Rates & Barrels - Francisco Lindor is a Met, and ideas to prevent MLB teams from tanking

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Eno, Britt & DVR discuss the blockbuster trade that sent Francisco Lindor to the Mets, plus ideas from Britt's recent piece about how to prevent MLB teams from tanking, Eno's look at the impact of missing in-game video in 2020, overdue changes to the Drug of Abuse provisions of the Joint Drug Agreement, and more. Rundown 6:07 Ideas for Preventing Tanking in MLB 14:59 A Likely Explanation for the Padres’ Recent Spending Spree 30:41 Breaking News: Francisco Lindor is a Met! 39:51 Cleveland Following the Cubs' Lead? 46:06 The Impact of No In-Game Video in 2020 59:10 Overdue Changes to the Drug of Abuse Provisions in the JDA Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow Britt on Twitter: @Britt_Ghiroli Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Stories mentioned on this episode: Britt on stopping MLB teams from tanking: https://theathletic.com/2301860 Eno on the impact of missing in-game video in 2020: https://theathletic.com/2294118 Britt on changes to the Joint Drug Agreement: https://theathletic.com/2298953 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want visibly glowing skin in 14 days? With Nuole Indulgent Moisture Body Wash, you can lather and glow. The 24-hour moisturizing body wash is infused with vitamin B3 complex and has notes of rose and cherry creme for a rich indulgent experience. Treat your senses with Nuole Indulgent Moisture Body Wash. Buy it today at major retailers. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Thursday, January 7th, 2021. Derek Van Ryper, Eno Saris, Britt Giroli here with you on this Thursday. On this episode, we'll talk about several big topics in the baseball world, which understandably pale in comparison to the events that we saw unfold in D.C. on Wednesday. Honestly, we're just hoping to provide some break from the doom scrolling

that many of us have been doing for the better part of the last 12-plus hours now. Our agenda includes Britt's attempt to stop MLB teams from tanking. She had a recent story about changes to the drug of abuse provisions of the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. We're also going to talk about Eno's piece about the absence of in-game video in 2020 and some of the things that that may have caused over the course of the shortened season. And we'll dig into this year's Hall of Fame ballot. Actually, sort of heavy baseball topics across the board, but again, much lighter by comparison

than what we saw unfolding on our screens throughout the day on Wednesday. what we saw unfolding on our screens throughout the day on Wednesday. Britt, I mean, you're pretty close to DC. Eno's got the most buffer. I'm caught in the middle here in the Midwest. But as you watch things play out yesterday, I mean, what was your general reaction? How did you feel about what was happening? Yeah, I mean, the first thing I did was text.

I mean, we don't live in D.C. We're in the suburbs, but I know a lot of people that do. So I texted everyone I knew in the area to make sure they were okay. Everyone was. And then same thing like you guys. It was this weird, we're on Twitter all day for our job. So it was just this weird unfolding of like news and videos. And it was very surreal, right?

Trump tweets, it's taken down. You just felt like you were kind of watching history unfold on your timeline. And I follow a lot of sports people. I don't really, I don't talk about politics. I don't tweet about politics. I don't really get involved. But there was like no escape, right? It was getting retweeted into your timeline. You were following along and being as close and being someone who reads the Washington Post all the time. It was just,

I couldn't look away. I mean, I don't know how you watch that and how you don't kind of sit there and think, oh my God, this is history happening right here. And I'm glad we're going to get into baseball. I think people need a little bit of a break from everything that's going on. It was disgusting. It was abhorrent. And hopefully we can get to lighter topics like who belongs in the Hall of Fame, which actually isn't that light of a topic. That's what I was going to say. I mean, I feel that, you know, deep in my bones, the need for a break and, you know, the need for a break from all of this the pandemic and just you know everything but you know at the same time to you know this will be part of our hall of fame

discussion later but just in general like we're human beings and then you know sport is part of being human and uh politics is part of being human it's just the the question of how to best uh get to the promised land. You know what I mean? We're just trying to figure out how to best run this country. And I think that everybody has these opinions. It's like seeing family. Eventually, you're going to get to talk about this.

There's no getting away. You see your family. You see your friends. You read sports. There is no getting away. You see your family. You see your friends. You read sports. There is no getting away. So I think on some level you just have to embrace it where you can, deal with it where you can, take a break and go run outside when you really want to get away. Because we're human beings. This is it.

This is what we try to work it out like if you think about you know the the league that was playing last night the nba they you know they you know there wasn't um a lot of their you know their movement you know in terms of you know where it was a little bit closer to home in the past maybe uh but they had things to say about it and they said it um you know eloquently um you know there's a lot of stuff on the on the athletic that you can read um where doc rivers But they had things to say about it, and they said it eloquently. There's a lot of stuff on The Athletic that you can read where Doc Rivers said some stuff, Bam out of bio. It was just really interesting, thought-provoking things that they were saying. And you can't tell, I think, an athlete to shut up and dribble, basically.

So I think we have to take it you know sort through it how we see it and uh and move on somehow um but it's just amazing to me how everyone's uh still working with different information i mean you know it's just uh i don't know i can shrug at it i guess the danger of individual truths was on full display yesterday, right? I mean, that's what we saw playing out in front of our very eyes. And unfortunately, those days are not over. But where we go from here, that is the great question that a lot of us are thinking about. And it's hard not to feel helpless.

But as you said, I mean, amazingly, I went for a run last night. It's 25 degrees here and everything's covered in snow and ice. I was going to ask. I ran indoors. I have a treadmill in my office. So the benefits to improving my physical and mental well-being is that my office smells bad because it's literally four feet away from my desk, but it's necessary to light a candle, open a window, do what I got to do to make the room smell better. Also, you don't take a screen break though when you do it, do you? When you're indoors, I have a thing that holds a tablet. I did not put a tablet in it last night. I listened to music. I did not watch anything.

You took a break. in it last night. I listened to music. I did not watch anything. You took a break. On a normal day, if there's a sporting event on and I want to just watch that while I run, I'll absolutely do that. It helps pass the time. That was not the case for me last night whatsoever. But when I first

started putting this rundown together in my head over the holidays, I was excited because the Padres were doing the things that Ido and I talked about a bit on the Monday episode. And it kind of walks with this other train of thought that Britt, you wrote about earlier in the week. Teams have been tanking for a long time in Major League Baseball, and it's problematic. A few weeks ago, we started to ask a question. It was in the vein of how many teams

are trying right now. And that's a little bit different than tanking i think tanking as you defined it in the piece is really more about being a multi-year loser spending as little money as possible on payroll and collecting an equal share of revenue from tv deals right this is the bob nutting owned pirates they are a magnificent example of this peter angelos's orioles right now are a good example of this right now. And you outlined a few different ways that this could be fixed. I think you wrote this probably understanding that the viability of some of these ideas is much greater than others, right? As you kind of put it together, how realistic did you feel that the proposed solutions you wrote about actually were?

How likely are some of these ideas to be implemented? Well, some of them, like fixing the draft, I think is an easy fix that doesn't require this huge negotiation, right? To me, the biggest problem to stop tanking, and like you said, not just tanking, but teams that aren't actively trying to win, is to stop reward losing. Right?

Why are we rewarding losing? Why is the worst team getting the number one draft pick? Why are they still getting millions of dollars in the revenue sharing? So I think of all the ideas I had, proposing a salary floor, it's going to be really hard to get owners to agree to spending a certain amount of money, right? And no one likes being told what to do with their money, how much to spend, especially in a pandemic. So I have a hard time thinking that the players are going to bring enough to the table for a salary floor to happen. I do think that there are certain things that could be instituted, like the draft order. I think blowing up free agency might be talked for the next CBA, right? They might change

how many years these guys are under arbitration. Maybe they get paid a little bit earlier on in their career. I don't know. Some of these involve a lot in terms of negotiation. I had something called the success ratio formula, which I had a friend who's been in baseball for two years, not two years, two decades, kind of come up with. And the more you think about it, OK, it's very complicated to take all these different factors into the equation of the model of how they're trying. Right. It's tough to tell who's trying. You know, the Phillies were trying. And if you looked at it on paper and didn't watch them at all, you'd be like, oh, my God, this team's tanking. You know, the Yankees have spent a lot of money.

They haven't won since 09. So you can't just say money works, but I think we can agree there's a threshold here. And did you guys know over the past 25 years that every single team that's won the World Series, except for the Marlins in 2003, has been in the upper half of payroll, the upper 15? So even those small market teams that won, you know, the Royals, the Angels, you know, those smaller market,

smaller payroll teams have still been in the upper echelon. So we can agree there's a threshold to being good. We can agree that teams need to figure out a way to try harder. And we can also agree it's never going to happen as long as losing is profitable. So unless Rob Bamford decides he's going to take away some of those gains, he's going to make it not financially profitable to lose. We're just sitting here throwing ideas into the wind, right? It's never going to matter until it matters to the people who can make real changes. Yeah. And I've seen some sentiment that it's along those lines that, you know, as long as owners work the way they do and want to make money and can make money without putting, you know,

as long as they see teams as money-making opportunities as opposed to what in the past the teams might have been kind of like an expensive bauble, almost like a Van Gogh or something that might have some appreciation value in the future, but you bought it for your enjoyment and you wanted to try and win. And so you sunk money to it and it didn't matter so much how much you made on a yearly level. And I understand that and I think it's maybe true uh which is why i'm kind of pessimistic about the whole thing um because i don't think i think in today's age like everything is a business i mean like tiddlywinks is a business you know i mean like like all these

games that we used to play like pokemon you know it's like a kid's game but it's a business and they make tons of money they sent they sell all these packs, and they get these kids addicted. Now they have Pokemon EX and GX and BX. I don't even know. I don't care. I hate it. It's okay. It's fine.

We play with my kids. The point is that these ownership groups, too, are increasingly complicated. They're no longer usually just one person. Now it's an ownership group. Now you have investors. Now you have part-time owners. And those part-time owners see it more as an investment. They aren't the face of the franchise.

They aren't Steve Cohen. They aren't that kind of owner. They're like a part-time owner. They're like a little bit owner. So what they wanted to do was have a good seat at the game and also have some part in the financial success of the corporation they bought into. So when you see it that way, and you see that the TV contracts have been going up to the point that they've dwarfed now, I think the average team makes more like 35% to 40% off of gate revenue. They just don't care as much about gate revenue.'s a it's a

thing that they figured out where they're just like oh we get the tv money when we get the tv money i don't know maybe maybe there could be something there maybe we have we like maybe tv negotiates shorter contracts there that could be a way in right because if the tv is negotiating shorter contract you only get three year contract if you're not good in any of those three years, that next TV contract is going to suck. Yeah, agreed. But it's a great point because I was talking to an agent that brought up that same thing,

that no longer does the league care about attendance. It's all about the rights to games. And until that changes, what's the incentive to have a good team and fill the stands, right? What does that buy you? One more middling player? It doesn't seem like it makes that big of a difference. And again, there's no punishment. If you're a bad team, you're getting the same amount of revenue sharing as the team that won the World Series. So to me, that doesn't make it. I understand what the point was to try to make it

a fair and balanced playing field. But now you have the losers that are taking clear advantage of this because I had a lot of people jump me up for that article and say, well, the Orioles are just saving their money for when they're good. Okay, so the $40 to $50 million of player payroll they're not paying now, they're not putting that in an envelope. So three years from now, they're going to spend $200 million randomly because they're going to go for it. You might see a tiny increase, but people are fooling themselves if they don't think that they're pocketing large amounts of money while these teams are going through these rebuilds. Yeah, the light really went off for me when I looked at the numbers for Oakland. And Oakland, I figured it out that between national TV money, local TV money and revenue sharing, their entire player payroll was paid for.

Wow. And I was like, why is Oakland $85 million a year? Oh, yeah, because the national deal is $50 million, the local deal is $5 million, and revenue sharing is $25. It just added up. It's exactly it. And then they lost revenue sharing because now they're declared a big market, which I think is actually a total travesty, if I can just do a digression. Do it, you know, do it. Oakland is not a big market. Yes, the Bay Area is, but the Silicon Valley heads and the marina people in San Francisco

are not going to games in Oakland, okay? It's true. It's a small market within a larger market. Anyway, they lost that 20 plus million of revenue sharing, and now they spend 60 million a year. I think we confuse very densely populated areas with easily accessible markets. Just because there's a ton of people that live there doesn't mean that the market supporting one specific franchise in that broader area is nearly as big as the entire area. That's, I think, the point you're getting

at with the A's, right? I mean, Bay Area is big, but I've spent some time recently looking at some of the geography of the Bay Area and thinking about how everything kind of comes together for some other reasons. And the money you're saying makes sense. Yeah, there's a lot of money there, but it's all concentrated in a few areas. So, you know, that's a factor to consider as well. And then, so in a similar vein to what you're saying about Oakland, I started looking into why the Padres are spending money now. They must have a pretty good TV deal. And they did get a pretty big TV deal back in, like, 2012. There was a piece from, actually, Trent Rosecrans, who had been writing, I think, for CBS at the time. And

they got their deal, which was supposed to be for 20 years and worth about a billion dollars. And San Diego is not a big market either. In the article, he points out it's the 26th largest market in baseball. They didn't start spending that money right away. Like if that deal kicked in six, seven years ago now, they just started spending like a team that had that TV money because they were doing the rebuild. And I think to Britt's point about the Orioles,

they're not going to spend extra later. They will spend what they should have been spending all along later when they're competitive, when they can pack 50,000 people into the stadium and make playoff runs and maximize revenue that way. That's when they're going to spend what they should have been spending the entire time. They're never going to overspend as a result of money they did not spend in the last three, four seasons now. Yeah. And to me, the biggest thing is the regulation of it, right? You're rebuilding. Shouldn't you have to prove where that money's

going that you're saving? Shouldn't you have to prove like I'm pumping it into here. These minor league facilities are doing this. We're paying our coaches this. It's going into the international pool here that you would say, hey, that's preposterous. MLB can't tell teams that. Well, MLB can now tell teams how many minor league teams to have. So MLB can't pick and choose when it's going to get involved, right? Now that everything is streamlined, now that we're all under this one baseball umbrella, that's fine if teams want to rebuild.

Where's the money going, right? That, to me, needs to be regulated. Where's the money going? If we're all under one big, you can't have an extra minor league team, you're taking away all these advantages, that's fine. If the Yankees save $100 million this year, where year where is that money going yeah it's not making tickets cheaper you know it's not making the games more accessible live games more accessible you know it's not it's not going into

player payroll so yeah but sometimes i throw my hands up because like i said it's a business you know they you can't claim that that they didn't lose money this year i don't think you know yeah depending on how you say lost though right because yeah braves made money they're a public company and and so therefore they can't lie and they still made money this year right i think it was 100 million dollars is that right around there so the aches might have lost money because they thought they were going to make $500 million and they only made $300 million, right?

Do you think any team actually is in the red or did they just make less than they thought they were going to make? Yeah, I think there were teams in the red. I've been asking executives about this for a while and they're pretty tight-lipped about it. And actually, even front office executives that don't have access to that sort of profit and loss type statement. If you're talking about baseball ops, a lot of times they get a number. They get a budget.

They don't really know how much the team is making or losing. That's sort of like up at the ownership level. But the idea that I got was that teams make on the order of sort of $30 to $100 million a year. And so the average loss, if you just look at gate receipts and stuff, the average loss is like $100 million a team. So yes, I think there were some teams that were even and some teams that were up, but there were also some teams that were down. But if you make that 10 years in a row

and then you lose it one year, you should have had some buffer. You should have been okay. That's what the rest of us are told when things aren't going well. Oh, you should have saved. You should have saved some buffer. You should have been okay. That's what the rest of us are told when things aren't going well. Oh, you should have saved. You should have saved. You should have been ready for that. You should have been prepared for that unexpected event

that messed up your world. I mean, that's what we're told all the time. So I don't really know why this is different. Your car breaks down or you have a big health bill. Yeah. Your medical bills. You should have been saving this entire time, actually. Oh, thanks. Good advice.

So I do think if you're going to find a way to prevent tanking, you have to hit owners where it matters, and that's in their wallet. That's the thing they care about because it is a business, as you guys are saying. It's obviously priority number one is to make money. And if it is no longer financially viable to put a crap team on the field and just be generally bad year over year, teams will stop doing that pretty quickly. option, as long as that's even the most efficient way to eventually become a good team again, they will do it and they'll have justification of their fan bases supporting

them in many cases. Pirates are one of the few exceptions where I feel like the fan base has actually finally turned against the team. Usually, fans just sit year after year and accept it, it seems like. They've reached this point where they're like, oh, this is okay. We're going to be better in 2026. Yeah, cool. If we is okay. We're going to be better in 2026.

Yeah, cool. If we get there, yeah, we'll be better in 2026. But I think the success ratio formula is the dream idea. I think it's probably the least likely for the reasons that you outlined. It kind of falls in line with something that we see in fantasy leagues sometimes where if you finish dead last, you pay double the entry fee. If you finish bottom three, you pay a little more. You end up paying more in some of those leagues for being

at the bottom because you're balancing the league with some of your activities or at least you're paying a penalty for not being competitive and it's effective. It works. You say, I'm going to rebuild for a year but i'm not paying a double entry fee three years in a row to eventually win a title later i'm not gonna get my

money back the league the league prize isn't that big right so it's kind of it's kind of in that vein so i do i do like that sort of logic uh i think across all sports and we saw this in the nfl this year the tanking for the first overall pick, especially, and it's less valuable in baseball than it is in other sports, that's a problem. But I don't think I like lotteries any better. I think the closest thing I've come to, again, from the fantasy world, is rewarding teams that nearly made the playoffs with the earliest draft picks. teams that nearly made the playoffs with the earliest draft picks. I play in a league where the first team that doesn't get paid, which is usually I think fifth place in about a 16-team league, fifth place gets the first pick in the reserve draft the following year. So they get the first crack at the pool of prospects after the auction. Something more like that. It incentivizes

trying and the attempt to actually make the playoffs. Now, I think the most skeptical side of each of us might say, well, there could be a team that decides that going to a wildcard playoff game isn't as good as having the first overall pick in the draft. So they start to do some fishy things and tank in September to get that number one overall pick. I think that's possible, but I don't think that's the most likely outcome if you implement something like that to determine your draft order. I mean, postseason money is a real carrot. I think that people do want postseason money. I just think that what's going to happen is you're going to have the expanded playoffs. And so you're going to have more carrots there. That's good. So there'll

be teams that it would be good to be an 84 win team you know and so every every there won't be any incentive to sort of build the yankees when the yankees and dodgers exist there'll be a lot of incentive to build the ace you know to build you know like a cheap uh team that can win 88 games and so there's i mean there's just all these needles going in different directions, you know, there is an incentive to win, which is, um, you know, which is the butts in seats. Um, but, uh, maybe you're in a place where you're, you have a terrible, uh, you're in a weird market or a terrible stadium like Tampa or Oakland. And you say, okay, well, we're never going to get that many butts in the seats. So we're going to, we're going to go for the post-season money in this way. And, uh, we're gonna we're gonna go for the postseason money in this way and we're

just gonna try and build a high variance 88 win team every year um it i yeah i i can't i can't figure it out even after reading your piece which i think was good i can't i can't figure it out you're not gonna you're not gonna convince owners just to like act differently out of their own will out of a good will you're not gonna going to convince owners that they should run baseball teams differently. That's like sort of pie in the sky for me. You need to have financial incentives. But what are the financial incentives that the players, the salary floor, you're right. It's going to be a player thing.

That would be throwing a wrench into the CBA. The one thing that I can think of is national TV money and revenue sharing money, because that's an argument between owners and not between owners and players. And that's something that Manfred could do. So you could actually tie some sort of incentive to national TV money. Do you also have to go through the process of showing the owners, showing them that tanking is actively bad for their bottom line. It's bad for the sport. It's bad for the Steinbrenner family. It's bad for the group that owns the Dodgers. It's bad for

the teams at the top to have bottom feeders that don't try. If you can convince them of that, maybe they decide, yeah, actually, we do need to change this. We need to actually leverage a change in our ownership group because this is bad for all of our bottom lines. We are giving up too much of a share

to these teams that are not bringing back business. They're actively hurting us with their decision to run the teams the way that they do. I think think can you connect declining attendance and declining ratings for baseball to tanking and i think there have been some some good cases that have been made i've seen it on baseball perspective in those places where um you know a large part of the attendance decline could be explained by like the Marlins. Like by teams that had like cut and run basically and blown up their teams. So I think that, I don't know who's going to make that case though.

Someone has to make that case to Manfred. I don't know, maybe the Players Association. I don't know, but someone has to make that case to Manfred to be like, this is bad for your your bottom line even if you don't see it right away this there is a connection between these teams tanking and overall health of the sport there is because if you you look at san diego and yes we're in a pandemic yes people a lot of people have lost their jobs yes you know teams are are looking at ways to get people in the stands. You can't tell me that once they let fans in, the people in San Diego aren't going to be clamoring to watch that

Padres team, right? Oh, man, yeah. Exactly. So you build a fun, excitable team that wants to win. People are going to show up. I believe that in almost every market in MLB. And to be honest, if you don't have an ownership group that is rich enough to be able to sustain $100 million, $150 million payroll every year, why on earth are you letting these people buy these teams, right? If that's really the case, and I think, Eno, you made a good point, you need to find an area where the owners are not unanimous. Revenue sharing is a great one. The ones who are paying in to this pot and not seeing as much as the smaller market teams are angry about it. That is an area you can expose. That's an area with national TV money. The Yankees are on

national TV all the time, but the Marlins are getting the same cut of that, right? So I think once you find an area where the owners aren't in agreement, now you can start to chafe away, right? Now you can start to build some momentum where there is an argument, where yes, maybe there are some changes that need to be made. But I know attendance isn't what it used to be. It's not as much money-wise.

But to me, it's the only way you grow this. It's a big way of growing the sport. It is physically attending the games is still a huge way to grow the sport. For kids, if you look at the demographic of baseball, it's getting older and older, right? Part of that is like, I don't know how you guys fell in love with the sport,

but I went to Turner, it wasn't Turner, it was Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in the late 80s, and I bought a real cheap-ass ticket, and they waved us down in the second inning, and all of a sudden I was in the front. Yeah, the team was bad,

but it was really cheap to go to games, and so that was a thing I could do in an afternoon. It was great. I loved it. So, you know, that's not how teams are run now. That's not how the ushers work anymore. That's not how ticket pricing works so well. So, yeah, I think attendance is, and that's tied into the minor league thing too, where now you can't in a lot of places even go see a cheap minor league team, um, because they've, they've moved it out of the, out of affiliation.

So I think that this is on Manfred. It's on Manfred. And, and Manfred to me almost seems like he, he's obsessed with things like time of game and pace of game and balls in play. Maybe there is something there about balls in play. Maybe there is something there about time of game. Baseball is maybe

20 minutes longer than the other sports. At least more than basketball. I mean, football to me seems like a three-hour sport. Definitely is. I don't know why three hours is such a big deal. Football is a three-hour sport. Baseball is a three-hour sport. Get over it. It's a three-hour sport. Baseball's a three-hour sport. Get over it.

It's a three-hour thing. The playoff games are a big deal. Four-hour playoff games are a big deal. Yeah, having 10 times as many regular season games also, I think, makes it harder for people to get behind three-plus-hour games. That's part of the problem, I think, for, again, very casual fans.

But I think for as good as Rob Manfred is at making money for Major League owners, I don't think he and the rest of the people in his office have done really anything to ensure future viability of the game by making future fans. The average age going up is an alarming statistic. They should be more concerned about it. They've done a few things more recently that I think are interesting. The vault with all the old highlights, that's cool. That kind of tech and that kind of stuff is a very small step in the right direction. But like you, going to games as a kid is a big part of why I love baseball so much. One of our neighbors, Mr. Calhoun, shout out to him. I don't know if you listened to the pod, but their family of four that lived behind us growing up, they had four

tickets to the Brewers, season tickets, upper level at County Stadium. And during the summer, Mrs. Calhoun had to work. She couldn't get off work to go to a one o'clock game on a Tuesday. So they brought me as the neighbor kid who wanted to go to the game, said, I got to see a whole bunch of baseball games live that I wouldn't have seen otherwise just because they were kind enough to bring me. My dad worked for a company that had some tickets. Every once in a while, tickets would go unused because the brewers were pretty bad in the late 90s. Our family would go watch games there. It changes a lot about how you feel about a sport being able to see it up close. With the minor leagues being completely dismantled and reshaped,

that is a major concern that is even greater now than it was even just a couple years ago that baseball has to figure out sooner rather than later. Be sure to check out Britt's piece. It went up on Tuesday. How do you stop MLB teams from tanking? It will. It will be posted up in the show notes as well. So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents

electronically? The answer is FedEx. Okay, but what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh, but let's say that... FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks.

No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything.

Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply. Breaking news, breaking news. We got breaking news. And it's relevant breaking news. Oh, yes. We have something.

What do we have? It's relevant breaking news. Jeff Passant is reporting that the Mets get shortstop Francisco Lindor and right-handed pitcher Carlos Carrasco. The Indians get shortstop Andres Jimenez.

Right-handed pitcher Josh Wolfe. Outfielder Isaiah Green. Jonathan Mayo is reporting that Ahmed Rosario is also in the deal. Okay, that's a big deal. That's the two shortstops that might have competed for the job in New York going to Cleveland. And the prospects are a little bit underwhelming otherwise

because Josh Wolfe, by fan graphs, is about the 15th best prospect they've got. And Isaiah Green is about 17th. So two top 20 prospects for the fan graphs. Both 40 future value with an ETA around 2024 and 2025. Guys that are far off. Let me see if I got an age on there. They are 19 and 20. So that's a right-handed pitcher and a center fielder that are far away. And then two possible replacements for the Indians. This

is a team that is trying in the Mets, that has a new owner, that is the face of the franchise owner, that does seem to be treating his new team as a fancy bobble, that has enough money to lose money. This is a team that's acting almost like an old-school fashion where he said, we want to win it all in three to five years. And he came and wanted a new catcher and wanted a new shortstop. And we'll see if they also sign Springer and or Bauer. But this is a shot across the bow.

I think this takes them out of the running for Bauer. I think that they've got a pretty good rotation now with Carrasco, Thor, and DeGrom at the top there. But the Indians, I mean, come on, Indians. Let me see what they're... They were running a payroll that was... They've been sort of down in payroll year after year. And they were already down to...

Let's see here. They're already down to... Oh, my God. Their estimated payroll for 2021 is 69 million. They were running 120s and 130s at some point. So they're down to 69 million for 2021 is 69 million they were running 120s and 130s at some point so down to 69 million for 2021 uh and that's before they get rid of carasco's 12 million and lindor's 20 million oh my god dude the indians are gonna have a 45 million dollar payroll after this yep where's that money go into an envelope for later? No, I don't think so. By the way, so Ken Rosenthal's all over this as well

with some of the stuff. But you're right. See, the Mets and the Padres are kind of saving us from what otherwise would be just an absolutely ridiculous hot stove. Right? At least there are teams trying to win here. I guess the Indians are not going to change their name to the Cleveland Lindors

anytime soon. Derek's face when you suggested that they were out on Bauer, the Mets suggest that Derek feels otherwise. Derek? This needs to be a streaming video show, but I don't think this necessarily

means they're not in on Bauer because I don't think we have a good feel yet for where that ceiling is going to be. I think we can assume that they don't want to pay a luxury tax. Even for someone with Steve Cohen's money, I think it would be reaching a little bit to assume he will go into that threshold right away in year one, especially when he said three to five years initially. away in year one, especially when he said three to five years initially. Maybe that was just setting expectations at a more reasonable points that are saying we're winning it all in 2021, which is a very difficult declaration to make. I'm blown away by this because Ahmed Rosario and Andres Jimenez, they're major league ready middle infielders. And for a long time, this is something that Cleveland developed in spades. I mean, are they completely giving up? No, they're just trying to do the cheap thing. They're trying

to do the A's, Rays, Brewers model. They're trying to slash payroll and stay good and stay good enough to hang with the Twins and the White Sox. And I mean, look, the Tigers are still a year or two away, but their next five years looks brighter to me than Cleveland's next five years. Or at least they're comparable. And that's hard to say when you look at how good Cleveland was just the last few years, right? This is a perennial playoff team that didn't want to keep its franchise player and absolutely could have kept its franchise player. I'm a little underwhelmed by the return, but I think this is more along the lines of what teams are going to get now when they trade players in the final year of their deal, no matter how good those players are. We're not going to see elite of the elite prospects on the move.

The Mets didn't have a player like that to give anyway. You know, the Mets don't have a player in the top 10, top 20 prospects overall. They just don't have a player like that. It's interesting that Carrasco is included too, because I didn't really expect that, but good for the Mets, right? I mean, they're going all in here. I think that means they had to add Carrasco to get more value. Yeah, I mean, I think in Cleveland's priority was probably just, well, hey, let's just save an extra $12 million, right? You said he was going to do $12 million this year? Yeah.

Let's just shave $12 million more and we can get back Isaiah Green too. I think Green's a little bit of a sleeper prospect, not highly regarded yet, but has potential to shoot up lists. How mad are you? If you're a fan in Cleveland, how disappointed are you right now by this decision in this process? This is what we were talking about, right?

Like, how can you sit here and be like, oh, you know what? We're a better team today than we were yesterday. No, you're not. You lost Francisco Lindor, who we know is in his prime. Yes, he had a down year in 2020. How much stock can you put in that shortened season? The guy's going to be a star in a huge

city, in a huge market, right? You're going to see Francisco Lindor splashed across billboards everywhere. Teammates love him. Great player, great teammate, a lot of energy. Baseball needs stars like this. And if you're the Indians, like you said, Derek, it's not like, oh, we got these hot shots. We're going to retool and be good next year. They're not going to be good next year. They're not going to be good the year after that. You're looking now at maybe not a tanking,

but this is kind of like Chicago Cubs-itis, right? Where they got rid of Darvish. By the way, is Chris Bryant just going to get absolutely, someone going to fleece the Cubs to get Chris Bryant next? Because why is he on that team? I feel like that might be the next move we see here. But certainly you're continuing the golf between the teams that are trying to win and the teams that aren't. They have and have nots. This is exactly, to me, what the issue with the sport is, is when Francisco Lindor is being traded

away because you can't afford to keep him. So I got a quick follow-up for both of you. I guess I'll throw it to you first. Is it hypocritical of us to tear apart Cleveland, but to be more gentle with the Tampa Bay Rays when they trade away Blake Snell? Conceptually, this really isn't that much different. I realize Snell had multiple years left on his deal, and that changes the type of return you can get. But are we unfair to cleveland in this case or are we just too generous when it comes to our analysis of the raise by comparison i don't know man like how much more like flexibility do you need the indians before this trade were projected to be a top six team in baseball they are a contender with lindor and they're to get actually now that I look at it close to 40

million dollars their payroll is going to be almost like it's going to be like 41 million dollars it's going to be the lowest in big leagues they'll drop like you know five wins six wins off of their roster and they'll drop out of the top 10 are they banking on the idea that that there's going to be expanded playoffs and they'll get it anyway with, you know, Jose Ramirez as their primary bat and figure the rest out. I don't know, man. I'm not...

Lindor and Carrasco. That's what we're forgetting, too. You know, those are two guys who have been a big part of Cleveland over their recent... Like, you asked me to name Indians. Those are, like, two of the first guys I mentioned of that recent team.

And they're super fun. And they have these backstories. It's Cookie. His name is Cookie and he had leukemia. This is a bunch of guys that play Mario Kart together in the clubhouse. They're generally a fun, likable group. Everyone loves him.

He loved Cleveland. At least he sure made it seem like he did, which I don't think everybody loves Cleveland. I don't think you can put everybody in Cleveland for six years and have them say, yeah, actually, I love it here. This is my home. Some people would say, get me the hell out of here.

That's true of any place. But I'm looking at this depth chart. They're still good. They're just not a lock to make the playoffs at this point, right? They're, they're doing the Cubs comparison is very fair because if the Cubs only get rid of Darvish and they keep Wilson Contreras and they keep Javi Baez and

they keep Chris Bryant in the NL central, they're still going to be in the mix to win the division. They're still going to hang around and, and possibly make some upgrades later in the season when it costs a little less money. And they could win the division and be an October team. That could absolutely happen, even though they traded away Darvish. I think you could say the same about Cleveland because they still have Ramirez. You have two other good middle infielders that we just mentioned. Ahmed Rosario is not necessarily the player people expected him to be, but 2019, 2.7 war up the middle. That's good. He's got power. He's got speed. He's a good defender. He's a good player. And Andres Jimenez looks at least like a solid

regular. So they're not gutting it. And I thought last year when they traded Corey Kluber for Emmanuel Classe, that was kind of how I felt about how they're trading Carrasco now. Like, this seems like it's a year too early. I think Carrasco's still good. I thought Kluber was still good. He got hurt, so we didn't really get to find out. And they came back and Plesak pitched really well. Savali exceeded expectations.

Tristan McKenzie came up and gave them some quality innings. They're kind of trusting their own ability to continue developing pitching in this as well. The shameful part is not keeping Lindor. We've known this was likely to happen for a long time. I think it's just as bad as the Red Sox not keeping Mookie Betts long-term. Whether or not Betts wanted to stay, whatever. That's another story.

But it's unbelievable to me that this is the norm, that we can expect this, and that this is not shocking to us when it happens. I think it's almost worse than bets who they at least got a a major league ready player back for bets i mean you guys baseball america had this great tweet the mets basically sent their number one prospect from 2017 along with their number 3 10 and 11 prospects to get francisco lindor and kooky carasco it's a itco. It's a fleecing. I don't know how Cleveland could have gotten three more prospects,

and we still would have been talking about how the Mets have won this trade. First off, I think the Mets, certainly with the money that Steve Cohen brings, are going to look to lock up Lindor. That seems like a no-brainer here, that they're going to trade for him and try to keep him as a Met, try to make him one of the faces of their franchise. But the returns on these deals is staggering. That's the other thing. They're not, it's not even remotely even, right?

Control and flexibility are the main words here. This is worse than the bets thing because price cost more and the Red Sox got more, right? It's actually pretty similar where you get one year of bets and you put a pitcher on there that costs a lot of money and they put it together, but price costs more. The Dodgers paid more of the price deal and the Red Sox got Verdugo as a centerpiece and Jeter Downs as a second piece. I would say that Verdugo is better than Jimenez and Rosario

because I don't even think that you're sure. Right now, the depth chart says that you split the time between Jimenez and Rosario and still come up with a below-average situation. So I'm not sure that you're sure that either one of those is a major league average shortstop. Maybe you hedge your bets by getting two, and so you say, between the two of them,

we think we have one major league average shortstop. But I think Verdugo was comfortably above average. Right. And price costs more than Carrasco. And might be like worse than Carrasco. Okay. This should be a video so everyone can see our faces. We're just stunned.

I guess the pandemic. I mean, the pandemic had something to do with this because they should have at least gotten something close to the uh bets return but i don't know i don't know how much to just wave your hands and say pandemic and that's it i think there's i think there's longer term trends here i agree with that i think steve cohen lost money in the pandemic all the rich everyone lost money in the pandemic that is that rich except for Rogers I guess Jesus yeah I except for the guy except for the zoom people but like otherwise I just don't Bezos this isn't like a yeah this isn't like a we had a one down year we got Treadland door away look we were talking about this before the pandemic let's not give Cleveland an easy hook off.

This has been talked about before the pandemic. This has been something that they've come out and said we cannot afford him. It didn't matter if they played 162 games this season and Cleveland sold out every one, right? Nothing was going to keep them from trading away Francisco Lindor because he got too expensive for what they deemed his value was in a market like Cleveland. And that is the real travesty here. How do you, as an Indians fan, these kids who love Lindor and love Carrasco, like I understand this is part of the game. However, who did they get back that's going to even remotely replace him? These aren't

even, to me this just trade and yes some of it is probably from the pandemic you know you're right there but i i don't know it just seems to me like desperation like they weren't sure anybody else you know the blue jays and who really didn't have that need they weren't sure anybody else was going to step forward so they took the the first deal they got that's kind of what this seems like right like you darvish with the the you know the cubs like hey you want them here you go take them we'll take almost nothing in return yeah or a lot of yeah future guys you know you could take a chance on yourself you could sign several players international free agency the way the padres did and just have

those guys without giving up you darvish if you're in the Cubs shoes but I think we're going to see Rosario and Jimenez playing the middle infield together I think they're starting shortstop and second baseman now for Cleveland so a tough pill to swallow for Cleveland fans even though you probably knew it was coming for a long time let's get to at least one other topic they definitely did a good job of cratering our outline with the breaking news but i'll take that like we've been jonesing for anything to happen and finally we got something that's right let's talk about eno's piece about the possible effects of no in-game video in 2020 and it's something we've kind of wondered about on pods throughout the last few months and one thing that really stuck with me was just seeing the third time through the order penalty nearly disappearing. And I think there may be some other factors in play there. You pointed out in the article, the way the rosters were built being bigger, the way some pitchers weren't fully stretched out.

fully stretched out. Maybe it was only very good and elite pitchers for the most part who were even contributing to the third time through the order split. But as you spoke to more people about how video is actually utilized by players in game, did you get the sense that it actually was more than just the unique nature of 2020 that played into the changes, especially with that third time to the order split. Yeah, it's interesting because the players I actually talked to, the hitters I talked to, said I only use it for the strike zone. And there wasn't really an evidence, not much evidence, that players were worse at judging the strike zone this year than they were in the past. So I don't know. It was hard to tease out an en masse effect, like an actual correlation between no video and this exact thing.

Because even if you think about it this way, you think about the third time through the order penalty disappeared, but also they were 26-man rosters or 28-man rosters for a while. There was only 60 games. And so we saw an all-time low of pitchers being used a third time through the order and we only actually saw uh we went from about 16 to 10 so now if you think about only 10 of pitchers are going third time through the order that means only aces are that means only about 15 pitchers and in the big leagues are allowed to go

third time through the order on average so if you're only seeing allowed to go third time through the order on average. So if you're only seeing aces a third time through the order, that's going to kill the third time through the order penalty because it's like, yeah, how much of a third time through the order penalty does Jake DeGrom have? He has a lot of pitches and great command. It's probably not that big.

So yes, I do think that certain players were affected and you get trolls and being like excuses i don't know man they're legitimate excuses this is like video is a real part of of preparation i think this what made it hard to tease it out is that apparently pitchers were also limited for how much video work they could do and because there's only one person in the video room at a time so you couldn't have like all your pictures for the day doing all their prep work um and so there was a little bit of both sides of the of the deal uh being hurt by by lack of video but um in-game

video is something that helps hitters hitters struck out more than ever before and i think that there is a link there i think that you know you may want no technology let me ask you this do you are you guys anti-technology during the game like after the whole astros thing like there's a definite strong feeling about that no i just think it needs to be better policed and what i thought your article did a good job of of explaining to people was the fact that the game has gotten to the point where if you don't adjust, you don't survive, right? And not game to game anymore.

It's at bat to at bat. And you made that great point that like, I can't notice, you can't notice. Like it's nothing that like you can see. All of a sudden a guy doesn't just add a leg kick, right? It's these tiny micro adjustments that I think all the best hitters in baseball are doing and without the video they struggled and again none of us noticed they're

not like oh you know what stanton didn't make the adjustment there clearly on that pitch that he needed to right like none of us can notice that so it's hard to appreciate it and what i liked about your article was that you like took us through the rhythms of the swing and and how important that third time and and how important that third time becomes and how these guys feel like they're kind of flying blind i guess for lack of a better word right they're so used to this they've come up with this and then they get it taken away yeah i think the younger players in particular they're just steeped in data and tech and in video you know that's just how they came up it's you know like i think about that bryce

jarvis interview i did where he's talking about spin efficiency and this and that and like attack angles and you know you're like this is the this is the this is how the kids talk these days hello how do you do fellow kids yeah how do you do fellow kids i just i speak video and tech too no but uh yeah i think that you're taking away something that you're used to. And so obviously there was ramifications. And whether it's how you time your load or how well you know the strike zone. Because the umpire's strike zone changes every night. And people talk about like, can't you do this with good advanced scouting?

I guess. But you step in the box and the umpire is different that day and the pitcher is different that day and the combination of the umpire and the pitcher makes something pretty unique. And so to be able to just look, and I think a lot of people equate in-game video now with cheating, but I just, I don't see it that way. There's people who are just looking to say, oh, look, Sonny Gray, like even in the one example I have, Sonny Gay threw him a changeup in the first inning. Sonny Gray does not throw a lot of changeups.

And so maybe, you know, Chris Agnelli was like, whoa, what was that? And he took it the first time, right? And in the third at bat, he saw the changeup again. He took it the first time and then he hit a homer off at the second time. So there's maybe he spotted something that was the changeup, or he said, I'm late on his pitches. I need to start when he breaks his hands here as opposed to where he breaks his hands here.

That's where you start your load, where you start your swing in opposition to where the pitcher is, is the main in-game adjustment that I heard from hitting coaches. And we're going to take that away because the Astros cheated? I don't know. I think if you took in-game video out away, you'd see more and more strikeouts. I think because most tech favors pitchers is how I see it.

Most sort of pre-game prep sort of tech. Pitch design and all that stuff and edutronic video and stuff it just seems ridiculous to me to not allow hitters to review video because the astros used video to cheat like they that's not equal like those are very different applications of technology so all tech's not bad because of what the astros did that people think that sort of baffles me. I thought there was an interesting question in the comments, and it was about whether or not pitchers do anything at all with in-game video. A lot of the tech for pitchers is more preparatory in nature, I guess we'd say,

and working on pitch design and all sorts of different things with mechanics. But is there anything pitchers are looking for similar if maybe they're losing something mechanically in a certain inning? Do they do anything on the granular level that you found? Or is this truly a tool that is more heavily utilized by hitters? I mean, the way that a pitcher works on his mechanics and stuff is with like slow, you know know like looking at high high frame rate kind of edutronic and being like okay this is how the ball's coming off my hands this is where

you know i am at foot plant and stuff and i just don't think that you're going to do that with the mlb am feed that goes out on tvs you know in the middle of a game it'd be like oh my foot is planting here and not here like That's between game work. That's like when you have throw day. That's what you do in the other four days. So the only thing that I can think of is strike zone similar. I'm not getting calls here. Look at that pitch.

I'm starting to see where his strike zone is. And maybe some sort of sense of like you know the hitter took that pitch like this you know the oh the hitter wanted to swing or the hitter checked his swing on that one kind of run through the last at bat especially if it but i would say that would you reserve that for the stud in the lineup right you know like oh yellow just coming up again and the game is tied 1-1 i better let me look at what I did in the last at-bat against him and kind of reframe and look at his body language and maybe. But I honestly don't think that pitchers do that much of it in-game.

I think the balance shifts over to hitters in-game. They get more value out of it in-game. Eno, so have you heard what the resolution is for 2021? Are we continuing down this road? Are they switching it? I know we don't even know if spring training is going to start on time next month. But what are you hearing in terms of what may be or even not? What do you think may happen with this going forward?

It's really interesting because it actually ties into how we've personally experienced the pandemic i think through all this because i have a quote from andy haynes from during the season where he says yeah i anticipate us getting back to normal next year and having in-game video and and that that being normal but i think if you kind of think about what it was like in august i think we thought things were going to be okay you You know what I mean? Like we were, we were kind of in the bottom of that, of that graph. Uh, and now we're back on the top of that graph and now people are talking about, you know, can we start on time and this and that, and what's the season going to look like? And we're kind of getting back into that.

I don't want to say chicken little, but like kind of just pessimistic mode where we're like, I don't even know if it's going to happen, you so i would say that i i assume in-game video will be back um in in some way and maybe they'll just one person in there at a time i don't know they they have to there has to be some sort of monitoring of it so they may have to install video cameras but i think there is some sort of video camera well like where you're actually watching the video game room you know what i mean so that mlb can like watch the video game room and see what's going on in there um they're gonna have to figure something out but i like i just personally the reason i asked if you guys were sort of anti-technology during the game is that there's, it seems like there's two solutions to the Astro situation or,

or any sort of manipulation of tech and data in game. The two solutions are either less or more, right? Less tech or more tech, you know? And I kind of don't see us. I think it's a Pandora's box. I don't think that,

you know, baseball or the world is going to have less tech going forward. Unless there's a sort of massive restructuring of capitalism and how things work. We're only going to have more tech. And so to me, more tech means some sort of Wi-Fi dampener or some sort of like you know watching the people watching the video you know like just like more surveillance of the players when they're in these video capabilities um maybe some sort of mlb employee that's that's actually like a snitch, you know, like an MLB employee at the ballpark that's like allowed to walk around and look at see what's happening in the video game

room and allowed to look in the dugout and see if they're, you know, what they're doing in the dugout with their technology. So I don't know. I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it's going to be some sort of luddite kind of like let's go back to amish baseball you know i don't i don't see that happening it's the cat's out of the bag butter churning between innings would be uh that's that's a minor league game actually like i would expect that if you go to like i don't know williamsport for a game or something they'd have butter churning night or something you could learn amish skills uh in between innings but yeah i mean i i think the toothpaste is out of the tube with the tech you're not yeah you're not getting that toothpaste back

in so lean into it find ways to police it that seems to be the most logical way to go forward it just seems weird to me that after an entire offseason and with so many players being willing to talk about how much this changed their season, that we don't have an obvious, oh yes, and the video rooms are now safe for social distancing. There are now six hubs, so six players can be in this 50-foot room and they're all six feet apart and it's all very safe and there are cameras and whatever we need to do to make it safe. Come on. You're telling me they can't remodel a couple of rooms easily that the players have access to right now? There's no shortage of resources in these organizations. If there are no fans, put a couple computers up on the concourse.

Yeah, then they're all in plain view. Everyone could see what's going on there. Yeah, everyone could see them. If they start banging on a trash can, they're in trouble. Oh, you wouldn't believe it if someone predicted it five years ago. You wouldn't have,

you said, no, that couldn't happen. There's just, there's no way. There's just no way. I highly recommend you check out Eno's piece and both the Brits pieces. The changes to the drug of abuse provisions piece is also really good. I'm going to link all of them in the show notes. Oh, man, that deserves a little bit of love.

That was a great piece and just an awful look into how rules can just be terrible to people. You know what I mean? rules can be just be terrible to people you know what i mean and just like how how we incentivize just weird ass behavior with with rules we incentivize people to get addicted to painkillers i mean you should see these guys there's buckets of painkillers in the clubhouse there's just buckets of them and these guys i think half of them are probably addicted to painkillers how that leads to opioid addiction. And we vilify the guys who decide to smoke pot for their pain management instead. Like, that was a great piece, Brett. And I don't, I don't want that one to get swept under the rug or anything. That was that was something I've been thinking about for a long time. And you know,

these guys get manipulated. You know, anybody that, you know, the piece about people, you know, that have had positive drug tests and how they get manipulated by their organizations, I found that just totally abhorrent. You know, it's part of why I won't work. If I ever worked in baseball, I wouldn't work for a couple of organizations

because of stuff I've heard about what they've done in the past. Great reporting on that one. Thank you. It was nice to bring a face and a story, too. You've heard about it. I've heard about it forever. The whole smokey-er way to the 40-man roster.

which some of this was either covered up or, you know, a lot of people believed, of course, that, you know, Latin players and non-white players were more marginalized, were tested more. There's, you know, a lot of things sports mirror society. And unfortunately, it seemed like, you know, as we become better and as we learn more about marijuana and what's going on with the opioid crisis, we're now like, oh, my gosh, why are we treating this like crack cocaine when these guys just want to play video games and smoke? They're not going to get in trouble. They're not the guys out at the bar. They're not the guys we have to deal with DV or some of these other things. And this episode was so packed that we didn't even get to the Hall of Fame.

Speaking of some of the interesting things, I mean, we've really run the gamut today, guys, I got to say. Sometimes in the winter, we brainstorm off-air, like, how the heck are we gonna fill this hour? And this has been, there's been a lot, the Lindor trade, I mean, there's just been a lot of stuff going on around baseball,

but certainly Eno's piece was terrific. Highly recommend you check that out as well. There's just been, there's been a lot going on here over this last hour. Yes. I have one last thought on your piece, Britt. The number of players who were pushed out of major league organizations who are still trying to build a career for themselves playing abroad is much greater than you realize. These guys are ticker material at the time of the suspension and then they're just gone. They just vanish.

And it's just really cool to see hey look, these people they're still trying. This is still what they want to do and yet there are players who've done things that are much worse still playing earning millions of dollars

and the hypocrisy is just off the charts. Yes, it's next level. It's like every guy in there said they wish they had done steroids because that's a lot easier to forgive in our society and in our sport than pretty much anything else. Yeah, it's on the long, long list of things that need to be addressed in this game that we all enjoy so much. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels.

This one definitely took a different shape than we expected when it started. But hey, thanks to the Mets for being active and trying to make their team better. No gratitude is owed to Cleveland. Sorry. You guys are jerks. Really sad that you traded your superstar. If you're a fan of that team, I'm really sorry that you have to root for that team.

On Twitter, he's at Inoceros. She is at Britt underscore Jerole. Again, I'll link all the pieces we talked about today into the show notes for today's episode. You can email us, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. Lots more great stuff to come, because this offseason really is just getting started. So we are back with you on Monday.

Thanks for listening.