is about how we talk about Evan Longoria translated to everyday labor, everyday labor issues. I'm not, although I'm also not entirely sure I understood your, your criticism. So, okay. So let me, let me just be more specific about Brian Dozier, who is number 20 on your list, who is clearly worth more than two years and $15 million, but only because of, because after he signed that contract, you know, he played really good baseball.

So it's not that Brian Dozier is currently under a terrible contract because the structure of baseball salaries is anti-laborer. Now, there is some of that in there. I mean, certainly with Mike Trout, that is the case. And it is true that Brian Dozier didn't get to be a free agent until he, you know, he has not yet been a free agent. And so even under any circumstance, he would be paid below his fair market value. But the reason that Brian Dozier is on this list is because once somebody agreed to pay him money to play baseball, he then went out and got even better at baseball. And you seem to be implying that Brian Dozier should feel ripped off by that. And in fact, Brian Dozier would be better off having tried it 60% effort so that he could justify his contract and no more. It feels to me like

you feel to me like the Pharisees in the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Well, I, okay, I'm going to step back. The Pharisees thing threw me for a loop. I need a moment to collect myself. Well, I think that Brian Dozier would be less ripped off. Like, I agree with you, he would be less ripped off if he were worse. And I guess that sort of feeds into a criticism of workers or that you see this a lot with athletes who get paid like now they've got paid they won't be motivated to improve themselves which I just sort of I don't agree with sort of as a from from the starting point I think that you're going to work I think if you're you're underpaid you might you might be dissatisfied with your job and in that way it might might cause the quality of your work to suffer but you know once Brian Dozier's on the field, I imagine he's not thinking about his contract. He's thinking about winning a World Series. So whatever he's going to do is going to be in

service of that goal regardless of how much money shows up in his bank account. I mean, the Cubs just won the World Series on the back of a bunch of guys who are making peanuts versus what they're actually worth. So I think there's a lot of evidence to say that salary and effort aren't really correlated. And once you take that away, you know, if Brian Dozier Warner is good, then obviously he would be less underpaid. All right. So I don't even know. I'm not even sure if I had a point.

I wasn't either. So I did the best I could. I think I heard one half sentence that I felt like arguing against in your original comment. It took me places. Let's go forward. So some percentage of the listeners right now are thinking unsympathetic thoughts about baseball players. That is inevitable when you bring this up. You can go read the comments on your article to find a few examples of that sort of reaction. I could, but I haven't, and I won't. I have done it for you. They're there. Okay.

So what do you say to the standard response that the most underpaid player on this list is making more than most of us will probably make not only in any year in our lives, but maybe in our entire lives put together. So why should I care? I'll say that I conceded a lot of philosophical ground to start by, you know, not only did I do things like I said, people are just who are just playing straight through arbitration, despite Carlos Correa is way more underpaid than Jose Altuve, for instance. But I pushed all them off to the side just for the sake of making the list something other than a list of pre-arbitration players. So not only did I make that concession, but I made the concession to the fact that sports are a multi-billion dollar business and athletes become multi-millionaires. And like, I don't feel bad for Jose Altuve. I think that I would love to make $4.5 million in any year that I work. And I would love for him to,

for instance, I think everybody on this list should see their income tax rate jacked up through the roof for the benefit of people who make salaries in the tens of thousands of dollars or get paid hourly wages or anything like that. But my standard response to that is the alternative is not MLB.TV costs less or your Shirze costs less or your ticket or the cost of a hot dog at the ballpark. Those things aren't going down because in a market economy, you're going to pay as much as somebody thinks they can get you to pay for whatever commodity they're selling, regardless of the labor costs. So if it was an issue of player salaries go down and ticket prices go down and we get, you know, and baseball becomes more accessible and so on,

then I might be more sympathetic. But otherwise, this money just goes right to the owners. And the players are the reason that I enjoy watching baseball. They're the reason that the listeners, I imagine, like watching baseball. So why shouldn't they get the lion's share of the money that goes in as opposed to people who inherited banks? inherited banks. Like if it's Anthony Rizzo getting this money or someone whose dad opened a bank and he inherited his position as an executive in a bank, then give the money to Anthony Rizzo. And that I guess there's some transferability between baseball and other industries. So baseball is the thing that we all pay attention to and it's our hobby and it's our interest. And there are ways in which maybe it's analogous to other industries and ways in which workers kind of, you know, maybe get exploited or don't make as much as they could or should. And it actually matters more

because they are not having to make do with several million dollars a year instead of many more millions of dollars a year. So it's a way that you can kind of talk about the larger way that the economy works. Yeah, you see that rhetoric exactly with the fight for 15. If the people working at Whataburger are making a couple dollars more an hour, maybe the price of your cheeseburger goes up, but it's not going to go up by that much. Paying people lower wages isn't about keeping costs down. It's about keeping profits up. So I know from talking to you that this was not the most pleasant article creation process. No.

It took you a long time to come up with a list. Lists take a long time. So as you were working on this, was there anyone in particular who really stood out to you as someone maybe you didn't even realize was paid as little as he is? Because it's easy to forget, you know, after the player signs an extension or whatever it is and a couple of years go by and you're not paying that much attention to what he's making and he's not near free agency. And so you're not looking at his salary numbers. Was there anyone who sort of jumped off the page at you? Yeah. So this sort of came up while I was working on pieces over the past couple of weeks about the Cubs and about a couple of trades that happened recently. That's where Altuve came from and Rizzo and Jose Quintana. The one thing that when I was actually going through every team on Kotz contracts that I didn't realize this contract was this bad was I didn't realize that Yelich's... I knew he had signed a long-term deal for however much money,

but he could have made that money that he's going to make through his year 5 and year 6 seasons. He could have made that in arbitration easily. I think his pre-free agency salary tops out at like $9.7 million. And that's like, he's really good. He could make $10 million, $12 million pretty easily. Yeah. How many guys fit into the Dozier mold that Sam was just saying about, you know, they signed a certain deal when they were this good and they didn't bet on themselves basically turning into superstars and now they are? they signed a certain deal when they were this good and they didn't bet on themselves basically turning into superstars and and now they are yeah i think well yelich is sort of like that and that

he got a lot better last year but he was sort of i don't know everyone thought he would get there like he didn't change class of player the way that dozer did or jonathan lucroy i think um i think kenton is probably the other uh big example of that because he didn't get better, but he stayed good, I think, in a way that was sort of unexpected. And he wound up locked into a number four starter contract, maybe a little bit better than that. Once you factor in that he was giving up arbitration years and how much he was going to be paid as an arbitration guy versus a free agent. But that was, he's another guy who's, I think is a lot better now than he would have been expected to be when he signed. Probably Adam Eaton would qualify. Paul Goldschmidt probably would qualify. I mean, Sal Perez, I had literally never heard his name when he signed his deal. And so he would qualify.

And this is not that deal either. Like that was the. Oh, is that right? That's right. He's already, he re-upped. They gave him a new one. Yeah, we did a podcast episode on that. Right, because he signed the five-year $7 million.

So he's probably not. Yeah, I had the same, like exactly the same reaction. I'm like, well, I guess this is a guy. Like, I guess this is a guy. I guess I just don't watch enough Royals games. Yeah, they ripped up his option years and gave him what is still, what I say, like the 15th worst contract in baseball or something like that. What do you think Kenta Maeda would get if he had signed a one-year deal with the Dodgers and hit free agency right now?

What do you think he'd be in line to get? It's kind of weird to talk about free agent pitchers just because there's not really good. I mean, there's Rich Hill, who's not a good comp for anybody. And Hellickson, who is also not a good comp for anybody and took the qualifying offer. If Ian Kennedy got what he got, I don't see why Maeda wouldn't. I mean, there's the issue of him having only one year big league experience, but it's not like he came from Cuba or anything like that. They play pretty good baseball in Japan, and he was good over there. So maybe if he's making like $8 million every year with incentives,

then he'd probably double that pretty easily. So I wrote a piece last week about Andrew McCutcheon, probably, it seemed at the time, getting traded. And in this strange way that the extension boom of about five years ago has basically led to these guys just all getting traded. Because by signing an extension, what you're really doing is turning yourself into an even better asset for your club to trade. And so of the extensions signed over about a five-year period, many of which still have years to go, roughly half have already been traded to another team. And there was something about that that made me sad. And I don't know that I quite was able to identify it until just now. But I think what

makes me sad about that is that when you're describing some of these guys, like, you know, for instance, Dozier, Dozier signs that contract. And it's good for him that he signs that contract. It's good for the team that he signs that contract. And it also is good for both of them that he then does well in the same way that Vernon Wells becoming a quote-unquote bad contract was not good for Vernon Wells it was also bad for Vernon Wells that he had a sad career I mean I remember uh seeing him walk out to the outfield after you know making the last out of an inning an inning at home in Anaheim, and he just looked so sad. And when you sign one of these extensions, you want to get on this list that you here have made, Michael. Like, it's good for you that you get on here because you want to

have a good career. But also, in signing this deal, you and your team are sort of saying, like, So in signing this deal, you and your team are sort of saying like, here we go. Let's go do this thing. We're in it together. And you know that the more you outperform your contract, the better it is for your team. And some part of you recognizes that it is a team sport, a team pursuit. You want to see the team do well, regardless of how you do. And to the extent that you doing well and turning your contract into a steal helps your team do well. And so then when they trade you two years into your five-year market suppressed deal, you're not helping the team that you're on anymore because they had to pay more to get you. You're now helping the team that you signed with, but does not want you around or does not need you around anymore.

And there is a way that it feels like it is a sort of severing of the good intentions or the moment of harmony that these contracts initially represented. And it basically eliminates any way that it turns into a wholly good thing. Because either you suck and your team's unhappy and you're unhappy and you're stuck with each other, or you do well and they trade you to the Dodgers for three prospects and it becomes sort of a crass outcome. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Like some of these contracts sort of feel transactional. It's just, let's just not do arbitration and then you'll leave as a free

agent or one year later. But some of them feel like, this might seem naive, but they feel like partnerships. The Longoria one in particular, both of his deals were about setting up that team. And Longoria is going to be the face of the franchise forever. And when you trade a guy like that, Sale was like this. Eden, I think to a lesser extent, was like this. And I think Dozier is a good example too. He was one of the first guys to show up and now the Twins are bringing in all this good talent. And then it feels like bad faith to

get rid of a guy who was such a big part of that process and just to bring in more talent. And it's sort of crass and impersonal. And we talked about listeners to this podcast or people who read BP or The Ringer, and a lot of them are sabermetrics types and sabermetrics types, I think have gotten a little, a little too easy talking about, you know, these, these athletes, these people we develop emotional attachments to as assets. And yeah, I'm just agreeing with, with your point, I guess. What would you advocate if a team is in the position of having a severely underpaid player, like the Sal Perez case, but with some of these other guys? I mean, do you think that from the team perspective, it makes sense to say, well, we made this deal and we were smart and now we are reaping the rewards? Or do you think there is actually a business argument that it's in the team's favor to when it gets too good a deal to try to find a way to make that deal worse somehow for itself?

Yeah, I actually think the Perez one is a good model because, you know, to a certain extent, the team is entirely, you know, I recognize the team is entirely within its rights to say, you know, you signed it, no takebacks, and this is great for us. But if the deal is so exploitive that it becomes a news story on its own, like the Perez deal sort of did, like you're, it's bad PR, it's a bad signal to other young, talented players you might want to sign to extensions. So like the astros with al tuve that's the only other contract right now that is i think is so egregious that they ought to just tear it up but al tuve is making four and a half million dollars this year and then the next two years are uh option years at about six a piece and so with the as you point out he's making less than tony sip yeah and so like the royals didn't tear up Perez's contract, but they tore up his options and said, let's pay you something closer to market rate. And I don't know if the Astros have – to my knowledge and to the knowledge of anybody I've talked to about this, the Astros, they aren't in the process of making something like that happen.

making something like that happen. And I think the fact that Altuve firing his agent and hiring Scott Boris, I think it was Boris, this past summer, leads me to believe that he's going to ride these two options out and then hit free agency. So the time for that might have come and gone. But part of what's making these deals so odious is not the money. Even a lefty like me can only feel so bad for someone making $8 million a year to play baseball. But it's the fact that the option years transfer risk from the team to the player. The player's only got the one body, the one career, while a team can cut bait on anybody at any time. So I think guaranteeing option years or ripping up those option years and paying the player a little bit more,

I think in certain particularly egregious cases, would be a rational move for a team because it would smooth things over with agents and with other players in the future. See, I think that what you just described is actually extraordinarily un-player friendly, that what you are describing would be bad for laborers in general. If you have a precedent set or any cultural precedent set that says that the team doesn't get to reap the benefits of this deal, if it turns out well for them, they're not going to sign players to these deals when they're pre-arb players. And clearly these players have decided that the pre-arb deals are in their

interests. They are rational decisions that they make. You can definitely say that the system set up whereby players have to withstand six years of risk before they get paid market value is odious. But these deals themselves, when they're signed, are between consenting adults. They are great for the player who wants to make sure that his family is taken care of regardless of how well he develops or how much his knee holds up. And if you start making it a unattractive avenue for the team, then the players are going to lose that sort of security that they are able to lock down.

I mean, these extensions in a way are a way of claiming some agency over their careers before they get literal free agency. Again, the system itself is gross and it doesn't make much sense from a sort of fairness perspective. But given that, given the collective bargaining agreement that gets re-upped every four years,

the extensions themselves are a very player-friendly. They're a player-friendly. They're a player-friendly part of this, I think. Yeah. Like you said, they wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't make a certain degree of sense. I guess I'd say that they're not all that player-friendly. Like I think it was you who said a while back about the challenge system that you know managers aren't challenging enough because they don't run out of challenges when they need them very often. And so these teams, the cases like Perez or Altuve are almost as rare as the cases where

these extensions come back to bite the team. Even Matt, I brought up Matt Moore in the piece, that extension was a disaster and he's still a bargain for, was a bargain for the Rays and is a bargain for the Giants. You know, you think about John Singleton, Craig Goldstein brought up Jose Tabata. Like, you really have to dig for extensions that definitely didn't work out for the team. And even when they don't work out, the team's out, I don't know, $10 million, $15 million, which is not that much in the grand scheme of things for baseball. know, $10 million, $15 million, which is not that much in the grand scheme of things for baseball, whereas when they don't work out for the player, the player's out not only more money, but that money means more to the player. So in the overwhelming majority of cases, if these kind

of particularly pre-arbitration extensions weren't available to the player, then the player would be better off almost all the time anyway. Yeah, And you have a whole category in here with several guys of pitchers who signed extensions and then didn't blow up their arms basically. And, you know, so now they are underpaid relative to their peers, but they already reached some value in that they got the security at a time when they weren't sure they'd ever get to a point where they could make lots of money because they could have gotten hurt before that point. Right. And I'll concede this is a completely different question for pitchers than for position players because of that risk of injury. Maybe you're the guy who doesn't – the one guy in 20 who doesn't come back from Tommy John. By the way, I had an annual thing where I looked at the extensions from some years

earlier to see whether the club would sign the player for what was owed. And I'm finding, so 2015, you mentioned Tabata was there, but there was also Jaime Garcia and Trevor Cahill were players who were owed more than the consensus was their club would pay them uh and sergio santos would have been another failure uh although each of them yeah each of them although cahill and garcia would have also in really any simulation of their career would have gotten you know basic economic comfort for their families i mean for all they're still getting paid right we're dealing with how many generations in the future is going to be rich because of economic comfort for their families. I mean, they're still getting paid. Right. We're dealing with how many generations in the future is going to be rich because of this contract, which makes it imperfect for, I guess, moral economic outrage.

Clay Buchholz was another player who in 2015, it seemed that his club would happily be out of that deal. And yet, as the deal continued to progress, the club decided that they actually wanted to like it goes, things change a lot. And so even when it looks like it's not going to work out, sometimes it does work out or vice versa, depending again, on what your perspective on work out is. And that's Yeah, right. That's the the big thing is like, you don't have to be very good to justify a $9 million a year salary. So, like, and, you know, you don't have to be a mid-rotation starter. You just, you know, middle relievers can, well, maybe not a middle reliever, but like a closer can do that. Or, you know, a decent number four starter can, 150 innings of a league average ERA is more than enough to justify that.

So before we wrap up, is there anyone else from the list you want to touch on? You've got a category for Pirates outfielders only. You've got Anthony Rizzo in the Altuve category as just probably the most egregious examples. You've got the best hitter and the best pitcher in baseball, Trout and Kershaw, as their own category. Anyone else you want to mention specifically? Rizzo gets a lot better relatively quickly. I mean, he's getting into like Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford. They're both making, I think, about $15, $16 million a year, maybe a little bit less than that. And that's less than their worth, but that's fine. And Rizzo's going to get into

that territory in the next couple of years. But you brought up the pirates thing. And I had a paragraph in that section that like, I worry. Another thing I worry about is that the players who are, who come from less privileged backgrounds might be more likely to take a deal like this anyway, because they, they value that security more than, than someone who comes from a wealthier family might. And it's just another way that if you get exploited once, it just means you're going to get exploited again and again and again, both in baseball and in society at large. Speaking of which, there's a tweet I wanted to ask you about just because we have you here railing against ownership. So we

might as well extend that to another topic. So in the Braves online live Twitter Q&A with John Cappellella the other day, there were some tweets that attracted quite a bit of ire online because people asked Cappellella for career advice, essentially, and he gave advice that you should work for free, more or less. And this is something that Capalella did in his own career, and it ultimately worked out for him. But when he is saying, look for internships, don't worry about the money, work hard and don't have expectations beyond being part of a team and assume nothing, that is obviously advice that gets complicated quickly. Yeah, and I think Craig Calcaterra in a couple pieces for NBC sort of spelled this out. Well, there was somebody who didn't come for money, who went to the winter meetings and

risked his last shred of money to go and hand out his resume and bump into GMs in the hallway and stuff like that, and did everything that they tell you to do, who can't afford to work for $10 an hour for two and a half years before he gets an analyst job or something like that. So it's just, we're talking about players making $4 million a year being outrageously underpaid. And interns make absolute, they make nothing unless you and it's so hard to get into the you know get into baseball get into a front office unless you played or you knew somebody in the first place and you know it's shocking to me like it's because of

the the gatekeeping effect like you can't live in New York City on 10 or 12 dollars an hour you can't live in hardly any major league city on $10 or $12 an hour, unless you're getting help from your parents. And even if your parents are middle class, that's next to impossible to do. And even if it weren't impossible to do, why should we be okay with these incredibly profitable companies paying their entry-level employees essentially minimum wage? Why is Capalella, who I don't think he was doing anything other than being honest. I don't think he's singularly unjust, but just because he had to do it, he should know better than anybody what a bunch of crap that is. And he shouldn't be expecting the next generation of general managers to have to go through what he did.

So I think there's no wonder that major league general managers right now tend to be white, male, and from privileged backgrounds. So it's not, I guess to a certain extent, I'm less shocked that there's only been, or I'm less shocked that there hasn't been a woman GM than I am shocked that there's even been one credible candidate so far in Kim Ng, just because it's that hard for somebody who isn't an ex-player or who isn't a Theo Epstein type to get in the door. So this is the diversity problem.

And it's going to take 20 years of making it better before the people who are actually getting into the door are promoted to president of baseball ops or general manager or anything like that. So like, you know, I just don't know where the impetus from within Major League Baseball is to change it. Yeah. I mean, that tweet looks even worse, maybe in light of the Braves and all their public funding schemes. Not that Kapolela is masterminding those, I don't think, but just because they are profiting from the public in that way, it would be nice if maybe they'd at least pay their interns something. So it looks even more money-grubbing to say that, or just this

ethos that you should work hard. Obviously, you should work hard. And if you are in a position, and I've heard Kapolela interviewed, you know, he was on Jonah Carey's podcast. And I don't think he was from a particularly affluent background. He was telling stories about how he was like eating out of trash cans to be an intern, which is not a good thing. It's like the sort of thing. If that's what it takes, if you're not from an affluent background, that's just a bigger illustration of the problem. Yeah, I mean, that's the sort of thing that maybe you kind of romanticize once you've made it.

You know, like this is what I had to go through and this is why I deserve to be here. And maybe it is. Maybe it's a sign of your commitment and enthusiasm, but it would still be nice if the possibility were open to make a living wage. Yeah. Yeah. And over the summer, we had Jed Hughes from Korn Ferry and John Hart on the podcast in relatively quick succession. And, yeah, and we asked about this. And I came back fairly dissatisfied with the answers that we got.

This doesn't seem like a problem that Major League Baseball, as I'm waving my hands here, as a monolithic institution is all that interested in fixing, which is a shame because they're shocked that everybody in power over there looks like Rob Manfred and Theo Epstein, and it's going to continue to be that way. Yeah. And Korn Ferry, of course, after we had that conversation was then dismissed as MLB's talent search firm. Perhaps not as a result of our conversation. No, probably not. But it sounded like for this reason that Rob Manfred was not pleased with their this reason that Rob Manfred was not pleased with their diversity recommendations. But again, it's kind of almost two separate things if you're talking about recommending GM candidates who are diverse in background. I mean, once you've gotten to that point, one of the problems is that there

aren't as many qualified candidates maybe because there aren't as many lower level employees from those backgrounds who are working their way up. And part of that is because of this internship structure. One last thing that I wrote about this and what I wrote about Theo Epstein a few months ago. Like just from a standpoint of making baseball better, even leaving beside the social justice aspects of this, teams are missing out on certain viewpoints. If you just get people from the same backgrounds and the same training, we talk about this and why newsroom diversity is important all the time in journalism. If a team backed up five full-time jobs to engineering departments or computer science or philosophy departments at HBCUs or even like

big land-grant universities and said, you know, we're going to pay you guys an honest wage. Come work for us. Tell us what we're not seeing because we all went to Harvard and Yale. I, you know, I would like to think that would have some kind of benefit too. This is where you link to Kate Morrison and Russell Carlton's five pieces on this topic. Yeah, right. The background of people in front offices and how internships work or don't work. Alright, so you can find

Michael on Twitter at MJ underscore Bauman and you can find him talking to me every week on the Ringer MLB show. Thank you for coming on and doing a podcast crossover episode it's been like two days since i've talked to you last yeah i've missed you been on effectively wild a few times but before we had a different podcast so all right so that will do it for today

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