← The Windup: A show about Baseball
The Windup: A show about Baseball
The Roundtable | Clase & Ortiz indicted on pitch rigging and will Skubal get traded
00:47:11
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- [00:02]
Marc Maron
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- [01:04]
Grant Brisby
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Marc Maron
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- [01:12]
Grant Brisby
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Marc Maron
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- [01:28]
Grant Brisby
Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com this is the Wind Up. Welcome to episode number 192 of the Roundtable. I'm Grant Brisby. I'm joined by Sam Miller and only Sam Miller. Sam, the government shutdown has ended. This might be getting a little bit inside baseball in the weeds. The President called and canceled Andy's flight personally. And so now he's stuck trying to get to Las Vegas in the middle of a baseball betting scandal. The ironing is delicious. I think right now Andy is somewhere in an airport grumbling. So it's just us today.
- [02:22]
Sam Miller
We're sad to lose him. He didn't tell us what the connection was. I always like to hear, I actually do like to hear people's connecting stories when it's like you have to make an unexpected connection because it can sometimes be like, like one time I was on a flight to Bristol, Connecticut and my flight, my connecting flight got canceled while I was on the Runway at the, at the place of origin and I got a text saying I'd been rescheduled and, and I would be arriving to Bristol 39 hours later.
- [02:52]
Grant Brisby
That's so good.
- [02:54]
Sam Miller
I called my editor, I said should I bother? I'm coming for a one and a half day conference. And she said yes, you should continue with your 39 hour flight plans and get here for the Last hour of the day and a half conference. So I like hearing people's connection stories. I wish Andy had told us.
- [03:12]
Grant Brisby
I've only once. And this was, I think, this year, coming back from a Giants road trip only once had one of these issues. And it was that my plane was canceled when I was trying to make a connection and then said, oh, we got a new one. It takes off five minutes after your plane lands. And so I'm running through Midway with two carrying cases filled with records right now. That doesn't sound like a lot of weight. It's about 40 records. It's a ton of weight. And I'm running. And because it's me, like, I'm not out there buying records that are like this. This one of a kind Prague psych classic from 1971 for $500. I've got dumb as records. I've got, like, the supreme court cases from 1963. I've got a Linda Ron said album that's still sealed because I like it. And so, like, that's what I'm carrying through as everyone's looking at me in the airport and I'm just huffing and puffing like I'm out of shape. It's. Yeah. So that's my one story, but it's a pretty good one.
- [04:08]
Sam Miller
Did you consider just like, tossing records overboard to lower the weight as needed?
- [04:15]
Grant Brisby
At that point, I, like, got in the plane and it's like, open up Google and say, how to start a stamp collection. Like, that's.
- [04:21]
Sam Miller
That's where I was.
- [04:22]
Grant Brisby
But then you get. It's like. It's like childbirth. And then I forget, and then I'll carry 40 records through the next airport. Just like childbirth, says the male podcaster.
- [04:30]
Sam Miller
Hello, Grant. Hello.
- [04:34]
Grant Brisby
Well, Andy is in Las Vegas maybe, or maybe not. But starkly ironic because we have gambling to talk today. I had a full hour about, like, Isaac Collins versus Caleb Durbin. Who gets that vote? If you have only three Rookie of the year votes, you got to leave one Brewer off. You could do a whole episode on that. Now we got to talk Emmanuel Classe. We could. You know, Bridget, he's not going to get a Cy Young this vote. So we're still talking about awards technically, but gambling and baseball, not great. But is it okay to be a little amused?
- [05:06]
Sam Miller
I think you can pick one thing to find funny about it, and then you have to move into tragedy. For me, the one thing that was funny is 100% Andy pages costing Clase's betting partners a parlay by swinging at an Intentionally wild pitch, like, pitch was so wild that Paes ruined his bet by swinging at it, which is, to me, like way up there on the. You can't predict baseball leaderboard, all time leaderboard. So I thought that was funny. Otherwise, I would say every sport has. In the last. Not every sport, but we've had a trickle of gambling scandals of, you know, what seemed like it probably should have been inevitable. It started to happen. We're starting to see these sports corrupted by players who are found to be, you know, colluding with betters or making bets themselves or giving inside information to their entourage or whatever the case may be. And they're all newsworthy, and they're all, like, signs of a society on the verge of collapse. But this one really was a paradigm shift in the way that I think about gambling problems in the sport. I mean, Emmanuel Clause is a guy who's making $10 million a year or whatever, and on a Hall of Fame, potentially a Hall of Fame path, and he's throwing rigged pitches for, like, two grand, seven grand. Like, absolutely no. Nothing about. Nothing we think we know about, like, basic human incentives explains this. And the fact that this happened with him and that it had. It went on for years and spread that it broke containment and spread to a teammate. All of that just shows that, like, we're not even, like, our imagination for how this can all go wrong has not been big enough or wide enough. Like, we were thinking rationally, we were thinking, 26th man on the roster. We weren't thinking hall of Fame closer torching his career and the sport for $7,000. Somebody pointed out that he was making less on these bets than he was making throwing the pitch. Like, just with salary. Every pitch he made, he was making about the same amount as he was, you know, allegedly accused of taking from the bettors. And so it really makes you think, okay, everything I know about human nature, now I need to reconsider it and see where the dangers really are in this situation.
- [07:49]
Grant Brisby
First, I'll start with the funny part, because I feel like we all get to laugh at that. Andy Paws, for one thing. I think that was a bad, bad pitch. I think that was. If you have a hitter geared up for a fastball, that pitch might have looked like a fastball for too long. If you're intentionally trying to throw a ball, I can throw an intentional ball. Like, that is the one baseball skill. I guarantee that I could throw an intentional ball. That part is like, man, you kind of missed the assignment there. Class A. I'm not as it's not as funny for Andy Pais, but it's still very funny. Andy, I know, hates the show. I think you should leave. Are you familiar with. With the sketch comedy of Tim Robinson? And I think he should leave.
- [08:26]
Sam Miller
Of course. Yeah.
- [08:27]
Grant Brisby
The scene where the. He's got the. The hat with the flaps in the back, and they cut to him in the court case. That was Andy Paha just like, he's reading this court case, and then all of a sudden, all the attention's on him for being, like, bad at a baseball skill and him going, what the hell? So I love that part, but this is darkly serious, Sam. This whole thing is darkly serious.
- [08:47]
Rula Sponsor Voice
And it is.
- [08:48]
Grant Brisby
But to your point, I reread an article I wrote, 2018, and it was every year for SB Nation, we would do, like, the big baseball preview, like, a big thing. And it is like, this is. You come up with a concept, it's going to be the theme of the preview. So one year, it was. This one year was how you know the pitches. Why. Why does a pitch clock make games shorter? That sort of thing. This one was why baseball isn't scared of gambling anymore. It opens up with this Vegas winner, meetings with a mob boss, connected Las Vegas mayor, with Elvis impersonators, trying to get baseball's attention, like, hey, look at us as a possible expansion candidate. And baseball just was like, no. And they're trying silly tricks. And now, like, that is the cartoonish version of gambling, and now the corporate version of gambling. And I went back to reread this, and I nailed every point except the. The human. The ability of a millionaire to just throw risk and reward out of the window. Like, it's not always rational. It's not. And you could say, well, he's probably doing this to clear some bigger debts off. And I don't care if you're a gambler and you make millions of dollars and you spell spend a million in one, it's going to come for baseball. Like it. Risk, reward, incentives, they're all out the window now because every player is going to approach gambling and the endorphins that come with it a little bit differently.
- [10:07]
Sam Miller
I don't know what else we'll find out about this situation. I don't presume that he was doing it to clear some larger debt. You know, if I try to make this make sense in my head, one of two things. One is everybody's got buddies. You know, you've got friends, you've got an entourage, you've got family. And I think that probably, if I were to speculate how something like this comes about. It's that your buddy's betting on ball, you are helping him bet on ball. And. And that's all it feels like. And you could say, well, you could just give your buddy $7,000, but no one wants to give their buddy $7,000. And so you end up with, like, feeling like maybe you end up feeling like you've got, like, it's just like a bro thing to do or like it's supporting your network. So I don't even think that, like, we need to envision that, like, you know, the mob is threatening to break Class A's knees and that's why he did this. I actually, like what worries me about this sort of is just that it actually is so much more, it seems from the indictment, again, maybe we'll find out. Maybe there was a, you know, maybe there was more to it. But it seems from the indictment that this was really casual. And that's what's so kind of terrifying about it because, like, for instance, like, we've known for our whole lives that gambling is the one thing that you don't, you know, you don't touch in. In baseball, like, it's on every clubhouse. There's the, you know, the rules explaining it. It's, you know, basically the equivalent of the death penalty. If you get caught, you're out of the game forever. There's no forgiveness. There's not, you know, it's not 81 game suspension. Like, you don't hear stories of players after their careers talking about how much they bet on the game. Like, they're just. It's like, not. It's like a third rail. Don't do it. Pure shame. Right? And the fact that according to the indictment, the way it's presented in the indictment, the fact that Clause brought in a teammate after he'd been doing this, that he was comfortable admitting to a teammate that, like, yeah, I've got this side hustle. Like, that strikes me as very casual and troubling in how casual it is. Like, he wasn't doing this super duper duper secretly. He. He like told a teammate, yeah, like, I sometimes I, sometimes I like, rig the game. You want to do that with me? Like, that freaks me out. Right? Too casual. And once it gets that casual where. I don't know if these estimates are correct, but, you know, I've seen various estimates in various places that like half of young men have a sports gambling app, you know, are engaged in sports gambling at the moment. When you combine the access and the sort of, like, you know, the ease and the normalness of it. And then you, you know, like, show that this was a pretty casual attitude toward doing it. Well, most ball players aren't going to do this, but there are a thousand active players at any given time, and you know, what? 10, if 10 do it, it's like an existential threat for the game. If two do it is an existential threat for the game. I just think that the fact that, like, it was just so easy, you know, like, that everything about it just felt like, yeah, sure, this is what we do. This is normal. Like, it feels like it's a bigger deal to us than it was to the guy who was doing it. Like, I didn't feel like he went into this, like, heist of the century, you know, I'm desperate. I'm in uncut gems. I just can't get out of it. Like, this is like, you know, like an extremely. It just felt like, yeah, like, you know, throw some money on there. I'll throw a pitch that's kind of wild, you know, and say that it was for payment for a horse and that's it. Like, and then we'll do it again next week. I don't know. That's kind of what creeps me out about it.
- [13:59]
Grant Brisby
I hesitate to make this analogy, but just the. The term is so fitting. And so I understand that there are much, much, much different stakes here, but the banality of evil, right, is kind of what you're describing. Like, this is the banality of evil outcomes. It's just. It's so boring. It's just. It's so just. They think of Pete Rose as, like, a name they've heard, you know, kind of like we might think of Clark Gable. Like, how many times are you thinking about Clark Gable? Not every day. You'll hear the name and go, yeah, that's. That's a guy from back then. And so I guess the scandal of these guys youth was youths was PEDs and steroids and gambling wasn't on the front burner as much. And now that it's in everyone's pocket, I don't know if I'd be here if there was gambling on sports. In college, I quickly learned that Vegas is not for me, that I just like to gamble, and so I have to not have myself in that situation. And in college, like, in the. So I went to Southern Oregon University in the 90s in the state of Oregon, ran a lottery game where you picked every winner of a weekend of football, NFL football. And if you hit the whatever, 16 team parlay, you won like a lottery size prize, you know, a couple hundred thousand or a million or something like that. Low stakes, a dollar to play, millions to win. You get to yell at a Keely Smith or whatever during the weekend. And that's as much gambling as I think should be allowed in the universe, give or take a little bit. The banality of it all, it's just so a different generation from us is so just. Yeah, that's what you do. You watch sports, you gamble, you, you feel a little bit and then you come back tomorrow and do it some more and. Scary as hell.
- [15:36]
Sam Miller
Yeah. The accessibility of it. I mean, I also, when I was a, when I was a kid, I was a gambling kid, you know, I wanted to gamble, I liked to gamble. But when I was a kid, you know how hard it was to find someone to take my action, you know, like I could play, I could play gin with my grandfather. So I did that and then I could bet. I bet pool with my buddy Ben for baseball cards. But I had to convince him, like he would torch me on I wanted to bet and he would use my desire to bet to get me to bet like a $2 card against like a $9 card. So I was getting cooked by him. And that's it. Like, who else was betting against you? Right. Like, as a kid, it's hard to find a house to take your money. And now, you know, like the bets are just always, they're always there. There's, you know, like it's, it's infinitely accessible. You don't need to convince a human to take your, your money anymore. You just go on the app and you punch it in. And so it, it takes down a lot of the safeguards when you're kind of impressionable. Again, like, I don't think most players are going to react to seeing this and go, oh, that's out there for me.
- [16:44]
Grant Brisby
Great.
- [16:44]
Sam Miller
I can torch my career for $7,000. Seven sounds attractive. But there's a thousand people out there. You only need a few. In a weird way, in a weird way, I think that this normalizes it for players to see that someone's doing it. Most people will see that he did it and got caught and got punished and he'll go, well, then that's not for me. But some people see it and go, oh, that's an option. It feels normal. Some people just like to rebel or do things that are dangerous or whatever. And, and so probably this increases the number of players who are you know, rig curious in the future.
- [17:20]
Grant Brisby
Rig curious. I like that.
- [17:22]
Sam Miller
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, look, I read. I remember when you wrote that piece in 2018, because I also, when I was. For the last 10 years or so, I've written an annual piece at the end of the year about what one thing from this baseball season will be remembered 80 years from now. What will history remember? People who weren't here. What will they know about us and that year? My speculation, my guess was that the one thing from the season was going to be the Supreme Court ruling that made sports gambling legal nationwide. And I quoted you in that piece. And at the time, I wasn't sure what was going to happen because, you know, like, March Madness has always been driven by gambling, Right? But in a fairly healthy way. And then horse racing has always been driven by gambling and pretty unhealthy sport, you know, like, you know, it's cordoned off from the rest of mainstream culture. And I didn't know which way baseball and gambling would go. But it's very clear now that, like, this is the gambling era. Baseball is thriving, gambling is thriving. Those two things are, like, have been headed in a collision course. And sadly, this was the inevitable but still shocking outcome of it.
- [18:35]
Grant Brisby
Once something is on a revenue sheet, boy, is it hard to get off. You know, if you are plotting for the next 10 years of baseball and you've got all this, all this money that's already there and accounted for, it's really hard to go back and say, you know, we're going to do X, Y and Z to. Even if you're just, we're going to keep those gains, but without the gambling, we've made it all up somehow. The answer is going to be, well, how about you keep those gains? And then also the gambling. I mean, that's how it's always going to work. I did want to point out that nobody would take my action is like a Top 10 Sam quote about your, your own childhood. Nobody would take your action. It gave me an idea because that's one step away of eating things for money. Right? Like, you were, you were real close to, to, you know, putting the spider in the Windex and doing something there. And I just had an idea. You can be in on it. Andy cannot, because he's not here. An app where you say, I propose that I will eat 17 spiders. And then you put it out there and then it's like a Patreon where someone comes by and funds it. And I think that's exactly what society Needs net positive to society. It's just called will I eat this? And we get like 10% of the take. Are you in?
- [19:46]
Sam Miller
There was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, pre app, there was a website that was basically that people would propose things that they would do or they would proposed things that they would pay for that were painful, endurance testing, demeaning, disgusting, and then, you know, they would connect and then they would do it and upload the proof. And it was definitely one of those cultural panic type things where lots of. There was lots of writing about what this website meant about us.
- [20:20]
Grant Brisby
Oh, I see. I missed it. Good for me. Mine's different though. It's an apple.
- [20:25]
Sam Miller
Yours is an app. Right. It makes it easier. It brings. Brings the consumer closer to the retailer, reduces friction. Yeah, I think you'd make a lot of money on that.
- [20:35]
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Sam Miller
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- [22:07]
Marc Maron
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- [22:36]
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- [23:08]
Grant Brisby
The banality is you've done a really good point because I haven't thought about it. I did the thing where I opened the indictment in a tab and I go, here I am, Johnny law expert, gonna go through this indictment, take some notes. And then I get one page in and I realize, you know why I'm a baseball podcaster? Because I have no other skills. Can't, you know, read through a whole indictment. But you actually, it sounds like you, you picked some nuggets. Did you get a summary?
- [23:30]
Sam Miller
Or are you.
- [23:30]
Grant Brisby
Are you the guy that's there, you know, red, red, pen in hand, taking notes? I'm impressed.
- [23:36]
Sam Miller
What do you mean? What, what's your question?
- [23:38]
Grant Brisby
Did you read the indictment?
- [23:39]
Sam Miller
Yeah, sure, I read the indictment.
- [23:41]
Grant Brisby
I can't get through an indictment. It's like, it's a superpower.
- [23:44]
Sam Miller
Before I was, before I was this city, I was a. I was a real reporter. That's right. I read a lot of indictments. I actually read the indictment and I felt a little bit annoyed that they had not asked me to write the indictment because it is basically a baseball blog post.
- [23:59]
Grant Brisby
That's what you're saying. Like Jeff Sullivan.
- [24:02]
Sam Miller
It is very Jeff Sullivan inflected. It is this week's wildest pitches. You know, with like screen grabs of like circles where the ball hit the ground, which is something that you and I have both done several dozen times in our life. Is circle where a wild pitch is. I think I could have done a better job with that indictment than they did. It was a little overwritten among the charges. You know, like, you know, through this scheme, the defendants defrauded betting platforms, deprived major league baseball and the Cleveland guardians of their honest services, illegally enriched them in their co conspirators, misled the public, all normal stuff, and then concludes and betrayed America's pastime. I would have edited that. I don't think you need to go, George Will, in this indictment. I don't think you need to bring Betrayed America's pastime into it, but definitely someone was writing a post like they wrote this indictment like they were writing a post. And I appreciated that.
- [24:57]
Grant Brisby
That reminds me, I have a friend who does not like Saving Private Ryan the entire movie because he doesn't like the bookends of, of, you know, Matt Damon, the old guy saying, you know, tell me I earned this or whatever. And I get that they're a little schmaltzy a little bit. I think they take away from the, the overall weight of that incredible movie. But I can also ignore it. I just, I feel like that is the, the analogy here.
- [25:24]
Sam Miller
The other one tiny detail that I noticed in this indictment was at approximately 8:24pm Klase sent a text message to Better One asking if Better One was ready. Better One responded, quote, but of course.
- [25:40]
Grant Brisby
So polite.
- [25:41]
Sam Miller
I'm gonna assume that that's an idiomatic translation from Spanish, that it was like por supuesto or something like that. But they didn't say that. They didn't say that any of this was translated dialogue. The idea of a better responding but of course is to me, very funny.
- [26:02]
Grant Brisby
One hand on the text and then the other holding a teacup with a pinky out. That's how that reads.
- [26:07]
Sam Miller
The other thing about this indictment that comes across is that they were. These were hapless criminals. You know, like assuming that they did what they did, the charges, the allegations, the accusations, they were not expecting to be surveyed, surveilled. Sorry. They were texting, you know, like, you know, that line from the Wire, taking notes about a criminal conspiracy. You know, they were texting who to make their payments, you know, how to make the payments and what they were for and what they were supposed to lie and say they were for and all that sort of stuff. And what does kind of come across, I don't know, to maybe to a heist, A heist mind like mine. I still think that. I think it would be really easy to get away with this. That's what's troubling is like, I think, I mean, I played out some scenarios. I think this is like sort of scarily easy pickings still. And they didn't do it well. They did it really badly. They did it really bad. According to the way that the indictment lays this out, they did this really badly. They didn't do any of the decoy stuff you would do. They didn't do anything to cover their tracks. And guess what? It took three years for class A to get caught, which is Also pretty troubling because baseball talks about how, you know, the fact that this is now legal and that, you know, bets are, you know, like above board and semi public knowledge makes it easier for them to detect fraud and catch fraud. And I think they probably do a decent job of detecting fraud and catching fraud. That's how all these guys end up getting caught is they make suspicious bets. But it still took three years, like someone was betting routinely betting $7,000 on Emmanuel Clause's first pitch of the game, and it still took three years for this to get discovered. It took Luis Ortiz being brought into it, according to the allegations, for him to, you know, get discovered. That's somewhat troubling to me as well.
- [28:07]
Grant Brisby
That nails really why this is the sk. This is scarier, I think, than Pete Rose in a lot of ways, because Pete Rose was such a shockwave and you couldn't imagine anything like that. Whereas this is not a shockwave. This is just the banal. And it is super easy, I think. Imagine if you're a hitter and you are tasked with starting, you know, and you are trying to rig it so that you start account 01. Boy, can you do that? Boy, would it be easy to do that without evading detection. You know, you gear up for a fastball that's gonna come or not gonna come, and they check your swing a little bit too much. No one is the wiser. So what are you doing to kind of flag those situations in the future? Suspicious betting? And there are gonna be some people who make it their lives and livelihood to not raise those flags. Who will be good at hiding bad pitches on a or bets on a single pitch throughout a larger menagerie of normal bets. And I would be surprised if there weren't at least a couple classes in baseball right now who will just never get caught just because it's too. Too tricky. The haystack's too high, the needle's too small.
- [29:20]
Sam Miller
Yeah, yeah. I'm not trying to, like, lay out a blueprint for how someone can get away with this, but most people who have a. Like, when you think about someone who's like, counting cards in blackjack, that gets their edge up to like, 52%. They're not trying to win every hand. They're just trying to win 52% and what class A and Ortiz and their betting associates were doing, according to the indictment. Again, there could be a lot of things left out here. Who knows, who knows what's misrepresented, who knows what's left out, etc. But they were trying to win 100% of the bets. And if you just, you know, like brought that, like if you just made it murky by trying to win 60%, it seems to me that you'd still make a lot of money. Someone's going to figure that out if they listen to this podcast or not, right?
- [30:08]
Grant Brisby
Yeah, I mean it's, I'm just trying to think then that's when you however start to get into the risk reward. You have to start thinking about the players who, you know, it's not always going to be a class A. It's not always going to be an all star. It's not typically going to be an all Star. I think you do have to start bringing in human nature and the, the incentive structure into this. But you will get a couple of classes in this net. But I would assume that you have, you know, producer Brian wrote as a joke, maybe Pahes was betting against that pitch. Like maybe he was betting to start oh and one. And it was just sort of a funny timing thing. Obviously that's a joke, but it's, you know, it's, it's just so easy for something like that to happen for a player who's, you know, pahis isn't necessarily a fringe player, but he's not someone who can guarantee he's going to get a nine figure contract, eight figure contract. He's still, you know, fighting for his seven figure contracts coming up. And so those are the players that the ones we always suspected might be vulnerable. I don't think you can take your eye off of that sort of paradigm because just because class A was busted and it like reworks our whole mind to go, wow, this could get anybody, you know, endorphins are endorphins. It's just so commonplace that people aren't even thinking it's a big deal. But I do think that there is like a bigger way to make serious life changing money for a huge percentage of the player pool. Which is the thing that was terrifying before the Class A came out and it's still just as terrifying now.
- [31:38]
Sam Miller
I'm so glad you just said what you just said because I think that sums up exactly how I feel that why this is such a paradigm shift. Endorphins are endorphins. Emmanuel Clase. I don't know. Did he need the money? Maybe we'll find out. He did. But did he need the endorphins? Everybody needs endorphins. Everybody. And some people go weird paths to get them. And this is just right there and there are always going to be people in this game, no matter how rich they are, that still love to win a $7,000 bet. And this makes you wonder about it. So I. One of the lines in this indictment was the bettor told Luis Ortiz to explain a wire transfer saying, payment for a horse. It's payment for a horse. You got that? And I made a joke about how I was going to be muttering payment for a horse every time someone throws a pitch three feet outside this year. And that is a joke. But do you think that while you're watching games, are we at a point yet, Will we ever be at a point yet where you see something in baseball that looks a little off and that your antenna go up? Are we gonna be muttering payment for a horse or is this gonna be. Are we still gonna think the game is clean and basically put it out of our mind while we're watching?
- [32:53]
Grant Brisby
That's the existential threat that you're talking about. Right. And I think when you think back to the Black Sox scandal and the. The stated reason why it was so big, why I kept Shoeless Joe out of the hall, and it's because it was an existential threat to baseball. It is. We have this brand new, at the time, pastime, and this has a chance to be big, but people, it needs trust. Like, that's the one thing you can't rip from it. And if you start going down this way, you're going to lose the trust that enables this to keep growing and benefits everybody. So we need to drop, you know, a different kind of hammer on this. We need to. To ban and ban alike. But it didn't happen like that. It wasn't. The World Series ended, and then there was a big expose. It trickled, and a lot of people didn't want to deal with it at the time. A lot of people were just, let, let boys be boys. Let the gamblers be gamblers. And it. It wasn't like an instant scandal. It took a while for that to build and develop. And at the core of it was this idea of, you have to have trust in baseball. So if you're talking about payment for a horse, pitches. Yeah, I'm going to think that all the time. Probably with those exact words now that you've said them. And now they're in my head, too. Like a. A virus that broke containment. A payment for a horse. Every pitch. That's like, you know, you gotta throw a strike here to Ohtan.
- [34:10]
Sam Miller
Nope.
- [34:10]
Grant Brisby
Payment for a horse. Right. That's why this is a big deal.
- [34:15]
Sam Miller
Yeah. Especially now that we've been trained. First pitch of an inning. Like they've trained us to think first pitch of an inning. Be on high alert.
- [34:27]
Grant Brisby
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- [34:56]
Marc Maron
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- [35:15]
Grant Brisby
Twas a cold winter's night and without any heat.
- [35:18]
Marc Maron
I wore Bomba socks so they'd warm up my feet. Yay.
- [35:21]
Grant Brisby
My feet cried. These socks are the best. So cushy and warm. I can finally rest. But don't rest, I said. There's more if you please.
- [35:28]
Marc Maron
Bombas also makes underwear, slippers and tees.
- [35:31]
Grant Brisby
And for each thing you purchase, they donate one new to someone who needs it. So they're cozy too. Everybody deserves to feel good all the time. So gift Bombas this season. That's the end of this rhyme. Go to bombas.comaudio and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase. Let's talk Skoobal.
- [35:50]
Sam Miller
You know, like a couple weeks ago there was the first report that, like, someone wanted to trade for Tarek Skubal. Like, great, good luck, buddy. But Tarik Skubal. Trade talk keeps going. And I've been through enough off seasons that this feels very familiar. Like, oh, no, we're not looking to trade him. Oh, the Tigers would have to be blown away by an offer. Oh, it's probably not going to happen six weeks from now. It's going to be inevitable and he will get traded. Like, it feels like this is a path that we've seen with supposedly, you know, like too good to trade players. It's like they're softening us up. But in six weeks there's going to be six teams involved. It's going to be inevitable and then he'll get traded. Hopefully it won't. Maybe it will. We'll see. We don't have enough to talk about, like, what any of it means at this point. But I do have a question. At this stage, at this stage in the rumor, blah, blah, blah, we Already know that if he gets traded, we will say, can you believe how shameful the Tigers, they make the playoffs two years in a row. They're in this competitive window. They've got a special unicorn player. He's the best player they've developed in forever, and they trade him. The game is broken. Why can't, you know, why do these cheap owners not want to keep their stars, even if you're going to lose them next year? He could have helped you win the World Series this year. We know that. That's how we're going to process it. Is there a return conceivable? It doesn't have to be realistic. Is there any point where you think that if he got traded, we would be like, you know, yeah, that's a good trade. Like, that was a good decision to trade him?
- [37:32]
Grant Brisby
This is a funny time to ask that question, because Bob Nightingale reports that this big part of the Nationals rebuilding plan is they're going to trade Mackenzie Gore. And to me, it's like. It's like that, you know, Family Guy does have a couple of bangers, but the one of anything could be, you know, in that box, it could even be a boat. Maybe one of the best jokes of all time. And it feels like we could trade for Derek Skubel for anyone. He might be the future Mackenzie Gore. Who then we would trade for any. You know what I mean? It just. I think there's on paper something where you can say, holy schnikes, they got yo on Moncada. Like, wow. Like, that's a. That. That they've locked that position down for a decade. And I think there's a way to say that after the trade. I think there's a way for it to look like that after the trade in five years, man, they traded Scuba and they got the mark to share a return. They have built their foundation up. Those are the outliers. Those are the outliers. What you know, now you have the best starting. You've seen how far a team can take. One of the best starting pitchers of a series, like Yamamoto just won the World Series for the Dodgers. The Dodgers do not win the World Series without that starter. They've got one of those starters. Maybe not someone who's willing to go into the seventh inning like Yamamoto, or not willing. I shouldn't say that. Someone who's able to empty it out in the earlier innings, that Yamamoto might. But you've got that guy. That's the hard part. I can't see a package where it's gonna Be like, well, now that they have future Skubal, now they're in better shape. I just don't see it. And I think it's not. Tragic is the wrong word, but just. It would tick me off if I were a Tigers fan.
- [39:06]
Sam Miller
This is an analogy, but, you know, it's part of the, Part of the baseball book is you don't make the first or third out of an inning at third base. Right. You don't make the. So let's just focus on. You don't make the third out of the inning at third base. It's just not worth it. You're already in scoring position. But obviously, if you have a 99.8% chance of making it safely, you still go to third base with two outs. Like, if it's a wild pitch, you still go to third base. It does improve your chances. And I feel like you don't trade Tarek Skubal, particularly when you're already like a bubble playoff to. You're like, this is the year that you want a player like Skubal more than any other, because with him, you probably make the playoffs and you maybe win the World Series, and without him, you definitely don't make the playoffs. Like, that's what marginal. This is when the marginal value years really kick in. So you would say you never trade Tarek Skubal. You never trade Tarek Skubal. Like you. That could be a baseball wisdom is you never make the third out at third base and you never trade Tarek Skubal. But. But do you Sometimes. Do you Sometimes. And you're saying that since any Tarek Skubal trade is predicated on the idea that its future value, that it's speculative value, that we're talking gambling on prospects, there are. You're. There's no chance you're trading Terry Skuble for Juan Soto or like a, an equivalent. Sure thing. So given that there is no gamble that you would make involving tarekskubo, we're back to talking about gambling. It was in baseball.
- [40:52]
Grant Brisby
I mean, yeah, if I, if I, if the GM trades, if Scott Harris trades Scubal, does he get a horse? I mean, let's, let's bring this all back.
- [41:03]
Sam Miller
I do think, though, that there has to be.
- [41:05]
Grant Brisby
He's trading a horse. He's trading a horse away.
- [41:09]
Sam Miller
He's trading his horse. Yeah.
- [41:11]
Grant Brisby
Sorry.
- [41:12]
Sam Miller
What is the payment for a horse? Okay. But if you assume that everybody involved is rational here, whatever Skubal is worth to the Tigers, he's presumably worth to another team. That's in another situation. So are we saying that the Tigers shouldn't trade Scubal just because he's already there? He. Or because he's already theirs? Like, for instance, let's say Scubal was. Let's say they didn't have Scubal. Let's say, like we imagine a world where they are themselves, but without Skubal already. A judge orders Scubal to the Phillies, you know. Ah, bummer. Judge ordered it.
- [41:48]
Grant Brisby
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why wouldn't the. Why wouldn't judge order them to the Yankees?
- [41:52]
Sam Miller
To the Yankees, Yeah. Do the Tigers then have the same moral imperative to trade for Scubal because they need him so much? Like, should they. Whatever. Whatever it takes to get him, should they now give up for him? Or does the fact that he's already on the team so tilt. The obligation they have to their fans, the obligation they have to the sport to themselves? Like, what is. Like. I feel like there's something mystical that's going on here that because he's already on their team, that makes it so that they can't trade him. But another team could just as easily say, like, whatever he's worth to the Tigers, he's worth to us, so we'll give up whatever that is. It's the loss aversion fallacy, I believe I'm going mathematics.
- [42:45]
Grant Brisby
You're wondering if trade talks if they're like addition or if there's division. Can you just flip the numbers around? Right?
- [42:51]
Sam Miller
It's right.
- [42:52]
Grant Brisby
It's the law of reciprocity. Maybe reciprocity is that. I don't know the transmutive property of addition. I don't know. It's one of those. But I see what you're saying, and I do think that the. So what we're. If we're trying to distill this down to the base unit of value, right? I don't think it's championships. I don't think it's playoff appearances. I think it's happy fun times at the ballpark, right? I think when you're talking about championships in a playoff team, you are that shorthand for happy fun times at the ballpark, right? However you get them, those are some of the most extreme happy, fun times. But when you're watching baseball, that's your hobby, it's something you've chosen. You want to have a good time, right? Now, the Tigers know, Tigers fans know that no matter what happens during the year, they've got a guy who can just make them laugh. Just someone who is so watchable, so supremely Watchable, that they are excited about Tigers baseball. And I'm not sure if you know that If. If Skubal doesn't exist and they're looking at, I don't know, Logan Webb or they're looking at someone else and going, gosh, if we only had that guy and we should give up everything to get that guy. And I just. I think once you have someone on the team and you've got the. The happy fun units that you enters the discussion a little bit to birds in the hand, birds in the bush, you've already got one of the main goals of baseball, which is to entertain your fans. Then you could start saying, well, can we get players who collectively start adding and entertaining the fans even more? Now we've got three players who are just as good at distributing happy fun units as Skubal, and we've won. I just don't think that's likely to happen because once you have a guy like Scubal, it's really hard to build them in the aggregate or replace them. Like, it's only so often that you're the. The Nationals and go, oh, no, our teenage hall of Famers leaving. What are we gonna do? And then there's Juan Soto right behind Bryce Harper. You're not going to get Derek school in a trade. You might. You might get, like, Ranger Suarez and go, boy, I'm glad we have six years of this guy as opposed to, you know, one year of Tarek Scubal, one more year. I think it all adds up into it. But, yeah, once you're on a team, you have already proven a big chunk of value for what you're trying to do as a baseball organization, which is put a good product on the field. So maybe that's too basic. Maybe that's too, you know, 10,000ft or whatever. But I do think that plays into this reciprocity, transmutive property of addition.
- [45:16]
Sam Miller
That's a good point. That. That's very convincing to me. You take school ball from the Tigers where he already has. Where he is already producing happy, fun times, you rip him out of that situation, and then you put him in another organization. Even if he pitches just as well, even if he leads into a World Series, there's friction involved in the exchange. There is a psychological loss. There is an identity. Part of your identity has been ripped out of you if you're the Tigers and the Tigers fans in that situation. And it takes time to build up the same sort of fun and love and relationship and identity in the new time, in the new team. So it is not as though you're taking all the vibes and carrying them. Vibes get lost in the journey. And I think that's particularly true, you know, when you're talking about trading a guy to his new team for one year. I don't deny that if the Phillies or the Yankees or anybody got school, they would love it. It would make them happier. It would make them have fun, happy times. I don't think it equals out though, the fun, happy times. That the. I think that the universal like, calculation, like the, the scales are not even. They're not balanced. Joy would be lost in the aggregate and therefore finding a trade that makes sense for both teams where the Tigers feel like they are made whole while the other team does not feel like they have been, you know, left with, you know, holes on their own side is unrealistic. So, yeah, okay, there you go. You've convinced me. Friction, it's a, it's a. Something having to do with friction with maybe with maybe with surface tension. I don't know.
- [47:01]
Grant Brisby
A less fancy way to talk about is trading Terry Scubal is real loser, right?
- [47:07]
Sam Miller
Yeah.
- [47:07]
Grant Brisby
I mean, like that's, that's just the vibe you're getting.
- [47:10]
Sam Miller
There you go.
- [47:11]
Grant Brisby
Yankees aren't trading Tarek, Scuba Dodger aren't be like, oh, one year old guys.
- [47:15]
Whole Foods Market Announcer
Loser.
- [47:15]
Grant Brisby
Come on, you're making the, you're making the postseason with this guy. He's amazing. He might, he might win the Cy Young next year. Don't, don't be a loser. Enjoy it.
- [47:24]
Sam Miller
Don't be a loser. Yeah, and the Tigers are on the, you know, the Tigers could tip into loser.
- [47:29]
Grant Brisby
Yeah.
- [47:29]
Sam Miller
Like they, their next 12 months are going to be defined a lot by whether they can, you know, feel like they've got something good going on. It could be crushing for them. Yeah. Okay, so they can't do it. They can't do it. Even if you knew you were getting the Teixeira return, right. You can't do it. Even if you knew, even if you saw in the future and you saw Naftali Feliz pitching in game six of the World Series allowing a, you know, just a routine fly ball to deep right field. Routine.
- [47:57]
Grant Brisby
Pretty routine. There's Rangers fans listening. Stop.
- [48:01]
Sam Miller
Even then you couldn't do it.
- [48:03]
Grant Brisby
I think if you had a crystal ball, there would be a way because I remember going through all the potential trades, like, lots of fun going through the potential MLB trade rumors blurbs about when the Marlins were trading Miguel Cabrera. Right. And you go through them and they're all Funny. Like, well, the Yankees, you know, they're not going to trade Ian Kennedy and Joe Bur Chamberlain for Miguel Cabrera. That's just nuts. And they're all like that except for one. And you get to one and it's Clayton Kershaw on Matt Kemp. Right. And this is before Matt Kemp wins an mvp. So there's like one Miguel Cabera trade. Okay. So if the Dodgers made that trade, obviously franchise altering, Clayton Kershaw is now on the Marlins and eventually another team. Big to think about the Dodgers, eventually the Dodgers.
- [48:46]
Sam Miller
Four years later, he comes over in the, you know, in the Austin Barnes trade.
- [48:50]
Grant Brisby
Yeah. So it's like that is. But what is. If you're worried about that and you're the Dodgers, like, what's the consolation prize? It's Miguel Cabrera in his prime. Now that's a different kind of situation because he was under contract for a long time. He's younger, he's a hitter. Very apples to oranges there. But at the same time, that's what you're thinking if you're a team with a chance to get Tarek Skuble, is that even in the worst case scenario we'll have Terry Skuble and you know, months to talk extension where no one else can even talk to him. I do think people underrate the negotiating window for a team that's getting someone like Tyler Glass now. Right.
- [49:27]
Sam Miller
It's.
- [49:27]
Grant Brisby
That is something that you like to have in your back pocket.
- [49:31]
Sam Miller
Okay, so yeah, shut it down then.
- [49:33]
Grant Brisby
Episode Knock this Train off the tracks 192. You know what I like to do in Vegas? I like to pick a soccer game from a league I've never heard of and bet like $25 on it. And that's like two hours where I am just obsessed with Bulgarian soccer. And I love it. It's cheap, it's. It lasts a long time.
- [49:52]
Sam Miller
Well, that was the vision. That was the positive vision that baseball had for itself when it started to invite gambling in, was that it would make the games more entertaining for people who watch. And that is how some people use it. I have friends who put eight bucks on a little daily lineup and it makes the day's watching more interesting for them. And that's as far as it goes. And that's not a hundred percent of users. No, some users are degenerates.
- [50:20]
Grant Brisby
They got the weed and the little pens. Right. And the little pen doesn't even smell that much like if I had that in a gambling app in high school. I mean, come on. Like I I don't graduate. I'm not. I'm not here.
- [50:30]
Sam Miller
Do you know that you can now go to a grocery store and they have, like, canned beverages that have like, 50 grams of THC and 50 milligrams. Maybe it's micrograms. I don't know what mgs are, but they're like THC sodas.
- [50:47]
Grant Brisby
They're just in a store.
- [50:49]
Sam Miller
They're just in a store. And again, like, I don't want to tell people how to do crimes, but if you're 16, don't you just walk into that store, open it, chug it, and leave?
- [51:02]
Grant Brisby
I didn't know about everything's got to be super regular. Maybe you got like a rogue store down there. You talking just Safeway.
- [51:07]
Sam Miller
Lindsay Adler has been tweeting pictures of the THC sodas in her. In her neighborhood stores. So I don't know. I haven't seen it, but it feels like it should be harder to. To get your illegal drugs if you're 16. Like, I don't begrudge them their illegal drugs, but you should have to work for it. This is how, like, my generation. Your generation. This is how we learned skills. It was hard to get high. Like, you had to, like, learn how to do these things. Now it's too easy. You just walk in the store, pop a top, discard the can in the cereal aisle, and you're done. What skills is that teaching?
- [51:51]
Grant Brisby
Don't even get me started on finding pornography. Gosh, all the skills I going to waste anyway. We will be back on Friday, maybe with it. Did we figure that out?
- [52:04]
Sam Miller
Haven't heard the connecting flight. It's not clear yet.
- [52:07]
Grant Brisby
He's still in Canton, I heard. And he's going to. He's going to make lemons and lemonade and write a rip and feature on the Football hall of Fame. All right, we'll be back. We're going to record at the end of the week. We're not releasing it until next week. We're starting to get into our offseason schedule. So for the the dedicated among you, A, seek help. B, we'll be back next week as far as the actual podcast being published. So thanks for listening. We will see you then.
- [52:37]
Sam Miller
I was very rock wrong.
- [52:47]
Paige Desorbo
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- [53:29]
Marc Maron
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- [54:03]
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