The Bill Simmons Podcast - Best NBA Late-Season Story Lines, Plus Theo Epstein’s First Appearance

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons runs through the biggest subplots to watch heading into the NBA playoffs (2:45) before talking to three-time World Series champion baseball executive Theo Epstein about bringing the Boston Red Sox their first World Series win since 1918, bringing the Chicago Cubs their first World Series win in more than 100 years, Red Sox fans vs. Cubs fans, MLB's strikeout epidemic, experimenting with making changes to baseball, and more (31:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lots of soccer stuff going on right now, or as they call it outside America, football. Well, I call it soccer here because I'm American. We have an awesome podcast called Ringer FC. That's where you can find Stadio with Ryan Amusa. You can also find Wrighty's House with Ian Wright. Breaking down all kinds of soccer stuff as we head toward the Champions League final later this month. Check it out.

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It's time. It's time to finally decide whether this is the goat of action movies. It might be. You'll find out. You can watch this if you have Showtime on demand or the Showtime app. It's free on Showtime right now. So Lethal Weapon 2, an all-timer. Check it out. That's coming Monday. Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk at the top about the 10 NBA storylines I'm the most excited for as we head toward the playing games, the last eight, nine days of the season

here, the 10 storylines I care about the most. And then Theo Epstein, the guy who brought the Red Sox a World Series in 2004 and then worked his magic again, 12 years later with the Cubs. We're going to talk to him about an incredible baseball career and more importantly, what baseball should do to try to evolve as we head into the second fifth of the 21st century. This is a really fun podcast. Can't wait. First, Pearl Jam. All right, taping this a little before 9 o'clock on Thursday. Tried to wait until after the Lakers-Clippers game. That didn't work out. It was a terrible game.

But it does lead us into top 10 storylines heading into the final 10 days of the NBA season. I wrote some stuff down. I'm going to rank these in order for things I am most fascinated by, and we'll go in descending order from there. The Lakers are the number one thing to be fascinated by. Where the Lakers land in this whole weird playoff system where basically Dallas is 38-28. They're the five seed right now.

Portland and the Lakers are tied for six at 37 and 29. If they all end up in a three-way tie, the three-way tie goes to the Mavericks because they clinched, or they would have like the division whammy. Basically they win their division. So that trumps anything anyone else does. The Lakers go into seven,

which is very conceivable, especially because now we don't know when Davis is coming back. We know LeBron is going to miss one more game at least. The Lakers falling to seven has the following possible ramifications. First of all, we could have a Golden State Lakers playing game with the 7-8 spot. That is now legitimately realistic.

The loser would not be out of the playoffs. They would just have to now play the winner of the 9-10 game. But still, LeBron versus Curry. Warriors-Lakers. It would be in LA, but there wouldn't be a full crowd. But that'll set the record for play-in ratings for TV and for interest and for everything. I don't know if we're going to be able to top that one. You could argue Curry and LeBron are the two most popular players in the league right now.

And, uh, and they'd be going head to head. There's a lot of history, obviously with all the finals. And if you're a Lakers fan, you're looking at this going, Oh my God, I thought we were the heavy favorites to repeat as champions. And now we're in a play in game. And if we lose that one, we have to play another play in game, possibly against Zion, which we'll get to in as champions. And now we're in a play-in game. And if we lose that one, we have to play another play-in game, possibly against Zion, which we'll get to in a second. But I'm fascinated by so many things with the Lakers going to seven.

First of all, the bitching about the play-in system. LeBron already started it last week. We didn't hear from him for five months about play-in games. And then as soon as the Lakers inched towards seven, all of a sudden he hated it. But the bitching from Laker fans who will say this is unfair because we fought through the bubble in four rounds and now we get injuries because we played too long and now we're in the playing game. This is bullshit. Everybody can fuck off because the

playing games are going to be great. You're going to be watching them. It's a great idea. It's an idea that I have personally wanted in some form since 2007. And the way to judge this stuff is, are you going to watch? Like just fundamentally. Now, this can go off the rails if are you going to watch becomes, are you going to watch somebody eat a jar of worms on Fear Factor or something? Like we've seen this gone too far, the are you going to watch corollary. But in this case, it's going to be really intense, high level basketball, because most

of the teams that are going to be in these playing games are going to be really good with legitimate stars this time. The fact that we could have LeBron and Curry in a 7-8 game, winner clinches the seventh spot and probably plays Phoenix, I'm assuming, unless Phoenix can somehow leapfrog Utah. So then you have Phoenix watching this, hoping and praying the Lakers don't end up being the seventh seed because that's the one team they're not going to beat. I also, if it's somehow the Warriors not in the eighth seed

and they fall to nine and maybe Memphis is eight and it's Lakers-Memphis as your 7-8, I can't wait to see who the refs are in that one. My guess, these are my guesses. Scott Foster is definitely going to be involved. I think Flea, we haven't seen Flea ref a game yet, but I think this would be the one if he was ever going to ref a game. I thought about Jack Nicholson as the third ref, but I don't think he can get up and down the court. So I think to be safe, Adam Silver is just the third ref. It's almost like when Vince McMahon declared himself the special guest referee for a match when he wanted Stone Cold Steve Austin to lose. That's how that plays out. So anyway, Lakers will get the seventh seed. It's all going to work out fine for them. They will be in the playoffs. They have too much talent.

LeBron will be fine. We've never seen him really get sidelined by an injury ever except for 2019. And even then, we're not completely positive how long that injury should have been. They are plus 200 heading into tonight to win the West on FanDuel. I'm sure that might have drifted maybe to plus 210, plus 220.

I'd still bet it. I still think, you know, the doppelganger for this would be the 1969 Celtics, where the Celtics won in 68. They were super old in 69. Russell was the player coach. Sam Jones was playing his last season. The team was just old on their last legs. Nobody thought they could win another title.

They were in the four spot. They had some weird seeding thing that year where it was one versus three and two versus four in the playoffs. I don't know what was going on. Everybody was, I think, on drugs in the late 60s. But Celtics end up winning in the semis, winning in the Eastern final. They beat Philly. Then I can't remember who they beat in the Eastern finals, but all of a sudden they're in the finals and then they play the Lakers. They're heavy

underdogs. They win. That would be your best case scenario for the Lakers. It's way more fun if they're in the play on game. Let's be honest. You should, you should just be rooting for this at home. We'll see if Portland could hold up there end of the bargain. So anyway, if you're saying Dallas, Portland, LA, my money would be on the Lakers to be the seventh seed without banged up there. So that's my number one scenario. Watch that. Number two, this is already kind of played out, but I really think people aren't focused on this enough, at least the people in my life. Philly has effectively locked down the one seed in the East. They have a two and a half game lead thanks to whatever the hell's going on with Brooklyn. Milwaukee got it together a little bit

too late. Here's what that means. They get to avoid the Brooklyn-Milwaukee round two, that whole let those two beat each other up, and then you just play whoever in round three. They're going to have an easy round one. They're going to be playing. It could be Charlotte. It could be Washington. It could be Indiana. Maybe it could be the Celtics. Would be, I guess, the hardest version of that.

The Celtics have done really well against them in years past. Not this year. Easy round one. Just pencil them into advance in round one. Round two, the way this plays out, maybe, probably, they would play the winner of Atlanta and the Knicks. Again, they're better than those teams. That shouldn't be a big issue. The one thing to watch out for, which we'll get to

when we're talking about my third storyline here, is just the possibility of Miami sneaking into that 4-5 matchup and Philly thinking they have it golden all the way to the Eastern Finals, and then all of a sudden they have to deal with the defending Eastern champs. Philly right now is 12-1 to win the title, and they're plus 390 to win the East. They actually have the third best odds in the East on FanDuel. I don't understand it. They have the best player, they have the one seed. For whatever home court is worth during these playoffs, they're going to at least have that.

And yeah, I said Embiid is the best player of the East. I think he is. He's the most overpowering, consistent force that we have in the East. Giannis has been challenging that lately. But I'm just surprised that they had the third best odds of the East. And in general, I don't think people fully understand how important it was that they locked up that one seed. I might be arguing against a straw man.

Who knows? Third scenario for me that I'm fascinated by is the Sleeper Hawks, who did lose tonight against Indiana. But that was a game. They were down, I think, 20-plus. And it just looked like it was one of those nights. They catch Indiana after a whole bunch of drama. Their coach is in the news.

They might fire him. And the assistant coach is fighting with one of the players almost. And you just think, like, oh, the Hawks will win. They're cruising. And then all of a sudden, they're down 20. They came roaring back, and they almost won. But here's why I bring up the Hawks. Last two weeks, they beat Miami.

They beat Milwaukee. they beat Portland, they beat Phoenix. They're just frightening offensively. And I think I have Knicks fans in my life who just think it's a foregone conclusion the Knicks are going to beat the Hawks in round one and in round two against Philly, who knows. I think the Knicks would have a shitload of trouble

matching points with the Hawks because that's what you have to do. The Hawks are going to be between 115 and 125 points in every playoff game. And I'm even factoring in, it's the playoffs, you got nerves, slightly slower pace, higher intensity, teams figuring each other out what they can and can't do. I'm not sure it matters with the Hawks.

And, you know, I'm meeting a ton of crow with the Hawks this year. So is House, so is Russo. This is a team before the season we all went under. We didn't see it. We thought they were a fantasy team. But as you watch them week in, week out, especially the best thing that happened to them was Trey Young went out for a few games,

but Donovich came in, took over the offense and really found not only a role in the team, but really seemed to find himself as a playmaker offensively in a way that we never really saw unlocked even in Sacramento. So this Hawks team, if they can get DeAndre Hunter to come back, there's been some stories about him the last 24 hours.

He had a knee thing. He was their second best player for the first six weeks of the season. And then he's gone. And if they can get him back with the way Capella's playing, with the way Bogdanovich is playing, Gallinari is kind of their hit or miss guy off the bench. Collins, any game could have 29 and 19 and you wouldn't blink.

And then you have Trey and then they have a bunch of guys throw at the swing. Like they're just going to put up points. And even Okwongu, who looked pretty good last night as a backup bench guy, they just, they have depth everywhere. They have shooting. They've really,

really found something with Trey and Capella. Now that's a trade where you look and you think like, Jesus, Darryl's last two trades in Houston were just abominable. The Westbrook-Paul trade and then the Capella trade, he's lost both. If I'm Darryl, I'm just like, I didn't make those trades. It's Tillman

Fertitta. It's his fault. The Hawks, the reason I mention all of this, they're 120 to one to win the title right now in FanDuel. And if you think, I think they would beat the Knicks. God bless the Knicks. Unbelievable season. Fantastic overachieving. They're tough.

Randall is going to be on my MVP ballot. He'll be three, four, five, somewhere in there. He's been awesome. But I just don't think they have the firepower to match the Knicks, to match the Hawks. They're going to have to ugly it up. They're going to have to try to pound Trae Young, knock him on the floor a bunch of times,

do that whole thing. But ultimately, I'm not positive it matters. I think the Hawks would really have to joke in that series. That feels like if the Knicks won that series, it would be one of those things where the Hawks led five of the seven games in the fourth quarter, or six of the seven games,

something like that, and the Knicks somehow pulled it out anyway. I think you should focus on the Hawks a little bit here. I don't think they could win the title. I don't even know if they could make it past round one. But if you're just talking about wild cards from four down,

that would be one of my picks. People are irrationally focused on the Celtics being able to turn it on and figure it out. It's not going to happen. Believe me. I wish I had better news for you. I've watched them all year. It's not happening.

This is the year from hell. And they're not going to get their shit together in time. They're just not. The team, so this leads to my fourth storyline because this is directly tied to the Hawks. The other team would be the Miami Heat, who I don't know if you remember this. They made the finals last year. They've had a semi year from hell.

They've gotten just an awesome stretch from Butler ever since he came back he's basically been 22-7-7 he's played his way into the weird all NBA thing and then bam obviously the shooting has not been there but they've just kind of hung around they're lurking now they have

a puncher's chance thanks to Atlanta losing tonight of actually maybe climbing up and trying to grab that division and leapfrog them and play the Knicks in round one and we would get an old school Miami Knicks thing. Either way, I like either of those teams in that four or five slot to maybe throw some punches at Philly in round two. And I know I just made the case for Philly.

Easy round one and then they should cruise through round two, but I guarantee Philly doesn't want to see Miami in round two. And I know I just made the case for Philly, easy round one, and then they should cruise through round two, but I guarantee Philly doesn't want to see Miami in round two. And then Atlanta, that could just be one of those weird series where Atlanta just makes a ton of threes and knocks them out. I personally don't think Atlanta is ready because I don't think Trey Young is ready for that. And ultimately he's going to be the guy who has to drive this stuff. But I'm just saying as 120 to one to win the title, when that's a team that it's not unrealistic that they could upset Philly in round, in round two, not saying it'll happen.

I'm just saying it's not unrealistic. They could just go all offense. And, you know, every year in the playoffs, we have that one team. We're like, wow,

I didn't see that coming. They are the number one pick for me for the, I didn't see that coming team. You know, the same way Miami last year, you could see it brewing in the bubble before the playoffs started. And I remember talking about it in this podcast. It was like, there's something happening with that team. I'm 90% there with Atlanta. Um, there's something happening in apartment. I think Hunter being back would make me feel better. I don't know if he'll be back and playing a real role in time. But just keep an eye on the Hawks and keep an eye on Miami. Keep an eye on who gets into that 4-5 because God bless the Knicks.

God bless Tibbs. God bless Randall. But that team has been overachieving all year. I don't trust them in an actual playoff series against a team that can basically get used to them for two weeks. I don't see the Knicks getting to round two. I'm sorry, Knicks fans.

All due respect. My fifth storyline, there's some all-NBA chicanery going on. They announced that they basically tweaked the rules. Maybe me and Zach Lowe might be the only two people that care about this, but they tweaked the rules and they basically turned it into a front court, back court thing.

They made Jokic and Embiid eligible as forwards or centers. I repeat, you can vote for Embiid or Jokic as forwards or centers. You can also, you have the following people could be guards or forwards. Jalen Brown, Tatum, Zach Levine, Luca, LeBron, Kawhi, Paul George, Butler, Chris Middleton, Ben Simmons, Devin Booker. Devin Booker being eligible at forward is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. But I think we talked about positionalist basketball with Kyle Mann and KOC on Tuesday. And I think the league is trying to

recognize this moment that positions have become less and less important. Here's why I absolutely hate this. You're betraying the legacy of the league and the all NBA teams, which admittedly I might be the only person who cares about this, but there's a time in the sixties when it was Russell or Chamberlain every year from like 1959 to 1968. And you had to pick one for first team all NBA center. There was no, ah, both of those guys are great. Let's make them center forwards. And then we could have both of them. We didn't do that that decade. We didn't do it in the 90s when we had all of a sudden we had Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson. We had some awesome Patrick Ewing seasons. We had Young Shaq. I don't remember us going,

hey, let's make Hakeem a forward so everybody can make it. Another egregious example of this for just being screwed as you had to vote was we had this run basically from 2000 to 2003. Kevin Garnett, C-Web, Dirk, Duncan, T-Mac, all of those guys were elite at various points of that 2000, 2004 stretch. Guess what? We can only vote for two all NBA forwards. So my point is in 2021 to now hide behind this whole positionless basketball thing, it just, it doesn't sit right by me. It ties into all this stupid trophy generation and just trying to make everybody a winner at all times.

I am not falling for it. I'm just telling you now, I'm voting for Jokic for first team, all NBA center, and I'm voting for Embiid for second team, all NBA center. And that's what I'm doing. And if you want to cheat

and you want to put those two guys on first team together under the guise of, I just want to have the best five guys this season. I want to put them on a team together. You can do that, but it's not how this works. It's just not. I don't think it's the right way to play it.

Now you have Gobert as your second team all-NBA center. If you do that, which means Bam Adebayo has to be your third team all-NBA center. And you're saying Bam Adebayo is one of the best 15 players this season? I'm not doing that. So good luck. Good luck, everybody who's like, I'm going to turn my back on the history of the NBA.

Now, when you're talking about some of the other stuff, I think Jimmy Butler should be eligible at forward or guard. And same thing for Jalen Brown. Same thing for Tatum because those guys do kind of, they're perimeter players more than anything. So I get it in some cases. Simmons is a tough one. Middleton, maybe.

When you get to like Devin Booker, like at that point, I don't know what we're talking about. So anyway, watch that, because I think there's going to be a lot of hand-wringing over the next 10 days about is it okay to put Jokic and Embiid on the first team together?

I think it's great. I think it would also be great if you just had two wives. Just do it. Fuck it. Who cares? Have two. Put them in separate bedrooms. You can sleep with both.

Sixth storyline for me to watch. Tank-a-palooza 2021, which has been very under the radar this year. We've been distracted by the playing games. And just in general, we haven't had enough time to enjoy a true tank. But how it's working right now, Houston 16-50. Detroit and

Minnesota are both 20-47. Cleveland and Orlando are 21-45, and then OKC is technically ahead of them at 21-46. So we have Houston, Detroit, Minnesota, OKC, and then Cleveland, Orlando. Here's why this is important. Houston keeps their pick only if it's top four protected.

If it falls to five or lower, OKC can grab the pick and send Houston Miami's first-round pick, which would suck for Houston. Even worse, Minnesota, top three protected pick. If that's four or lower, that goes to Golden State. This lottery, if Golden State can somehow pull out four, five, or six from this draft, would have dramatic ramifications on the next couple years of the season.

So this will be an unusually intense lottery. And, you know, they changed the lottery ads a little bit. Minnesota basically tied for second right now, but they have guys that are like Russell Edwards towns. Those guys are all playing there. That, that team is a hundred percent not tanking and might actually be dumb

enough with the new coach to win a couple games and squander that pick away. What they should be doing is send Towns and Edwards, send them packing somewhere, send them on a vacation, and then tell Russell to just keep doing what he's doing. Because I don't know if you've watched him this season, but he's one of my top five least in my wheelhouse players that we have in basketball right now. I just cannot stand watching him. I can't imagine what it would be like to play with him.

Don't aggregate this, by the way. I'm just, I'm talking as a fan. I just don't like his style. I don't like what's happened to him. I thought he'd kind of figured it out in Brooklyn. And now I just see a guy who's jacking up 25 footers and good luck. Good luck with that trade.

You know, when a team gives up Wiggins and somehow loses the trade, you know it was a bad trade. So anyway, watch that Tankapalooza stuff and especially see where Minnesota, where they eventually slide in that bottom five or six. For the seventh storyline I have for you, is just Zion?

Because first of all, Zion is dangerously close to making an all NBA team for me. We have 10 days left. I'm not even really seriously thinking about it until the last two nights. But New Orleans right now is 30 and 36. The free falling San Antonio Spurs are 31 and 34. New Orleans, they've squandered 15 games in the last four minutes. Somehow still alive. Sacramento is somehow still alive at 29-37 too, but you could potentially have New Orleans in the 10 spot. And I just think that would be hilarious

because they could absolutely beat Golden State. As Chris Vernon has talked about multiple times on his podcast with KFC, The Mismatch, for whatever reason, New Orleans owns Memphis. So if we had a New Orleans-Memphis 9-10, trust me, that's the worst case scenario for Memphis. And we could see a scenario where New Orleans is playing the loser of Lakers Golden State to try to make the playoffs, everyone wrote off New Orleans two weeks ago. Like, we brought them to the morgue.

We put them in the thing, the little drawers with the coffins. And now they're still alive. And nobody wants to design in the playoffs. As weird as that team is, as poorly coached as they are, as erratic as their guards are, as weird as their offense is, as unfrozen caveman law as weird as their offense is, as unfrozen caveman lawyery as their offense is. I just don't want to play Zion in a playing game.

I don't. No thanks. Three other storylines for you just quickly. The scoring title, Curry is 31.5, Beal is 31.3. Just Curry winning another scoring title for some reason. I'm kind of rooting for this. And then tied to that, Golden State, I think they need to get the eight seed because if they can just win that one game in the 7-8 and not have to play two play-in games to basically try to get in the playoffs,

followed by all of a sudden they're playing the one seed, that team is not deep. That team is going to be in some real trouble if there's a lot of games bunched together in this round one, if they're stacking the playoff stuff. The less playoff games for them, the better. We want more Steph.

Keep an eye on that. These are all tied for I guess the 10th storyline. Indiana falling apart and all this stuff with the 10th storyline. Indiana falling apart and all this stuff with the coach is hilarious. I've read everything the last couple of days by Shams. Jake Fisher wrote something for Bleach Report.

Just that they hired this coach because they were impressed by his offense and his ideas on offense and didn't seem to realize that he has no people skills. Fantastic. Way to go, NBA. You did it again.

Kemba Walker has kind of quietly showed signs of maybe rounding into something. And again, I don't believe in this Boston team, but I am interested to see what happens with him and Neesmith these last six games because they had this Fournier COVID situation and he's been a shell of himself. There's a world in which the last four games of this season, the Celtics get

their shit together and start to look like an actual playoff team and suck dumbasses like myself in. I'm preparing myself already. They play the Knicks last game of the season and maybe that's a thing where they have to win that game to get to a five seed or a six seed. It's the Knicks last game of the season. And maybe that's a thing where they have to win that game to get to a five seed or a six seed. It's the Knicks, maybe they're in the same situation. And I can see the Celtics fucking sucking me in. Dude, and the Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, he pulled me back in. But Kemba is the guy to watch

because they're not doing anything unless he can at least be 90% of what he was at his peak. And there's been signs of life. So I'm just going to mention that. And finally, let's end on this. We want the Wizards in play-in games. It looks like it's going to happen. It looks like they're going to get at least a 10.

They won an incredible game tonight against Toronto. That was one of the most ridiculous, both teams trying to give it away, games that I've watched in a long time. But they're so freaking entertaining. They're so much fun to second guess. They're such a rollercoaster ride. Russ is, for 46 minutes, looks like a second team

all-NBA guy. And then the last two minutes does more dumb things at the end of games than any superstar I've ever watched ever in my entire life as a basketball fan. I've never seen a really good player do more inexplicable things, be more careless with the ball, commit dumber fouls. Um, you know, today he, he, it was a cornucopia of dumb moments from him today, but one of them was like, they're up three, seven minutes left. He's kind of in charge of Van Vliet,

which seems important because Van Vliet's the big scorer and just leaves Van Vliet to go double team somebody with four seconds left and then realizes it too late. Van Vliet gets an open shot, sends it to overtime. Then in, then in the, uh,

at the end of the last minute of the overtime, throws the ball away, comes down the other end. They get a stop. They throw it. They inbound it to him. He somehow loses it and then commits his six foul as an intentional foul, even though they're leading. I can't, it almost broke my brain. You have Scotty Brooks, who's just putting Bertans on Siakam the whole game. Siakam's like, this is great. You're significantly rejuvenating my career. Awesome. Thank you. And then they're going offense, defense, somehow bringing in somebody who's worse than Bertans to guard Siakam. But that team is just a mess. I enjoy it so much.

I text House, my buddy Joe House, diehard Wizards fan. I'm just texting him, watching this. He's going nuts. He's wondering if certain guys in the team are shaving points. It's just the best. I really want the Wizards to be in a playing game. And I'll tell you this, I would not want to see them in a playing game. They're the classic, it's like the boxer who is either going to get knocked out or they're going to knock somebody out. And it's going to happen in the first five rounds. And you know, somebody's going down. You just don't know who those are.

The guys know the champs, the great boxers never want to fight that guy. That's the wizards. And Beal has been really good. Beal at the end of these games can go toe to toe. So the wizards, I would say that would be the last storyline for me. Let's make sure they lock down that 10 seed because they're going to lock down some, some genuine excitement. I'm excited for the playing games. I'm excited for me. Let's make sure they lock down that 10 seed because they're going to lock down some, some genuine excitement. I'm excited for the playing games. I'm excited for basketball. I'm excited to see what happens with the Lakers. It feels like basketball is heating up. We're

going to talk about this a lot more on Sunday night, but that's what I got. Top 10 storylines. All right. We're gonna take a break. Coming back with Theo Epstein, the guy who saved two fan bases. That's next. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer.

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or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right. I've had this podcast since 2007. This has never happened. Theo Epstein is here. He's the guy that brought me a World Series in 2004 and removed the very,

very big, big thing that was hanging over me. The fear that I was going to live my whole life and then die without a Red Sox World Series. Then you go to Chicago and you do it again. And I'll just start here. Thank you. Thank you for all your help. I appreciate it. It was a group effort, but I appreciate that. That's really kind. And that is one of the, probably the coolest thing about having been through both those experiences. Just, you know, not a day goes by when you don't run into somebody who wants to share what the World Series meant to them and to their family and kind of invites you in

to that intimate relationship and thanks you for it. So yeah, you're very welcome. I was going to ask you about that. I imagine that's like a decent chunk of your life, just people coming up to you and just immediately launching into some monologue that's super a decent chunk of your life. Just people coming up to you and just immediately launching into some monologue that's super emotional to them. And you're just kind of standing there

with a confused look on your face. Yeah, I mean, it's happened all across the country. You know, as I travel around, it's happened in foreign countries. It's happened, you know, at urinals. It's happened, you know, on chairlifts, you know, on mountains and stuff. But it's great.

It never ceases to be a great experience. And people, they share stories about their parents or grandparents who didn't quite live to see the day, but they felt that they were there watching. And what it means to them is there are tears involved sometimes. And again, it's a really intimate thing. That's the great thing about baseball is just the way it connects families and generations and the shared experiences, the shared loyalty. And so there's something about seeing someone, you know,

I'm sure it's more so with the player, you know, you run into Poppy, you're going to get even more emotional, but you know, I'm connected to those teams and, and so people open up right away. It's one of the joys of my life to be able to continue to share that going forward. So the Red Sox fans, I think what made us unique was that we would get kicked in the balls every year, but then in March and April, you would talk yourself into whatever the next team was. And it was almost like you had no long-term memory.

And then you'd have these playoff moments and you really talk yourself into it. And then something would happen. The DNA would kick in and you would have this epiphany like, Oh yeah, that's right. We, this can never happen for us.

The Cubs fans were wired a little differently, right? Where they're, they're more like, this is just never going to happen for us. We go to Wrigley, we have a good time. We're never going to actually win. How different were those fan bases to you?

Or were they more similar than I'm saying? Well, the similarities are significant. You know, it's just extreme passion, extreme loyalty, part of the daily conversation, part of the daily rhythm of the city. It's what you talk about with your family at dinner every night. So great, great baseball markets and fan bases. The neighborhood ballpark is a huge part of the identity of both organizations. And then you're right.

The Red Sox experience was more getting close and then having these tragic outcomes. And the Cubs experience was not even getting close at all. They hadn't been in the World Series since World War II. Yeah. They're talking about like Leon Durham. That is their equivalent of like Calvin Chiraldi for us. Yeah. Like a division series. Right. But I found that the biggest difference between the fan bases, I guess, runs sort of counter to those differences in the experiences in that the fan bases really reflected the sensibilities of the region. So in New England, I mean, you opened with it.

You said this fear that you'd never experience a Red Sox World Series. I think the New England sensibility, and I can say this because I'm a New Englander, I'm a Bostonian, is a little bit fatalistic in nature. A little bit? A lot. A lot bit. I don't want to piss anyone off, but a lot. And it probably goes back to the Puritan roots, the Calvinist roots of the region to begin with. Everything is heavy. So I remember as a kid, you could be at Fenway Park,

the team could be in first place. You could be riding a five game losing streak. And then I guess speaking of like Calvinism, but Calvin Shiraldy comes in, you know, protecting one run game in the eighth inning. And he throws ball one and you hear this little buzz go through the crowd. And then it's ball two. And now it's a full-blown, the sky is falling, what's going to happen? Like, how is this going to go wrong?

So there was just this expectation that things were going to end in tragic failure for the Red Sox. And again, I think a reflection of the sensibility of the region. The Cubs reflecting the Midwestern sensibility in this sort of, pleasantness that sort of marks a lot of the Midwest. It was just totally different. The Cubs could be in last place. Nothing could be going right.

They'd be losing by eight runs in the fourth inning. But the sun was shining you know you have your beers at Wrigley Field and someone would make a nice hustle play and make a diving catch and everyone would be out of their seats like it was the greatest thing in the world you know standings be damned scoreboard be damned and and so you know not not to say they didn't care at all they cared deeply but there was I think just this tendency to see the bright side in things and the experience more so in Chicago than what I remember as a kid in Boston. It was kind of the opposite.

Now, I do think that optimism had started to fade a little bit in Chicago by the time I got there. And certainly after I dropped a couple hundred lost seasons on them my first two years, they were definitely running out of patience and expecting to win. And we kind of caught the tail end of that. Yeah, I remember writing a column for my old website. It was the 2000 season, the Carl Everett season.

You were, I think, in San Diego at that point, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was Cologne versus Pedro. And it was basically like a fork in the road afternoon game. We had to win. And I think we were down one, nothing. And Nomar let off the eighth or the ninth and he hit this bomb and it was going to be a Homer and it hit like the very, very, very top of the wall, but didn't go over and it became a double and the whole mood,

you could feel it in the. It was just one of those Red Sox DNA moments where it's like, oh, we're going to lose. If that had been an inch higher, it's a home run. It's a double. He's definitely not scoring. And we're going to lose 1-0. And it was exactly what happened. And we gave up.

You could feel it. And that was this energy in Fenway. And that was why 0-4 was so weird because the Robert steel, it was almost like it was, it was rock bottom, but we didn't give up against Rivera where there were, there was actually like in my, I remember my dad and I were in the, you know, underneath, we were going to leave, but we couldn't leave. And we wanted to make sure and see if, oh, all of a sudden you got to walk. We're hustling back in. But my dad was like, we can't leave, but we should at least head toward. Because we were about to get swept.

We were leaving a crime scene. The score was 19 to 8 the day before. It was, I mean, they were literally writing the obits on the season. Not just the calmness, but ownership was writing. Oh, my God. Apologizing to the fans, too. It was really ugly. And then a walk, and then there was hope again.

I walked. And that was it. And I tell you what, Posada made a hell of a throw. That was a bang-bang play. Roberts did an unbelievable job on that stolen base. And then you had Bill Miller single up the middle. Bill Miller kind of owned Rivera. We didn't brag about it, but

he would have good at-bats against him. And he had the swing game, and the whole season was July 24th that year. Yes. The fight between Baratek and A-Rod, and then we came back and Miller hit a walk-off into the bullpen off Rivera that day. And then we came back and Miller hit a walk-off

into the bullpen off Rivera that day. And then we made the trades a week later. And then we didn't really start playing well. We went 3-8, I think, after we made the Nomar trade. That was a rough time. That was a low point for me, personally. And then right around mid-August, everything started clicking with the new group that we had.

I think we went 45-11 or something, counting the playoffs the rest of the way against a really good team. But you're right about how 2004 ran counter to the experience. I was 12 in 1986. You were probably 15 or something. Yeah, I was 16. That was our moment. Anyone who's lived through that now saw everything that came after through that lens of expecting the worst to happen. You're up three runs. You're going to win.

Now all of a sudden, base hit, base hit, base hit, wild pitch, error. You lose, and that's the lens through which you view all of Red Sox experiences going forward. Our parents and their grandparents had their, their own moments going, you know, going all the way back. And yeah, 04 definitely changed all that. You know, I think Ortiz is a, is a big part of what changed it. You know, you talk about that, that game four, um,

obviously hit the walk-off off Quantrill that day. And then, you know, but we had to win three more games. You know, he came back the next day, had to walk off La Wiza, up the middle after, I think, hitting a big home run late in the eighth inning. Wait, this is the greatest 24 hours of my life. I think you're underselling it. The four and five. It was ridiculous. After game three, when we lost 19 to eight, we were so beaten down. My friends who I work with and I hadn't at that point ever seen,

we couldn't watch the Aaron Boone game. We just said, wipe that from our memory. It became our motivation to go have a great offseason and come back in 04. So we were so down after losing 19-8 that we just went to my buddy's house who lived right next to a block from Fenway. We just started pounding vodka sodas and flipping channels. I don't know if it was Classic Sports or ESPN Classic, whatever it was back then. There's the Aaron Boone game from the year before.

Oh, God. So we forced ourselves to watch. We were like, we have to atone for this. We have to punish ourselves by watching this. So we sat there drinking all night, watching the Aaron Boone game. It was like the lowest of the low. It was like masochism.

And then the next day was game four in that wild ride. So I was hungover for most of that game four. Well, you were a young guy too then at that point. You were 30 in 2004? Yeah, I was 30 for that postseason day. Yeah, you mentioned the history of the first time the Red Sox crushed your soul. For me, it was game 775. That was like one of my first major losses.

I barely remember it. But the real one was 78, which was a Monday. I don't know how to explain this, but all the kids got to leave school early. Like we all watched it. It was just a given that we were all going home. And then Yaz coming up against Gossage and just believing in Yaz. Like, it's going to happen. So that doesn't happen.

Then 86, Hendu's homer seemed like it flipped the karma. But then it turned out not only did it not flip the karma, it was 100 million times worse. So you have that. ALCS is so underrated against the Angels. Just go back and watch that game five in Anaheim. It was insane. One of the best games. Yeah, I think game five, that might be the greatest start to finish playoff game that I can remember with the Red Sox. I mean, we obviously had some awesome

ones in the 2000s, but that was epic. You know, it was interesting. One of those Dodger games in 2018, I think that I went to, um, had a little bit of that too, where you just think like, it just seems like a baseball game's heading a certain way. And then you have that Drago, the Russian is cut moment. We're like, Oh wait. And then it flips around. But, you know, but by the time we got to the Boone Homer, that was, I think for me, and then maybe it was just the age I was at where you just start looking at it going like, why do I do this? You know, I think a lot of Red Sox fans are just looking at this, like, what's the point? Like, like, why do I have this thing in my life that just makes me feel terrible about myself, about life, about my destiny as a human being?

But for me, that was my first gut punch as GM. So it was my first year as GM03. So it was a different experience for me because I was in a position to do something about it. I give the whole organization in the position to do something about it. I give the whole organization in the front office a lot of credit. We took a day or two to wallow in our sorrows, but it was really a galvanizing moment. We went out and signed Keith Falk after that, traded for Schilling when he said he didn't want to come to Boston. We had to fly out on Thanksgiving to Arizona and convince him to waive his no his no trade clause and sign a contract extension.

So I think we, we used it to our advantage. So it was, it was interesting experiencing the Boone thing from the inside as opposed to just being a fan. I don't know if, I don't know if you know this, but we almost did a baseball movie about the A-Rod chase in 0304 at ESPN. Remember when they were making sports

movies? So they hired me to write the movie and they had reporting from Gammons and I think Buster Olney. And you were one of the lead characters in it. And we made it in the script. We were doing it with Ben Affleck's company and we had a script and we're ready to shoot it. And then they were redoing their MLB deal and they decided Steinbrenner is like a villain in the, in the movie I wrote, go figure. But they decided they can't risk it. So they decided not to do it, but you were a key figure and there's a whole scene in the movie I wrote about you going to Arizona trip with, I think you went with Jed, right? Yeah. Yeah.

They're basically trying to talk shilling into it and wait, God, there was some wrinkle in there where you noticed something in his house. We negotiated in his house for a couple, over the course of a couple of days, including Thanksgiving. And, and, uh, um, they were kind enough to host us for Thanksgiving. And then, uh, I'm sure it was unrelated to to the cooking but jed got sick the next morning was throwing up all over the hotel room but so we negotiated back and forth during the course of the negotiation shilling who represented

himself no agent whatsoever um he would keep excusing himself to go to his his his study in in another part of his house and come back. And we didn't know what he was doing. We thought maybe he's calling a lawyer or calling an agent, getting some negotiating tips. And we finally reach agreement on the deal right before the window closes. And so he invites us back to the study to print out the agreement and sign it. And I notice, as he's printing out the agreement there on his desk is, is a dog-eared copy of this book called negotiating for dummies. That's what he'd been doing.

He'd been going back there and like referring to it. It's an amazing story. So then you, you thought you were going to get shilling and then A-Rod's done. It's, it's a wrap. And then all of a sudden it falls through, but that,

that seemed like, I mean, that was when it went to a whole other level all of a sudden it falls through. But that, that seemed like, I mean, that was when it went to a whole other level of, Oh my God, not only do the, have the Yankees owned us now for 80 years, but now they're, they're going to swipe in last second and grab this guy who was going to

change everything for us. Yeah. That was, that was going to be an Epic deal. It was, um, it was Manny and Nomar for, uh, A-Rod and Maglio Ordonez. Right. And then, and then it fell through when, when, uh, A-Rod to his credit,

uh, cause he was, he was the highest paid guy by like a standard deviation in all baseball. To his credit, he was willing to walk away from a significant part of his salary. It was like $25 million. Yeah, it was a lot. And then it just died in the politics of the whole thing. The union got involved and MLB got involved. It died. And then that was that.

We thought we still had a good offseason. And then I remember I was running errands, getting ready to lock everything down so I could go down to spring training. So it was the day before we left for spring training, and I heard on the radio that Aaron Boone at Torres ACL, there's that name again, Torres ACL, playing pickup basketball, and the Yankees traded for A-Rod.

Isn't that, you think, you had a couple unbelievable what-ifs early in your career, right? Like Billy Bean takes the Red Sox job, you don't have the red sox job so what happens to you well sounds like you do too if that movie had been made maybe you never would have gotten into documentary it would have been all drama very possible maybe i would have written scripts uh but what happens to you if billy bean takes the job i mean you're going to be a gm at some point but yeah i mean have you played that out in your head? I hadn't really thought about it too much. But I was leading the search to find our general manager. And so I was the one

talking to Billy and he did the contract with John Henry, but I was his biggest advocate trying to bring him over. I thought, this is great. I get, you know, I've been the assistant GM of my hometown team for a year. Now we get, you know, the best, you know, this like transformative GM in sports to come in. I can, you know, help them build a winner in Boston, learn from him, and then maybe someday go off and try to be a GM myself somewhere else. That's what I was kind of getting ready for with Billy. It's crazy.

Do you think like, and now his legacy is a really good Brad Pitt movie, other than some great time in Oakland, but he has this... I guess that begs the question, who was going to play me in that movie? If accuracy is a factor, it wouldn't have been anyone who looked like Brad Pitt.

That's for sure. So in 2003, you're 28. I got the job at 28, yeah. And you're dealing with a media that I would say is, let's be nice, we'll call them frisky. A frisky sports media. That's probably how you describe them in your movie synopsis. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe not a forgiving sports media. That's probably how you describe them in your movie synopsis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe not a forgiving sports media, and you're the young guy, and immediately it's there's some people trying to do the boy wonder thing, and then there's other people doing the, oh, this freaking guy. He should be like an intern. How is he running the team? But you know

how the Boston media works because you grew up in Boston. Yeah, thank God I had that advantage, right? Like all those hours I spent reading, you know, the Globe sports section in the morning, all the hours I spent watching Red Sox games on Channel 38 and on the time at Fenway Park and listening to Eddie Edelman in the sports huddle and all that, that was the best media training I ever could have had.

So, yeah, I think they cut me a little bit of a break because I was local. Definitely didn't cut me a break because I was young. I think there was some resentment there. And I tried to be smart and be really transparent about what I didn't know. I definitely didn't come in guns blazing. Like I had all the answers. I, you know, we hired Bill LaJoy, who's the GM of the 84 Tigers. He was a great mentor. And yeah, you know, we, we, we were open about, I think our motto,

our front office motto that year was we don't know shit. Right. Because baseball, baseball is that way right the second you think you have it figured out it'll humble you and then even to this day there's probably you know we probably understand like five percent of the game 95 of it is still a mystery just like existing out there in the ether that you have to work so hard to find any small insight into the game that's actionable so we would tell each each other, like, we don't know shit. Let's just work our asses off, do the best we can. And then I tried to be that way with the media to just get a little bit of rope.

But, yeah, it was crazy. It went from completely anonymous to the day I got the job, I walked to work. I lived a couple bucks. And then I walked downstairs and there's like five TV cameras right in my face following me on the way to work. So, yeah, it could have been a total meltdown. If we hadn't had a good, you know, that first year, those three teams were so much fun. We set like the all-time.

That team was really good. That might be my favorite Red Sox team of all of them. There's just so much personality. We absolutely raked. Like we just go into people's ballparks. We go into Yankee Stadium for a summer series and drop like 35 runs on them. And we couldn't really play defense. You know, the pen was kind of hit and miss.

But we just, we had such swagger and we absolutely crushed. And so, you know, we got to Game 7 CS my first year. We won the World Series my second year. So I got the credibility that came with that. But it could have turned out the other way. But you're right. Those sliding door moments, certainly. Well, and then you had the other sliding door moment,

just that A-Rod trade not happening. You get to keep Manny, who was such a huge part of two World Series and was my favorite Red Sox player of the century. No, absolutely. The way it turned out, obviously I wouldn't redo, but A-Rod, go back and look at, player of the century no absolutely the way it turned out obviously i wouldn't redo but you know a rod go go back and look at like we would have had him for i think i think it was three or four

years left on that deal the way we restructured he was he was like mvp twice and like the second best player in baseball for the other two years so obviously i don't want to do over at all and yeah it was a huge part of the personality and the production of that team. But it's interesting. He would have been able to stay at shortstop. Maybe he wouldn't have had certain figures looming over him in New York a little bit. Maybe his life turns out differently too

if he comes to Boston. Certainly, from a production standpoint, he was unreal in those years we would have had him. But I'm glad that fell through. Just one of many dumb luck instances in my career that have helped me out along the way for sure. You know, when you got hired, Gammons was so influential, you know, and he's still cranking all these years later.

But back then it was, he would, if he wrote in a column, like, this is a good hire. This person is good at it. You would just believe it. You would take it as face value. And I remember he was really selling you back then as like, this guy's ready. He's special. There's something. And I had nothing to go on other than that.

But I was like, well, listen, Gammas is all in. So there's got to be something here. I did think that helped you a little bit. I think so too. You know, he, I mean, he so deserves that position of influence in the game. He just, you know, he's respected for such a reason. But first of all, we're both from Brookline. So I have that advantage. And then I met him at this chance encounter with him.

So in 1998, when I was working for the Padres, we went to the World Series against yankees and i was you know just starting out in baseball operations i was doing the radar gun behind home plate i was i was uh like scouting the opposing pitchers and also putting the the velocity and the pitch type up on the scoreboard so i was there for you know every game so now it's the world series and now all of a sudden here's peter gammons who snuck down there because he wanted to watch from the great vantage point. We were closer to home plate than the pitcher was. It was like 50 feet behind home plate. It was a great view. And so we started talking. And we ended up watching those two games together. And I obviously knew our staff extremely well. And I knew the advance report and what we're trying to do. So I'm sitting

there saying like, yeah, we're going to bust this guy in. Then we're going to go away with an off speed pitch or, you know, Sterling Hitchcock, he's going to throw three splitters in a row right here. It's just a question of if Leibritz can block them. I'm worried about the wild pitch right here. Sure enough, like swing and miss on a splitter wild pitch. And so I was like predicting everything that would happen. And I was, I was just lucky and kind of on fire that night.

Yeah. I'm saying like, Oh wow. Yeah. I was just lucky and kind of on fire that night. Yeah. I remember him saying like, oh, wow. I think he was impressed. And then from that moment on, we hit it off and we have this great friendship to this day. But I think he advocated for me. I'm sure he opened doors for me I'm not even aware of. I think it's the most influential sports column of my lifetime. Yeah, both in terms of what it meant to the

readers and also it transformed the medium with the notes column right completely it it made like when i started really trying to figure out what i didn't want to do with my calm the the mindset was always like gamins would write this big ass column but it was like one of the highlights of my weekend this 15 minutes was like, he would put so much thought into it and there was so much in it. And you would just be like, Oh my God, I can't wait to dig in on this. And you know, his, he it's, I can't even think of a media parallel now with somebody who has the kind of influence he had, because at that time he wasn't really competing against a lot of people either. So when he had information in there, it was,

it was like nuggets left and right. And you would just wait until it came out in this Sunday column. It was weird. It doesn't work that way now. Total, complete new paradigm. He might've changed even the way like a whole generation of kids. Like when I'm writing emails now, every now and then, if I'm being lazy or else go like dot, dot, dot. And then put the, I do the same thing.

Yeah. I think him and Bob Ryan's basketball stuff, like, you know, we're just game changers in so many ways. We were so spoiled. Yeah. Totally. You think that's how every sports section is.

Then you move somewhere, you know, not quite the same. So in 04, we win, spoiler alert, and you're 30 at that point. Like, how did you handle it? You weren't married at that point, right?

Or were you? No, I wasn't married yet, but I had... You had a girlfriend? Yeah, my current wife, then girlfriend, I met like within the first two months of coming back to Boston in the spring of 2002. So I met her right away. So I had a girlfriend that whole time. So there's an alternate universe here where you and Brady are like the biggest bachelors in Boston for five straight years.

My friends tease me about that all the time. They're like, yeah, we love Marie, but if you hadn't gone out that night and met her, then all of a sudden, what they always say is, we would have been living entourage in Boston with the Red Sox winning World Series for a decade. When you got, I mean, after 04, did you, like the old joke is like, you never have to pay for a drink in Boston again.

Did you ever have to pay for a drink in Boston again? I mean, people were really great and still are. But it didn't, it didn't play out quite that way. I always joke around with Tito. So, so the next year, 05, you know, we had this off season, like half the team is free agents, right? So there, there was significant turnover from, from 04 to 05. And we had kind of a rough spring training towards the end of 05.

A bunch of guys got hurt. So we go to Yankee Stadium. And David Wells, I think, was forced into being our opening day starter because Schilling was hurt and someone else got hurt. So we get blown out on opening day at Yankee Stadium, lose the next day. So we're 0-2, I think it was. And then we have a day game, getaway day, and Tito starts having, like, heart palpitations before the game.

They take him to the hospital. I go to the hospital with him. So now it's the third game of the season. We're 0-2. We're watching on this little black-and-white TV at the hospital in New York, and we look at each other, and we're like, well, I guess the honeymoon, I guess the honeymoon's over. You know, cause we knew like if we lost that game and came back,

came back to Boston, it was like, the sky is falling again. And it kind of was like, you know, I was, I was wondering what the experience would be like. And it was pretty much back to normal where like, if, you know, if you blew a game in the bullpen, blew a couple of games on a road trip in the bullpen, like they wanted to, they blew a game in the bullpen blew a couple games on a road trip in the bullpen like they wanted to they wanted to hang in the bullpen by the time you got home so i mean there's a great level of appreciation but like the intensity and the criticism that comes with that intensity really didn't fundamentally change not now that

i'm gone and when i go back all people remember you know, 04 and 07 and it's great. But in the moment, like if you're the Red Sox GM or you're the Red Sox manager, even more acutely, in Tito's case, like when things aren't going well, it's hot, no matter what. You know, I've thought about that a lot because I remember writing a column maybe 20 years ago about the 20 rules of being a sports fan.

And one of them was like, when your team wins, you got to give them a grace period of like five years after you can't get mad about stuff winning. And the, the DNA of some of these cities. And I think Boston's like this. I think Philly's like this. I think New York's definitely like this.

You're just not wired that way. Your DNA is to almost default toward getting pissed off, being mad. You can't believe it. Like the theater of all of it. I would watch it through my buddy, Hench, who's the craziest Red Sox fan I know. And we had like, I remember like that 0-2, he was going nuts. And I'm like, we just won.

Why are you so upset? But some people, it's the DNA. You can't change who you are. I think it reflects the fact that baseball, while maybe best enjoyed from 10,000, or best understood from a distance, you have to step back to understand big trends in the game and the way the math of the game works and fits together.

It's always best enjoyed in the moment, from your seat in the grandstand, up close, first and second, two outs, seventh inning, what's going to happen on this pitch, and you're totally invested in the pitch. And that's how you want it to be. Like you want that fandom, you want fans to be like fully invested in that day's game and be passionate about it.

So it's hard to keep perspective, even if your team won the World Series the previous year. But I think that's what makes it great. You want that all-in feeling. Then you had a lot of drama. You ended up leaving. Then you came back. And I remember writing about it at the time

trying to psychoanalyze it, which is what we do on the internet when we write columns. But I always felt like the biggest piece of it was you worked for Lucchino, who was the president at the time. And you were like, you started out as like his intern and you kind of rose up. And I, I mean, I have this issue sometimes with people that, that work for me at the ringer of Grantland, where you, you have people

at certain points in your life and then they evolve and it's hard to see them as the person they are in the moment. Cause you still see them as that person that you knew from the very get-go. Do you think that was a piece of the struggle with Luchino? Yeah. That relationship is complicated. Relationships in general are complicated. And the dynamic you described, there's probably some merits to that. I'll say it wasn't personalized or directed at one person. We were going through, we had just won, and the organization was changing in ways that, and we went through a lot.

Like the Nomar trade I referred to earlier, that put a lot of stress on the organization. I was young and felt vulnerable and felt like, you know, piled on at that time. And I made just a big, young, dumb mistake of, I wanted to fix some things in the organization and make sure the values of the organization were such that I still really believed in the place and what we stood for and how we treated each other and how we went about our business. I shouldn't just kept showing up to work, right?

Like the last thing I wanted was drama or attention. I wanted to do it in private. And stupidly, you know, I'm a bit of an absolutist, but when I was younger, I was an extreme absolutist. And I felt like, you know, it's black and white. Like I can't work here another day. I can't sign another contract or I'll be selling out. And so I was like all proud of myself for that decision,

you know, sort of living my values. And the reality is all I did was bring all this unwanted attention, this microscope and this drama. If I could do it over again, I just would have said like, okay, I'm just going to keep showing up for work. So there's nothing publicly. Everything's fine. But like, hey, let's sit down. Let's have a series of meetings where said like, okay, I'm just going to keep showing up for work. So there's nothing publicly. Everything's fine. But like, hey, let's sit down.

Let's have a series of meetings where we are really honest with each other. Let's look under the hood. Let's get in front of some of these issues with the organization and make sure it's the exact place that we want it to be. Problem solved. But that was a big time, young, dumb mistake. It's funny looking back at that stuff. I mean, I was older when I's funny looking back at that stuff. I was older when I had some of my ESPN stuff, but now I look back, I'm like,

why did I handle it that way? Or why didn't I just do this? That's part of life, though. You learn as you go along. And if memory serves, you didn't even put on a gorilla suit to get out of it. No, there was no gorilla suit. I think it probably had other stuff.

You said something interesting after you left the Cubs that, uh, you thought maybe 10 years is the max when you're an executive for a franchise. And it actually seemed like you thought it was maybe even more than that. It was, if you're an executive anywhere, do you, what, what made you think that that was the right theory? Well, first of all, I don't think that applies to everybody because there are some, certainly didn't apply to Red Auerbach. And there are a lot of people who are great in their current jobs. We've been there more than 10 years. But actually, I got it from Bill Walsh, who I always really looked up to as a coach. And then I read a couple of his books and started to admire him even more just as a thinker and as a person.

And that was his rule was just that. And he applied it more broadly than coaching and more broadly than sports. He said like any leader of an organization or an institution after a period of time that he characterized as about 10 years, you should really look at whether it makes sense to move on and change both for your own benefit, because you start to lose a little bit of an edge when your environment and your surroundings are so constant for so long, You start to see the same patterns and the same cycles and be surrounded by the same people and solving the same problems over and over. But also, especially for the organization, because the leader's voice, the leader's message, the leader's style

doesn't resonate quite the same way on the 10th time around, the 10th time through. And I just feel like that resonated with me, with my personality, way on you know the 10th time around at 10th time through and so right you know you can and and i i just feel like that that resonated with me with my personality like i i tend to need the um the the stimulation of a new environment to bring out the absolute best in myself like if you look at my the best work i've done was you know the first like six seven years in in Boston um we were you know we were on like a pretty good heater there for for a while a lot of the moves we made and the performances and you know winning 95 games every year and then in the first uh five six years again

in Chicago like we had you know a rebuild that was just one of those times like everything went right um we hit on a number of trades and draft picks and everything came together. And then the end of my 10 years weren't nearly as successful in either place. I just think that that works for me. I have the type of personality where like, I can't manufacture the same kind of like urgency

and motivation and that sort of just like rush of new thinking and new ideas and rising to challenges in the same place after eight or so years as I can when I'm like immersed in a completely new environment with new people, all this new stimulus around me, it brings out the best in me. So I think there are people like that, but there are people who also probably just get better and better over time in their environments. Iger's written about this a lot. In both of his books, he wrote about how important it is to basically not have the same regime in

place for too long, because then you start kind of reacting instead of acting. With the Cubs thing, I think it's really funny that you won your first World Series in each place in this way that was basically

almost like a natural disaster movie. You can't win a weirder World Series than how the Red Sox go from being down 3-0 to then winning eight straight games. And especially the way those four Yankee games went, it's just like, you couldn't make it up like sports movie would reject it.

And then the Cubs thing, I mean, the whole journey, but then on top of like, they choke and it's, that's it. And it's like, Oh,

here we go. We choked. And then there's this fortuitous rain delay that allows everything to reset. And then they win the next training. It's like unbelievable. I can't believe that's how it played out. It's mind boggling. But you forgot the part where we were down 3-1. So we had a great comeback to get to a comfortable lead in game seven that slipped away in a hurry with a three-run inning. And then it just starts raining just out of nowhere.

What are the odds of that happening? It was nuts. And that probably won us the game. I mean, you give up a home run like that. The stadium was shaking. It was one of those times where you can feel it shaking around you our players were stunned we get we somehow get through the ninth inning chapman still out there he pitched a ton in that series and and and he had like he was going on fumes he somehow gets through the ninth inning and start it starts to rain and i remember i um i had to go

meet with commissioner manfred and chris antonetti of the Indians to figure out, like, what are we going to do? It's never rained in Game 7 of the World Series before. It's getting late. How are we going to handle this? So I took off from behind home plate where I was, cut through our clubhouse to get to this auxiliary room where we were going to have the meeting. And as I cut through the clubhouse, I didn't see any players. Typically, during a rain delay, when you go through the clubhouse, all your players are at their locker, taking their wet uniforms off, checking their phones. Everyone's at their locker doing their own thing. I didn't see anybody, so I got a little concerned. Then I looked in the weight room,

which had just a little glass part of people on the door. I looked in and in the small weight room, all 25 players were gathered around. And what happened was Jason Hayward and David Ross and a couple other veterans recognized that we were, we were shaken by what happened. The home run, they called everyone together. Aroldis Chapman was in tears um for what had happened in the game feeling like he had let everyone down and then one by one all the key veterans on the team stood up and said like you know this is not gonna happen like we're gonna we're gonna win this

for each other we're gonna win this for you chappy we wouldn't have been here without you like you know all all this hard work everything we put into this no one's going to take this away from us like it's going to stop raining we're going to go out and we're going to score a run that Schwarber who was leading off the next down he was sitting there with a bat in his hand like like a raging bull I couldn't wait to get back out there it was just it was so emotional guys were hugging each other rallying each other and then it was you know that team was really close so it's like all those relationships that you build, all those connections that you make from day one of spring training through six weeks of spring training, six months of the season,

three and a half weeks of a postseason, you get to this point, and their instinct after getting rattled like that, you said it was like a death blow, that kind of a home run on the road after having a three-run lead. Instead of having the instinct to go to their lockers and be by themselves and check their phones they rallied together picked each other up 17 minutes later Schwarber single Bryant fly ball moves the pinch runner on more at a second base they walk Rizzo and Zobris doubles down the line and we scored two and we needed two because they came back and scored one and we hang on by one.

It was absurd, just the odds that it would happen again that way. I also don't think it was an accident. It was a reflection of the fact that we were one of those teams that had those bonds, that kind of connection where you can come back from a disaster on the road

at the biggest moment like that. Yeah, the 04 Sox, talking about chemistry, I thought one of the biggest advantages they had was we just had a lot of guys who didn't care about the curse and didn't even grow up in America in some cases or were just complete idiots or whatever. And all the Boston DNA stuff bounced off them, whereas the 86 team,

like Gedman was from Worcester. Yeah. You know, he fucking got it. Bob Stanley, like understood. And you think like when the stakes go up, these guys actually understand what the stakes are versus like,

man, he doesn't know where he is. Yeah. An hour later. That was real. I mean, Oh three was the cowboy up thing where it started. And then 04 was the idiots.

But it was really, I mean, really huge personalities that created this bubble that allows you to have a bit of this, even if it's manufactured us against the world mentality or in the case of the environment in Boston, defining a universe for yourself where the talk shows don't matter, the writers don't matter, the fatalist fans don't matter. It only matters that you're in there doing shots of Jack Daniels before the game and not caring about anything. And David Ortiz was huge for that because he had such energy, such a smile, and he was able to relate and connect to all the corners of the clubhouse. Not just the Dominican dudes, not just the high school players, the college guys. Everybody bring them together.

Kevin Millar has one of the most energetic, dynamic, positive, upbeat personalities in all sports. I know a lot of people don't believe in chemistry, but trust me, his active role, he played and keeping it going. But you thought about it with the Cubs, right? That's how you end up gravitating to guys like Hayward and Ross because you knew they were guys that did that. Yeah, that was

sort of the evolution I've had as an executive. I came in, Kevin Towers taught me how to scout and I learned the analytical side from a bunch of people when I was in San Diego and by reading Bill James and ultimately working around him.

But when I came in with the Red Sox, I made most of my decisions on the numbers and relied more on our analytical group than on anything else. And then over time and the things that I saw and the experiences that I had, just seeing the impact of certain guys as force multipliers and how they can fundamentally change the outlook, I evolved.

And you have to factor in personality and makeup and group chemistry. And it's so simple. I mean, people still to this day say it doesn't matter. But I always ask them, well, when you go to work each day, in terms of your performance, does it matter if you have strong connections with the people around you? Does it matter if you can't stand things about your work environment and people around you? Can that bring you down and you don't perform quite as well? If you feel connected to the greater vision of what your company is trying to accomplish and understand your role in helping to accomplish those goals, does that help coax better performances

out of you? You feel supported by your colleagues in that mission. Does that bring out the best in you? Always, they say yes. It's the same thing in sports and in baseball, which is a game built on adversity. It's like, there are a few guarantees going into a season. The one guarantee is like, you're going to face myriad instances where you feel like all hope is lost and where like everything is going against you. Injuries are mounting up. You're in a team-wide slump, your bullpen's blowing games left and right.

That's going to happen to every team at some point. And the chemistry in the clubhouse, and if you have personalities that can help guys get through that and bring out the best in them, it absolutely does affect performance at the most important moments, I feel. You know, maybe it's just because I'm old, but I think with baseball teams, you almost kind of know in the first week. This Red Sox team we have this year, you can just see it.

Like they had that chemistry and it was right. Once they started doing the pushing the guys in the cart after they hit home runs, I was like, oh, we have a good. This is we have a chance to share. This is good. This is, you know, it was like 2013, I think, was when they had the beards. That team wasn't good. This is, you know, it was like 2013, I think was when they had the beards. That team wasn't good. Um, they won the world series and they won it because they had a couple of great players and they got some guys that hit at the right times, but that was like a chemistry title. It really was. Those guys all like playing with each other. Yeah. That was the, you know, the April, just what

they went through in April with the marathon bombings. The whole city was going through this incredible cathartic experience and they really connected with that too. But look, talent is hugely important. The Red Sox right now are doing a lot of things really well

that many other teams in baseball aren't doing, like putting the ball in play consistently. They've got a great adaptable approach to the plate where they're doing a lot of different things dynamically. A lot of their pitchers have shown improvements in certain pitches. It's very real talent-wise. Look at Theo watching the Red Sox. I watch it all, baby.

I work at MLB all 30. People opportunity viewer. We have good arms and we put the Red Sox. I watch it all, baby. I work at MLB all 30. People opportunity viewer. We have good arms and we put the ball in play. I like this team. I've watched. I quit the Red Sox last year for a year when they traded Mookie, which I still have an emotional recovery. One of the reasons I agreed to do this was because I feel like deep down,

you're a huge baseball fan and the NBA has just monopolized too much of your time over the last so many years you're right i've been watching more baseball because it's first of all when when you're when your own team is actually good and fun to watch that's going to be a determiner i think basketball you can watch bad teams. Bad baseball is pretty tough. Well, let's just put a pin in that because I can't watch teams I don't care about in basketball. There's no competitive tension throughout. I'm saying if you have your own bad team, then you can audible and root for them to lose. I got you. You can like, oh, at least we'll tank.

Now I have some sort of stake. Bad baseball is just once it gets to August, it becomes a slog. No, baseball. So they did some stuff. And I know you're an advisor. What's your official role? Consultant? Yeah, I'm officially a consultant for on-field matters.

But Commissioner Manfred brought me in to help take a look at the product and try to find ways to move closer to the very best version of baseball. And that's really all we're doing is, you know, it's kind of a, you know, you're going to get criticism no matter what. If you don't change, you're going to get criticism because people poke holes in the product. If you do change things, you get a lot of pushback but i think the way to look at these rule changes and i'll ask you like in in your mind and this is a question i want all baseball fans to ask themselves is like what is the very best version of the game to you what is baseball baseball at its most entertaining and its most joyful um at its most action-packed what

does that look like to you? And it'll be different for everybody, depending on what era you grew up in and what your favorite team was and all that. But we've been asking hundreds, thousands, and through surveys, tens of thousands of baseball fans and players and executives and scouts and everybody else. And you do see some common trends

in what the best version of the game means to people. And those trends are that I think people believe the best version of the game involves more action than we have now. So fewer strikeouts, more ball in play. It involves more athleticism on display all over the field than we see now. It involves a faster pace of play than we see now. And so because there's this pretty strong consensus about what the best version of the game looks like, I think we'd be negligent, and the commissioner feels we'd be negligent, if we didn't work really hard to try to find ways that we could nudge the game in that direction,

just to give fans more of what they want and less of what they don't want without compromising the essence of baseball. Like the last thing we want to do is reinvent the wheel. Like I think the game is, I think it's the greatest game in the world. Like you could argue that the rhythm of baseball is our rhythm as a country. Like we don't want to take away from what has made the game so great, but there is a very best version of baseball, and we would all benefit from pushing the game a little bit closer to it.

If you ask fans in surveys what their favorite events are when they go to a game or watch on TV or stream a game, it's doubles, triples, and stolen bases in that order. Maybe it was triples, doubles, stolen bases, but those are the top three events. And triples, I think triples were number one. Triples, if you go back to our last year's stats, lowest rate in baseball history. Lowest rate of doubles in baseball history lowest rate of baseball history doubles lowest rate of doubles frequency since 1992 and and stolen bases going back to 19 our last full season lowest frequency of stolen base attempts since i think 1964 so the three things that fans like the most triples doubles

and stolen bases that all involve like action athleticism players in motion players in motion like all over the field suspense we're giving this style of play that we have and we'll get into why in a second but primarily driven by the strikeout rate problem but um we're giving fans problem it's like an epidemic epidemic pandemic yeah it's it's brutal um but we're giving fans less of what they like and the things that they don't like, like pitching changes and dead time. There's more of those things. So it's important to just be thoughtful and intentional there are in the game and how much the game has fundamentally changed. It's obviously still a great product, but is there a point in the future when players are so good at three-pointers, three-point percentages go up so high that now the entire game is just a three-point shooting contest? At that point, I guarantee the NBA will start

experimenting, maybe in the G League or whatever. They'll make the court a little bigger, move the three-point line back a little bit, maybe change the dimensions of the lane, just to see how that impacts the style of play. Maybe that brings back a beautiful interior passing game or a great post-up game that maybe fans want some more balance and want some more of those things. So it's the same thing in baseball, just trying to be mindful of the landscape, figure out what variables we can adjust respectfully without interfering the essence of baseball to try to bring about the best version of the game. Yeah, I could see basketball getting rid of corner threes just completely. They just change the line so the corner three is actually just a two

and just to try to change the geometry. You can keep it. If you made the court bigger, then you can push them back enough where it's still. Yes. Right now, or they could change the point scoring system. It's the fact that a three is 50% more valuable than a normal field goal. Like if it was four and three instead of three and two,

that would change the math. It would change the shot distribution fundamentally too. So those are some of the things we're thinking about on the, in baseball analogous type dynamics. So for baseball, I've thought about this a lot and sometimes in class on the, uh, ESPN classic,

whatever that channel is called now, where they, they show the old baseball games and MLB will show some of the old games too. And the pace is so different in the seventies. And so, so, so we fix one thing, right?

The pitching change rule, I think has been really good. The fact that you have to throw to at least three batters before you get yang that that's really helped. Cause that was out of control. That was awful. Everybody hated it, but just fundamentally, I just think the, the, you've talked about pitch clocks and all that stuff. It should be 15 seconds max. I don't know why the guy gets to step out of the box. I've never understood it. There was a pitcher the other day. God, what team was he on that was shutting

the Red Sox down the 8th or 9th inning? He was like a minute between pitches. And it's just like, how do we allow this? So just fundamentally, that has to change over everything. Yeah, I agree with you. Everyone I talk to about these issues, I give them a homework assignment of like,

go find an old game from the 70s or 80s even and just watch it. Like the other day, the 75 World Series was on. I was watching. Louis Tiant was throwing a pitch every 8 to 10 seconds and couldn't take your eyes off it. It was like a beautiful rhythm of the game. Every time he took a breath, he was taking a beautiful rhythm of the game every time he took

a breath he was taking a pitch he's got the ball back out the sign and through and this isn't like nobody on nobody out this is like you know two guys on and johnny bench at the plate like you know a big spot and you know pitchers right now it's it's on average i think 23 seconds between pitches with guys on base it's over 30 seconds right i Right. A lot of the time. And I agree with you. I think just it's a fundamentally better product when you got guys like Louis T on the mound. And this was league-wide. Like, that's just the way the game was.

So we're open to any solution to try to get that pace back. It does, you know, there has been a fairly successful experiment in the minor leagues with pitch timers, a pitch clock. And even the greatest critics of the pitch clock, baseball lifers, minor league managers have been in the game forever who wanted nothing to do with it. What we found was there was a new normal established after four weeks where a month in, everyone was just pretty used to it. And yeah, there were some loopholes in it that were exploited, and you have to write the rule pretty aggressively and find ways to close the loopholes.

But ultimately, players got used to it, fans got used to it. However we get there, a faster pace is, I think, important for the future of the game. It's an easy fix, because here's why we know it's easy because it's the way we used to be able to do it. Fundamentally, baseball players have been able to adjust to this and it's just like

you don't get to step out of the box, grab your dick, grab your balls again, change your bat, take your glove. I do feel like it's just fixable. The guys on base thing has to be dealt with because of sign stealing. And so there's a potential that there's a technology component in the solution

too, where MLB has been working with some technology partners, and it's not far away at all to have some technology where a catcher can have a wristband with all the pitches that the pitcher throws in locations, and he just presses the button, and the pitcher is the only one who hears it with a little technology sewn into his hat. And that right there would cut down on all those delays where you have to run through three sets of signs.

You have to sit down with guys on base and change all the signs. So, you know, if, and when there's a pitch clock in the big leagues, it would make sense to do it with some corresponding technology that allows, you know, because there's a lot of information in the game, you know, a lot of analytics in the game. And I think you can make a strong argument. There's too many in the game right now, especially when it slows down the pace of play,

you have to process all this information like fans don't buy tickets to the ballpark to see players process information they want to see action they want they want they want to see players play so anything we can do to you know put let players play turn the game back over to the players keep information like in the dugouts and in the clubhouse and improve the pace of play would be beneficial. My theory on the home run strikeout thing, other people have made this, I'm not creating it, but I just think the shifts,

to me it's all tied together, right? If you're a right-handed hitter and you're prone to hit it to the left side and they're playing three infielders on the left side, you have five fielders and you're just reducing your chance you're the left side, you have five fielders and you're just reducing your chance. You're going to get hit because that's where you hit it. Why wouldn't you try to hit a homer at that point?

Why wouldn't you swing harder? Like that's the part where I hate the shift. I, and maybe partly because they used to defend Ortiz this way. And so it was a personal thing, but I just don't like it. And I think if we got rid of it, I think we would get some of the stuff you were talking about with doubles and triples. So a lot of people feel the way you do.

And I think there's a lot of merit to that. And you'd be happy to know that we're experimenting in the minor leagues this year with the first half, we're not letting any infielders go into the outfield so it'll reduce the depth so that advantage you get by the second baseman or whoever whichever infielder playing short right field against the left-handed hitter that's gone because depth is a big part of it you expand your range you are and then in the second half we're likely to experiment with requiring two infielders on either side of the bag to essentially prohibiting the

shift. But I will say this, I personally feel like the shift is more a symptom of the problem than the cause. I think the strikeout, you call that an epidemic, the league-wide strikeout rate is essentially 25%. We used to be 15, right? Yeah. When you were your son's age, it was 12.5%. So it was half of what it is now. And it's a fundamentally

different... So 1980s, it was 12.5%. It's 25 now. So it's a fundamentally different game when one quarter of the hitters

are striking out in their plate appearances as opposed to one eighth. Fundamentally different and i think worse game you know when you when you just don't when you have the ball out of play that much um and and and it's it's driven by um this this strikeout rate is is the biggest problem and it's driven essentially by by the fact that pitchers are so good right now more so than

badder incentives and batter behavior. So if you think about modern pitching, there's never been a time in the history of the game when pitchers had so much going for them. We understand so much more now about training, physical conditioning. We can actually train for velocity. And if you look at the chart, the velocity in the game has just gone up and up and up each of the last 15 years. The average fastball right now is 94 miles per hour. That was a flamethrower. Even 10 years ago, 91 was the average fastball. Now it's 94. Do you think it's because it's almost like where shooting got better in NBA because the mechanics and the repetition, they just got better at it.

And same thing with pitching. Yeah. I mean, baseball as an industry has weaponized data and technology for pitchers exponentially better than they've done so for hitters. for velocity, then gets a full biomechanical breakdown of his body, of his delivery, the kinesiology of his delivery, how it moves. Then he gets to go into a pitch lab and get recommendations from an analytic staff about making fine-tuned adjustments in his grip to get a little bit more spin on his pitches, therefore get a little bit better movement. You can optimize individual pitches.

You can optimize attack plans. You can optimize repertoires. And then at the same time, so pitchers just have more going for them. Our understanding is so much greater. And even outside the 30 organizations too, companies like Driveline have just done an unbelievable job at helping pitchers optimize velocity and certain traits that lead to swing and miss. And so they've never had more going for them.

And at the same time, there's never been a time in baseball history when less is asked of pitchers than is asked right now. If you go back a generation, what was the job of the starting pitcher? It was to get into the eighth inning or seventh inning, eighth inning, or finish the game if you could. That was the starting pitcher's responsibility. Now, and there were 10 or 11 pitchers on the staff. And so you had to give your manager innings or your whole team would recruit.

And so when you have to prioritize volume and innings, then you have to factor in efficiency and get some early count outs. You have to pace yourself a little bit. You might come out throwing 88 and then you dial it up to 92 or 93 when you need to or you need to strike out. But pitching was more of an art back then. And now it's more of a science.

In a lot of places, not for every pitcher and not for every team, not in every instance, but now the job for a lot of starting pitchers is defined not by like, let me hand the ball to the closer or,

or, or, you know, shake the catcher's hand at the end of the game. Now it's, I need to miss as many bats as I can,

punch out as many guys as I can. And if the manager has to come get me in the fifth or sixth inning, so be it. I've done my job. There's nine guys behind me who throw 97 in the bullpen.

We're going to punch out even more guys. Right. So pitchers have more going for them and less is asked of them. And they're just doing a phenomenal job at using the technology and using the data to throw harder, have their breaking stuff also, which is at a greater velocity, move more. And it's fundamentally changed the game. A 25% strikeout rate, which is the league-wide rate right now, is Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan's career strikeout rate. So the entire league right now is striking out batters at a rate

as if they were Nolan Ryan or Sandy Koufax. Bob Gibson had a career strikeout rate less than 20%. You know, Roger Clemens never had his career strikeout rates under 25%. Dwight Gooden in his Cy Young season had a 25% strikeout rate. It's like when he was Dr. K, punching everybody out. His strikeout rate is the exact same as the league-wide strikeout rate right now. So that tells you how this pitcher's stuff is creating these strikeouts and it's keeping the ball out of play. And there are consequences, right? So your son, your daughter go to a game, guess how long they have to sit

in the stands on average before they see a ball put in play? Oh my God. Probably like four minutes. It's three minutes and 56 seconds. Yeah. So that's how long they have to wait just to see one ball in play, let alone a double or triple or stolen base or one of these opportunities for motion and athleticism. So that's directly correlated to the strikeout rate. Throughout baseball history, directly correlated to the strikeout rate, right? Like throughout baseball history, batting average and strikeout rate have like almost a directly inverse relationship. So when, when, when batting average goes up,

strikeout rate goes down, when strikeout rate goes up, batting average goes down. And right now the league is hitting 232. With a 25% strikeout rate. So I think a lot of the, you know, I talked earlier about just trying to nudge the game in the direction of the very best version of baseball. So like this is the biggest issue, I think, is fixing the pitcher-batter dynamic, getting that back into balance,

getting that into equilibrium. Well, they did this in the late 60s. Well, yes. That was when the stats, you can go back and look. Yeah. But what's interesting is, so they lowered the mound by 10 inches, a significant amount. But what they also did at the same time was they changed the strike zone. So a few years earlier, they had really enlarged in the strike zone. And so what we think upon going back and studying the data is that it was actually the strike zone that was leading to the pitchers dominating that much. And so at the same moment that they lowered the mound, they also shrunk the strike zone. And we think that's what led the hitters to have the bounce back that they had.

So we have looked at lowering the mound again. But, you know, the way modern pitching is with the reliance on the elevated four-seam fastball, you know, all these strikeouts are basically coming from, like, optimized four-seamers up above the, at the top of the zone and above the barrel, and chase breaking balls below the zone. Four-seam fastballs, elevated four-seam fastballs, are actually more effective from a lower release point. So if you lower the mound again, you might just be doing, you might turn a lot of four-seam guys into Craig Kimbrell,

you know, with a low release point they get above the barrel. So we are intrigued at seeing the results of what it would look like if you move the mound back slightly, hence the experiment in the Atlantic League this year. You know, 60 feet, six inches is an important number in baseball, but it's actually the result of a time like this. There was a time in the 19th century where pitchers started striking out a lot of hitters. All of a sudden, pitchers figured out the overhand delivery, figured out how to spin the ball, and the game started to evolve from this game

where the ball was constantly in play, and if you had really good fielders, you would win, or good hitters, you'd win, into a batter versus pitcher contest where strikeouts were starting to dominate. And so they moved the mound back five feet. You know, someone, a prominent writer came out and said like, baseball is a game, you know, played by nine men, not two.

In other words, like we need to, and so they moved it back. And, you know, it's not anything anyone's rushing into. It might not be part of the answer. If it turns out that player safety is compromised at all, then we can't do it. But in the second half of the Atlantic League season, we're going to see what it looks like at 61 feet 6 inches because that extra 12 inches buys the hitter an extra 1,

100th of a second of reaction time. That's equivalent to a tick and a half of velocity so like you're rolling back the clock like 10 years and now the average fastball instead of being 94 it's going to seem more like 92 and a half and we'll see what that does for contact rates but we just have to be open-minded you know look we can tweak uh the play rules we can tweak the ball itself. We can look at some of the dimensions on the field. There are a lot of different variables. We're changing the size of the bases in the minor league this year

to try to encourage the running game and make the in-play environment a little bit friendlier to hitters. So it's incumbent on us to find out as much as we can about which of these changes work, what variables are most important, so that we can work collaboratively with the players who also have an interest in making the game the most exciting version of the sport. And then just nudge us towards that very best version of baseball. Well, it seems like the NBA was in this conundrum a couple of times where they had to change

the illegal defenses and allow to zones, basically depending on how the coaches mastered what was going on. And unfortunately, I think for baseball, people have mastered some of the rules that were in place. Yeah, I think pitching, yeah. You could say that modern pitchers have mastered the art of bat missing. I think that's fair. Yeah, and how do you fix that? I don't like the

runner starts on second base and extra innings rule. I just intensely dislike it. I would rather we just had ties after 12 innings. I really would because I think at that point it's so arbitrary. I don't think it's like college football. I like that they're trying

stuff though. I think the seven inning double headers has actually been a good idea. And I, and I think they're fun to watch, but there's a different level of intensity to them. There was a twins Red Sox game. Um, I think last week when all of a sudden, you know, you're like, Oh shit, they're bringing, it's the sixth inning, they're warming up, they're closer. It just, it made it go faster and I liked it. And I thought that was a good wrinkle, but I would rather have ties the next

year. I think what I'm taking from it is that, you know, both those rules were tested in the minor leagues, but they ultimately were adopted because we were playing under COVID conditions, which we all hope never happens again. But the world didn't end, right? People still watch baseball. People still love the game.

Sure, there are critics of both rules, but there was successful implementation of something new. And we could see how it impacted the game on the field, how it impacted the fans' experience, learn from it, move on, maybe perfect the rule moving forward once we get back to regular circumstances. I think that's what we need to do as an industry. If we just put our head in the sand and pretend like a 25% strikeout rate and climbing is normal, we risk moving farther away from the best version of the sport. So I'm, you know, the minor leagues and I'm sensitive to, you know, prospects haven't been able to take the field for a couple of years. They need to develop. So I appreciate that they're

playing with these experiments. But I think the experiments are really important because we need to find out what works, what doesn't work, what improves the product, what maintains the essence of baseball. And then we can take a whole suite of changes together with the players and try to chart the best path forward. All right. I took too much of your time. I have four quick questions for you. One, are you ready to replace Williams with Ortiz in Boston Mount Rushmore? It's a big argument.

I've been in multiple, multiple arguments here. Because the argument for Williams is he's the greatest hitter of all time. He can't take him out. And the argument for Ortiz is he almost, he didn't single-handedly, but he was the most important instrument to this world that we live in now

where the Red Sox have won four times as many World Series this century as the New York Yankees. And he was involved intimately with three of them and completely changed everything. And he should be on there. Yeah. So I think my answer to that is, and I have a huge, I wouldn't have a job without David Ortiz.

And I have a huge Ted Williams photo framed on the wall of my office. My favorite player of all time. Greatest head who ever lived. So my answer to that, it'll be the one thing I've ever taken from Donald Trump. When he went to Mount Rushmore, he posed for like a selfie as the fifth face on there. I think that's what we have to ask Poppy

to do is like kind of position his head right next to Ted Williams and take the picture. That's fair. You think like it's been over a hundred years of Boston sports. Maybe we need more than just four. It's a tough one though because I think Bird, Brady, Orr, and Russell

all have to be on there too. So that's six. So maybe it's a six-person Mount Rushmore. You can't have it without Russell or without Bird. You can't have it without Orr and you can't have it without Brady. So maybe it's just six people. All right. So we solved that. There's probably no way to answer this,

but drunker fan base post-title 2004 Red Sox or 2016 Cubs. Here's the caveat. I'm going from the moment they won the next 60 hours. Next 60 hours? Okay. A collective blood alcohol level, what do you think was higher? I will go with Chicago because one thing they have over Boston, they're more into day drinking. And with the Red Sox, I feel like I was more, you know, in bars and in houses at night and in Chicago after they suffer through the

winter, any opportunity, you know, if the temperature, if the sun's out and the temperature is over like 48 degrees, they're, they're having a good time doing a lot of outdoor day drinking. So I'll probably give it to the Cubs for that one. Plus it was 108 years versus 86. I had Chicago as like a minus 200 favorite for that question, but I'm glad you were able to confirm it. What is the next,

obviously you're going to do some other gig at some point. Is it more realistic for you to become basically what you were before with the Cubs? Is it more realistic for you to become like a commissioner? Is it more realistic for you to become the face of an ownership group? What, what, where are you five years from now?

Uh, I don't, I mean, I definitely would love to have a third chapter in baseball. I just had so much fun with the Red Sox experience and with the Cubs experience that I'd like to do that one more time. Um, with, with the right people. Listen,'d like to do that one more time with the right people. Listen, it can't be the

fucking Yankees, all right? I know you won't, but you just never know with this stuff. That would be the all-time wrestling heel turn anyone's ever done. No. Well, Brian Cashman is in good stead. No, I'm saying like down the road, a million years. The Yankees have to

be out. They're crossed off. No, I grew up and there are two things you couldn't do in my house, like vote Republican or root for the Yankees. So I'd love to have a third chapter somewhere. I don't really care what form it takes, but I love... Ownership is interesting, I'll be honest, seen i've seen really positive examples of of just and i think it's underrated how impactful the right ownership group can be in transforming a city and like addressing real problems in a city becoming like civic institutions that make a real difference and then obviously you know you build a great organization winning organization around the right kind of values it It's just a transformative experience.

And so that's interesting. My other job right now, besides the baseball consulting gig, I'm working for Arctos Sports Partners, which is a private equity firm that's doing some groundbreaking things with sports ownership. So I'm trying to learn more about that side. So if it all came together where, you know, I could impact a baseball operation and be part of ownership in the right spot with the right people, that'd be pretty sweet. Would you have ever traded Mookie Betts? You have to answer. You can't weasel out of it. Like, would you have ever traded Mookie Betts? Like, honestly, I know you have a history with Henry. I know all that stuff, but would you ever have actually traded him?

I mean, I'll turn the question back. 2011 was my last year of the Red Sox. That was the year I'd be drafted with Betts. The players that you draft, you end up feeling a real connection to. And I do think you see

those guys differently. The guys that you knew from the time they were in high school, you see them grow up, you get to know their families. Obviously, things get complicated when players become among the very, very best in the game or have arguments to be the best player in the game. And salaries get that high. So I'm not going to go there and put myself in the...

The Boston media crosshairs? I'll just say he's a special kid and obviously an incredible player. And yeah, you root for the guys you draft. You gravitated toward generational talent. You don't have to answer. I just don't think you would have traded them. I do think the Dodgers ripped off your Cubs blueprint, though,

in a lot of ways, right? Where they had a lot of money, but they also tried to build up their farm system and basically did the blown-out mega version of what you did in Chicago. Yeah, they've grown it, the model in a lot of ways too. They were, baseball player development changed. It probably went through a whole generation in like five years with the way

data and technology have changed that landscape. And they were very much on the forefront of that. I think we won in 16 and that was right when a lot of things were changing. They've been, along with a couple other organizations, have done a great job being out front on that. I can tell you don't like them. I do. You can just see it from

your eyes. You don't like the Dodgers. My mom grew up a big Brooklyn Dodger. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Dodgers. All right. So the most important things we settled were you never would have traded Mookie Betts. Ortiz over. No, we didn't settle Mount Rushmore at all. We didn't settle Mookie Betts.

But I thought I love talking Red Sox Cubs. I love talking about the future of baseball. And I realized this year that I felt like maybe I was outgrowing baseball in some way. I won my four titles. The game was starting to change, but you know, when it came back this year, I've, I've been more into this season than, you know, as, as many as like any in the last 15. And it's nice. It's important. I'm glad, I'm glad it's here. I'm glad they're tinkering with it. I don't know what the right answers are, but I think that's what makes this so fun. Yeah. Look, I don't think anyone knows all the

right answers. And I'm trying to take my personal preferences and my opinions out of it and just listen to the fans because that's what's most important and then find out what works. And so that's the basis of a lot of these experiments. But I'm glad you're into baseball this year. I think ratings are up. A lot of people are engaged. It's kind of a golden age for young players. You look at Tatis and... It really is. You can see it from the baseball card industry.

There's so many of these dudes that everybody is... It's almost like what happened with basketball in the earlier part of this decade. So maybe when we see how some of the role changes work in the minor leagues and see how the Red Sox season turns out, I'll come back and we can talk about the best way forward.

I would love to have you again. I will say, as much as I despise the Mookie trade, I love Verdugo. He's like, it's weirdly, he's, I mean, he's a completely different player than Trott, but he's weirdly Trott-Nixy combined with like a couple other Red Sox players that I've liked over the years. He's good at bats.

He knows what he's doing in left. He's great chemistry guy. So I, it's not like they botched the trade. I just, the movie thing hurts. He does a lot of different things. Well,

and he plays with a real attitude, which is pretty infectious, I think over there so yeah and it fits with what the way Cora likes to run things too so if Downs turns into something who knows I still wish we had a trade movie it was

it was great to see you yeah I'm going to take you up on your offer I'm bringing you back when we get in the pennant race sounds great alright thanks alright that's it for the podcast. Don't forget about the Rewatchables coming on Monday and we're going to have another podcast

late Sunday night. This podcast was produced by the one, the only, my guy, Kyle Creighton. Have a good weekend.