Meg Riley (2:44)

It is early opening day.

Ben Lindbergh (2:46)

But also wbc, we got World Baseball Classic coming.

Meg Riley (2:49)

Yes.

Ben Lindbergh (2:50)

Which is I think March 5th I think that starts so March 5th to 17th, something like that. So that period, which would typically be the lull in spring trading where we've kind of gotten over the excitement of spring training games starting such as it is, let alone pitchers and catchers reporting in mid February and we're counting, counting down the days till opening day. And you're hoping that your players won't get hurt before the season starts? Well, you'll still I guess hope that they don't get hurt but in the WBC instead. So I am very curious to see how big it gets this right because there's a lot of pent up anticipation. Like last WBC in 2023 was way bigger I think in terms of how it captured attention in the US at least. And so now with a few more years of anticipation, I wonder whether it will reach an even higher level of enjoyment and attention. I think so.

Meg Riley (3:48)

Yeah. I do think it's worth differentiating the way that the WBC is engaged with internationally versus how it is engaged with here. But the gap between those things is rapidly collapsing in a way that I think is really terrific. It does make me think that we're just, I don't know, I don't know about the viability of baseball is an Olympic sport, but that's a separate conversation. So you know, I think that and something we'll have to contend with soon. Yeah, but I, I think that the, there has been a shift among American players about the wbc. The, the perception of that event among players has really changed in the last, call it 10 years and the, the desire for big, big stars from the US to participate is I think a lot higher now. I don't want to suggest that like is what is important for that event in terms of it being good or exciting, but it does change its profile in the US And I think that having really good players from the US compete raises the overall level of competition. I still think that you're going to have a pitching problem because you've gotten all of these guys who have said that they're going to be a part of the US squad and it's very exciting and goodness knows I love to see Cal and Aaron judge on the same, same team but who's throwing the innings? You know, who's throwing those innings. And I also, I also want, no, I feel a little, you know, nervous saying this but I think that we could maybe have a better selection of coaches and managers for Team USA and it's a, it's a tricky thing, honestly. A trickier thing than securing individual player participation during the wbc because yeah, you know, who's really busy during spring training as a big league manager.

Ben Lindbergh (5:47)

Yeah. You can't really get special dispensation like let's just take Dave Roberts and send him to manage the WBC team. Or you know, you can't, can't be away from big league camp if you're a manager. So that immediately writes off those 30 people and then it ends up being. Yeah. Former managers or, or MLB Network commentators personalities.

Meg Riley (6:08)

And look, you know, and, and you, you're. You limited too. Like if you're a college coach. If you're some hotshot college coach. Well, you can't, that's during the college baseball season. Right. You can't take off time. So I appreciate that there's some timing issues that prevent, you know, your, it's not like Steven Vogt can just go hang out. And the way that they've structured the locations this year, it is a little harder certainly for the Arizona based folks because there aren't going to be games here like there was the last time. But I don't know, I just, I just like to. Everyone could just think about it, you know, they could just think. They could just think about it. And I don't have anything against Mark Garrosa, like personally, but I also felt like, you know, we could have had a. Anyway.

Ben Lindbergh (6:54)

Oh, I, I do think it's become kind of a plum assignment.

Meg Riley (6:57)

I would say it is a plum assignment.

Ben Lindbergh (6:59)

Yeah, totally. Like in terms of the, the prestige, the attention, the prominence, all of that. You mean. Yes, you should be able to get the pick of the litter, whatever the litter is left.

Meg Riley (7:10)

Right.

Ben Lindbergh (7:10)

Whatever litter is on major league coaching staffs, which is a lot of the litter to be fair. But like, you know, you can lure out of retirement or temporary retirement, someone who could just. And they've done that in the past. But yeah, you'd think you could really entice anyone who is available. So it's, it's pretty cushy gig. It doesn't take that long and it's, it's playoff atmosphere. Right. It's like international attention and national pride.

Meg Riley (7:39)

At stake just long enough to be a problem for anyone who's currently managing a big league roster. But no, I think that, I think that it's very exciting. It was so much fun the last time. It had, you know, really great individual moments. I think the quality of play was really terrific and I look forward to it. I think that the WBC is awesome and you know, I'm going to need to have something to watch on the delay when I'm up late editing ppr.

Ben Lindbergh (8:09)

So I guess the only way in which it isn't a plum assignment is navigating the many constituencies. You serve as the manager of that team because you don't have free reign. It's very much a collaborative endeavor. If anything, you're sort of subject to the ground rules you are given. You know, yes, you have certain players and then you basically have to abide by what the teams and maybe to some extent the players also dictate in terms of their usage, especially with pitchers, of course. But yeah, everyone's number one priority really. Even as the WBC has become super important, at least on the US Team, you're still going to prioritize the MLB regular season. And so you do have to abide by all of those restrictions.

Meg Riley (8:56)

And look, it was a fluky thing. I don't think that anyone would say that it was the result of like indifferent managing or risk taking behavior. But like literally all you have to do is look to the last WBC to see why, why teams are concerned. Right? Because Edwin Diaz was just not available for the entire season basically because he got injured celebrating in the wbc. Again, that's not like an indictment of the event. And I don't think that it was the fault of his team or his manager. It wasn't Edwin Diaz's fault. It was a freak fluke thing. And it could have just as easily happened on, you know, a mound in Florida as well. I guess it did happen on a mound in Florida, on a mound in a, you know, in the Mets, you know, in, in Port St. Lucie as it could anywhere else.

Ben Lindbergh (9:44)

I guess he might not have been celebrating quite, quite as effusively if it had been a spring training game because he heard himself sort of celebrating a win. But, but other than that, yes, guys get hurt in spring training all the time.

Meg Riley (9:55)

Right. And so it's, you know, it's not as if there's no risk to, there's just risk to playing baseball and there's risk to being a pitcher. And that risk is I don't think like meaningfully heightened in any way by the fact that you're playing in international competitions. But I do think that like you have the reality of there being reticence around that because you want goldarn it. If you're gonna get hurt on a mound, it's gonna be for the Mets. I mean, not always, although historically often. But I think that all of that aside, I do not want anyone to think that I am down on the WBC as an event. I think it is a wonderful event. I think to see the pride of place that a lot of the players have. The profound sense of sort of pride and belonging for representing their country, particularly for the athletes who aren't Americans. Although I think the Americans feel a pride of place too. Right. But it's like this is a meaningful thing for the players. You get to see a bunch of guys who you maybe would never see otherwise or haven't seen in a long time. You get to learn fascinating things about everybody's secondary citizenship. You know, like I had no idea you were Italian. That's great. And you know, I think as we saw last time, like when you have countries that put forth like a good team and maybe go a little bit further or play a little bit better than was expected, like it has knock on effects like you know, the, the team from Great Britain like that, that meant something to kids over there. And that's not a baseball country, at least not primarily. So I think the WBC is great and I can't wait to see them figure. Way to put Clayton Kershaw, Team usa.

Ben Lindbergh (11:44)

Yeah, maybe that'll be the actual end of his pitching career. But yeah, take heart everyone. If you are counting down the days to meaningful MLB action, there are fewer days to count down. Especially if you're into the wbc, which I think a lot of people will be and should be, then you're looking at a month shorter off season than we used to have and that's a significant difference. So that's the glass half full perspective.

Meg Riley (12:11)

And I will just remind everyone that all of the lead home stuff is just available through MLB TV now. So if you are hankering for baseball, there's baseball to be had. There's a couple more weeks of fall league. But more conveniently for you, like all you have to do is navigate over to those lead home games and you can watch, you know, some guys who are going to be big league relevant next year, some guys who you are going to be delighted to remember and, and I hope that I'm trying to remember if we got the commercials from the doctor Last year, the first year I watched lidome in a serious way, which was 2020, we just had to subscribe through a service and we just got the commercials from the doctor and that was so fun. It's just fun. Commercials from other countries are so much more fun than your own because you're like, I don't know what I'm being Advertised. I mean often Presidente Golden Light. You get to hear the lead home announcers. You get to hear the guy. There's one announcer and now I'm blanking on the team. He primarily calls and I feel so embarrassed, but he does a, you know, he has a couple of words that he consistently says in English during his calls and then obviously the rest of the broadcast is in Spanish. And he will go, here's the pitch. And then he also goes, I can't believe it. Like when something cool happens and it's just, you know, it's a good fun time and you can pick a, you can pick a squad and get really into it. You're going to see some prospects, you're going to see some fringe 40 man guys and you know, you're going to see some lead home legends. So get, get on it. Lead homes.

Ben Lindbergh (13:46)

Fun. Yeah. Well, as we'll get into with Eric, there's a lot of baseball being played all over the world. You know, it's a great game, A lot of people agree, they want to play it in their countries too. So let's talk briefly before we bring on Eric about a number of managers who will not be eligible to manage a WBC squad because they've been hired to manage major league teams. We've had a round of managerial hiring that has happened while we were busy talking about the playoffs. So let's do a little managerial catch up. Just a little quick managerial hiring catch up. It occurs to me that we've seen essentially every kind of manager under the sun. Yes, just a wide range. It's hard to identify exactly an archetype that teams are targeting here. And I guess maybe there shouldn't be. Maybe it should just be case by case. But yeah, you, you look at the variety here and we talked about a couple of hirings. We did make time to talk about Tony Vitello hired of course by the Giants coming straight out of college. And then we talked about Kurt Suzuki being hired by the Angels coming straight out of. Well, also not managing, but more, more big league experience. He was of course a catcher and then was a special assistant to the Angels. But no, no big league coaching staff coaching experience really, let alone managing experience. We've seen Albert Pujols be a top target who has a little bit of managing experience, not in MLB or coaching for that matter. And then we saw the most recent hire was Walt Weiss of Atlanta. Now Walt Weiss, I think that's sort of like, that's the most cliched managerial. That's sort of like the most orthodox kind of hiring. I'm not saying that that's bad or good. I'm just saying if you had to come up with the mold of a managerial hiring, traditionally come up with someone like Walt Weiss, who was a player and was a manager formerly and then was a bench coach for what, eight seasons with the team that hired him, I mean, that's just, you know, the standard model of managerial hiring, essentially. Right. Just like player to manager. And then, you know, go coach again, be the manager in waiting. And when Brian Snicker's gone, then you get the job and you ascend to that role again and you're a retread second time around. Manager. Of course, he was with the Rockies both as a player and as a manager and also played for Atlanta. Anyway, that's the deal with Weiss, who I think is in his 60s now. And then elsewhere in the NL east, you have Blake Butera, who's hired by the Washington Nationals. Not even one of the better known Buteras. Right. You. You probably know multiple other Buteras before you know, Blake, of course, Drew Butera. And his dad was Sal Butera. And as I understand it, Blake Butera is from a different branch of Buteras entirely.

Meg Riley (16:52)

I think that's right.

Ben Lindbergh (16:53)

No relation as far as I'm aware. And the even more notable thing about Blake Butera is that he's 33 years old. He turned. He turned 33 in August. Yep. And that's. That's that. That rocks you back on your heels if you're a certain age, perhaps. But the Nationals opted not to make Miguel Cairo a permanent hire. And of course, they just hired a new pobo, Paul Taboni. Paul, what did we say? Did we. We came up with something, right? Po Boni. Did we say that? Maybe. Anyway, Pobo Taboni to Bony the Pobo. But he's a younger guy, too, so he's bringing in his own younger guy. Butera is the youngest manager in more than 50 years. I mean, this is, you know, we. We've seen some young and inexperienced managers, but he's the youngest since Frank Quillacy was hired by the twins back in 1972. So that's how long it has been. And he was a raised guy. He was the senior player development director for the Rays, and he was a minor league manager for four seasons, starting at 25 years old. So he's like the. The Juan Soto of managerial prospects. He's just like starting super young, which I guess bodes well. And he won league championships in his last couple seasons, which was you know, with low a Charleston. So that's quite a jump. He's skipping several rungs there as a manager, but has some managering. Managing. Managering. Mr. Manager. He has some managing experience at least. So that's another model, which is the minor league manager to major league manager pipeline. But also like front office staffer, too. He was that as well. Sort of a hybrid and barely played professionally. Just very briefly at a low level, I believe. Then you had the Twins who hired or rehired, really Derek Shelton to replace Rocco Baldelli, who is still at large, still out there interviewing.

Meg Riley (19:04)

Maybe he'll manage Team usa, maybe.

Ben Lindbergh (19:06)

But he might get a job before then. But if he doesn't, then, yeah, can't think of a better guy. But Derek Shelton, this is interesting because he was with the Twins previously. He was.

Meg Riley (19:16)

Right.

Ben Lindbergh (19:17)

A bench coach for Bald Deli and their besties, basically, Baldelli and Shelton.

Meg Riley (19:23)

Yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (19:23)

Which is kind of awkward, I guess. Like, you know, I'm sure they had some conversations about it. There's no, like, manager bro code. I don't. It's not like, you know, I. I can't take the job you used to have. I mean, once you're let go, I'm sure Baldelli was like, yeah, by all means. I want my pal to be the manager. Replace me. There are only so many of these jobs to go around. But obviously they liked what they saw out of Shelton when he was in Minnesota and he was in the interim Pirates manager, and that didn't go so great. But no one really blamed him for that because there are more obvious people to blame for the Pirates lack of success. And then the Orioles replaced their interim guy with Craig Albernaz. And Craig Albanez was the associate manager for the Guardians and was like their bench coach when they hired Vogt. And then he was a finalist for their managerial job. And then no one seems to know what the difference between an associate manager and a bench coach is, but he was both of those things, and he was a catcher and he was, you know, future manager, prospect, and the Rays had him as a coach, so he's kind of done it all too. So just really every possible path one could take to picking a manager we have seen. And I don't know that there's a right answer. You know, if there were, then I guess all the teams would have converged on, oh, this is exactly the type of manager. And maybe that just speaks to how difficult it is to quantify the contribution of a manager. Or I guess you could even say maybe it Just doesn't matter as much as it used to. But I kind of like that there's still a variety. That's, yeah, we'll, we'll go get a young guy who was a minor league manager and a front office guy. We'll go get an old guy who's been around the block. We'll go get someone in between who's been a bench coach and was a player in the minors. Oh, we'll go get, yeah, well, and we'll rob the cradle to hire Blake Butera. And you know, just like college coach, backup catcher who has a managed at all but was a special assistant. It's just really every possible, just such variety. We talk about the biodiversity of players. We do have a biodiversity of managers.

Meg Riley (21:44)

At least, at least from a background perspective. Right. Like it is. And an age perspective. There are a couple of other demographic factors we could note some similarities on. Not universally, but for several of the folks involved. But yeah, it's like I always feel like I don't know what to say about manager hires. I mean, sometimes I do, Sometimes I have an understanding of a guy based on what other people have said about him or particularly when that person has occupied a bench coach role before, you've gotten at least a little bit of exposure to them managing because they're the one who normally takes over when the manager gets tossed. But do I know how to evaluate Blake Butera? No, I keep stressing about calling him Drew Butera. I've almost called him Drew Butera four times today. But I, I do think that the notion that you're going to only the teams would converge on one profile seems faulty to me because there are so many different baseball players and presumably different rosters with different compositions might have different needs. You know, I, I, I imagine that the average big league manager, like, maybe not right away, but like after a year, they're all probably pretty similar. I mean, I spent a month complaining about Dan Wilson managing. But like the, the tactician piece of it I think can be kind of assumed for a lot of guys. Now if they've never managed before, maybe it becomes more of an issue and you have a steeper learning curve. But like, you know, these are all, all, these are all baseball guys, right? They're baseball, they're baseball dudes. They've been baseball, they've been baseball guys. I feel like there's not a ton to necessarily differentiate them when it comes to that stuff. And so then it's a question of like, how does, how does an individual guy fit with your Roster and your team building philosophy. And, you know, like, maybe you're. Maybe you think that a really young guy who has a player dev background is going to, like, resonate with a particular kind of clubhouse or be an important departure from the last guy. Maybe you think, you know, you're Buster Posey and you want to. You want to zig when everyone thinks you've been zagging the whole time. Right. Like, there are a lot of individual motivations that go into these choices. And as always, like, the stuff that goes into a guy being a really good, you know, manager, a lot of it we don't see. So it can be hard to know what to think of any of these individual hires other than, like, I do kind of resent the Blake Butera one just because I'm gonna get his name wrong at least a couple of times and I'm gonna feel bad about it because I should be able to get it right, but I'm gonna get it wrong. And he's so young.

Ben Lindbergh (24:30)

Yeah, we'll get. We'll get used to it and probably we'll all forget true Butera at some point.

Meg Riley (24:35)

You know, you say that, but there are still.

Ben Lindbergh (24:38)

The Buteras are household names. Exactly. I mean, we're aware of the Buteras.

Meg Riley (24:44)

I'm not worried people refer to Blake Butera. I'm worried about how I refute refer to Blake Butera because I'm a professional and I think it's important to get people's names right, but I'm going to get it wrong. You say that people won't, but every now and again, I'll be editing something I'm not going to say from who, and I'll be like, why is Clay Bellinger in this copy? And then you just realize sometimes you brain fart, Ben. You know, you have a little brain fart. Yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (25:09)

Yeah. To be clear, Meg doesn't edit me because I don't write for Fangrass, but that is something that I would do because I remain fond of former effectively wild guest Clay Bellinger. So.

Meg Riley (25:20)

Right. But, Ben, the number of times we're. We're in the midst of top 50 free agent season, as we've noted, and the number of times I've been like, we have the right. Roger's brother on there.

Ben Lindbergh (25:32)

Right?

Meg Riley (25:32)

It's the right. We have the right. We have the one we mean. We have the one we mean to have on there. On there. The one that we mean. That's the one we mean. It is important because. Because they are not the same, man. They are different men.

Ben Lindbergh (25:45)

It occurs to me that a manager that young, I have no idea whether, I mean that's a promising thing. I think in terms of Blake Butera's. You hear me just pause there as I was searching for the right. But I'm wrong too, just to be sure. But I think that it bodes well that he's getting the call this young and this early. But probably, I would think from a clubhouse perspective that's only viable with a young team that is still trying to rebuild because he is older than every Washington national, I believe. Except I guess maybe Trevor Williams. Trevor Williams had internal brace surgery in July. I guess he's still on the injured list and he's 33, but I guess an older 33 than Blake Butera. But other than that, just scanning down their roster resource page, they do not have anyone who is out of their 20s. So I think that probably makes it more manageable for him to manage this team because he at least does have some seniority over these guys. So that helps I guess a little bit because you know, most teams he would be younger than some of his players, which has happened before. That's, it's not unprecedented at all. But if you had a, a significant number of players who were older than you were and you had that background where you haven't been a big leaguer before, that might be an impediment, I would say. Yeah, you're probably not going to hire the 33 year old first timer to take over a team that is expected to contend immediately, though they'd certainly like the Nationals to contend sooner rather than later. But you know, he's not joining a team that is coming off of recent success. Quite the opposite in fact.

Meg Riley (27:33)

Yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (27:33)

Yeah. There are still two vacancies as we speak.

Meg Riley (27:37)

Right.

Ben Lindbergh (27:38)

The Padres have not yet hired a manager and the Rockies. And what is going on with the Rockies? I guess that's a evergreen question.

Meg Riley (27:48)

Do you think, do you think that that spot. I imagine that that spot will stay vacant until they have identified their pobo. Right.

Ben Lindbergh (27:55)

Yeah, you'd think. But even that sounds like it's been a bit of an adventure.

Meg Riley (27:59)

Not going great.

Ben Lindbergh (28:01)

Yeah, I'm not following Rocky's reporting that closely. I'm not the most plugged in on Rocky's news, but just from afar I've picked up through osmosis that the two well known and respected front office people they were interviewing and and were said to be finalists, I think at one point from the Diamondbacks and Guardians are now not in consideration. Or maybe the Rockies are Not in consideration by them might be the, the, the way to put it. So no one seems to know what's happening other than the fact that there was a recent report that they're interviewing Adam Adevino as their pobo or as their front office head, not as their manager, like, as running the baseball ops department, which I guess there's no harm in interviewing anyone. And Adino seems like a pretty smart guy, but, like, okay, he was playing this spring. He was. Like, he has done nothing.

Meg Riley (28:56)

I think. I think that Ottovino is a smart guy and, you know, he's got his facility and he does, you know, all.

Ben Lindbergh (29:03)

Kinds of stuff, you know. Yeah. Player development.

Meg Riley (29:06)

Yeah, yeah. But also, I'm sorry, come the on, like, what are we doing?

Ben Lindbergh (29:12)

No, yeah, I've written plenty about just, you know, the major leaguers, they're becoming GMs and Pobos again. Gabe Kapler was just promoted to GM. He's not Pobo, of course, but we've seen, you know, these guys coming back into the game after a down cycle where it was out of vogue to have former players be managers. But now the former players are, in many cases, very analytically savvy and, you know, think the same way as some Ivy Leaguer who never played. Right. So now you're getting more of those guys. But they do at least typically have some sort of apprenticeship, you know, like, whether it's Craig Breslow or it's Chris Goetz or it's Chris Young or, you know, like, there are a bunch of them now, but they all did some stint in some front office and they worked their way up a little bit, typically, or they worked at the commissioner's office or whatever it is. So, yeah, to go from playing in the preceding season to having that kind of responsibility, that would be wild.

Meg Riley (30:10)

But it's bonkers. And, And I'm not, I'm not trying to say that, like, Arvino couldn't be a good executive. I, I mean, I have no idea. But he does seem like a thoughtful guy, you know, has aspirations toward that. Okay, great. But you gotta get your feet under you at least a little bit. Like, it's just a. And like this. The message that it sends that you are interviewing him. It's just. I found the. Found the other promotion title swap that we need to laugh at a little bit, and it's related to the Merlin. So they. They promoted Gabe to general manager and they made a lot of other front office moves, and one of them was promoting their existing, or maybe just retitling. I'M not sure. Their existing director of Amateur Scouting, Frank Bleari, to vice president of amateur forecasting and player evaluation initiatives.

Ben Lindbergh (31:07)

Wow.

Meg Riley (31:08)

Come the. Again.

Ben Lindbergh (31:09)

Come the. On.

Meg Riley (31:10)

Like, no, no, no, no. Stop it. It. Stop it. You just don't want to say amateur scouting. Like, what's the deal?

Ben Lindbergh (31:19)

Yeah, that's weird. Why do we need to. Is that even. Is that title. It's titled Elongation. I don't know. That's so strange. What is it? The. The semantic treadmill. It's like when certain things, you have to come up with a new term for something that means the same as the old term, but maybe the old term has fallen out of favor for some reason. I don't think we need to do away with scouting.

Meg Riley (31:41)

Scouting.

Ben Lindbergh (31:41)

Scouting still seems fine.

Meg Riley (31:43)

It seems. It sure seems fine. It's just. It's one of those moments where you're like. Like, Peter, we remember you used to work for the race. You don't have to do this, you know. Yeah, you're fine.

Ben Lindbergh (31:57)

Gonna have to make a small text size on that business card to cram all of that. Yeah. How are you gonna fit it?

Meg Riley (32:03)

You're gonna have to get big cards. It would be so funny. You can't fit them in a wallet, and then people just throw them all way. You know, they're like, what. What am I supposed to do with this? Sometimes you get a. Sometimes you get business cards that are, like, weirdly long and narrow, and you're like, what am I supposed to do with this? Where's this?

Ben Lindbergh (32:16)

I think there was also a report I saw in passing that maybe they won't want to hire a pobo until the CBA situation is settled.

Meg Riley (32:26)

That's over a year from now. You have an entire offseason to conduct and a draft and a. And a trade deadline. What are you talking. What are you talking about? What are you. What do you just.

Ben Lindbergh (32:36)

I issue a challenge. Rocky is. Just don't be weird for once.

Meg Riley (32:39)

Just don't be weird.

Ben Lindbergh (32:40)

It seemed like they were determined not to be weird this time. They were just like, we're gonna go outside the organization. We're gonna do a real search. Like, we're gonna hire appealing people. And it seemed like they were reaching out to the type of people that a normal team might reach out to. And I don't know who rejected whom, but it seems like they're just falling back into Rocky's weirdness. And people they know, you know, they said they were going to go outside the organization. Of course, Adam, out of. You know, was in the organization for years and years. Yeah. As a player. I mean, it's just, I just, you.

Meg Riley (33:16)

Know, it look and I again, I want to be, I want to be clear that I don't, I don't know what kind of executive he would be. He might end up being a very good one. Like I'm, I'm not trying to knock Arvino here at all. All just like I'm not trying to knock anyone associate with Marlins. It's just like be serious. Like, come on, be have. I mean those are different, those are different levels of be serious also to be clear. Like just very different levels higher.

Ben Lindbergh (33:47)

Normally they could, they could call that person's title whatever they want and Rocky's fans could live with that. I think if they invented some, some novel thing, some new term for their top baseball ops exec. As long as it was this sort of baseball ops exec that just a normal team might hire. That's all people are asking at this point from the Rockies. But are they going to get that? Who knows?

Meg Riley (34:09)

Who knows?

Ben Lindbergh (34:10)

Yeah, like out of, you know, maybe he's a great front office prospect, but you need some seasoning. You know, you got to get some reps, you got to put some time in. And I guess you could say, well, how much worse could it be really? Like, you know, if he's learning on the job, is it really going to get that much worse than it was? That's, that's fair probably. But yeah, I just, I really thought they might just turn over a new leaf. But it's Charlie Brown with the football.

Meg Riley (34:37)

And I don't want to underestimate the like, you know, you are swimming upstream there, right? There's the reputation for institutional dysfunction and that's going to be a problem because it's not like ownership changed, right. So you're going to have to deal contend with that when you are trying to attract serious candidates. And then there's the challenge of just trying to put a good team on the field when you play where you play. Right. So I, I want to be fair to the Rockies about what, what challenges they face. But also like, come on, like, come, come, come, come on, come on.

Ben Lindbergh (35:16)

My last thought here, because the Padres have not yet hired someone and you know, Baldelli is still out there in is still out there, but whomever they hire will be the sixth full time permanent. Well, obviously not permanent, but not interim manager A.J. preller has hired during his tenure as the top Padres baseball exec. And you don't usually get that many managers. You don't because if you've had to dismiss that many managers or they've left for whatever reason, you know, know, sh. Just retired or, you know, some sort of circumstances surrounds that and his relationship with the coaching staff and Preller and everything else, but he, he did seemingly walk away. So you don't usually have that happen because, you know, you, you get a. A couple, you, you get a few maybe, and then you can kind of use that manager as your sacrificial layup them. It's. You can basically, you know, take the heat off yourself by firing your manager. And that can buy you a little bit of time. But that move only works a few times, typically before suddenly the onus is on you because you've hired those managers that you had to fire or the team just did poorly, which is why you had to change managers. And, you know, eventually the attention is on you. And so this will be his sixth. If you don't count interim managers. If you count interim managers, he's had eight already. And I think there was a time when, when Dave Roberts was a Padres interim manager. Yeah. And Pat Murphy, I think was. Was an interim manager that same season. And then the two former Padres interim managers ended up going head to head in the NLCS this year. But you know, that was a while ago. But Pro ERs had eight interims, five full times, and I wanted to see how many someone else has had. What's the record? Is this unprecedented? And so, you know, mini stat blast, I guess from Kenny Jacklin of Baseball Reference, who sent me the list using baseball references, designation of who the top baseball operations executive was for a given team in a given year. And the way that Kenny. Well, he sent me a list of interims included, which I can share with people too, but I was more interested in the full times. And he just looked at this only counts the first manager of the year, essentially, you know, you don't have an interim to start the year typically. So only the first manager of the year during the tenure of the top baseball exec. So Preller has had five. He will soon have six. The record technically is Calvin Griffith with the Twins 11. But he was, he was the owner. Right. So a couple owners show up here. Calvin Griffith and Charlie Finley with the A's show up. So, you know, we're not going to count them, I don't think. Next on the list is Jim Campbell, who was Tigers GM forever for 21 years. And he had eight managers under him. But Predators only had 12 seasons. I mean, only. That's kind of a Lot, but it's not a Jim Campbell length extent. And then it was John Holland with the Cubs, 19 seasons, had eight managers. Ken Williams, Kenny Williams of the White Sox, six managers. And that was 23 seasons. Phil Sigi with Cleveland, 13 years, six managers. So that's Preller esque. Mike Rizzo with the Nationals, whom we just talked about, six managers, but that was 17 years. So more time than Preller. Jack McKeon, who of course managed himself, but was also a front office Exec, he had 11 years with six managers with the Padres. So the Padres have a history of this sort of turnover. And then Roland Hemans with the White sox, he had five managers in 13 years. So if Preller gets to six managers in 13 years, I guess that's exceeded almost only by, well, a handful of guys who actually qualify. And almost all of them had longer tenures than Preller. So yeah, this type of tenure. And there are even fewer guys ahead, if you count the interims, which you probably shouldn't, but if you do, then Preller will be about to be on his ninth. You know, I guess you could count interims because it does sort of speak to the instability of the, the situation maybe, you know, you couldn't pick someone, designate someone as the manager. So Gabe Paul in Cincinnati, he had eight in nine years, but then it's Finley and Griffith and Campbell and Holland. So it's the same group. He's on a short list is the point. You know, there have been very few top baseball OPS execs who have presided over this many managers and most of them had longer stints than Preller. So just another way in which A.J. preller's stay with the Padres has been been unusual and aren't there so many ways? But you gotta figure that this will probably be his last guy, I would think, right? Yeah, it's probably his last crack at it. Because if this doesn't go well and you know the Padres, are they gonna keep contending? Is this like, is their window starting to close? Who knows? So, yeah, if. If Preller doesn't nail this higher and also get the good results that are needed to actually keep a manager and keep your job as the popo, then he may not be long for that front office. But he's had quite a run, that's for sure. I'd like to, to read a book about A.J. prowler's time with the Padres. That would be quite eventful.

Meg Riley (41:04)

No kidding.

Ben Lindbergh (41:06)

All right, well, let's take a quick break and we will be back with Eric Longenhagen. To preview the professional international free agent market. How do you calculate? Does it come from the heart? Should we use defensive runs safe or follow the OAA way? Who's gonna win? With their quips and opinions, it's effectively wild. Effectively not effectively wild. Effectively wild. It's effectively wild. Well, for most of us it's the off season, but for fangraph's lead prospect analyst Eric Langenhagen, it's always scouting season. The levels change, the locations change, but the goal does not. And prospect ranking season really kind of kicks off in earnest when the season season ends. And this is a man who's scouting the Arizona Fall League while everyone else is watching the World Series. To be clear, he was watching the World Series as well. He was just watching other stuff too. And his eternal Sisyphean struggle to figure out which guys are going to be good at baseball never ends. And thus neither do his appearances on this podcast. Welcome back, Eric.

Eric Longenhagen (42:35)

Well, thank you. Yeah, there have been a couple times this fall when ye olde Samsung tablet has come to the field with me. So that, yeah, playoff game or World Series game? I think the ALCS game is the last last one of the ALCS games is the last one. I like sat and watched while I was at a field. But yeah, I'm excited to be back and we still have another couple weeks of fall league here and then we'll have our tolerance break for the off season. But yeah, I'm excited to get going on lists and I will say those Verizon Wireless commercials where they're like however old your phone or tablet is, you can bring it to us and well, you know, you can trade in for the new one. They don't mean that when you have a Galaxy S3 tablet.

Ben Lindbergh (43:23)

Yeah, I was many S's behind the current model and I also could not but that's because our non iPhones last so long, they're just so durable that by the time you actually need a new one, you can't trade it in anymore.

Eric Longenhagen (43:38)

There's something going on with the iPhone that makes people really want the new one.

Ben Lindbergh (43:42)

Yeah, it might have a teeny tiny bit better camera or something maybe.

Meg Riley (43:47)

Hey, it's not tiny.

Ben Lindbergh (43:48)

It's not.

Meg Riley (43:49)

Wait, it's not a tiny bit better. Get your girl finally photographed.

Ben Lindbergh (43:53)

The moon.

Meg Riley (43:53)

Okay, I did it.

Ben Lindbergh (43:55)

It was visible.

Meg Riley (43:56)

Oh yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (43:58)

Detail.

Meg Riley (43:59)

Yeah. Thank you. I it was my white whale or moon as the case may be. So there you go.

Ben Lindbergh (44:04)

Well, we're here not to talk about the moon, but to talk about players who are coming over from Asia, possibly potentially this off season or definitely in some cases. And maybe we can start actually by talking about players who came over from Asia already, some of whom we were just watching in the World Series. Because I am curious whether your scouting radar has been calibrated better just because there have been so many players coming over from Japan and Korea and elsewhere over the past few seasons and we've seen some of them do super well and some of them not so much. And so I wonder whether you now feel like you have a better sense of how the next group of players to come over will fare, because that's sort of what scouting is, right? It's like looking at what's worked or what hasn't worked before and extrapolating, projecting from that.

Eric Longenhagen (44:59)

Yeah, I think there's, there's definitely just during our lifetime, I mean the, the Daisuke Matsuzaka matriculation was such a big deal when we were kids. Like at least I was still kid ish. And then, you know, you could see how some of that stuff went and how Kazmatsui did and how Hideki Matsui did, did. And now the last several years it has sort of picked up. I do kind of have background anxiety that something akin to what has happened in Cuba is slowly happening in Asia where you do have a few, even Japanese amateur players, high schoolers skipping their home countries leagues draft to like come to college in the States or do something else. And I wonder even if that trend, there's probably only a couple of guys every year from overseas who could conceivably make a real long term big league impact. And I'm talking both Japanese and Korean born players and also the group of American players or sometimes Latin American players who have gone overseas, learned something new or changed in some way and are coming back. And that's Merrill Kelly. Kelly was that guy. Robert Suarez was that guy. The Padres have had a bunch of these players over the years. There are plenty of pitchers especially who go learn a split or find something else and then come back having been on the fringe of a big league roster and now are pretty entrenched on a good team's pitching staff. It happens kind of a lot actually. And then the very, very top of the group group, the Yoshi Yamamoto's like Yamamoto is freakish. Like if people have seen what it's like when this guy's doing yoga or just like moving around, it is definitely a different thing. He was appropriately stuffed coming over. Like, you know, would have been the top two or three prospect Roki Sasaki, you can sort of see some of the limitations and just some of the chaos of pitching itself where even within this calendar year his stuff is not operational at certain points and then is enough for him to close for the World Series team at others. So I think the one thing that is still tough though, Ben, is the hitting piece of this. And then obviously the individual chaos of injury and changing bodies, which we're going to talk about I think, as we come to Muna Takamurakami here. But like, you know, Yoshi Tsutsugo didn't come over here and hit. There are plenty of players who have attempted to transition and every once in a while you get a Shinsu Chu where he has an amazing long big league career. And then at other times you do get like your Yoshi Tsutsugos or, you know, Akinori Wamura where the, the longevity of the impact is pretty limited and you know, the, the annual impact is. I think Iwamer like did okay, but when you, you go back and look at his stats, it's like, all right, ultimately this is like a one more player. And so being attuned to some of the older Cuban players and some of the players who are like kickback guys, that's a place I've stepped up in the last few years to the point where we've had like reports on, you know, the Eric Feddies of the world and how they've changed on the site for the last several years. And I think that it adds, you know, I think we are getting better at it.

Ben Lindbergh (48:40)

Let's talk about Roki for a second then, because I don't know that my outlook for him has really gotten any more concrete than it was when he came over. Obviously the way his season started, not so hot and then being on the IL and concerns about the speed and everything else, then he comes back and, and looks dominant at first out of the pen and then maybe a little shaky. So what do you think? What do you project him as now? Would you keep him in the bullpen? Do you still think he can start what has to happen for him to be as much of a success as he was expected to be?

Eric Longenhagen (49:13)

I think they have the flexibility of him being what they need him to be. I think in a vacuum. I guess it's really not in the vacuum because like, his salary is so, so minimal compared to some of these other guys. If he had been paid like a true free agent, then I'd be more inclined to try to start this guy because of what we're paying him. But that's just not the case here. So you know, in the Dodger situation like I like Emmett Sheehan more than Roki at this point like as a starter. And those two guys stand in contrast to one another perhaps most of all because of the fastball playability piece of it. Whereas and some of it has to do with like Sheehan is a little bit more fluid. And there are other reasons to think Emmett Sheehan' and will end up being more polished and. And better than Roki's will. The strategy against ROI should still be just to stand there until you know you. You can just hunt for a fastball. Because I really think that like the level of strike throwing this is I think pervasive in Asia guys lack of strike throwing can be masked by the hitters over theirs their tendency to chase, especially in Korea. And I think, you know, as we talk about Tatsuya Imai today, that that's another thing that will come up is does this guy really have starter quality command or does it look that way? Because more hitters over there just willing to offer at pitches outside the zone. And I think that I was definitely not tricked so to speak, but overzealous in projecting Roki's command. Some of it was just. This was like a freak athlete to me. Despite the fact that he. His build is sort of strange and vampiric. And I think that like the he's maybe lack lacked more lower body strength. Like my appreciation for that piece of it was miscalibrated. So I think all that is to say that twisted my arm. I'd say Rookie is probably a closer going forward. He's probably a best fit in that role. Just because I am skeptical that the command piece of it is going to. To develop to a satisfactory degree. If his fastball played more like Sheehan's does, he would have more margin for error in that regard. Because you can miss a little bit when your fastball has that kind of. That kind of life. Not, not just the amount of life but like the type of movement it has. Roki's just sort of sinks into barrels whereas Emmett Sheehan has like vertical ride. So the command piece of it has got to arrive for him him if his fastball is going to be less vulnerable. And you know, I don't know how you get to that point without trying to develop him in that role. The Dodgers roster is going to turn over some here like some of these guys who they have on the 60 day and you know, I think who are currently on the 40 man, but not on the projected big league roster. Guys who have experience as starters like Knack and Robleski and Nick Fro and low leverage Ben and like there's going to be, there's going to be some amount of turnover. There's got to be some kind of consolidation and what they're starting pitching depth looks like when that stuff is done when like River Ryan's coming back from injury and Gavin Stone had shoulder surgery at the end of 2024 and so like he should be back and how they decide to consolidate and what kind of real starter depth they have at the end of that, that I think is more than anything else will dictate what they tried to do with him. But if I'm just projecting like what he'd be best suited for, probably a closer.

Meg Riley (52:53)

We had a lot of confidence and I think you've just walked through some of the complications that have arisen for him and some of the things we maybe learned from Rohi. When you look at this year's class of guys who are confirmed to come over, guys who when our top 50 free agent ranking comes out later this week will place, you have have Murakami at the top of the guys we know to be coming over in 2026. And he's an interesting case because there's some flaw in the profile and there's also Titanic tools. So can you talk us through the Murakami of it all and sort of how your assessment of him has changed over his life as a prospect on the international section of the board?

Eric Longenhagen (53:33)

When Murakami was 21, 22 and we're talking at this point about 2021 and 2022, you know, it looked like he was going to be, he looked like a top three to five overall prospect. If he were a 22 year old playing at double and AAA, that he would have absolutely been like a top three to five prospect. He has, you know, two consecutive MVP seasons, he wins an Olympic gold medal as a 21 year old, he has a 56 homer like 10 war 22 year old season, he wins the Triple Crown. You know, the names he becomes associated with at this time are like, oh, you're the youngest MVP since Hideki Matsui. You're the, you know, the youngest Triple crown winner ever. You're the most home runs by a Japanese born player in our league ever. And then over the course of the most recent three seasons his strikeout rates have spiked back to where they were when he first debuted, which was sort of in a problematic area like but he was a teenager and it was fine. And then they got better and then they really regressed. And you think, okay, well 28% strikeout rate, like that's okay. There are plenty of guys who strike out that much in Major League Baseball.

Meg Riley (54:45)

Sure.

Eric Longenhagen (54:45)

And are still good. And that's right. But when you start looking under the hood, I mean you look at like Murakami's strikeout rates relative to other NPB success stories, it becomes kind of scary. So. So for instance, in 2025 against secondary pitches, so splitters, sliders, curveballs, cutters, everything that's not a fastball, this guy's contact rate was like 49%, like really bad. Like there aren't big league hitters. His contact rate was 51% against breaking balls and off speed pitches. So for context, like the best, the very best secondary pitches in baseball, like Roki Splitter or whatever, pick your favorite pitch, they generate a contact rate this bad. Like they're so good that hitters miss them like 40 to 50% of the time. And that's how every secondary pitch plays against Murakami.

Ben Lindbergh (55:49)

Yeah.

Eric Longenhagen (55:49)

And then you have some of the splits against velocity. And again, I'm just like doing this on synergy as we're sitting here. So in 2025 against fastballs, 93 miles per hour in a bunch of, he's hitting 230 with a 70% contact rate. That's not awful. If we looked at a multi year sample, and this is an issue here too, if you looked at a multi year sample, it's just like generally not favorable.

Meg Riley (56:17)

Yeah.

Eric Longenhagen (56:18)

If we are looking at the big league player population at some of these splits, there like isn't much precedent for guys who succeeded even though they swing and miss this much. And some of those guys you, you'd be excited about for some amount of time, like Joey Gallo. Like if Munataka Murakami were to come over and have a career similar to Joey Gallo where he has like a couple of 40 homer seasons and you know, some other productive power hitting seasons on either side of that, like you'd be pretty happy with that. You know, Gallo is really the only precedent where you look at the contact rate and say, okay, this is, I'm down for this. I would pay 100 plus million dollars to have this guy in his theoretical prime. If I'm looking back to, you know, the year 2000 at qualified hitters who have like swung and missed this much. And again for Murakami, like from an overall contest contact rate standpoint, if I Take I'm going to include everything since 2022 in my sample now. Just have, like, a really big sample. Because part of, you know, why 2025 might have been a down year for him is that his 2024 ended with injury and then he dealt with several more right throughout 2025. And they were various different things. The only thing that recurred was oblique stuff throughout 2025. Everything else was, like, more acute. So Murakami, again, it's 63% contact rate against fastballs, 93 miles and above since 2022. And against secondary pitch types, his contact rate is roughly 60% against sliders, 55% against splitters. Like, these are bad numbers.

Meg Riley (58:12)

Yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (58:13)

Okay.

Eric Longenhagen (58:13)

And this is include. This is the last four seasons. So that's scary. And then again, like, if I'm looking at pitch level data on the fangraphs leaderboards, guys with contact rates in this area. So overall for Murakami, it's 65%. The guys with the lowest contact rate in Major League Baseball since the year 2000. There are only like 10 guys who have a contact rate under 65%. And it's like Miguel S, Bobby Dalbeck, Keston Hura, Chris Carter, Mike Zanino, Alberto Mondesi, Jorge Alfaro. So it's not anyone who has had sustained, like, generational talent type success.

Ben Lindbergh (58:56)

How dare you say that about Mike Zenino on a podcast with Meg?

Eric Longenhagen (59:00)

And this is the thing Zino could do. Zeno played a valuable position. Jorge Al Faro plays a valuable position. And some of these, like Alberto Monas, he man, like, talk about tooled out and just not a good baseball player. But you can see how the makeup of some of these players, and once we get past the 65% threshold, you can see some of the names I'm going to say to you sound a lot like the guy we're talking about, because Murakami has insane power. Right. Russell Branion, Mark Reynolds, Ran Mil Reyes, Nolan Gorman, Patrick Wisdom, Luke Voight. Like, these are the types of power hitters who were talking about, talking about.

Meg Riley (59:38)

Bunch of beef boys.

Ben Lindbergh (59:39)

Yeah. These are the kind of hitters who go to Japan and have success maybe after. After they wash out of the major. So that's not great.

Eric Longenhagen (59:47)

So these are all players whose contact rate are hovering around that 65, 66% mark. And maybe, maybe there's a way to get this guy to a place mechanically that improves it, because once we start creeping into the upper 60%, 70% area is when you start to get like, Ryan Howard and James Wood and Ellie.

Ben Lindbergh (60:13)

Right.

Eric Longenhagen (60:14)

So it's just more Adam Dunn. If Murakami could become Adam Dunn, you would be thrilled. Well, he needs a 70, a 70% contact rate to do that. And so yeah, we're talking about really it's, it's 5 percentage points, but it's really like more, you know, like 8 to 10% improvement, which is kind of a lot.

Ben Lindbergh (60:33)

Yeah. I wonder if someone will bet on the upside or a bounce back. He kind of had a bounce back this year in his partial season after he came back from injury. His power was way up and way back and he had a 210 WRC plus in 56 games, but still with the strikeouts. And it's odd, it's a strange progression because you don't usually see that when someone's that preternaturally and precociously good at 21 and 22. Because I had, if I see stats like that, even scouting the stat line. This was kind of the way I felt about Ohtani, where obviously with Ohtani you didn't really just have to scout the stat line because he has all the tools and the build and everything else too. But when there were people skeptical about his bat translating, I just kind of defaulted to like, look what he already did, you know, at. In like the second highest level league in the world at an extremely young age. I just, it was hard for me to square that with the idea that he was not going to be a viable big league hitter. And that's what I would have said about Murakami too a few years ago when he's setting the single season NPP home run record at 22 and he has 56 bombs and a 225 WRC plus and back then he wasn't striking out that much. So it's just, it's odd. I don't know whether he went backward physically and whether that's about the injuries that he's had or maybe the injuries lead to mechanical issues or whether the league figured out his vulnerabilities and exploited them to some extent. But anyone with that kind of talent at a young age, if you've demonstrated that, if you think that's somewhere still in there, like if you could port that version of Murakami to the majors, I believe he would hit. So can you get back to that version of him a few years later? I guess is the question. Right.

Eric Longenhagen (62:21)

And there was a point where he had the 1 20, 23 season where all of a sudden there were more strikeouts. And at that point that was the anomaly. You Say, okay, well, if I'm taking a Bayesian approach to this, then I care more about the last several seasons than I do just this most recent one. And now it's just been three seasons in a row. And I agree with you. There's a point where I would be in on Murakami. If I'm sitting in a front office office, I'm in on him to an extent. And so much of it is just going to be dictated by which of the teams are in, who can afford to take a risk like this or who has some preconceived notions about what they can do to get him to the place that we're talking about. They are the ones who are going to be most likely to do a thing like this. It is not going to be the raise, right? Like it is going to be the Mets or something like that is going to be the Dodgers or the Mets or you know, it's not going to be the Mariners, right? Do it. It's, you know, it's going to be a team who can afford for it to go belly up if, if it does.

Ben Lindbergh (63:25)

Can he field? He plays first, he plays third. If he was decent at least then that would maybe lower the bar a bit for how well he has to hit. But yes, how, how long can he play those positions or how well it.

Eric Longenhagen (63:41)

Is better at first than at third. But Max Muncie just played third base for the team that won, so it looks comparable to that. Muncie's feel for doing some stuff in time is, you know, commensurate with his experience. Murakami is like a lumbering dude, but I think like whoever likes him most, again, probably thinks we can put this guy at third base. And so I would bet that he, he plays enough third base that it matters to hit. You know, the way his positional adjustment is done.

Meg Riley (64:13)

Done. So imagine you're a team and you're nervous about all the things that you just described about Murakami. One of the other options you might pivot to if you're keen on the international market is Okamoto. So tell us about Kazuma Okamoto.

Eric Longenhagen (64:28)

He's older, he's 29. In some ways he's got a similar track record to Murakami. There were big power hitting seasons a couple years ago. There was at one point also this issue of Okamoto versus better velocity. But that's been better of late. In fact, like overall, his bat to ball skills have played better over the last couple of years. He was like a 2021% strikeout guy at a certain point and has cut that to 11%. He's been trending down like in the 16 to 11% range over the like most of the last four seasons. So I think you feel a little bit more confidence that the bat to ball skills are going to translate for him. He's similar on defense where it's like he could play third base, I guess, but it's not great. You know, I have a 40 on him over there, but he's not so bad that he's totally unplayable. It's just a more balanced overall skill set. He does have a couple like 40 homer seasons, but realistically it's not that kind of power. It's just a good blend of contact and power. And you can see like some of the stuff that you would expect to see mechanically from a guy who has shortened up and is hitting big league velocity is like, oh, this guy, he's on time. Back to the baseball. He's able to pull the baseball more consistently. Not necessarily murk. I mean, it's like all fields huge pull the pole power when he's making contact. And Okamoto is more like. It's not quite Isak paradise level extreme in terms of how much pull, but that's what it looks like. He's crowding the plate. He's really trying to pull everything. He does have some in zone slider, you know, swing and miss because of his approach. Like he's just trying to pull, pull, pull. But he's on top of the plate enough that it's not like a ton of the zone. And I like him. I've talked to scouts who were either in Japan at times this year or who did remote work on some subset of these guys who agree with me that at the price that they would rather have Okamoto and they're just more in play for him, they think, than for Murakami because they expect Okamoto will get a lesser deal in part because of his age. And they just feel like the floor is higher on him as a like a contact hitter.

Ben Lindbergh (66:55)

Well, there's no Yamamoto on the pitching market and there's no one who's even quite as sexy and enticing as Sasaki was a year ago. But let's talk for a moment.

Meg Riley (67:05)

There's someone for everyone. Ben, you don't know.

Ben Lindbergh (67:08)

I'm sure that there will be plenty of suitors and you will find a match. But Tatsuya Imai, whom you mentioned earlier, red righty from the Cebu Lions and Then we can talk about a guy who might come back over after remaking himself. But give us the skinny on Imai.

Eric Longenhagen (67:24)

Imai, the first round pick out of high school over there and was in a rotation at 20. He's pretty walk prone. For several years he was injury prone. And then really starting in 2022 each year strikes got better. He was working more and more innings to the point where like a lot of pitchers in Asia, he's thrown 160 innings. Like some of these guys go to Korea and it's just like, wow, you threw 200 innings over there. Like, yeah, you're welcome. We have this idea of, you know, pitchers starting that is sort of solidified when some of them like come through Asia. And Imai is one of those guys. So, you know, he's coming off of four consecutive seasons with an ERA under two and a half, half even in the seasons when he was walking a bunch of guys. And then in 2025, you know, he had a 192. He sat 95 all year. He has a legit plus slider and a splitter. He's like actually has a splitter and a change up. Although towards the end of the year, like in the playoffs, it was really just the straight change which he had had, he's had for a while. Splitters is newer. The straight change was really what he was leaning on as his off speed. So still kind of developing that splitter. I'd say, you know, this is a really athletic, loose, whippy bodied guy where if you're thinking about, you know, Ben, we've had conversations about this like quantifying deception or what you're looking for. Some of these deceptive pitchers and what makes them deceptive, if some of it is they're just hiding the baseball behind their own body for longer. This is one of those guys where he just does not show you the baseball until very, very late because his body's just so loose and his arm is just back laying parallel with the ground until his release point almost. And so I really think this guy's fastball and his slider both are going to play. There's stuff about his delivery I don't love. This is one of those pitchers who has a lot of arm side misses. His arm is late. Like if you slow the video down when that front foot lands like his arm is late. And when you see that and the up and arm side misses with the fastball, to me that's like a little bit of a yellow flag or at least an indication that something should Change here maybe. And then you look at the rest of his delivery and I do think for how athletic he is, he's just got such a, like a short striding delivery. It's one of those guys who, where he is on the rubber and or his stride direction. These are things that are pretty common to change nowadays. Like Garrett Crochet changed stuff after he was traded. Like they're. The Red Sox are one of those teams, they're growing number of them where they're just like, we don't really care how good you've been to this point, how this is working for you. If we think we can make you better by changing some of this stuff with the way you're on the rubber or the direction you're striding off of it, we're going to do it. So I think he might as a candidate for this. And some of it I think will help his offspeed pitches play because I do think they're pretty easy to see out of his hand. They just start tailing away from the zone like too early. And I think if you change the angle of it some that it will be less identifiable. So just on athleticism and durability and the way his on paper strike throwing has trended and the arm strength and the breaking ball quality, like that's a lot of really, really good stuff. And so I think he might could slot into a rotation right away and like I have him behind Gallon and Michael King in this year's free agent class. But I think, you know, once you start talking about like hit Imai vs Jack Flaherty and stuff like that, now we can really start having a conversation about who we'd rather have. He's 27 and so I think like sort of slots into that next probably at the front for me of that next group of pitchers after the Gallon and, and, and Michael King, you know, area.

Meg Riley (71:18)

And then Ben made mention of someone who might be coming back and that returner would be Cody Ponce. So what has changed for him since he was a prospect and big leaguer here in the US and what are you expecting of him if he does make a return?

Eric Longenhagen (71:33)

Cody Ponce? I mean it's funny, I saw Ponce in college at Cal Poly Pomona and he's always been like a cutter heavy guy and you know, he, he made his way through the Miners and had a whole pour overs worth of big league innings and he's been overseas for a couple years and was basically the same, he was an MPB first and he was basically the same guy over there. For the first couple of years. And then in 2025 he went from MPB to KBO, which is normally not a good sign 9 but you know, he added two ticks to his fastball. He lost a ton of weight, like totally different conditioned guy and then had more of a split look to his off speed pitch than before. So there have been real discernable changes here. And then, you know, monster season from him. He had a sub two ERA, he worked 180 innings. He had like a, you know, 35 or 36% strikeout rate. He barely walked anybody. And then even like deep, you know, in the season, during the playoffs he's like pumping 94, 97. So Cody Ponce looks really good. He's got, you know, a better secondary pitch than he had before. I still think his curveball is good looking. And there have been physical changes to his conditioning that make me think, okay, he's actually sitting 95 now. And he did it all year. He did it for 200 things. When you factor in his, his, his playoff innings, basically, yeah, he was like.

Ben Lindbergh (73:04)

Otherworldly to be clear. I mean KBO standards, he, he won the equivalent of the Cy Young. He led the league and everything essentially.

Eric Longenhagen (73:12)

But I think he and Drew Anderson both are poised for like a real role over here. Drew Anderson, I don't know if he's going to come because like he's married to a Japanese woman, he has spent a lot of time in Asia. But Drew Anderson's another one where he's had a, he had a velo spike and sustained it for 170 plus innings. And like I kind of buy it and I like Ponce more because I just think his secondary stuff is better. But like Drew Anderson, who's 31 is another one where like both of those guys I think should get big league deals and, and play meaningful roles in someone's rotation next year. And they both, I think like at one point they were sort of in, in a Maguire Sosa, you know, KBO strikeout record race. And I forget how it settled because I think it maybe had to do with like the playoffs or not. But like yeah, both of those guys I think totally. I'd be very interested in for more, especially Ponce for more than what Eric Fetty got a couple years ago, which was 2 years 15 mil. I think Ponce will get closer to 25 and maybe Anderson's will be more like exactly like Feddy's.

Ben Lindbergh (74:25)

So those are the headliners. We've hit there. Your first couple tiers of players and people can Go to your piece which we will link to on the show page to see the complete list. But is there anyone else who may come over, at least if they're not guaranteed to yet, who has real impact potential?

Eric Longenhagen (74:44)

Yeah. So some of the same dynamics that are at play for Drew Anderson. Well, some of the moves are just like interpersonal. Basically it's thought of that in Asia, NPB is obviously the best league and then the KBO and then the CPBL in Taiwan. And so what normally happens is if, say there is a good Taiwanese player, which there is, his name is Joe C. Susan Do. And if folks watched the WBC qualifiers 10 months ago, you saw this guy pitching for Taiwan as they won, you know, he's pumping 98, he is a good splitter and curveball. He's little but he's really athletic. Generally the Taiwanese players will filter up through KBO and MPB either sequentially or like some of them will skip right to npb. There's just better money there. And the rules guarding entry are easier when you're transitioning from one of the Asian leagues to the other than they are if you want to come to mlb. And so Josie Su is one where if a big league team thinks he can start, then maybe the money is enough for him to come. He's too young to be posted and paid closer to a free agent. He still has to, you know, pitch for a couple years in a foreign pro league before he could be like posted and pursued in that manner. So it's going to be hard for the money to be that big. Like it would take teams who have pretty sure. Right? Like I'm not talking out of school here. They're like, you know, the same considerations that Roki Sasaki had, you know, applied to this guy. Where how much money are you going to make if you come over here? Especially if only if people over here only think that you can be a reliever. And I think that that's the camp I fall into right now because at the end of the CPBL season Sue was sitting like 92. So he went from like sitting 95, touching 98, 99 in the early part of the season and during WBC qualifiers to like sitting 92 to 94. And he's little, he's only 24. So. So I would say that like he's more of a multi year guy to watch. It would be really interesting if there were a team that had real bonus pool space from like the amateur arena remaining to like actually make a run at this guy and maybe do the Blue Jays or somebody like. No, because the Blue Jays signed some other crew. They signed like a different Asian pitcher.

Meg Riley (77:14)

He just turned 25 on November 1st.

Eric Longenhagen (77:17)

Gotcha. Anyway, that's what name to follow. And then old buddy Leewyn Diaz, you know, formerly of the Twins, most of all, had 50 bombs in Korea this year. I don't think he's Eric Thames. I don't think it's real. Like he still is so chase prone that I'd be scared for Leewind Diaz to come back over. I did speak with someone who was like, hey, this guy's always been a really good contact hitter. He's a good athlete, he's a good defender. We like this player. So maybe Leymond Diaz comes over. He was on like an 800k deal entering the season in and then had a 50 homer year. And so you can imagine like there are restrictions on what KBO teams can pay foreign players. And it's possible someone over here would rather, you know, can, can supersede that by a little bit and he gets like a, you know, a two or three million dollar deal and ends up wanting to come back over. But I don't know that that's necessarily going to happen. Hiroto Saiki, who's from Hanshin, he's pretty startery. People don't think he's going to come over. There's been interest in the past that's been written about. Like people reported that he's kicking the tires on it or whatever. Like I think twice over the last handful of years that's happened. But most of my sources are just like, eh, we don't think that guy's coming. And I think the same is true of Takahiro Norimoto from Golden Eagles. He's like a 36 year old who throws hard. He could be a reliever over here, it'd be okay. Or maybe it's show you a Iwasaki. I have the text, I have to look at my text messages. But one of the other players who I've got like projected in relief, it's either Iwasaki or Norimoto. Somebody texted me and was just like, hey, I don't think that, I don't think that guy's gonna come over. And then also like the Cubans, Levon Mo and Ray Del Martinez could definitely be good leaders. Ray Del Martinez could be a setup man and Levon Mo could be someone's mid rotation piece. Like he's really good but the Cuban government and sort of the way that Cuban players end up on loan to Japanese teams. It would take these guys fleeing and defecting in a way that like Oscar Coloss did a couple years ago for them to sign. And nobody was like, you know, anticipates that that'll happen. It could conceivably happen at some point. If it is about to happen. I would hope that it's not like out there for these guys sake, you know, like it's the type of thing that if executed properly nobody knows is going to happen. So who knows. And then I guess if I'm going to mention a couple other guys for the future, you know, there's Champeti Yamashita who pitches for Oryx. He was hurt a bunch this year. And Do Young Kim from Korea, he's a third baseman for the Kia Tigers. Yamashita is like really, really good. I think like could be a number two or number three type on a really good team. Three plus pitches. He's strapping six foot three guy. And then Do Young Kim has, I think it was three, was it three different hamstring injuries this year? Like just super tightly wound in his lower body type guy, he's a 70 runner. He has gone absolutely bonkers during, you know, international competition. He won the KBO MVP last year. In his early 20s. He has real big league power and speed. Even though he's kind of a small ish guy, he's like medium framed guy. He's just been so injury prone for the last 12 months and it's always his hamstring. And so those are two longer term names for folks to know. I guess they're still in their early 20s and several years away from even potentially coming over here. Although I would have told you Rohisaki was a couple years away too based on his financial incentive and maybe there are financial incentives that we're not appreciating at play for some of these guys.

Ben Lindbergh (81:15)

Well, we will be without you, Dariush in 2026, who we learned on Tuesday is having internal brace repair. But we will have some new players coming over from Japan and elsewhere in Asia to get to know. The last thing I wanted to ask you is about the moratorium on scout scouting. That does not apply to you but applies to big league teams. You can keep scouting, take that mlb. But the rules that we talked about when they were announced back in September in an effort to promote pitcher health and actually let guys get a bit of a break and not go all out at showcases because MLP teams cannot scout them, cannot scout high school players as of now. I guess that's already started. Started and college players soon. So there will be a break. Do you think that will work as intended? Do you think it will help and will it change anything really about how teams scout and prepare for the draft?

Eric Longenhagen (82:18)

Well, I don't know. There's still so many fall scrimmages scheduled for the period encompassed by the moratorium. So it's not like these college baseball programs have totally shut down. They're like, oh well, our kids can't be scouted so we have to do our fall scrimmage in October rather than November. I don't know that this sort of top down way of incentivizing pitcher health matters. It struck me as the kind of movement made for a couple of other reasons. One of them is similar to some of the NFL's posturing around concussions where it's like, hey, look what we're doing to try to advocate for arm health, right? That's one thing where even though what we're doing isn't necessarily useful or helpful at all, we're going to do it because then we can say we try to do stuff. Then there's the is this more about about scouting industry shrinking than it is anything to do with arm health and the players you're scouting? Because to me just the incentives of Major League Baseball and some of their behavior over the course of the last couple CBA negotiations indicate to me that they are trying to outsource development to colleges. They're cutting minor league affiliates, they're limiting minor league roster spots. The timing of the draft changed to not really align at all with college baseball season and to try to best position it for the purposes of marketing, you know what I mean? It seems to me as though we've talked about this some on the pod, that there are people who view player development as an expense and there are people who view it as an investment. And you can guess which teams fall on which side of that based on the way we've talked about them during moments like this for the last 10 years. Seems like Cleveland would rather outsource this and that and share data rather than, oh, the Astros put a trackman unit at Vanderbilt and have exclusive access. All these themes are the same. So I can go to the field. Teams are not technically supposed to purvey video from me or data from me or who knows, like, can I talk on the phone with the scouting director about what I saw that day at ASU's scrimmage against Grand Canyon? Like, how are you gonna police that?

Ben Lindbergh (84:57)

Right?

Eric Longenhagen (84:57)

How are you gonna police that? If I send a YouTube link to a buddy with team because whatever got I threw a good inning at a scrimmage I was at. How are you going to police that? To me, it doesn't really have teeth. It doesn't really have what I perceive to be an impact other than there are scouts who would like to be at the field. Please. Because they want to be thought of as full time year round employees. Their contracts for most of them end at the end of October and, and notice the way the moratorium date kind of coincides with that. So, you know, there are probably a bunch of other reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not the pitchers at USC Upstate, you know, are healthy or not. I think it's maybe about other stuff, but I can say that, you know, I feel like I've favorited the D1 baseball. By the way, great website site. D1 baseball just has a fall scrimmage schedule which is beautiful. Like absolutely the type of thing that is a super useful tool that a media entity like this could. You know, thank you for putting it together like so much. I can't find it at the moment.

Ben Lindbergh (86:20)

There it is.

Eric Longenhagen (86:20)

I. I found it. I'm looking at the schedule and after the moratorium begins there's plenty of stuff. Like a lot of them. Like I just haven't stopped scrolling yet. So I think that I don't understand. I don't really understand their, their reasoning behind it or why they think it's helpful. Like I didn't read any of their marketing material on it or the press releases. Some of the places do their scrimmages before that because if you're Lehigh or whatever in November it's, you can't play baseball in Bethlehem. But if you're Arizona State you can and probably should be. And I'd rather the facilities be used year round because some of these are state schools and da da, da. So, you know, I think I call kind of BS on it. But also, I guess, let's see, to me it's just a way of keeping scouts away and limiting their expenses for an extra month. An extra month and a half.

Ben Lindbergh (87:20)

There's certainly the cynical interpretation which I think Meg and I mentioned the last time we talked. I guess I'm a little more optimistic about it or at least hopeful. Just every little bit of arm protection helps. And it sounds like there are some enforcement mechanisms. Yeah. In the scenario where you're ruining everything by just texting information on YouTube just freely. Right.

Eric Longenhagen (87:43)

Like if I'm to LSU scrimmage in November and just put the video on YouTube. How do you police that?

Ben Lindbergh (87:50)

Yeah.

Eric Longenhagen (87:51)

If part of what's explicitly stated is, like, you shall not acquire data or video, like, essentially do remote scouting, then what is the point? And also if there aren't, if the goal is, well, let's disincentivize false scrimmages. All you might be doing, first of all is they might just be front loaded before the moratorium.

Meg Riley (88:12)

Right.

Eric Longenhagen (88:12)

Like, you maybe aren't limiting usage at all. You're just changing the distribution of it.

Ben Lindbergh (88:16)

Yeah, right.

Eric Longenhagen (88:17)

And then the other one is, okay, let's say the colleges were like, okay, fine, we're not going to have fall practices or scrimmages anymore. Then all that's going to do is there's a certain subset of the college pitching population that the school is either going to pay for or the player is going to pay for. Going to Driveline, going to tread, going to Maven or whatever and doing their own training somewhere. And now you're gonna bifurcate, like along socioeconomic lines, maybe even more than you already have.

Ben Lindbergh (88:50)

Right.

Eric Longenhagen (88:51)

Like, think of the, the potential knock on. Okay, so if what you want to happen is colleges don't do false schedules anymore or, you know, high schoolers, like, for one, I do think if you're a high school athlete, play basketball, kid, like, wrestle and play basketball or run track, like, go do other stuff and don't play baseball year round, please. There's not a single baseball scout who would advocate for you playing baseball year round. Seriously. Not a single one. But, yeah, let's say all this stuff is canceled and there's nothing in the fall or winter. I just think that there's a subset of college players especially who are just going to go to tread or get private training, training, and you're just perpetuating a thing that is already kind of a problem that you've had to address in other areas with RBI and breakthrough series, which, by the way, good job on that. That's going pretty well. Even though a lot of those athletes come, you know, come from rich families too.

Meg Riley (89:47)

Yeah.

Ben Lindbergh (89:48)

All right, well, the scouting grind never stops. There's always winter ball. Australian Baseball League starts next week. There's always something a little more NFL left. Yeah, that too. And you will start rolling out rankings and lists and lots to look forward to. But thanks for bringing us up to speed on this off season's international pro class.

Eric Longenhagen (90:13)

Thank you again for having me on. And yeah, I look forward to whatever comes next, whether it's, I don't know, next time I'LL talk to you guys will be but Ben yeah, we should just talk for the sake of talking at some point. Ben because we only ever do it on the pod.

Ben Lindbergh (90:26)

Talk to someone not on a podcast, not for content, just a non content conversation.

Meg Riley (90:34)

Ben lives the rest of his life on vocal rest.

Ben Lindbergh (90:39)

It's a novel idea, but I'm into it. All right, couple things to promote one self serving, one less. So I'll start with the latter Effectively Wild Secret Santa is open for business already early this year, the eighth consecutive year that listener Zach Went will be organizing this. You can sign up now and be mad matched with other participants, other effectively wild listeners and you can send and hopefully receive some baseball related gift. The recommended maximum to spend is $25 unless you're feeling especially generous and you can share pictures in our various online communities or not. Up to you. Please sign up only if you intend to actually follow through and send someone a gift because it's a bummer if you get the equivalent of coal in your stocking and you've sent someone else a gift. That's not nice, that's not fair. That's not in the holiday spirit. So please don' flake. Follow through if you sign up. But if you intend to follow through then I encourage you to sign up. The more the merrier. Spread some holiday cheer. I always participate. I always get great gifts and hopefully give some. So the deadline is not until December 10, but early notice this year. I will link to this and keep the link on the show page until the deadline. Secondly, I never know how much to promote other projects of mine. When I'm doing Effectively Wild, I usually stick to asking people to support Effectively Wild. But I do do other stuff stuff and I make other shows. And so you may have heard me reference Hang up and Listen, the general sports podcast that I co host for Slate. You may also know that I host a video game podcast for the Ringer called Button Mash, which appears on the Ringerverse feed. And of course I'd love for you to listen to those. But I have a new project, a new show that just launched and I would love your support. It's called Plot Hole or Knothole. It's a video series, a combination of an essay and an interview in which I talk to TV or movie makers. 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In the episode Tahaji I won't spoil the details here, but I will link to this video on the show page and I hope you'll check it out. It even features a delightful, catchy theme song by my wonderful wife Jesse, who also composed the Stat Blast song and Meet a Major Leaguer so you won't want to miss that. Even if you're not interested, give it a click just for me, but hopefully I'll hook you and you'll want to watch more, but I'd like to make more of these that would be fun for me, but that's kind of contingent on anyone watching this one, so I would very much appreciate your support and help spreading the word about that. And as always, I deeply appreciate your support of this podcast as well, which you can offer by going to patreon.com effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount, as have the following five listeners, Bob Schultz, S.H. destin Kelly, Baxter Barrett, and Matthew Williams Williamson. Thanks to all of you, Patreon perks include access to the effectively WoW Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams. Well, those are a ways away, but I am about to post the latest of our monthly bonus episodes, the 48th one that's available right now. As soon as you sign up, you also have the option for personalized messages, potential podcast appearances, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad, free fangraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email, send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphts.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild. Another way to support the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and other podcast platforms, you can join our facebook group@facebook.com group effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at RC Effectively Wild and you can check the aforementioned show page or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then.

Eric Longenhagen (95:15)

The Zombie Runner Bobby Shands Bobby Shands Bobby Shands Effectively Wild.