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Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2504: I Choo-Choo-Choose You
01:40:28
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- [00:01]
Meg Rowley
Star plus passwords and better for free. Three new episodes for us each week.
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Ben Limburg
Effectively.
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Meg Rowley
Wild. Wild. Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2504 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraph Spaceball podcast, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of fangraphs, and I am joined remotely by Ben Limburg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you?
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Eric Longenhagen
Quite well.
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Meg Rowley
Good. And very directly by Eric Longenhagen, also of fangraphs, who is sitting next to me in the hotel in downtown Philadelphia as we get ready to talk about the MLB draft. Eric, how are you?
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Ben Limburg
I'm pretty good. You could use some deodorant, though.
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Meg Rowley
We figured that it was probably easier to do this in the same place and in the same room of the hotel. It might mean that the audio quality is a little tinny. So our apologies in advance to our listeners and also to producer Shane, who assured us that this was okay. We'll see if he has conviction in that conclusion when he gets the file. But yeah, it's a beautiful, if hot day in Philadelphia.
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Ben Limburg
Dude, it is. It's so hot here. Like, I walked from the hotel down 13th street all the way to the stadium on the day that we picked up our credentials, and it was only like 86 that day. And by the time I got there, I was wringing wet. I definitely have, like, felt some of the effects of yesterday at the Futures Game. Like, I was in the sun for most of the game and, you know, kind of nauseous for a little while afterward. Like, it is just a different type of of heat here and it's not even going to be that much cooler, like Wednesday, you know, it's going to be 100 here, basically the same temperature back home and in Tempe. So, yeah, you know, it's just one of those things like a fan graph tradition of trying to get out of Arizona in the middle of the summer and go do other stuff. And the heat just sort of follows us around. So here we are, we're baking or I guess. No, this is more like with this. What is it? Where it's.
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Eric Longenhagen
We're marinating. Steaming.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, we're in a. We're in a soup.
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Eric Longenhagen
Well, you know, this heat. Well, this is your neck of the woods, Eric. So I'm sure it's like a warm embrace being back there. And you two are hopefully cool where you are recording as you are Paul and georging it on the same mic. Not Paul georging it because he's no longer in Philly, but McCartney and Harrison. That's that's what I was going for, sharing a microphone. Anyway, we have lots of draft stuff and Futures Game stuff and All Star Week stuff to discuss. And before we do, one person who is, well, I was about to say not in Philly, but I guess probably he is, unless he's on vacation somewhere. Zach Wheeler. We talked about him last time, Meg. About how he was aggrieved not being appointed to the All Star team selected. He and his agent went public with their complaints about that. And it turns out that after we recorded MLB kind of caved to the bad PR and the pressure and gave him a courtesy invite, sort of a pity invite, at the last second on Friday. Evidently he was in fact invited by MLB to join as an injury replacement. But after all that, he refused. He declined the offer and said that he was not going to be the fifth option. They disrespected me, so I'm just not going to participate in that thing, he said. Maybe I didn't earn it from the get go, but maybe just second choice once. I feel like they kind of messed that up, I I'm out. So the squeaky wheel got the grease and then decided he didn't want the grease. Actually, no thanks. No grease for me. Or this was not the way I wanted my grease. So does this make you more or less sympathetic to his plight that he actually did get a late invitation and turned it down?
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Meg Rowley
I just find the whole thing a little bit odd. And it does reinforce my speculation from, from last time that Zach Wheeler is, is maybe staring down the, the end of his career, feels that that is much more proximate than the beginning of it. I think that's how you end up in, in sort of legacy mode here. But I, I am curious sort of what their expectations were because unless it had been remedied immediately, was there, was there just never a resolution on MLB's part that he would have found satisfying? I don't know. It. It does. He does seem kind of sore at this point in a way that might not be especially flattering. But also, I don't know, I wonder if MLB wouldn't have been better off just saying, oh yeah, like a terrible clerical error. Zach, you were supposed to be on the first round.
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Ben Limburg
You handled it how I would have handled it. Seriously, because there's a certain point where last year, if you're going to do this thing where Misarowski makes it last year, because, hey, this guy has a special something that we want in the game and so we'll put our thumb on the Scale a little bit to ensure it happens. I don't know why you wouldn't want to do that for a guy pitching in for, you know, the home team for the All Star Game, the host team who is maybe like a Hall of Fame pitcher who's one of the best pitchers of the last decade. That's the. Seems like the sort of guy who I'd want to do that for. And there's not like, once you've hurt me in this way, once my pride or whatever, like you could say that any of these feelings are, are foolish, but once that is. Is injured initially, there isn't really like a way for you to remedy that with me. If I were Zach Wheeler and was passed over. And then of course, we have the Phillies stuff from last year too, with Chris, with their pitchers last year being, you know, disrespected, I suppose is not, maybe not the, the verb that I would use if I were complaining. But yeah, disrespect will not be tolerated. You know, that's, that's a persistent Bomani Jones catchphrase that I believe. You know, I think that I adhere to that too. So I support Zach Wheeler in complaining and then refusing when the olive branch was extended.
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Meg Rowley
If nothing else, it strikes me as a deeply Philly sort of perspective.
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Ben Limburg
That's fine.
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Meg Rowley
You're going to be saying water by the end of this trip.
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Eric Longenhagen
Yeah.
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Ben Limburg
You know, like they didn't invite me. This disrespect will not be tolerated.
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Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, I guess once they didn't have him in the initial round of injury replacements, there was no remedying it to his satisfaction, though if what he really wanted was just to have been an All Star, whether he actually pitched or went to the game or was on the roster or not, just for kind of career accomplishment purposes, then might as well have just taken it because it wouldn't have made a difference in the long run. No one would really have remembered how and when he was selected, just that he was an All Star. But there will be no shortage of Phillies at the All Star Game. There are six Phillies on the roster as it is, which is a lot. And he pitched like an All Star on Sunday and he went six scoreless and he outdoed Tarek Scubal. So actually, if I were a Phillies fan, I think I would be pretty pleased about this snub because it seems like he is powered by spite now and Spike can be a powerful motivator. And so having Zach Wheeler pitch the rest of the season, just still stewing about the fact that he was not an All Star and wanting to show everyone how wrong that was. I think that's, that's bullish. That's makes me feel better about the Phillies probably. And he has been fantastic, his usual excellent self since he returned. The other bit of news that we didn't get to discuss last time because it was late breaking is that we got another big long term extension for a rookie signed. So just two years ago JJ Weatherholt was drafted seventh overall by the Cardinals. And hey, he's not an All Star either. Even though he is leading all NL rookies in WAR and is the presumptive Rookie of the Year favorite. He is a Cardinal and will be a Cardinal for a long time. He signed an eight year extension, runs through 2034, buys out his first three free agent years. It's 1:12.5 million, no options. There's some incentives that can bring it up another 20 million almost. So we've seen a rash of these extensions. We saw Kevin McGonagall, Connor Griffin, Cole Demerson, Cooper Pratt, Luis Lara of the Brewers. So this is yet another one of those guys and another guy who's looked fantastic this season. So I don't know if you have thoughts on his long term future or what you've seen from him so far.
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Ben Limburg
Eric Weatherhole was my top player in the class the year he got picked. And then for him to go seventh, well, some of it felt odd, like hey, was I too high on this guy? But things are going well for this draft class in general. They certainly are. For, for jj, you know, a big piece of his war production to this point this season has been from defense. I wonder a couple things about that. Number one is I wonder how real the size of that impact is. And I also wonder if it means, you know, indeed the Cardinals believe it to be real, if he might just be their shortstop at some point. You know, the notion of sliding him over there, if they think he can do it over the course of this contract I think would be pretty interesting. I tend to think that he cannot. This is a guy who had like hamstring stuff pretty consistently in college. And I do think that in the way it just seems to pop up once or twice a year for guys like Cattel Marte, it will probably be a thing. J.J. weatherhold, who's just like a really, you know, thick in the lower body, tightly wound kind of guy, he's probably going to have soft tissue stuff here and there. But you know, at 14 million a year, average annual value over the course of this deal you know, he really has to be like a one and a half win player for that to be like more than worth it. And he's doubled that already this season before the break. So, you know, I like the deal for the Cardinals a lot. I like the deal for JJ to some degree. Like to have $100 million contract before your rookie season is over is no small thing. Yeah, this is just one of those build around type players who absolutely deserves an extension like this. And it feels less scary than some of the other ones that have gone sideways when they've been doled out even sooner than this. And obviously like some of those like Jonathan Singleton and Scott Kingery and such were not quite this big. So the fact that JJ's been this good, I mean his ex wo was even better than his actual performance to this point. He's still slugging just a shade under.400 as we're sitting here talking. But yeah, I think really good player, consistent all star. I don't think he's going to be like a six war player every year. Like he's on pace for this season, but still going to be like I think a regular all star, especially given the state of the infield across the game at this stage.
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Eric Longenhagen
And has a lot to do with the fact that the Cardinals are sitting one game out of a playoff spot, which is somewhat unexpected. And even if they don't make it, they've got about a 1 in 3 chance, according to the Fancraft's playoff odds of making the playoffs. Still a pretty successful year when it comes to evaluating what their core and what their foundation is and who's good and who's worth keeping around. What do you think of what appears to be an uptick in the number of these extensions? Because a couple of the ones that you mentioned there that didn't pan out were years and years ago and maybe that actually dissuaded teams from doing this as often as they seem to now. So are they doing it as much as they always should have been now? Are they sometimes reaching for some of these guys where we have these perception that oh yeah, pre arb extension always very favorable to teams but not always and if you start giving them to more and more guys then eventually that's not really going to be the case. Have we gotten to that point or have you looked at all the ones signed this season or prior to this season and said yep, that makes sense, that's the kind of guy I would want to sign long term.
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Ben Limburg
I think it's mostly tends to be players who I'd be enthused about having an extension with. I think the ones that are there are definitely going to be some of these that go sideways because of the length more than the aav. It's just like who is going to have a weird early decline. We see this all the time where they're just players whose peak tends to be at age 24, 25. And something just about doing this every day for six, seven months for three, four years can start to have an impact on your body. Like I just, there are probably going to be some of these, whether it's Jackson, Cheerio or whoever that start to feel bad later. And I just don't know how to predict which those are going to be. I would guess just based on the way the careers of guys like Mo Vaughn and Richie, like the types of players who take a dip earlier than you want them to tend to be guys who don't really have anywhere to go on the defensive spectrum once those skills, once your athleticism starts to slip for whatever reason. But the guys who tended to get these extensions are the ones who play up the middle. They play a position of value, like there's something to fall back on even if they stop hitting or stop hitting as well, I suppose or if they start to slip athletically and have to move from center field to left field or whatever it is. So I guess like that's why the Cheerio one concerns me a little bit. He is not as overtly physical as some of these other guys. Like a Connor Griffin. He has already moved permanently it seems to an outfield corner just off the top of my head of guys who have like been extended. But yeah, he's still been obviously like really good to this point. He's a guy whose ex WOBA has pretty consistently been a little bit lower than his observed for the first three years of his career. So that might be the one where if I'm like take a shot on a guy who's whose extension might feel bad before it's through. I guess it's just sitting here off the top. I'd say Cheerios.
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Meg Rowley
But even there, like he's shown an ability to course correct at the plate this year after, you know, having kind of a weird tale of two halves in both his freshman and sophomore campaign. I think the interesting thing about Weatherholt is that like, you know, often these long term extensions, we're seeing them sort of fit into a long term payroll picture where there are already a number of established guys and the guys who get these deals obviously are seen as players who are going to be core pieces for a long time. But like in Weatherholt's case, it's really him. Like St. Louis's long term payroll picture is wide open. You know, they moved all those guys this off season. They have a couple of guys who are in that like our 1 through 3 range. But like he is their only long term payroll commitment at this point. And so it'll be, you know, this one is interesting not only because of what it says about how they value him to your point, like does he just become the shortstop in the event that Mason Wynn moves on, but how do they then supplement around him? And seeing what Bloom and company do on that score long term I think is going to be really interesting.
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Eric Longenhagen
And as we've discussed, it's not the Yankees and Dodgers signing these guys to early long term extensions for the most part. It's a lot of NL Central teams. It's the Tigers, it's the Mariners. It's teams that may have concerns about being outbid for top free agents or not being seen as top destinations. And so might make sense for them to just take these guys out of free agency and keep them around. Which regardless of whether it's good for the player, can be good for the game if you're concerned about the top talents clustering too much in the by coastal behemoths.
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Meg Rowley
So yeah, and like J.J. weatherholt had the presence of mind and sort of feel for the audience that this is totally anecdotal, but when he got the cowboy hat, right, when he got drafted, by the way, the last time there were actually players at the draft, which we'll get to at some point here. But his draft was in Fort Worth. It was at the stockyards. We've talked about the objects of that. And he walks in with a 10 gallon hat and a bolo tie and he was just like ready to go. He had West Virginia stuff on the inside of his suit jacket. He thanked God to the uproarious applause of the crowd. That guy clearly knows how to get settled and sort of have a feel for where he is in a non baseball sense. And if he feels at home in St. Louis and they think that he's a fit for them long term, I will say the one thing about his deal, you know, because he was a college player, he's a little bit older. He is in a spot where the length of this deal takes him into his 30s in terms of the next time he's going to be a free agent if he is this good, even not every year, but for a couple of his seasons going forward. He does seem like he is leaving money on the table in a way that might be more profound. But if, if he also has concerns about like how the lower body health is going to trend over the course of his career, this might be a really nice flesh fit for him too.
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Ben Limburg
You know, I also wonder if there's like a symbiosis at play here with some of these teams that if we end up with a salary cap and a salary floor, some of these teams signing these deals are the types who in the past might have had trouble clearing the floor. And this is like a big puzzle piece that you can feel good about aiming toward clearing that bar. And then the converse is maybe true for some of these players who might be worried that because of a cap, their long term earning power might be limited and so they want to bank a $14 million a year pay payday, you know, beyond this era that might then include the start of some sort of salary cap. Like, rather than try to figure out, well, after the cap, what might my value be if I hit free agency in six years? It might not look all that different than some of this stuff. I think if we look at like, you know, this NBA off season because of the Sixers of it all and the Jalen Brown trade and the impact of the second apron in the NBA and what that's doing to the way teams build and retain players, or in this case, kind of not. If I'm looking at that and mapping what baseball team behavior might look like in a similar format, then I might be inclined as a player to just say, yeah, give me this deal for this long right now. Because I don't know what the environment is going to look like for me when I would hit free agency. If in fact the system has changed significantly.
- [19:22]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah. And that might be relevant to baseball come a few years when all the broadcast contracts are up for negotiation. Again, just because in the NBA people were banking on the salary cap continuing to climb by the max every year. And now that's not happening because the revenue growth has sort of slowed down and people were crowing about how big the most recent national broadcast contract was, but that was a lot more inventory and a lot more games and more networks and less local broadcast revenue. And so that's actually seemingly having some effect on how teams are operating now because some of those max contracts are taking up a higher percentage of the payroll than they were projected to. So hopefully we won't be in a world where we're caring about aprons and percentage of payroll caps in a few years in mlp, or declining broadcast revenue for that matter. But we will see, other than the declining broadcast revenue, I guess that's the world that MLB owners want and they're kind of envious of their counterparts in other leagues. J.J. weatherholt, by the way, born in Baltimore, went to high school near Pittsburgh and went to college, West Virginia, as Meg said. So probably the black Stetson and string tie were not a regular part of his wardrobe prior to that event, though I don't know. No accounting for personal style.
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Meg Rowley
So hey man, when you're in Texas, you gotta go buy cowboy boots and a hat and a bolo. I think they took those draft prospects like to a habadashery. Is it still a habadashery if it's a cowboy hat?
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Ben Limburg
Isn't it just hatters?
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Eric Longenhagen
Aren't they the hatters? Yeah, I don't know.
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Meg Rowley
It's not a haberdashery.
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Ben Limburg
No, I think haberdashery is more like all kinds of different clothing.
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Meg Rowley
Oh, it's not just hats.
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Ben Limburg
I don't think it's just hats.
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Eric Longenhagen
I don't know. I watch a lot of Taylor Sheridan shows, but that does not qualify me to weigh in on that. But yeah, that is a a Bryce Harper approach to pandering to the local fans. Just blend in immediately, get the jersey, maybe get all of the local sports team's logos on one article of clothing so that you just ingratiate yourself with absolutely everyone and don't alienate anyone. Seems to have worked fairly well for Bryce, who is around this week as a legend pick and a Home Run Derby participant. So lots of teams are trying to draft the next JJ Weatherholt, or tried to this past weekend. So we will of course have Eric break down the draft as always. But I do want to ask you about this weekend's proceedings because according to people who were there, including yourselves and also spectators like myself, it seems like this weekend was an abject failure when it came to actually making a marquee broadcast event out of the Futures Game in the Draft. And I don't know whether it's chicken and egg and MLB has just conceded and capitulated and they're not trying to make fetch happen anymore with with these events or what, but not doing themselves any favors in any number of ways. Right? First of all, the Futures Game timing, which you have ranted about repeatedly, Meg. Still an issue because it's Sunday at noon, right before a full Slate of games and it's a seven inning affair. And everyone always wonders, well, couldn't they just do it Monday afternoon before the derby when nothing's going on? Or Wednesday for that matter. MLB always says no for some reason. So that was its usual kind of buried by Major League Baseball counter programming. And then Saturday and into Sunday, the draft was kind of amateur hour in any number of ways. First of all, very reflective of the times in that we talk a lot about how you have to have seven different streaming services to watch anything. And this was kind of taking that to its logical or illogical extreme where Peacock and NBC had the first 10 picks. And. And maybe this is reflective of just where the MLB draft stands in the pecking order because it's like we can't show the rest of the first round because there's a celebrity golf tournament going on. So that's a bigger draw, evidently. And maybe it is.
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Meg Rowley
That was why I. Yeah, I mean
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Eric Longenhagen
maybe there was just no, no interest anyway, but that was what they were switching over to.
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Meg Rowley
What possible celebrity was Taylor Swift golfing? Who was golfing? That would.
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Ben Limburg
Charles Barkley.
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Meg Rowley
Okay, but we, we just saw so much of Chuck, you know, we just saw a bunch of Chuck.
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Ben Limburg
I think that's okay.
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Meg Rowley
I don't, don't get me wrong, I enjoy.
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Ben Limburg
It is embarrassing to have like the draft like appetizer picks basically. And that's it. Just apps.
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Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, apps, desserts. Yeah, right. It's the top 10. And then the rest of it, no thanks. I mean, Steph Curry was, was playing. It was won by Marty Fish, the former tennis player. So you know, the biggest stars. But I think the biggest stars, I think Steph was third. But yeah, for whatever reason, if you wanted to watch the rest of the first round, then you had to switch over to MLB Network. And then after that, if you were real draft sicko and you wanted to keep watching beyond pick number 40, then it was just online streaming@mlb.com and MLB TV and MLB plus or whatever. So yeah, it was very kind of cannibalized by other things and segmented and then the actual production values, not great either because instead of dedicated draft heads, instead of having Eric on there to break down every pick, which granted might have run up against time constraints possibly, but not even Eric's co author Kylie was leading the draft coverage this year. Right. It was like generalists. It was WBC manager extraordinaire Mark DeRosa and Harold Reynolds. And I'm sure that they prepped and crammed for the draft in the last week or something, and had never heard of these guys prior to that. Not that I can talk, but, you know, you'd think that maybe Rob Manfred would have asked how to pronounce Rock Chalowski's name at some point before calling him Chaluski. With the number one overall pick.
- [25:32]
Meg Rowley
I appreciate that. You were like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna.
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Eric Longenhagen
I did my research, unlike Rob.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah. And I'm gonna make sure I get it right.
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Ben Limburg
With the first pick of the 2026
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Meg Rowley
MLB Draft, the Chicago White Sox select Rock Chaluski, a shortstop from ucla.
- [25:52]
Eric Longenhagen
You know, it was not tough to project that he would be saying that name at some point on that day, probably pretty early. So there was that and then there was lots of stuff which, which you can tell me about, but I've. I've heard about just like, you know, the sky bridge from the hotel was closed and it was tough to get in there. And then they kicked everyone out. And then we're like, wait, you can come back. But everyone was gone already. And so, like, if. If you were covering the draft, you couldn't actually cover the draft in person very well. And then as people heard, if they were streaming subsequent rounds, the whole set was being broken down very loudly as the draft was still being constructed. And so it's like we were dealing with, with roofers on the podcast last week with you, Meg, and I've had construction going on at my place. That was what was happening with the MLB draft, where it's like, first round done, we gotta just move this place, I guess, gotta get the show on the road. And they're still drafting. And meanwhile you're hearing like hammering and drilling and all sorts of sounds as the set just gets deconstructed around them. They just couldn't wait. So the whole thing had the air of. We have given up on our quest to try to make this a marquee event.
- [27:05]
Meg Rowley
I want to preface all of this by saying that I appreciate that people in general don't care when the media is inconvenienced in the course of doing it job. And so the. The risk of navel gazing too much here. Yeah, it was, it was a bit of a cluster. There's always an element of chaotic disconnect around all star and draft related stuff. Because, you know, you have the host team, you have Major League Baseball. There can sometimes be a gap between what each of those entities thinks is their responsibility. And that can lead to some amount of being told, no, go over there. And so you expect to have to bob and weave a little bit. But the draft is Major League Baseball show, right? This is a one entity production, although I guess NBC presents a separate one. And so you would imagine that you would want to make covering the event as easy as possible, because even though it has not gotten the traction that the NFL draft or the NBA draft or even the NHL draft has gotten, the stated purpose or one of the stated purposes of the owner's recent draft proposal was, well, we want to make the draft a big deal. We want people to feel a connection to these players earlier in their careers. And so if they are all college guys and we've had this influx of talent to the college game because high schoolers aren't draft eligible, well, everyone's going to get so amped about it. And if that is true, well, you have a long way to go, buddies. Because it was a mess. We, you know, Bauman got in very early and so was allowed to sit there even though his. Even though his credentials.
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Ben Limburg
He was in there on his own. Like Charlton Heston and Omega Man.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, just for hours. When a group arrived around like, 11, which is typically when we have been allowed into the proceedings, they were told media would not be allowed to enter the draft room until 11:30.
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Ben Limburg
So, yeah, so I walked over the skybridge to the convention center. Cause I thought, like, we're all in this hotel, right? And the convention center's right there. It's convenient. Great idea, guys. And then, yeah, I was told, hey, you can't come in this entrance. You have to go over to, you know. So I walked, like, around the. And again, who cares?
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Meg Rowley
Like, right? It's a block.
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Ben Limburg
It's over. I don't really care. I've done this for long enough now that as much as I try to prepare for whatever curveball I'm going to be thrown, you kind of can't. There's always something like this that has you sweating like you're in the TSA line and your plane is boarding, basically is how we felt our scanners for our credentials would not work. And we're standing there, you know, I walked up to the entrance I was supposed to use in J.J. cooper and Sam Dykstra. And, you know, important people who work for Major League Baseball were coming out, just saying, like, they won't let us until 11:30. And I was just like, fine, I'm gonna stand here and wait. And then 11:30 rolls around, then our credentials will not scan. And then it took like another 45 minutes or whatever before someone with enough clout said, Just let them in. Just look at their face and the credential, the face on their head and the face on their credential. And if they match, then let them through.
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Meg Rowley
Right.
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Ben Limburg
And did I have to sit and scramble and do stuff, like, hurriedly after we finally got to sit down before the draft started? Like, yeah, but it's over now. I do think that there might be some producers, you know, like Gene Wilder producers, element to what's going on, where if, in fact they do force everyone to go to college, etc. Like, all the stuff that they proposed to change to amateur acquisition a couple weeks ago, could they then actually try to put a little bit more elbow grease into what's going on here and say, look, it worked, we did it. See how it was so bad before? And now there's this. Like when we had, we hired Michael Winslow to do sound effects during, in the background of the, the, you know, the second through fourth rounds of the draft in 2026, and now it's like, nice and church mouse quiet and stuff. I do wonder if it would be more popular if they had asked me to go on tv, which I've never been asked do. Part of me thinks that, like, Greg Amsinger knows he doesn't want my head of hair on TV next to him.
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Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, doesn't want that smoke, doesn't want that competition.
- [31:43]
Ben Limburg
But, but no, I keyed, I keyed the, the I don't know what the answer is. There is part of me that wonders. I do believe that people care more about the laundry of college sports than they do of, like, minor league baseball and high school stuff. I, I, I, I wonder if everyone did have to go to college, if it were more like the NFL. And I do think college baseball is growing in a way that there might be something to that part of it. As much as I disagree with, like, limiting the earning power of kids who could be drafted into a war that might still be going on by the time they're, you know, their high school draft picks next year. And the optics of that are different than football because, like, there's a real safety issue in pro football that you have to guard against. But, like, it wasn't the best. We were not privy to any of the broadcast stuff. A change for us from our perspective in, like, media row this year was we were not exposed to any parts of the broadcast. In past years, there have been, like, aspects of the broadcast that we have been able to hear sitting there. This year there was just like a stage show, which I thought they did a really good job. Like, if you were at the draft, it was fun. You got cool stuff.
- [32:56]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, I think that, like, there's, there's, you know, one of the challenges of this as a broadcast event is that, you know, you have a room full of people. Most of the folks who are there are there because they want to see their team pick. They, you know, I'm sure some of them are draft heads, but a lot of them are Phillies fans or, you know, insert team here. And so they want to see their, their team pick. To keep the energy up in the room, you gotta have the mascot dancing around and karaoke. And I will say, as an, as a historically anti DJ person, I did think that the DJ was good. She, she was on her game, but it was very, it was so loud. It was so loud. At one point, I'm sorry, I'm going to do a swear and you should bleep a chain because it's a pick one. At one point I messaged you, Ben, and I said, it's so loud in here because it was so loud in there. But, you know, they, they need to keep the energy in the room up for the benefit of the broadcast. And so there is this balance to be struck between actual draft stuff and, you know, the T shirt toss or whatever the activity is. And I thought it went too far in the direction of the T shirt toss this year. But I think you need some of that stuff so that it feels lively in there, particularly because, you know, I'm sure that Rob Manfred wasn't the only one who would have struggled to pronounce rock last name just by virtue of not everyone in there being a college baseball fan. So there, there is some of that that needs to go on, but it does feel very impersonal. This was the second year in a row where there were no players in attendance. I know that the plan under the owner's proposal is that, you know, they will pay players to attend. Why don't you just do that this year? It puts the beats in this weird situation where they're there to cover the team, they covers draft, and yet they have to step out of the room to do media availabilities with senior brass. Because it's not like the kid is there for them to talk to. That presents sort of a weird wrinkle. And I will say, when the event was in Fort Worth, they had, they only had six players there. It wasn't like the entire class was in attendance or the entire first round, but it was. And it punctuated it with, you Know, with a JJ weather Holt with a Braden Montgomery enough that it did add energy to the proceeding. It was cool to get to see those guys, you know, put on the hat for the first time, to see JJ take that giant cowboy hat off, you know, the year that Braden Montgomery got drafted, he had just busted his entire lower leg in the College World Series. He's on one of those little rollers to get up on the stage. But it was great. It. It made the crowd so happy. They really cheered for him because he was. Was still injured. So I think that there is, like a, you know, there's a version of the draft that is good in the room. There's a version of the draft that is good on tv. I think there's a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram, but they just haven't been able to nail it. And it seems like it has gotten worse lately in a way that even though I don't want to be conspiratorially minded, makes me wonder if there is some of this dynamic at play where they make it. You know, the production value is there for a TV broadcast, but they're not able to really do what the NFL or the NHL does. And then clearly, the way that they treated rounds two through four was just ridiculous. Like, and especially frustrating for the people who actually care about the draft because when the broadcast transitioned to the later rounds, like, they had people on that broadcast who are prospect people who do know these guys, right? It was. It was callous. It was Carlos, it was Lance, like, like. And they are very in the weeds on this class. Would have been able to offer tremendous analysis if you could have heard them do it. I was very gratified because, you know, I'm sitting. I'm sitting in my hotel room after the fact. I have Norway losing to England. I'm devastated. It's hot. I'm still annoyed that we got kicked out, like, moments after the first round ended. And in true Philly fashion, very rudely by, you know, conference convention center security staff who, like, yeah, well, what? Look, look, I'm just calling it like I see it. And I'm sitting there and we get an email to the podcast, email account, being very annoyed by the quality of the broadcast, which was the first that I had heard about the forklift of it all. And it was.
- [37:30]
Ben Limburg
It was just Michael Winslow. It's false flag.
- [37:32]
Meg Rowley
It was true.
- [37:32]
Ben Limburg
It's not true. There weren't people breaking down the set. It just had Michael Winslow doing sound effects.
- [37:37]
Meg Rowley
It was tremendously gratifying to see but anyway, I think, Sean, I see your email. I appreciate your perspective. You were right. It was a little bit of a catastrophe from a broadcast perspective. But and here I'm going to very subtly transition us. That doesn't mean that the draft itself was a disaster. So maybe, maybe now that we have given our media criticism, we can transition to talking about the players taken, because it's an interesting group and some of the strategies that we saw deployed on Saturday were curious. So maybe we can start though with the guys sort of right at the top of that class, because there was a real bifurcation for you and Brendan Eric between sort of the top four who were taken here, who are guys who are 50 future values and above will immediately move into the top 100 and then the, the rest of rest of the class. So do you want to talk about those four guys and maybe just some of the dynamics of the first round?
- [38:42]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, sure.
- [38:43]
Ben Limburg
So it was generally assumed that there were like a top four to five or six, depending on who you talk to, players in the class, with the top three being Rock Cholowski, shortstop from ucla. Grady Emerson, a high school shortstop from Texas, and then Vaughn Lackey, the catcher from Georgia Tech. And Rock and Emerson had been up at the top of this class basically the whole time. I had Rock towards the back of the first round when he was coming out of high school. He's a Hamilton High school kid in Arizona. And then Emerson last summer was generally regarded as clearly the best guy. Maybe he had a chance to go first, if not definitely a top five type of player. And then Lackey, when I updated the list, the draft list in January, I had Lackey at fifth, which was like sort of avant garde at the time. And now, you know, he pretty clearly moved into this group throughout the season and those were really the top three. And then Jackson Flora, the pitcher from UC Santa Barbara, who I had I think fourth before the season. Part of why he maintained his status as, as the top, or at least one of the top pitchers in the class was because some of the other guys, it was just sort of like a war of attrition really for the other college pitchers throughout the season. Cameron Fluke, who went later in the first round to Detroit, he was the top college pitcher on some folks boards entering the season. And then he got hurt in his first start and was just okay when he came back. So Florida just sort of stayed up there the whole year. Rock Cholowski, the first pick in the draft, he's one of the better shortstop defenders I've Scouted domestically, like pre draft, just really acrobatic. He's a bigger, boxier guy. He's not like super twitchy athletic. He just has unbelievable body control. He's very creative. The way he's able to contort himself to make some of these plays. I do think he has like Gold Glove type ceiling at short. I don't think he's just merely okay there or even just like, like above average. Like this is a plus plus shortstop defender who has power. He has that like teacherman style swing where there's like a very aggressive attack angle. He has a crazy bat rap of sorts where it's just so. Takes so long for him to get back on plane with the baseball. But when he is, he is geared for launch. Is he going to strike out more than you want? I think so. I think that's why he was third on my board rather than first or second. Although I do have the same grade on him. Emerson and Lackey. I had Rock third just because I felt better, more sure that the other two guys are really going to hit for contact. But as we saw with Jacob Gonzalez, the White Sox have been better at augmenting swings. You don't want to take a guy first whose swing you have to augment necessarily. But if things go sideways for Rock, if he ends up vulnerable to fastballs around his hands, as I think he will be some, that maybe they could dial things down enough that that remedies that really. I think that even if you just let things play out as they are right now, that his production will be similar to Dansby Swanson's where he's striking out like a quarter of the time, but he's getting the power. He's playing really good defense. It's a really good player and it's a player who you feel fine about taking first. Emerson, who went second to the Rays, the Rays had Emerson first in their board and with some separation between him and whoever they had second, which I think was lackey. Emerson can really hit. He's left handed. He's definitely going to play shortstop. He's got a great arm. He's not as good a defender as Rock is, but he's good enough that he feels like a sure bet to stay there. And then the question for Emerson is this is not a Corey Seager. This is not a Carlos Correa type of body where you think, wow. And he also maybe will have plus plus power one day. He's more like if he's going to hit for meaningful power, it's Going to look like Gunnar Henderson where he's like 6:2 and he got stronger than we thought he would because this is like sort of a narrow bodied, you know, he's just like really skinny through the forearms and his hips and he's just sort of like a stick figure, like 6 foot 2. So how strong he's going to be, I don't know. Still a really good player. The type of player who in any draft you'd feel good about taking third, taking fifth, like you feel awesome about that. Taking him second feels fine. And I do like him a lot and he's my second ranked player in the class. The twins at 3 took Von Lackey, who was my. I had him ranked first. Vaughn's just gotten better, significantly so every year for each of the last four years he is consistently an arrow up guy. He's an unbelievable defensive prospect. Like he's not necessarily the framer that Patrick Bailey is yet, but he is the thrower. Like some of the off platform stuff that you see Joe Mack and Bailey and some of these guys doing, Von Lackey does that stuff. He's really athletic for a catcher. He's really fast for a catcher. He's a well rounded offensive player. I'm not worried that this is like Henry Davis or Joey Bart or anything like that or even like Zanino, obviously Mike Zagino did enough other stuff that he was good. But I'm not worried that Von Lackey is going to hit like a buck 90 and then just do enough other stuff to be fine. I think Von Lackey is going to hit like 250, 260 with 20 bombs and be a plus defensive catcher. He's just like really, really good player. So those three guys are great. And then Jackson Flora at four, really smart, funny, charismatic kid. He blew a lot of people away at the combine talking to him. I think it's really good what the Giants did here. You can help soon. And I think that he is like, like a rudder of sorts entering a situation that feels rudderless and just like clearly the best guy in the class. And then after that things were strange. Like what were teams going to do after these guys went? And the answer was that they either ran to safety or got creative or just took a guy who they were hoping might still be there. And so we saw a lot of teams run toward college bats over the mostly over the next several picks. Safe feeling, college hitters. It began sooner than people would have guessed, I think like a month and a half ago. Some of the high upside, high Schoolers that, you know, I wasn't on necessarily like on all of these guys to the same degree as some of my peers. But like, Jacob Lombard fell to pick 14, which to me feels fine because I don't think he can hit. I'm really scared he can't. But, you know, two months ago that would have felt crazy. Eric Booth, you know, it's just like those teams picking fifth and sixth. Rand Pirates and the Royals were just like, let's take these safe feeling college hitters rather than gamble on these high school outfielders who people maybe think on upside should be the next two guys.
- [45:45]
Eric Longenhagen
So it was a pretty deep class, a lot of good players, but sounds like the cream of the crop. The elite guys were not really at the level that we've seen with some previous drafts. Like if Cholowski is the guy who is basically the number one projected pick from last year's draft to this year's draft, and I don't know how unusual that is for someone to go kind of wire to wire like that. And what that portends, if anything, you'd think probably, oh, the guy people maybe have been hearing about for that long and he actually stuck at the top of the class. I don't know whether that is a testament to him or says something about the class in general. You'd think that if someone was kind of the consensus top pick for that long, then maybe he would be sort of a no doubter superstar. And yet you're dropping Dansby Swanson comps, which he's a good player. You know, he's probably better than the median number one overall pick, but also maybe is not quite what you're aspiring to when you have the number one pick. Right. And he's not exactly a household name, not in the Manfred household, at least, clearly. Which, you know, I suppose speaks to what we were talking about with the Balkanized broadcast and the lack of live look ins. They actually, they had kind of a montage of like guys getting drafted in their living rooms, but without even identifying who they were or anything like just collected at the end. It was weird.
- [47:07]
Meg Rowley
It was at the end.
- [47:08]
Eric Longenhagen
Okay, so it was so weird.
- [47:11]
Meg Rowley
I just, I, I, I don't, Yeah, I don't know, man. We just assumed that those had been shown because they did show that that same montage in the room. And we just assumed that we, that the people at home.
- [47:24]
Eric Longenhagen
I don't think so. I think that was it. Yeah, it was weird. And, and yeah, and I was even thinking of the, like, is this trying to tank the draft so that they can get what they want. But I think if they could make it into a major marquee event that got huge ratings like drafts in other leagues did, I think MLP would want that and its broadcast partners would want that. So to some extent, it's kind of. Of conceding or surrendering to the inevitable, which is that there are just all these reasons why the MLB draft is not as big an event. Just because college baseball players are not as famous as college football and basketball players, generally speaking, and they're further away from being big leaguers, even if the timeline is somewhat accelerated now. And you have Rock Cholesky, who's the number one guy, and that wasn't a surprise. And yet even the commissioner can't say his name, right? Which maybe that's more of a reflection on Rob Manfred than, than. Than the caliber of, of, you know, celebrity or, or pedigree that that number one pick has. But you probably wouldn't see that in other sports where that guy's going to be a national celebrity when he gets elected, because you're going to be projecting the number one pick to be a superstar for the team that takes him in the coming season. Right. And that's just never going to be the case for baseball. So, Cholaski, do you think that the fact that he was just sort of the guy for so long, does that make you think better of him even if he wasn't your number one guy on, on your pure talent board? Or is that more about just the fact that there wasn't some sort of generational prospect available this time around?
- [48:56]
Ben Limburg
I think it's a good thing. I think that if we look at recent history, who are the players who basically, since they entered college, who we've cared about the whole time and they perform the whole time, it tends to be a good group of guys. The way Dylan Cruz has played is one of those exceptions where the rap on Dylan Cruz coming out of high school was, hey, we're scared this guy maybe won't hit that. He might strike out more than you want him to. And his swing is long. And then he went to LSU and he crushed it for three years. And then he gets to the big leagues and it's like, hey, maybe like some of those concerns were valid. He still is. I still like Dylan Cruz and think he's going to be a good player. But the type of wire to wire, this guy destroyed the SEC for three years. He's got to be great, right? You know, that's, that's not necessarily true. Travis Bazzano was wire to wire coming out of Travis Bazan his sophomore year. He was basically the top ranked guy in the class. And you could argue that it should have been, you know, Kurtz or Weatherholt or whatever, but people generally thought, hey, Travis Pizzana, that guy's good. It would be totally fine to take him first in a draft and he'll be good pretty quickly. And that's, that's the sort of thing that I think about Cholowski, where he feels in his defense that that piece of it gives him a floor of sorts. But the fact that he's been good the whole time and seems like a good kid, like, I know I was watching the Sox Machine interview that Rock had media availability after he got picked and he was describing like walking through Chicago after he had met with the team and spent the whole, you know, a couple of days there. And I would feel really good about it if he seems really enthused about the city and being there and you know, just the year that the White Sox as a franchise are having, I think I'd feel really good about generally, I don't know. There are just years where the draft isn't as sexy. There are just years where the draft isn't very good or where the best players come out of a place where you wouldn't have expected them to because it's 2026. You know, our buddy Keith and I think other outlets too. Like it's been 10 years since the 2016 draft and that's the draft, that's the Mickey Maniac draft. And you have to go so deep in that draft before you find players who you'd feel good about taking first or second or third. Like Will Smith went in the comp round. Corbin Burns went in like the second round like and was a two way player for a while at St. Mary's you know, I'm thinking of Tony Gonsola. Nevermind, they were on the same team. You know, Boba Shet was like kind of a doughy high school player who got his act together between his junior and senior year and was an arrow up guy, but not to the degree where you were going to take him first. And maybe since then, 10 years is kind of a long time. The way teams behave and the way teams understand players has changed enough that maybe Will Smith does go second. You know, if you, if you have the 2016 draft today, with today's style of thinking and like understanding of the data and this and that stuff, maybe Will Smith and Boba Shet, like maybe Boba Shet's bat speed gets measured in a way that lights up enough teams that he does go where Eric Booth went this year rather than in the second round. But sometimes these drafts just aren't good. There just aren't good players to take. It happens in every sport. You just do the best you can. I had a scouting director last week as I'm like, you know, working the phone and working on mock drafts and trying to understand the players who I don't have a good first person understanding of. I had a scouting director tell me, yeah, like one of the other guys and I were talking and he was just like, I won't make fun of yours at the end if you don't make fun of mine. Because there's just a certain point in this draft where, like the part of the first round where normally teams go, okay, I don't love anything that's left for me. Let's just take a safe player. That normally happens in like the middle of the first round. And in this draft, it happened fifth. The fifth pick where the Pirates were just like, give us Derek Curiel, who is a skinny center fielder who. Who has good contact skills, and that's sort of what he is. And Zion Rose, who, by the way, like, as. As much as we have kind of like shat on. I don't know if that's a believable swear, past tense, shat2f shat the. But we've like, shat on baseballs, this and that stuff. Like Zion Rose, the breakthrough series initiatives like the. And the RBI program, like that type of stuff. Del Matthews and these people who have. Have worked hard to facilitate and foster, like, the participation of black amateur players in these events. Like Zion Rose just went six in this draft. He's been a guy who was cultivated since he was an underclassman in high school. Like one of the most excellent young people to come through that program. Just went six in this draft because he can hit. He showed it for three years at Louisville. The Royals were long rumored to be a team who might cut a deal early so they could do high schoolers later on. And even though we didn't get like, you know, and get that pick right in the mock, I don't know that anybody did. The fact that we knew the rumor was that the Royals would be the team to do that, like, that turned out to be true. So it just seemed like that type of draft this year where let's. I'm scared. I'm going to take a college player who I feel good about right now and that it started at pick five.
- [54:39]
Eric Longenhagen
Since you referenced picks that might have been made differently in an earlier era. I read a study that was published this past weekend by Andrew Ball, the former executive for teams assistant GM for the Astros, and he was trying to figure out whether MLP teams have gotten better at drafting as a result of all of the data and models that they have now. And so he looked at three different, different periods of time pre Moneyball 1990 to 2002 and then kind of the Moneyball era a decade after that, and then a decade after that when teams all had advanced models and you were starting to get real pitch data for amateurs and a little more kind of biometric stuff, maybe not quite as much as they have today, but it's the draft. So you need to wait several years to actually evaluate how picks turned out.
- [55:27]
Ben Limburg
At least. Least.
- [55:28]
Eric Longenhagen
So he broke it down a number of ways, just kind of looking at how closely the order of picks conformed to the value that those picks produced and like the bust rate and the success at evaluating stars. And however he sliced and diced the data, he found that at best there's been maybe modest improvement, that it, it's still kind of crapshooty. And that's not unique to baseball. Obviously. You know, you have a higher hit rate for stars, of course, in the early rounds of say the NFL draft or NBA draft where guys are just going to make that leap quite quickly. But you still have lots of people saying, well, why can't teams draft quarterbacks? And it's still a lot of luck and chance and everything. So I guess it's just the exercise is prone to a lot of variability and it's just really hard to project players, particularly in baseball where you have to look years ahead. But it doesn't seem like the data revolution that has been ushered in by all the new sources and all the new people doing this draft analysis has led to a total overhaul in how successful teams are at picking players. So I don't know whether you think that will change as we get more and more data now or whether that's just kind of inherent to this process and why you think it hasn't become more accurate as a result of the less garbage information, not producing less garbage out.
- [56:59]
Ben Limburg
It's tough to say. There's definitely always going to be some amount of variability just because of people like I have a high ranked player, like fairly high ranked, who wasn't, you know, picked in a place where he'll sign, who's going to go to college, who, like I learned no showed his team private workout. And that impacted the way the team felt about the player's personhood. And so there's like some of that stuff going on. You end up in an organization that's not the right fit for you personally. Or a coach makes the wrong decision with how you should be doing something and it impacts you, maybe get hurt. Or I'd be curious to know if that study was looking at like the linearity of the production. Like, hey, the first pick and he produces like this. And the second pick he produces like that. And because even as there's a piece of it that is us, quote unquote, improving our understanding of how to evaluate the player. And then there's the development piece of it which maybe flattens the curve that you would expect the outputs to show. Because if I can make Will Warren or Cam Schlitler as good as that are, well, then the results of the draft are going to be less linear than they would be if I couldn't do that. So I've maybe improved how I can evaluate the player because I know watching Will Warren that I can change him from like a small school swing man to a mid rotation big league starter. Or I know that I can take Cam Schlitler, who's just this bean pole who's never seen a weight room in his life. I can add like 10 ticks onto his fastball. But even though, you know, there's. There's a perfect world where all the teams know and understand this and they know and understand about each other, that they all know it. And then Cam Schlitler goes eighth in the draft knowing that they can all do this with him. And then there's a version of it where the Yankees are the only ones who know that they can do this and they know that they can sit and wait and take that guy later and still turn him into something maybe not, I'm sure they didn't think like, oh, he's going to be like this, this, but they know that they can improve him. And so if what the study is looking at is, are we good at knowing that the player who's picked second is in fact the second best player, then I would say, like, there's going to be some noise in that because if you can take Corbin Burns and the brewers, make him what he becomes, then there's just going to be some, like, you know, it's not, not everything is going to be Mike Piazza.
- [59:33]
Eric Longenhagen
But.
- [59:33]
Ben Limburg
But I do think it does cloud our ability to evaluate how teams do in the draft because they are so good at developing because of some of the same means, data, technology, applied science, basically that it's going to make the middle round players better than they would be if we didn't have that stuff.
- [59:54]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah. Another thing he mentioned is that maybe the improvements in player development are producing a lot of what appear to be improvements in drafting. And that could also make it a little less predictable, I guess, because it's going to be the less elite guys may be benefiting the most from that, in theory. And he also said the influx of data also hasn't added much information around health, physical development or psychology. The most critical component to determine success is player skill. If a player can't hit a curveball or consistently throw strikes, there's not much chance for them to provide value for those that can. Things like availability, physicality, aptitude, competitiveness and ability to respond to failure become separator. And what teams are able to access in those spaces looks much more similar to 1990 than the on field metrics do. So that's perhaps part of it too.
- [60:41]
Meg Rowley
I'm curious, you know, as you think through some of the guys who went later, because Ben noted and you noted in your preview of the class, that there is good depth here, even as there's sort of a donut hole of guys missing in that middle round, the middle of the first round where teams might have historically still gotten really good players. All of those guys are potentially good but have health concerns or performance red flags. Are there teams that, as you know, they sort of progressed through their draft, you thought, hey, this group had a really good class, even if some of that quality was of the depth variety or guys who came later in the, you know, the second or third or fourth round.
- [61:26]
Ben Limburg
Yeah, so there are some teams who had a really good class in my opinion, just because of the sheer volume of picks that they had, like St. Louis and Tampa Bay. I think the White Sox too. Like when you have the top pick in the bonus pool that results from that and you flex that a little bit, like you can have a really good class. Then you have some of the teams who are employing a more overt strategy to take advantage of the class depth and the team, you know, we've talked about the brewers for sure each of the last several years as being the poster child for this thing where they cut some early deals and then they go hard on high school players much, much later on those last 10 rounds of the draft. Most teams are just taking org filler at that Point, they're taking older college players who are. They need a catcher in the lower levels of the minors or taking a guy who the area scout likes and knows to be in all likelihood like a mercenary type of org player. And while all the other teams, for the most part, are doing that, the brewers are taking high schooler, high schooler, high schooler because they've structured the bonus outlay of their first 10 rounds in such a way that, that they can negotiate with some number of these guys. They're like 2, 300, $400,000 bonuses and they know they're good at development. And so why not go wide and access half a dozen high schoolers in a draft class or more and start developing them from the time they're 18 and see what you can make of them. And the brewers did this to the extreme again this year. And then you have the Red Sox and the Braves, who also did a version of this. The Red Sox version of it was more balanced, where they took a probably underslaught college player with their first pick, a guy named Jake Schaffner, a shortstop from the University of North Carolina, who was a small school kid before he transferred to UNC. He was at North Dakota State, 6 foot 2, back to Ball skills, can play shortstop well enough. So there's like some black box, you know, arrow up stuff to him because he was two years at North Dakota State and then just like thrived in the one year that he saw good pitching. So I really liked him as like the underslot target for what they did. And then the high school kids who they took later were Jace Matachinsky, a shortstop from Wisconsin. He has hit tool risk, he has power, he's, you know, sexy. High variance shortstop. Martin Scheller, a Georgia outfielder who's like a little Tyler o' Neill starter kit. He's not that like beefy, but he is that style. Like his swing looks so much like o'. Neal. He's just trying to pull everything with power. He's probably a corner outfielder, same type of thing. And then Caleb Lefevre from Iowa, who threw at the combine. Another aspect of, you know, MLB's involvement in the draft process that I think think is going well is the combine. Like, I know that Von Lackey is not working out there and some of the top guys are not like running 30 yard dashes and whatever. But the combine has a real impact on the players who players stock and these guys get paid. Caleb Lefevre, who they took in the 10th round, he's 6, 7, he's only throwing like 88 right now, but he can, he moves well. His secondary stuff is really good. Like his breaking ball and his changeup both at the combine in his mound session were pretty good. I liked him. I think that he's. He's a nice, like, target for this type of thing. And then the Brave Braves version of it this year where they're employing this strategy, this was the most extreme, where they're like front loading, underslot guys and then taking a bunch of like the Bravesy type of high school players. So they took AJ Gracia out of Virginia with their first pick. I like Adrian Gracia. I had him in the top five of the draft coming into the year and then his season was just okay. He's another guy who transferred from a smaller school while he went to Duke. But, you know, it's Duke's not a small school, but it's not the baseball school that Virginia is. So he transfers to Virginia. He has an okay season. He just didn't hit for as much power as you thought a guy who's as physical as he is would. And then he played center field at Virginia, but is probably a corner guy in pro ball. So he was like towards the. Using the last third of the first round, they took him ninth. He's under slot almost certainly. And then with their second pick at 26, this is where I would have guessed and I did like in my mock draft that the Braves would use some of that savings and take now. Okay, here's going to be an overstock guy. Here's going to be like a high school pitcher who wants three, four million dollars to sign. And instead they took another underslock guy. And this is Carter Beck from Indiana State, who's from like a tiny town in Saskatchewan. He went to a small school in the Dakotas, like we had a bunch of North Dakota. He went to Mary University in North Dakota and then transferred to Indiana State. And he's this like, you know, super strong 511 guy. He's got big tools. Midwest area scout I talked to said that it's risky, but he could be like a capital D dude just on tools. You just don't know how this guy's going to hit pro pitching because he was at a small school. And then Indiana State and then The Braves took two high school pitchers who are 17. Kaden McCarthy, who reclassified from 2027. He's from Vermont. He is 17 years old. He threw at the combine. He's touched 101 this spring. He's little, he's six foot tall. I don't know how that's going to go. But the guy who has worked out most who looked like this when he was in high school is Dylan Cease. Where it's just like boy this is violent. He's throwing pretty hard. Not pretty hard, really hard. He's maybe not as big and fluid as I want like a Seth Hernandez type guy to be. Where it's just hey yes, this is going to work. I feel really good about this. It's more violent and high effort than that that but it is a 17 year old touching 101. And then Cole Dennis, another guy who was at the combine who performed there, it's more mid-90s with a good curveball. He's 17, he's not as projectable. And then Jensen Hirschkorn, one of the better names in the draft who had at area code games last year. Hirschkorn, who's 67 had like one of the best area code performances where I think he had like a no hitter after three innings. And I was just like, you know this be to going is guy keep going. He's like seven strikeouts through three innings or something like that. And just like slider command 6 7guy. And then they kept going. Like they took Jack Brenner from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin high school catcher, really athletic, can really run, maybe play some center field in pro ball. And then Ryan Barker, a shortstop from Arizona, a Castile high school in Arizona. When the spring started he wasn't even the top prospect on his own team but it's like again kid at the combine, projectable, 6 foot 1 shortstop who you know, the Braves take these guys and they are good at development. And from a couple of drafts ago, Eric Hartman was a guy like this who were saying at the time hey it's a mid six figure high schooler, he's fast, let's see how strong they can make him, etc. And now he's a top 30 prospect in the game two years later. So this is what the Braves are doing. This is what the, you know there are other teams who have had good classes, who have a more traditional looking approach. But those three teams took this approach where let's cut underslot and they go a ton of high schoolers, you know, in volume. It sort of cuts against what that MLB proposal we talked about was where hey if the smart teams are doing this, why is it you want to stop them from doing it? These are small market teams most of the time time who feel like this is a way that they can compete with the Dodgers and, you know, the Yankees or whatever. This is the approach they're taking. Why are you taking this out of their. Their kit to be able to do. I don't know how many teams could conceivably employ this strategy before there's like a game theory piece of this that becomes a problem for the teams who are doing it. There are only so many teams who could do this before we reach sort of a critical mass, but those are the teams who took that. You know, I have like, like other, obviously like so many other teams who I've liked their classes, but the strategy and the talent combined here I thought made this like those couple of teams I thought knocked it out of the park.
- [69:55]
Meg Rowley
This has nothing to do with the strategy employed by anyone. But you talked about the great name and that's like a great name and an interesting name. I feel compelled to point out that the Phillies took Drew Titsworth in the 11th round, and then the Mets took Zach Crossfelt in the 14th round.
- [70:16]
Eric Longenhagen
Pick number 420.
- [70:19]
Meg Rowley
Are you serious? It was 420. It was 420. And I'm just saying that, like, sometimes the stars align such that you have not only one of the better combos of names, but that they would fall. That they would fall as you have
- [70:35]
Ben Limburg
to unwind before bed look as that
- [70:38]
Meg Rowley
they would fall as they would between division rivals who hate each other. With the power of the sun that is currently destroying the city of Philadelphia and much of the eastern seaboard, we need to take moments to have little treats and enjoy ourselves.
- [70:55]
Ben Limburg
So my all name Titsworth versus Crutchville, My all name group. So the brewers took a guy named Aiden Nack, who also threw really hard at the combine. And then they took a guy later whose last name sounds like my Sharona. It's like Myorana. So they took Knack and my Sharona.
- [71:11]
Meg Rowley
Amazing.
- [71:12]
Ben Limburg
The Rockies draft class is like the Scrabble winning draft class.
- [71:18]
Meg Rowley
Okay.
- [71:19]
Ben Limburg
So that they had Tanner Saguspi, Micaiah Negretti. They have Ryan needs what needs wides, Knights wides. They have like guys with multiple Z's. They have a lot of guys with Z's and W and W's in their name. Josh Swink.
- [71:36]
Meg Rowley
Yep.
- [71:37]
Ben Limburg
And Gavin Swartz.
- [71:39]
Meg Rowley
Yep. We have, we have a new. We have a new Brewer in the mix, Garrett Brewer, who went to the Rockies. Just because we always need to have one guy in the, in the league, in affiliated ball, where you're like, well, the team has to acquire that guy so that he can be a Brewer.
- [71:55]
Ben Limburg
And then Macon Winslow. Yeah, the catcher from North Carolina, who has been a guy since high school like Macon Winslow has. Has been around, but it's just like a scary baseball name to draft a guy who's making wins low.
- [72:09]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, yeah.
- [72:10]
Ben Limburg
And the Phillies did him in the sixth round.
- [72:12]
Meg Rowley
And, and I just. At. At some point, I will conduct an actual study into this, but the sheer number of cades and cadence and, and cades spelled the way you'd think. And also cadence spelled with. With. With k's and Y guys. AI's it. They're just a, A real. A real surfeit. Also, the, the. The Bradens and Braylons, they're out.
- [72:38]
Ben Limburg
Yeah, they're out of control.
- [72:39]
Meg Rowley
They're out of control. There's just like. And, you know, and, and all of that.
- [72:43]
Ben Limburg
And not just. And it took a crass. It's not just white kids anymore.
- [72:47]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, that's true.
- [72:48]
Ben Limburg
One of my favorite players in the draft was The Blue Jays 11th rounder Braden Martin from Maryland, who's like the Chandler Simpson type of guy where he just does not strike out in college at all. And the other tools. And he's not Chandler Simpson fast. He is fast, but the other stuff is like, he's got 20 power, you know, like, it's about trying to make him swing. Ernie Clement is the other guy. Like this where it's just like bat to ball speed and you have to try to figure out everything else. Brayden Martin from Maryland was that guy. In the 11th round. The Marlins had, like an international flavor to their draft. They took a kid named Fabian Bundy. I've seen Fabian and Fabio. Oh, he's. He was born and raised in Switzerland.
- [73:28]
Meg Rowley
Oh, cool.
- [73:28]
Ben Limburg
And he was at a junior college in California. He was committed to ucla. He was supposed to be at UCLA this year, and it didn't. I don't know why that didn't happen. But he stayed at the junior college, so they took him in the 11th round. They took a kid from Panama who went to Georgia Premier Academy for high school and Rintaro Sasaki.
- [73:45]
Meg Rowley
Mark.
- [73:45]
Ben Limburg
The Marlins took all three of those kids. So they have a pan Panamanian kid, a Japanese kid, and a Swiss kid.
- [73:50]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [73:51]
Ben Limburg
So, yeah, a pretty interesting group for them too.
- [73:53]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, a lot of unpredictable names. It's like Madison from She Hulk, Attorney at Law, A show that I'm sure you two enjoyed. It's just spelled M A D, I, S, Y, N, N. And she says Madison with two N's, one Y. But it's not where you think. There's always some unusual.
- [74:11]
Meg Rowley
Then when we do our next Patreon, we got to talk about Widow's Bay.
- [74:15]
Eric Longenhagen
Okay. Okay, sure.
- [74:16]
Meg Rowley
Because I'm. I'm. I've finished Widow's Bay. And so I'm ready to. I'm ready to talk about one of my favorite shows of the year.
- [74:25]
Ben Limburg
I dropped out of it. I didn't finish it.
- [74:26]
Eric Longenhagen
Wow.
- [74:27]
Ben Limburg
It was too. It was too derivative of other stuff for me to enjoy. I was just like, if I were Steven Spielberg, I would be pissed at
- [74:33]
Eric Longenhagen
this Stephen King, but.
- [74:34]
Ben Limburg
And Stephen King Spielberg, too. Jaws.
- [74:37]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, yeah.
- [74:37]
Ben Limburg
All the jaw stuff. But the sound design was amazing.
- [74:39]
Eric Longenhagen
Amazing.
- [74:39]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [74:40]
Eric Longenhagen
Okay, we can discuss that.
- [74:41]
Ben Limburg
And I think that. I think. And a hero. Mariah is great, and I think Katie depold is a very promising prospect, but this was too much like, hey, you know, you can do your own work rather than, you know, as soon as. And I. Steven Root had like, there's no Patreon pod for Eric. So he's just gonna go on this.
- [75:00]
Eric Longenhagen
He's just gonna talk about it now.
- [75:01]
Ben Limburg
But there was a point where, you know, they're on the boat and it's just like, okay, like, hey, I've seen this before. You know, like, I've seen Steven Roots about to have some harrowing, like, monologue where he talks about some dramatic thing. And I was just.
- [75:14]
Meg Rowley
But we know he wasn't on the Indianapolis.
- [75:16]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, it was. It was certainly a synthesis of familiar things, but lots of things that I liked. And it was its own thing. Enough that I enjoyed it. I might agree with you, that was slightly overhyped just because there was so much hype. Even though not incredible viewership. It was one of those very big online. Not huge in the actual audience size, but that's Apple TV for you. Anyway.
- [75:39]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [75:39]
Ben Limburg
Anyway, sound design, though, like, whoever the sound design. David lynch would be proud. You guys, great job. Hero. Marai and Dipold. Whoever had to do with that. Yeah, I love that part of it.
- [75:50]
Eric Longenhagen
So lots of tragedy names, unusual spellings in the draft. Also lots of large guys. You kept saying six, seven. And you weren't trying to do tired memes. You were actually just describing guy's height.
- [76:01]
Meg Rowley
And.
- [76:02]
Eric Longenhagen
And Bauman wrote about that, too. 67 was. Was not the biggest. They came bigger than that. You're going to need a bigger boat for some of these MLP draftees. Sorry, you need a different plan. Yeah, I've heard it before. Yeah. So I did just want to ask you about a couple surprise picks or or at least differences in draft strategy. People were wondering what the Angels would do having now dismissed perrymanassian, who seemingly was running their drafts. And they of course had their super aggressive strategy of let's get close to the majors, guys. And then it turns out they're closer to the majors than anyone anticipated because we'll just promote them whether they're ready or not. So with John Moselek overseeing this, but seemingly largely deferring to Scouting director Tim McIlvaine, the Angels did break their streak of seven years, selecting a college player with the number one selection. And they took a high school outfielder number one, though they did then take take college hitters with their next few picks. So that's interesting. I don't know whether that'll turn out to be better or worse, but it is different. And I guess if you're the Angels, different is more likely to be good than bad. So that is kind of. I wonder whether you noted that with some teams with new regimes, the Rockies. Right. New people running draft rooms, whether you noticed any difference there. And then also I saw a lot of buzz about the Red Sox pick Jake Schaffner. Is that how you say it? He was their their number one at number 20 overall and it seemed like the consensus was a lot lower. So people were sort of surprised. I guess they took a couple of UNC left handed hitters who had been roommates with their first two picks. So maybe there was a theme there too.
- [77:44]
Ben Limburg
Yeah. So on the angel stuff, the way it was put to me is that no, now that Minazian is no longer there and Mosquito Mo, even when he's been in an org for a while is to be sort of laissez faire with the draft stuff was that the angel scouts were going to be the ones who got to make the pick. Jared Greinlinger reclassified. He was originally going to be a 2027. He reclassified I believe in January, which is sort of an awkward time for a hitter to reclassify because ideally we would have seen you against the other good pitchers from the class the summer before. And that helps make you feel good that the players that can actually hit. So Greinlinger had to be evaluated based on stuff he had done against underclass pitching and then stuff that he did this spring playing high school varsity ball and SoCal, which as far as places to try to evaluate whether a guy can hit, that's near the top of the list of places that you could feel good about doing it. I like Jared Grindlinger a lot. He Is a real prospect both ways and it sounds like the Angels are going to let him do both for at least a little bit. The ceiling is higher. As a hitter he's big and projectable. 63190 left handed bat kind of has like a Tyler Soderstrom look to him swinging and just depending on the event that he was seen at last summer by mostly like agents and some of the scouts who like where teams care more about getting a track. Like having a track record with kids before their juniors and seniors. Like you know towards the end of last summer was when power started to to show up. So he's really exciting. The Angels second pick Jaren Advent Coola. He's going to be your favorite Ben. He is the most asked to deal ish player in this draft where it's just totally absurd barrel feel and he swings at absolutely everything. Like one of the more chase prone players in all of college but baseball and also one of the more difficult guys to strike out. I agree with you Colorado. It's different. When I was doing my mock and trying to figure out what to do with Jacob Lombard, normally the Rockies are where I would have put him because I'd just be like who has done this in the past where they're just scouting the physical tools and they're not really as concerned about the contact red flag piece of it as I am. And that has been the Rockies and that's been the Rockies with Zach Veen and that's been the Rockies with Benny Montgomery. That's been the Rockies with Ethan Holiday. But now that Josh Burns is in charge and Tom Tannis is there and it just felt better. Now some of this was like Tyler Bell was sitting there shortstop from Kentucky for them who I think is like a top six player in this class. So it was just great value. A no brainer I thought for them to take him at 10 but then they just did like a bunch of college guys. Daniel Jackson from Georgia won the golden Spikes. He had an insane year at Georgia. Like a lot of Georgia players. He's got kind of weird home road splits around like chasing sliders and such. Super weird like his misrate against sliders on the road is double that what it was at home. Really strange. He's tooled out. I don't know if he's going to hit. I kind of don't think so. But he's got enormo tools so to get him at pick 37 was I thought good value. And then Logan Rediman from ucla, he got hurt towards the end of the year. His stuff was down at the combine. He's more of like a buy low 4th starter type. Jack Natili from Cincinnati, catcher who can really frame and has power. So definitely a different look to the Rockies draft than years in the past. I mean, the Red Sox draft I touched about touched on when I was speaking on the brewers style high school, go wide strategy. I like Schaffner. Owen Holder's second pick is the one I don't like. Like he's just so long to the baseball. It's just an extreme oppo oriented spray profile. He's big, he's six' four. There's college, big conference performance there, as you said, North Carolina. But he was one of those guys who I didn't rank. I knew to watch him. He's one of those people where you ask other folks, hey, who's not on my board, who should be? And they're like Owen Hull. And just in my opinion, he's a no for me. But I guess we'll see. The the Red Sox have done positive things with swing augmentation in the past, although not all of it has been sustainable. Christian Campbell, but, but yeah, Owen hall was not my speed, but Jake Schaffner was and then other new regimes. Just like looking off the top of my head at who else has like changed. The Giants situation was interesting because of the timing of everyone joining. They had their first draft class last year, but they had their first full draft cycle as a group this year. Just the timing of when Minazian got hired and stuff like that, like it was in the winter. So this is the first draft where those guys have had a chance to as a group collectively start from scratch with the high schoolers rather than just have the recency bias of the college guys. They went college heavy last year and this year was more balanced where they took like Carson Bowman and Kaden Wechter, who are high school pitchers who they took at 29th and 55th overall before they took Peyton Bonds. But there was a change there with the Giants, where they felt more comfortable, it seemed like with high schoolers this year than they did last year in their first draft as a group.
- [83:06]
Eric Longenhagen
Speaking of the Giants, a couple months ago, Jarrett Seidler at Baseball Prospectus suggested that the Giants Giants should blow up the draft. And someone suggests this about some team basically every year, right? And it just never happens. The idea that some team should just blow through all the slots and just go way over and use up its whole pool and do the overages and get penalties and just eat the draft pick and spending penalties for future drafts. And this relies on, on certain conditions being satisfied. And maybe you have a lot of top picks in that year's draft and then and other things down the road. But people have been suggesting this for about a decade and it's just never really happened the way that everyone always says, oh, this would be a competitive advantage. And I guess it's even less likely to happen now because of nil with college being a better financial proposition for players. So you're not going to just get guys to sign for any old number at this point. But why has this never happened? Why did this never happen even though there's been a chorus of people saying, oh, this would work, you could could just go get all these guys in one big spending spree.
- [84:19]
Ben Limburg
I think it was in our bold predictions post before the season when I was also like, hey, this is maybe the year to do this because of at the time it was still just like whispers about this sort of thing, but because maybe high school players won't be a thing in future drafts. And if indeed that's the case and that starts next year, then the talent pool for the next couple of draft classes are going to be worse. And so some of the pick penalties that you incur as a result of blowing through your pool don't feel quite as bad because they're picks in worse, less talented drafts. The next couple of years like this did feel like the year, if anyone was going to do it, that they should have done it. The NIL money running around college baseball is not so, so big that the most talented high school players are going to be tempted to go rather than sign. The NIL money that teams are throwing at players is often in the like 300 to 700k per year range where like the 700k type thing is so on the high end of what we're talking about. And it's almost always given to players who are already on campus, who the school feels good about in a way. So like this year, the guy who that applies to is an Oklahoma State outfielder named Colin Ritchie who did not go on the first day of the draft and told teams yesterday, hey, my number's still 800k. I don't know that that means that he got like 700k to stay at Oklahoma State for another year, but you can kind of make the inference that that's what happened is for him to stay in school. They're giving him about 700k. It is more in that 55th, like beyond the 5th round really range where the bonus slot amount the team can offer without going over is fighting against what the colleges are willing to give some of the better kids. And maybe if you're like a million dollar high schooler and a team wants to give you 400k per year and you're going to go to school for three years, then that number can maybe compete with if a team wants to give you like 700k. But, but I think part of the problem is if other teams catch wind that you're doing it, you can get screwed by them. Taking those guys who you have an eye on taking and just blowing through your spending pool like even now, while no one is doing it. There are picks on day two of the draft that are just big name high schoolers who aren't going to sign, whose name just gets called for whatever reason either because teams want like another name to negotiate with or just to like talk to the kid more or whatever it is. Like they don't really think they're going to sign the player. They know the player is going to school. The kid wanted, you know, 4 million or whatever it is and wasn't going to get it and still you draft him. And there's just a point during some of these last 10 rounds where you don't have enough space in your minor league system for all these picks and so you just call a kid's name. And because of if the draft happened all in one day, maybe it would be possible for teams to like sneak one through everyone on everybody else because there's just not enough time to communicate and adjust. But even as the draft shifted from three days to two, the fact that we have like an overnight period where teams would get hip to what you were doing soon enough that they could kind of undo it on you. Like, like it's just too risky for teams to want to do it. But I think you can tell that like if you're trading a comp pick for Alex Claudio straight up or if you're, you know, like, look at that, the, the White Sox Pirates trade from a couple days ago where hey, it's basically a comp pick for a guy who you're swapping like middle relievers and a player who had a swing change and maybe, maybe is better now and the Pirates thought enough of Jacob Gonzalez to like give up a first round pick essentially for him. You know, the, the value of a draft pick is not so great to teams that they wouldn't, you know, sacrifice one via penalty, you would think. But yeah, for whatever reason, no One has tried to do it. I just think that it's a house of cards strategy and in some respects because there are only so many really good high schoolers worth doing it with and a bunch of them are going to get drafted either because teams think they can actually sign them or they'll do it out of spite to undo your strategy.
- [88:51]
Eric Longenhagen
Okay, well, we will link to all of your draft coverage and I assume you will be doing some mid season prospect rankings updates and farm system values. And Ben Clemens recently helped refresh your fangraphs prospect prospect valuation model which Craig Edwards had put in place several years ago. And so now there are new values based on outcomes of various picks and prospect rankings. And so that's already reflected, I suppose on the board. But you'll be, you'll be combing through, you'll be doing some mid season updates and verdicts on who had the best draft and where the farm systems stand.
- [89:32]
Ben Limburg
Yeah, we're going to, to pull the graduates off. We're going to have some post mortem on the grads. The farm system values will change as the grads come off, of course, like the preseason, the preseason farm rankings are just going to stay on. You'll be able to like look on the farm value page of the site and see, hey, before Connor Griffin graduated, like this is where the Pirates system was valued. And and then yeah, like there will be a ranking update. We'll have a sweeping top 100 update date here pretty shortly and then we're going to be doing like buyer's guides basically for teams who we expect are going to trade prospects at the deadline between now and the deadline. Those are the farm systems who Brendan and I, James Fegan as well. We're going to be updating those systems and, and writing pieces that are just like hey, here's like if you're shopping the Cleveland Guardians farm system, here are the aisles that you want to walk down. Here are the players who are improving and put a fresh coat of paint on Milwaukee and LA and the teams who you would think and that's all in the offing. And so yeah folks, if you're just listening to this but aren't visiting the site, come on over. We have a lot of draft coverage and Futures game coverage as well. So it's a great time I think to come to the site. There are colors now on the board, all the team. This is a big deal to me as a guy who's colorifies his spreadsheets in the background a lot of the time with like the team colors and the hex codes, you know, and all that stuff. Like a huge dweeb that's. You'll be able to enjoy some of that stuff. Like, it's more visually arresting. Now, the board, the presentation of the board. Now that the team colors. Duke, the colors are all on there.
- [91:11]
Eric Longenhagen
That's exciting. All right, check it out. And before I let you guys go to take in the Home Run Derby and Bryce Harper, and then we will reconvene in a day to talk about the. The new old derby format, Bryce Harper did release a statement on Instagram, I believe, while we were recording. So just to close the loop with our discussion about Bryce and his video that was sent to a Fan Graphs to a FanDuel. Very different fan.
- [91:42]
Ben Limburg
FanDuel.
- [91:43]
Meg Rowley
We don't know if he was a Fan Graphs member. It doesn't change how well I wish him.
- [91:48]
Ben Limburg
But he's losing over a million dollars. No. I feel bad for.
- [91:54]
Eric Longenhagen
Yes.
- [91:55]
Ben Limburg
And his family. Mostly his family.
- [91:56]
Eric Longenhagen
And. And now we have heard about the circumstances from Bryce, and if this is accurate, then it's. It's more or less what we expected. So. Harper said in response to a recent article in the Philadelphia Choir, I wanted to provide the following facts. I joined Cameo to engage with fans through paid personalized videos. What happened here went beyond anything I knew about or approved. In November 2024, someone identifying themselves only as Brittany. And this is speaking of two ends and a weird Y. This is. It's actually Brittany, Not Brittany, but it's B, R, Y, T, T, A, N, N, I. Anyway, that's not the point.
- [92:33]
Meg Rowley
Anyway.
- [92:33]
Eric Longenhagen
Submitted an order through Cameo for a personal holiday video for Terry. Cameo had a separate category for business video requests, and at the time, I did not know this video would be used for commercial purposes. The request included a short script. I read it in good faith. FanDuel then put its own logo on the video and used it as a gambling promotion. I did not know fanduel would do this. I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it. Had I known FanDuel's true intent, I would not have made the video. The same is true had I known anything about Terry or his situation or about any alleged partnership between Cameo and fanduel. Contrary to the Inquirer's suggestion, I did not know the Cameo video would be used for a FanDuel VIP promotion. And I have no affiliation with Vanduul whatsoever. Council has directed me not to comment any further at this time. He also included a screenshot of the request from Brittany for this. Again, the text of the message did say it was from your host, Brittany from FanDuel. So I mean, you know, probably he was just reading a bunch of scripts and didn't think much of it or didn't think of it or just didn't realize that it was, I don't know, in a business capacity. But he, he maybe should have known but. And flagged it at the time. But look, it's just.
- [93:45]
Ben Limburg
It is a lot to ask. Yeah, I think.
- [93:47]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [93:47]
Eric Longenhagen
I'm not surprised. So that. That doesn't shock me. I mean.
- [93:51]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [93:52]
Eric Longenhagen
Either way, it's just part of this predatory practice by the company. So it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't shock me that maybe they would have done this in sort of unofficial shifty way. Gorilla cameo video way. Yeah. Where maybe the. They knew that they couldn't get an official message like this and so they went the cameo route. So that seems to be how it happened. So.
- [94:16]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [94:16]
Ben Limburg
Wowzers, man, that's so shifty.
- [94:19]
Eric Longenhagen
It is, yeah. So I won't say fully exonerated, but yeah. Cleared to some extent, certainly.
- [94:28]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [94:28]
Eric Longenhagen
Makes it more understandable how this could have happened.
- [94:32]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, certainly.
- [94:33]
Ben Limburg
Well, I wonder what the timeline was between the Inquirer running. Like, I'm sure that the Inquirer reached out to Bryce for comment before they.
- [94:39]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, they definitely reach out to Boris and, and the Phillies and mlb. So. And they all know, commented, but they were probably trying to get their ducks in order and figure out. Yeah. Maybe how this happened. He probably didn't even remember. So. Yeah.
- [94:53]
Ben Limburg
Yeah.
- [94:53]
Meg Rowley
When there's. And especially with pending litigation. And I, I think I saw a headline that the Pennsylvania Gaming Board is going to be looking into it as well. So like, like, you know, I, I think this largely lines up with what we thought had happened, as you said. But I can also understand there being, you know, a. A beat taken to like dot eyes and cross. T's just given that there seems to be some amount of actual jeopardy here. So.
- [95:20]
Ben Limburg
All right, well, what's the funniest fangraphs version of this where we can't we pay for a cameo and someone unbeknownst to them is like in inadvertently. Is it like is Mike Wilbon on cameo?
- [95:33]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, it's definitely. It's definitely having someone who is famously anti analytics sing the praises of like fifth based war.
- [95:42]
Ben Limburg
Congratulations, Eric, on your 10th year with fan graphs.
- [95:45]
Meg Rowley
Right?
- [95:46]
Ben Limburg
Yeah. Or something like.
- [95:47]
Meg Rowley
Something like that. Something like that.
- [95:49]
Ben Limburg
By the way, if anybody still listens to this knows Wobon, like I'd Love to have a bury the hatchet cup of coffee with him in Scottsdale somewhere. You can pick the place.
- [95:56]
Meg Rowley
To be clear, he and Eric do not have specific beef. He just has beef with the concept of analytics more broadly.
- [96:04]
Eric Longenhagen
Right.
- [96:04]
Ben Limburg
And I know he's kind of playing a caricature of himself because Stephen A. Smith probably convinced him it would be good for his pocketbook to do so on tv. But like, you know, like, Wilbon's part of the reason that I am here, you know, like, so it'd be nice to be like, hey, dude, like, we're not all. I mean, I am sort of troll, like in some ways, but like, as soon as you see the hair on my shoulders, you're gonna guess that's true.
- [96:28]
Eric Longenhagen
But.
- [96:29]
Ben Limburg
But yeah, like, well, bona, I would like to have some sort of like, peacemaking with him.
- [96:33]
Eric Longenhagen
Yeah, that'd be nice if we could make that happen. Yes. Other than that, I guess all that fangraphs and fanduel have in common is. Is fan and camel case or Pascal case or whatever it is. Because they do do that. So that at least I'm sure you respect expect Meg that they capitalize the D. But my.
- [96:50]
Meg Rowley
My understanding is that Pascal case is a subtype of camel case. That it is a. It is camel casing. It is just a particular form of it, you know. Not that I had to remind myself of that when we got an email to that effect.
- [97:03]
Eric Longenhagen
Yes, well, congrats to Eric on pulling back into a tie with Ben Clemens for most appearances ever on effectively wild. The two leaders now nodded at 38. Right after we finished recording, I got a message from Meg. Eric just realized Smoltz would be the funnies is for the cameo style message praising FanGraphs. Yeah, that might not be bad. Someone ambushed John Smoltz with a cameo script about how great fan graphs is the personal video price for Smoltz on Cameo. 200 plus dollars. A business video. 1,400 plus. Bryce Harper. By the way, it's $8.99 plus for a personal video. 99.99 plus for a business video. So he's probably especially upset that Fanduel got a business video from him for, I don't know, 11 7th the price of what he typically charges for those. As I look at his cameo page, it says only four left. So maybe it's a going out of business for price sale. Maybe he doesn't want to make cameos anymore after he's been burned. Or maybe the supply will be replenished. Our supply of podcasts will continue to be replenished as long as people support Effectively Wild on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks including personalized videos. Today's five shout outs go to Brittany Bentley. Not an abnormal spelling of Brittany by the way. Not that it matters. To each their own. Happy to have people with non traditional spellings support us on Patreon. Also Drew Tim Childs, Isaiah Enochson and Deep Space Trace. Thanks to all of you, Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord Group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, a third complete unrestricted episode every week week exclusive live streams membership in our Discord Group for patrons only, the aforementioned personalized messages, prioritized email answers, Fangraphs memberships, shout outs at the end of episodes, potential podcast appearances and more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectivelywild if you have already signed up for Patreon, you can contact us via the Patreon site. If not, you can still contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphts.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and other podcast platforms. You can join our facebook group@facebook.com group effectively wild and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R Effectively Wild. You can check the show notes in the podcast post at fangraphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we've cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. More coverage from Philly Annafar coming to your podcatcher soon. We will have a home run derby breakdown next time along with lots of other banter. Talk to you then.
- [99:51]
Ben Limburg
Oh baseball,
- [99:55]
Eric Longenhagen
what have you done?
- [99:59]
Ben Limburg
Something's never been seen. Something factually fun. Oh there's so much of you but
- [100:08]
Meg Rowley
there's so little time.
- [100:13]
Ben Limburg
So thank God for Effectively Wild.