Alex and Bobby discuss favorites for the Mets’ upcoming talent show, break down the news that MLB is lobbying to exclude minor leagues from minimum wage law in Florida, and take stock of the results of the official Tipping Pitches Fans Union Survey (thanks to listener Owen for putting it together!), then talk to The Athletic’s senior MLB writer Evan Drellich about his new book “Winning Fixes Everything,” including the reporting process for the book, how the Astros have influenced other front offices, how consultants took over baseball, ill-advised X-ray machines, and more.
Follow Evan on Twitter @EvanDrellich.
Links:
MLB lobbies to keep minor leaguers from minimum wage law
Buy “Winning Fixes Everything”
Join the Tipping Pitches Patreon
Tipping Pitches merchandise
Songs featured in this episode:
Gerry Raftery — “Right Down the Line” • Mom Jeans. — “What’s Up?” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC]
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and, and, and being able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitching and kind of help out so he wasn’t Tipping his Pitches. So Tipping Pitches, we hear about it all the time. People are home on the stand, what Tipping Pitches it’s all about? That’s amazing! That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, according to Michael Mayer, @mikemayer22, the Executive Editor of Metsmerized, a Mets blog, quote, “The Mets and their families are having a talent show on Friday. Katia Lindor is the heavy favorite as a concert violinist. Pete Alonso-“, meanwhile, “-is working on a comedy routine”. I, I struggled to think of three sentences that could provide me more new information that I should have already known about.
ALEX: The absolute whiplash of going through that.
BOBBY: Seriously! Okay, talent show, fun, fun event, you know. Like a thing of team building exercise. I’m sure Max Scherzer was heavily involved in planning it he seems like the, the events guy, The events coordinator for the New York Mets. Katia Lindor whom I, I’ve religiously follow on Instagram because she posts great, great content about the New York Mets and her and Francisco Lindores lives.
ALEX: And the occasional Tipping Pitches tweet.
BOBBY: And the occasional Tipping Pitches tweet without even realizing it, yeah. Just resharing it from one of the- I love when, what is like the economy of the Instagram tweet aggregators? Should we get in on this? We just ag- we changed our account name and we aggregate our own tweets. Like we go way more viral on Instagram and Twitter.
ALEX: I mean, that’s, that’s all you got to do, right? just screenshot your shit and put it everywhere.
BOBBY: Yeah, but knock off the account name, though. Because that’s what all of those accounts have to do.
ALEX: Right. Can [2:02]–
BOBBY: Anonymize, you can’t- know- knowing who came up with the idea.
ALEX: That’s, I mean, that’s the internet, right? It’s taking other people’s content and passing it off as your own.
BOBBY: The Zuck algorithm is much better than the Elon algorithm these days, I have to say. We could go viral much easier on Instagram than Twitter. We are being shadow banned. The views are down.
ALEX: Trying to wrap my head around a Pete Alonso comedy routine, though.
BOBBY: He already did one for his charity event last year. Do you recall this?
ALEX: No, I thought you were talking about his Home run Derby performance the other year. Because that was funny to me.
BOBBY: We can’t, we can’t continue without you hearing this.
PETE: I’m not going to tell a bunch of butthole and dick jokes. I’m gonna leave that, I’m gonna, I’m gonna leave that to professionals. But I do, I do have a story. So our manager, he’s probably, I think he was older than Buck.
Unknown Speaker: Almost impossible.
PETE: He’s older than Buck. He’s in his whitey tighties that were sagging down to here with two Miller Lite Tallboys. He comes in the, in the office like this or in the clubhouse like, Goddammit! That was the worst offensive production I’ve ever seen. We didn’t execute, this was absolutely horrible! I can’t believe this. You suck! You suck! You suck! And you are fucking horrible! And all of us are scared shitless, we’re just a bunch of 19-year old kids just looking around at each other like, oh my God, what’s about that? What’s he going to say? And these are the next words that came out of his mouth. Are any motherfuckers in here a virgin? Were a bunch of 19-year old kids, were like really, like tiny little mouse. We’re like ahhh, like, seriously, raise your fucking hand, if you’re a virgin! No one raises their hand. He’s like, good! Now you motherfuckers know what the fuck I’m gonna be talking about. Now, let me ask you another question. Do you think when you fuck, we’re like, holy fuck [4:20]. This guy’s off his rocker. This guy’s off his fucking rocker. No one said anything. He’s like, good! Now when you step in that fucking box, you don’t fucking think. If you don’t think when you fuck, you don’t think when you can. You grab the fucking back and you just fucking hate it.
BOBBY: Alex, that was Pete Alonso’s first attempt.
ALEX: I appreciated this disclaimer upfront because when I heard Pete Alonso comedy routine, I was like, Oh God, it’s gonna be a bunch of butthole and dick jokes. Because that’s what my mind goes to when I think stand-up comedy. it’s butthole jokes.
BOBBY: I mean, that’s one of the jokes in the Oscar Best Picture front runner everything, everywhere all at once. So I don’t know, it’s like the peak of comedy these days.
ALEX: I hope he’s refined his craft, a little bit.
BOBBY: I don’t know if I would call what he’s done to this point now, clearly I, I can’t speak to the talent show that at time of recording is two days away and at a time of publishing will have been three days ago. I don’t know if what I would call what we just played a snippet of stand-up comedy?
ALEX: No, that was–
BOBBY: There’s no jokes.
ALEX: –those, those storytelling, is a funny story.
BOBBY: Was it?
ALEX: I mean–
BOBBY: He has an almost unique ability to not be funny.
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Or like not, not be funny in the, the way that a stand-up comedian needs to be funny. He’s funny, like, between two ferns funny. Like so unfunny, that it’s really funny, you know.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like when he did his Area 51 thing with Kenny Mayne, which we talked about on the show a few years ago when it happened. That was not, he wasn’t trying to be funny, and therefore he was much funnier.
ALEX: Yeah, it’s not like there’s structure to his jokes. Like, it’s not like he’s setting up tension. and then throwing a twist in there. He’s just kind of hoping you’re gonna laugh it. I, I, I appreciate that he was like, I’m not going to tell a bunch of dick jokes. Then he tells a story about his hitting coach. Talking about, fucking. And I’m like–
BOBBY: Charity event?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I don’t know, he’s getting some pity laughs in there, though, that’s for sure.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Some real like sign a team friendly extension Pete laughs.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. He could afford to go blue a little less, I think honestly.
BOBBY: I, I agree. You know, if he really wants his burgeoning stand up career to blossom, what he needs to do is he needs to get on Instagram Reels, and he needs to start doing some crowd work. That’s like 30% of the videos that I see on my Instagram Reels is just like 28-year old white stand-ups, just having a conversation with people in the crowd. Not even a funny conversation just to converse, like, where are you from?
ALEX: Yep.
BOBBY: Tuscaloosa, cool. Moves on. And the next person is like, alright, it’s like Tuscaloosa, that’s an Alabama.
ALEX: Yeah, you’re ri- I mean, the other 70% is guys saying like, you can’t say the things that I’m about to say anymore. And I know that Pete has one or two of those ideas in his head.
BOBBY: He could just combine them all into one big thing. And one no, not the other 70%, maybe like, maybe like 30% more, and then the final 40%, at least on my, on my Instagram Reels is just people talking about bulking and getting natural physiques.
ALEX: Alright, that was on you, bro.
BOBBY: First on using steroids, it is on me, I told you about this last episode.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: The internet is really figuring me out, you know. It’s giving me the bulking content, it’s given me crowd work. It gave me a Skinamarink ad on MyFitnessPal. Are you familiar with Skinamarink?
ALEX: Honestly, no. I saw a, a Joe Biden Deepfake video.
BOBBY: Yes. Yeah–
ALEX: Where his–
BOBBY: –from, from Zach Silberberg?
ALEX: Right, exactly. And that was my entry point?
BOBBY: Right. It’s kind of all you need to know, Skinamarink is like this experimental horror film where it’s just like an hour and 25 minutes of just darkness, and just children being trapped in a house with no doors or windows, and hearing noises and being scared. It’s like an immersive far experience, started on YouTube, became a feature film that somehow made it into like a bunch of movie theaters nationwide. And it’s just the children for an hour and 20 minutes going, did you hear that voice? What’s that over there?
ALEX: Enough of experimental movies. I don’t need experimental movies.
BOBBY: Really? Just coming out–
ALEX: Just–
BOBBY: –strong in favor of the boring flicks. I like it.
ALEX: Oh, were you, were you a fan? I didn’t mean to offend if you were–
BOBBY: I didn’t even see it.
ALEX: –Skinamarink head.
BOBBY: I didn’t even see it. There are, there is a Skinamarink hive, for sure, though. Not quite as powerful and robust as the Babylon hive, which I am a key member. Pete Alonzo Skinamarink bulking joke at the Mets talent show. This is like Word Cloud Association–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –in my head.
ALEX: ChatGPT could never.
BOBBY: I’m patiently awaiting more reporting on this front. You know, I joke that we should get credential and we should fly down there and cover this. Treat it like a, treat it like the World Series more or less. Because that’s kind of, this is kind of right in our wheelhouse.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: What baseball player talent, what baseball players think is their second talent besides playing baseball. Because it takes–
ALEX: You know–
BOBBY: –a certain, it, it takes a certain broken part of your brain. To think that you could do stand-up comedy when you’re spent your whole life becoming a Major League Baseball player.
ALEX: No, that perfectly tracks, I understand that, 100%. I’m sure Pete is not the only one who’s like, yeah, I could do that, I keep it up there. Also, I have to assume Mark Canha is going to be involved in, in some way. Perhaps maybe a little like cooking show? Or maybe like a blind taste test sort of. Did you see he’s, he’s writing a book about food?
BOBBY: I did, yeah. That’s pretty cool, good for him.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Get into the publishing industry? It’s in a good spot these days. Yeah, but okay, one can Canha actually cook? I mean, I know he can eat. I know he identifies good food. But can he cook it? Number one. Number two, is there a time limit on a talent show? I feel like five minutes is probably the max that you can get.
ALEX: Right. And he’s like, I’m gonna do this, this oven bake slow roasted pork for six hours. Circle back, you guys do all your routines, and then we’ll come back and taste mine at the end.
BOBBY: Dark, dark horse candidate for who I think could win this, Eduardo Escobar. No idea what he’s gonna do. He just seems like he has a lot of personality and charisma.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That’s what it takes to win a talent show.
ALEX: That’s true.
BOBBY: Do you ever participate in a talent show? You had to.
ALEX: I did, a couple of times.
BOBBY: Your young, young musician.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Your young Paul McCartney on our hands. What did you do at the talent show?
ALEX: God, I’m trying to tthink/ Wow, I’ve actually been in a few. The, the more I think about it, the–
BOBBY: A lustrious talent show career.
ALEX: –the, the more, I think I’ve participated in like, four or five talent shows between my elementary and high school career.
BOBBY: Wow!
ALEX: And really–
BOBBY: Journeyman.
ALEX: Right. Yeah, well, it’s, it also–
BOBBY: You, you wouldn’t gonna give up on the dream, you’re in the indie leagues for talent shows.
ALEX: Right, exactly. I was like, I do it for the love of the game, you know?
BOBBY: Were you doing like Fall Out Boy songs or were you like, playing the piano? Like what was going on?
ALEX: There, yeah, so I, so I did a Wilco song in elementary school.
BOBBY: So sick.
ALEX: So sick, middle school–
BOBBY: Dude’s rock.
ALEX: –middle school wasm was kind of a, a wild- there was a Depeche Mode piano song. There was a Boys Like Girls song.
BOBBY: I, the price–
ALEX: And, and a Green Bay song.
BOBBY: –the price is going up for what I would pay your mom for this video.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Although she will definitely give it to me for free.
ALEX: Absolutely. If anyone exists, and then because I had to bring it home in high school. I did a [12:39] song ’cause the, you know–
BOBBY: Young Conor Oberst [12:42]–
ALEX: I can, I Can Only Be Me.
BOBBY: I did the talent show twice, once was with our ba- like a full class in elementary school.And we did like a, like a little dance singing routine. I don’t really know how to describe it. And the second time was, I was in fifth grade, and I played the National Anthem on the electric guitar.
ALEX: Nice! Little Jimi Hendrix over here.
BOBBY: Little bit, yeah. It definitely wasn’t good. Also, I kind of, I kind of assumed that because I was playing the National Anthem, they would put me first. But I was like fifth to last. So it was kind of a weird vibe, you know, like everybody had already gone. It’s like your comes to kid playing the National Anthem.
ALEX: Now, did anyone stand for it?
BOBBY: I don’t remember. I have like, extreme stage fright and anxiety. And so I don’t have any real recollection. Like I remember doing it in that I remember practicing. And I remember talking about doing it afterwards with everything they have–
ALEX: Right. Is kind of blacked out, yeah.
BOBBY: I got nothing.
ALEX: Real, real patriotic. You were like, you’re like, you know what song really speaks to me?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Francis Scott cheese, classic, banger!
BOBBY: But I remember thinking about it in the style of Jimi Hendrix. Like I think even then I was like, I’m not gonna really do this like Jimi Hendrix. But, you know, I remember doing it not because I was a big F Scott Key fan. But more because I was like, dude, Jimi Hendrix.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know who’s sick? Jimi Hendrix.
ALEX: I mean, you had like the long locks a hair back men too. Like–
BOBBY: I did, yeah.
ALEX: Like you had the rocker look going.
BOBBY: I did. I had like a lightning bolt guitar strap.
ALEX: Ohhh.
BOBBY: One of those, one of those bad boys.
ALEX: Oh, hell yeah.
BOBBY: Pretty sure I wear a Beatles t shirt. And bands–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –and bands.
ALEX: That’s like, that’s like a streetwear look now, you know, like–
BOBBY: I was a way ahead of the curve. Our culture is being co opted by Gen Z. Ohhh, boy!
ALEX: This is incredible that we went 20 minutes on, on this talent show, honestly.
BOBBY: It is incredible. I hope that the Mets talent show goes much longer than 20 minutes. I’d like to hear stories about this for weeks. We have a fun episode coming up. We finally have our conversation with Evan Drellich about Winning Fixes Everything. His book on the rise and fall of Houston Astros front office. And we are also going to do, we’re also going to share the what has been dubbed the Tipping Pitches fan union survey. A GM survey style questionnaire that was handed out to members of the Tipping Ppitches Slack. So this will, this will kick off our, our month of previewing the baseball season by looking back a little bit last year, and looking at some of the results for questions heading into 2023 as well. But before we do all of that, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I am Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches.
[15:38]
[Music Theme]
BOBBY: Alex, no new patrons to shout out this week. Not yet at least, we are recording this five days in advance. So there’s five days of nether time that will happen between this recording and when people actually hear it. Where somebody might sign up, so thank you to that somebody or, or not thank you. Or you’ve really all let us down and hurt us this week.
ALEX: Right. If you’ve already signed up for the Patreon, go do it again, sign up as many times as you can. Just, just keep signing on.
BOBBY: Fake email accounts, you know, like we’re trying to Bernie Madoff this thing.
ALEX: Right. Stuff the, stuff the box a little bit.
BOBBY: I saw that you watch the Bernie Madoff saw on your Letterboxd account that you watch the Bernie Madoff Netflix, four part Netflix documentary.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I’m, I’m three parts of the way through that. And the, the Wilpons have only been named dropped once, and I’ve fallen asleep twice. So that’s a bad ratio.
ALEX: It was a bit of a tough hang, if I’m being quite honest.
BOBBY: So bad, it’s so bad. It’s like we can’t get the side tracks.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They, they literally just like recreate the entire thing as if it’s like a, like a 2002 Discovery Channel aliens show reenactment. They just have these weird dramatic- anyway.
ALEX: I mean, this is my, this is my we’re gonna do a tangent, right? This is my problem was documentaries today, right? Is they’re like, we, we want to tell a story, but we don’t have any footage to tell it. What if we just do like, kinda like half shadowy figures walking around and like secretly shaking hands? While someone talks about their mundane experience in the background.
BOBBY: Everybody thinks that they’re an odd tour nowadays. You know, like, if you’re a documentarian, you also have to be a filmmaker. Like in big, shiny letters and like no, just make a documentary. No people like documentaries, normal documentaries. They felt like they needed they wanted to make a like the Elizabeth Holmes TV should style show the docu drama that they did last year. Or the one with Uber, or the one, I don’t remember the names of any of these. The one with–
ALEX: WeWork.
BOBBY: –WeWork, right. But they just didn’t get the budget for it. And so they just made they did like seven interviews, and then they just shot these weird beat roll. Okay, let’s move on. Before we talk about the fan union survey, we got some news this past week. Interesting news for the purposes of the Tipping Pitches podcast. You know, the minor league labor negotiations are happening more fervently than we thought they were. Just because we hadn’t seen much reporting around this. But I do think that those two sides have been meeting, have been negotiating. We got some reporting from Evan Drellich about how it’s going so far. We also saw from Jason Garcia who was investigated reporter who publishes a Substack, titled Seeking Rents. Where he writes about corporate influence and, and big business in the state of Florida. His newsletter last week, detailed and I think expose I really didn’t see this reported anywhere else besides Jason’s newsletter. Exposed that Major League Baseball is lobbying currently to cut minor league players off from Florida’s minimum wage laws. So to exempt them in the state of Florida the same way that they have been exempted federally from, from minimum wage laws through the Save America’s Pastime Act. MLB’s lobbyists are going directly to the governor of Florida, one Ron DeSantis. No other point of interest for that man. Nothing else going on in that man’s world. There’s nothing else to talk about With Ron DeSantis. One of MLB’s owners, the Ricketts, gave $1 million after filing a bill to exempt minor leaguers from the state minimum wage laws. And I think it’s kind of a head scratcher at first, because you might think, well, Minor League Baseball players have a union now. They’re negotiating over certain rights. They’re likely not going to be making minimum wage now that they have the MLBPA on their side. And they’re actually negotiating over what their value is. And I thought that too, so I was surprised, and I was reading along with it, why would MLB be directing millions of dollars, millions of lobbying dollars towards Ron DeSantis to try to exempt specifically from Florida? Well, number one is they just had to settle this $185 million lawsuit in Florida and Arizona. Over not properly compensating based on minimum wage laws, minor league players for their time at Spring Training in the past, or extended Spring Training. That lawsuit was alleging that these players were there and they were working and they were not being paid at all for that time. That was last year. And the second part of this is that, if you have to legislate- well, the second part of this really is that they’re going to be giving this money to these politicians either way. So they’re just directly asking for something now they’re like, yeah, $1 million for Ron DeSantis, sure, that’s nothing. That’s, that’s a write off.
ALEX: The Ricketts already had that one in the hopper. Like the check was already written and they were like, oh, well it’s–
BOBBY: I can ask for something for this one.
ALEX: Right, let’s just add a little note to it.
BOBBY: They lobby both sides of both political parties in all states. So that when they want something that one side can provide, they can attach a request to it. It just so happened that this was the request. Now why is this the request now? I don’t know this for certain, but I would guess because as they are negotiating in the CBA, they’re trying to be as aggressive as they can, without endangering, say a Minor League Baseball season, because of a strike or endangering their relationship with the Major League Baseball Players Association as a whole, after just getting a CBA last year. Or really embarrassing themselves in front of fans as stuff comes out about how these negotiations are going. So they’re trying to do stuff, kind of behind closed doors, that will clear up some political capital for them to ask for these things in a collective bargaining agreement. You can’t put anything in a CBA that violates state or federal labor law. And so MLB could not say, we don’t want to pay minor leaguers in the offseason. If minor leaguers are included in minimum wage law. Minimum wage law in various states forces employers to pay people throughout the entire time if they’re full time employees. And this whole seasonal worker aspect of how MLB has chosen to pay minor leaguers in the past is not, is not legal in a lot of states. You know, it’s they lobbied for it to become legal federally, so that they could do it, in most cases. But in places like California like that, that was already illegal. and there were already lawsuits going into effect over how they were being paid, and whether it was legal or not. And it’s clearly worth millions of lobbying dollars to them to have this part of the law on their side. Even if they are going to be paying minor leaguers more than basic minimum wage in Florida and Arizona and wherever else. They have minor league teams or Spring Training facilities. They clearly feel that it’s worth it so that they can continue to devalue the minor leaguers labor’s, labor as a whole and not pay them in the offseason.
ALEX: Right, exactly. Well, and it’s something that they can then actually come to the table with as a bargaining chip, right? If they actually codify this. Because as you said, I mean, right now, obviously, Congress passed the Save America’s Pastime Act, which exempts minor leaguers. But, but states don’t follow those amendments to federal wage law. So they’re basically saying we just want to make it clear that minor leaguers are not being paid minimum wage, right? They’re basically saying we want to, we want to extend this exemption to supersede the state law at the moment, basically. And, and as you mentioned, I do think a key part of this is insulating themselves from future lawsuits. Because lord knows they are not keeping overtime records for their, for their players, right? Like or timecards, or anything like this.
BOBBY: No, no, no, no. And if they’re not doing that, then what they have to do is pay them the state minimum wage for salaried workers too. Which, which I don’t really know what it is in Florida, but like, for example, in, you know, California, in New York, it’s like in the mid 50,000s. Which is, which would be a lot more money than they’re currently paying all of their minor leaguers, you know. So they would have to reach that threshold in order to say that they are not hourly workers eligible for overtime. So if they’re carved out from that exemption, then slightly easier for them to pay them less. And the other thing is like, even if you’re not talking about strict numbers, like getting to a salary minimum to call this person, a salaried worker. What you’re talking about is a conceptual argument back and forth between the two sides. Is this person working for you for nine months? Or is this person working for you for 12 months? If they’re working for you for 12 months, you have a lot more ammo on your side to say they should be making more. Because they are working for longer, and that’s how we reward work in this country, right? Like, are you–
ALEX: Well–
BOBBY: –I mean, that’s how we conceptualize the idea of working–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –in this country. Like you get paid for the time that you’re there, I guess. And if they’re only working for them for nine months, well, then MLB teams are gonna say, well, they should make 75% less, they’re only working for us for three quarters of the year. They’re make- whatever you think that they, that they should be making, yearly, salary wise, they should just make 75% of that.
ALEX: Right, exactly. And they shrewdly went to a lobbying firm, that just so happens to be run by a former DeSantis lobbyist. And also employs DeSantis’ former campaign manager, right? So everything’s on the up and up here, I just want to be very clear about that.
BOBBY: I’m wondering like, why does it, why is it just the Ricketts? Did they just draw the short end of the stick? Like it’s their turn to do the lobbying?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like, owner has to do a million every couple of years. Or did the Cubs just care more about this?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Or, or even better. Did they get a Venmo from every other East Coast team that has their Spring Training facility in Florida, and they just paid, they paid it and then Venmo requested Steve, Steve Cohen and John Middleton for their portion of it.
ALEX: They do.
BOBBY: [26:31]
ALEX: I mean, it’s, it’s like the MLB commissioners pack, right, when the owners don’t want to know, like, who’s going into it? They’re like, well, we’ll just put it they all looked at the, the Ricketts and they were like, there’s no secret with you guys. There’s who like, can, can you make the donation for me, please?
BOBBY: Oh, boy. Okay, so we’ll see, we’ll see about that. Shall we move on to the Tipping Pitches fan union survey?
ALEX: Let’s do it!
BOBBY: So as I said, this is a GM survey style, you know, the GM surveys every year where they ask a bunch of fun questions, and they anonymize the responses. And we all get to make content out of it for a week, when 29 out of 30 GM say that they would build their team around.
ALEX: Shohei Ohtani.
BOBBY: Or, you know, 23 out of 30 teams say that they wish that they could be the Cleveland Guardians or some shit like. There’s always like, it’s always like a, a fun way of hearing what people don’t actually think. You know, like, it’s a fun way of giving people the cover to, to lie, on the GM survey. That is not the case with the Tipping Pitches fan survey, it’s all people being 100% honest and answering very important questions in the baseball world. I want to give a large, large shout out to Tipping Pitches Patron, Owen Maynard, who organized this survey. Wrote up the questionnaire, all from way across the Atlantic, in the UK. Doing this in his spare time, thank you to Owen. You’ve given us quite a bit of content to share with the world.
ALEX: And, and really, it’s the first formal action by the fans union. Obviously, the next step is, is drafting a CBA. But we need to get everyone on the same page first, the very least.
BOBBY: Interesting of you to say that this is the first formal action by the fan union when, I have it on good authority that you signed on to the Ron DeSantis $1 million lobbying pledge. You as the head of the Major League Baseball Fans Union, Alex Bazeley. You’ve been elected president, Jimmy Hoffa style.
ALEX: Once again, they’ve been worryingly absent, you know. They came in, made a lot of bold promises that MLB fans union, and then disappeared. Like my, my email is just being mined for, for marketing dollars right now.
BOBBY: Have you noticed an uptick in spam emails since you signed up for the MLB Fans Union?
ALEX: I mostly get spam emails anyway, so no, I haven’t.
BOBBY: Knowing how little you check your notifications on, like text messages.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I don’t even want to see your email account.
ALEX: You don’t.
BOBBY: Any of them. Okay, let’s go through these responses. The first question, which player in Major League Baseball has the best vibes? This is not who I would have thought would have won this overwhelmingly. 37% plurality, no majority, ’cause, ’cause this was an open-ended response form for this question. 37% said Julio Rodriguez, and only 16% said Shohei Ohtani. Other guys who got votes, Jose Trevino, Jazz Chisholm, Joey Votto, Matt Vierling, Smokin’ Stogies in the clubhouse. Mookie, Nick Castellanos, Eugenio Suarez. Starling Marte, and Alberto Pujols. Julio Rodriguez, the leading vote getter, 37% of the votes. I mean, he does have good vibes, but–
ALEX: I mean–
BOBBY: –I guess for over sampling in Seattle?
ALEX: –was there something, was there another player who, who came to mind? Because I know that he’s a, a fan favorite in the Slack for many reasons.
BOBBY: Why not John Fisher?
ALEX: That’s actually true.
BOBBY: Congrats to Julio Rodriguez, the first annual Tipping Pitches best vibes winner. Best vibes by team, I think we just got, we just got flooded by Mariners fans, bro. The Mariners–
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: –won this one too. 52.2% Mariners, 43.5% Phillies, and 4.3%. Mets. No other teams getting any votes. Do you think this is going to remain true in 2023? Do you think the Mariners vibes are going to continue?
ALEX: I think it’s a good question, right? Because once a team like the Mariners kind of breaks out and captures the hearts and imagination of fans in, in a given year, there’s a bit of attrition, right? In the, in the, in the coming year.
BOBBY: Backlash.
ALEX: Yeah. That said, I think that they still have room to grow because they can be a better baseball team. And I think that helps with, with general vibes. Like the Phillies are the one, I’m, I’m actually a little more concerned about. Because they would have been my pick for, for best vibes in 2022. But, but how does that change once you’ve been to the World Series?
BOBBY: The Phillies vibes thing really was like a three week thing. Like everybody was like, I mean, I understand that the vibes were unbelievable, but the vibes of that team in August were dogshit. Really bad! Really bad vibes! There was like Alec Bohm just threw another one, eight feet over the second baseman trying to turn a double play. Like let’s all fight each other. Slam our head against the wall.
ALEX: It was a vibes roller coaster, that is for sure.
BOBBY: Definitely! There’s–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –no way that they’re gonna have the best vibe to 2023.
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: Just would not be very Philadelphia to just be consistently good vibes.
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: All in.
ALEX: Small sample size, it’s unsustainable, man.
BOBBY: Okay, next question. The worst vibes for a player. Here are all the people who are receiving votes. Oh reveal the winner last, Aroldis Chapman, Mike Clevinger, Robbie Ray, Fernando Tatis Jr. Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, Brooks Raley, Gerrit Cole, Tommy Pham, Trevor Bauer. And the worst overall vibes for a player in 2022 was Josh Donaldson in a landslide!
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: 42% of responses chose Josh Donaldson. Now that, that has to just be a Yankees fan thing, right? Like we just have a lot of Yankees fans in the Slack.
ALEX: I don’t know, his vibes are pretty fucking awful, man. I mean–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –hey, look, I mean, I gotta say, if, if people are voting for you having worse vibes than one of the most universally reviled players in the sport right now, I don’t know, maybe, maybe you’re due for a little introspection–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –you know.
BOBBY: Maybe. I feel like most people who voted on this didn’t take it as like worse person, you know.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like worst vibes of players who were otherwise have not done anything. Unbelievably, morally, morally terrible?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I know Josh Donaldson had his own whole thing where he called Tim Anderson, Jackie Robinson, I can’t believe that happened.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah, I know.
BOBBY: I can’t believe that happened. He does have just heinous barstool vibes, Tim.
ALEX: Yeah. Well, do you remember when he like went on that rant? And he was like, why can’t I say Saturdays are for the boys? How was that–
BOBBY: No.
ALEX: –how was that sexist?
BOBBY: The other days for the ladies.
ALEX: That was literally like his point! He was like, you guys can have Sundays, it’s fine.
BOBBY: Saturdays are for us. Worst vibes for teams, A’s, Angels, Braves, Rockies, Cardinals, Padres, Astros, Reds, Yankees, Nationals, and Rays. All receiving votes, but taking the cake was the 2022 Chicago White Sox. I think that’s right.
ALEX: Really?
BOBBY: I think that’s right. They had really bad, bad vibes. Tony La Russa, all year.
ALEX: Totally.
BOBBY: Starting, starting off the year by taking down the Reddit lounge sign and replacing it With La Russa’s Lounge is not a good way to start it. Having Jerry Reinsdorf within 100,000 miles of your fra- franchise, let alone owning and signing the checks is, is another terrible way to get the vibes cranking. And then the good things about the team really went out the door quickly. A lot of injuries to the fun players. You know, some regression from some of the pitchers. Really only like a handful of bright spots that I can think about. Dylan see I guess, who you know your mileage may vary on how much of a bright spot he actually is. He’s a pretty great pitcher don’t want to know anything else about him.
ALEX: Nope.
BOBBY: The other teams on this list here, I mean, there are 12 responses here, so it’s almost half the league. Most of these got just a handful of votes. You know, the A’s are on here bringing up the rear. I really don’t think their vibes were that bad, they were just non existent. Like they didn’t really have much of a pulse from like July on.
ALEX: Right, yeah, exactly. Like it’s just, there’s just kind of no motion there. You know, it’s like alright.
BOBBY: Who do you think should have had the worst vibe? So who you have voted for?
ALEX: Well, I mean, maybe on reflection the White Sox are, are a good answer. I think the, the Nats vibes were, were pretty rough this year, honestly.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: With the whole–
BOBBY: They tied for second.
ALEX: Yeah, they did tie for second, they had the whole Soto thing. The, the, the threat of ownership change. But perhaps, perhaps has less of a vibes thing and more of just like kind of a like disappointing franchise thing. Like, like the, the Padres made it on here. And when I saw that, I was kind of like, wow, that’s a little, a little harsh. And then I reflected a little bit and I’m like, no, that the actual vibes in that clubhouse were, were tough at some points during the season.
BOBBY: So weird.
ALEX: Really weird.
BOBBY: Tatis missing the whole year and like getting into a fight with Machado at the end of [36:19]. Yeah, but some weird vibes. Seems like they’ve ironed everything out–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –in San Diego. But we, we will see. Bob Melvin’s coming in steady hand, you know. It’s Walter White looking ass, small at this scale. Just looks so much like Walter White. Bryan Cranston, you know, pre shaving his head. Pre Heisenberg date, anybody know? Okay, let’s move on. Best tweet of the year, best baseball tweet of the year. Third place, Ben Verlander, woke up thinking about how Babe Ruth set his poor wife Helen on fire. Yet the moral gatekeepers are keeping Barry Bonds the greatest hitter of all time, out of the Hall of Fame. That’s, that, that’s the bronze medal, Alex.
ALEX: Indistinguishable from a drill suite, I just want to say it.
BOBBY: Second place @BNightengale, our good friend Bob.
ALEX: Heard of him.
BOBBY: It is now midnight, and no one is moving as the two sides moving ever so closer. My personal favorite tweet of all time? Of all time! And first place, Jon Heyman, Arson Judge appears headed to Giants.
ALEX: The, the tweet that spawned 1000 jokes.
BOBBY: I think that that was recency bias. There’s no way that that’s a better tweet and Ben Verlander or Bob Nightengale. There’s no way! Also receiving votes where “Tungsten Arm” O’Doyle, which I think is like a two or three year old tweet at this point.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And the pitching ninja tweet of the Raisel Iglesias throwing a box of sunflower seeds with the tail attached to it. As well as Sean Murphy getting hit by a pitch sticking his ass out.
ALEX: Yeah. I, I have to, I mean, to give the Heyman’s tweet some credit, right? I understand, you don’t have to hand it to Jon Heyman. I think part of the reason why it holds so much gravity is like he was actually trying to like convey information, you know.
BOBBY: So was Nightengale.
ALEX: I mean, yeah. But he–
BOBBY: He was trying to convey that no one was moving as you signs are moving ever so closer.
ALEX: Right. But, but here’s the thing is he wasn’t wrong, right? It was close to midnight. No one was really moving, but they were moving closer. Heyman got like a third of the words wrong in his tweet. And it has actual implications on the game of baseball.
BOBBY: So true. I think that maybe why I’m not responding as much to Arson Judge, other people clearly did is that I missed it the first time around.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I didn’t see this tweet, and it didn’t make me think that Aaron Judge was going to be on the Giants.
ALEX: Right. So you didn’t–
BOBBY: I love this tweet so much, by the way.
ALEX: –get to experience [39:06]
BOBBY: Now, I know I’m sort of undercutting it, but still at the same time. Even if he was right, he’s still hedged. He says appears headed to Giants. Given himself a little wiggle room. Okay, best baseball moment of 2023. Receiving votes, the era game, presumably that’s the Joe Musgrove, era game. I would not call that the best baseball moment of 2023 personally, but that’s okay. The Phillies choosing Dancing on My Own as their anthem for the playoffs. Ohtani near perfect game, minor leaguers voting to unionize, Miguel Cabrera’s 3000 hit. Mets comeback win versus the Phillies, Kyle Schwarber ejection, amazing moment. Julio Rodriguez Derbies/All Star Game breakout. Jesse Winker, throwing baseball seeds onto the field during ejection and then someone door dashing him a pizza, I wasn’t aware of this. Aaron Judge’s number 62, Cal Raleigh walkoff homer to send the Mariners to playoffs. Pujols 700, and Harper NLCS home run tied for first. This seems right. I would lean Harper, just because it happened in the playoffs. But the Pujols 700 home run is probably the thing that will be remembered the longest.
ALEX: Yeah, well, that’s, that’s actually the one that I like, remember where I was, right? We were together when it happened and have the game on. And we were like eating, I don’t know, probably big [40:29] like we usually do. And then he just did it. Like I screamed.
BOBBY: Two home runs in the same game, too. He was like, let me get this out of the way.
ALEX: I know. I, I, I do have to hand it to our, to our listeners for the sheer diversity of responses we got here, right? We got like, one of the greatest players of this generation hitting a milestone so few people reach. We have another player breaking a record that has stood for more than half a century. And we have someone Door Dashing Jesse Winker, pizza. And you know what, they all hold an equal amount of space in my heart, frankly.
BOBBY: All right, the rest of the survey is pivoting a little bit towards 2023. But there is one more question that was rear view that was looking backwards into 2022. And that is, who are the favorite episodes and guests of 2022? [41:26] top this, our, our wonderful friends at Batting Around, and Grant Brisbee, the crowd pleasers of the world.
ALEX: Truly, both of those episodes, supremely fun. Extremely fun talking to, talking to Grant about our baseball, not what ifs are Baseball Butterfly Effects. And of course Batting Around I mean, the only, the only xtime we really get to talk at length about Sean Murphy’s butt, so–
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: That’s a win.
BOBBY: Coming in and close second, where the All-GIF Draft. It feels like cheating ‘cuz there’s like eight guests on that. As well as Trevor Oldenburg talking about forming the Minor League Baseball players union. Cool episode, cool thing. Can’t believe that happened in 2022 minor leagues are unionized, what a time. Okay, let’s pivot a little bit forward, 2023. We’ll move qui- we’ll move through these quickly. There was a question asking people what are you most looking forward to in 2023 in Major League Baseball? And I went has helpfully organized these categories, these responses into categories for us. You know, we have the normal stuff like getting to go to games, long games, All-Star games. How the Mets screw up, interleague play, everybody getting to play each other for the first time ever. Rule changes, shift ban, more stolen bases. Individual player things like Tatis coming back. Kodai Senga coming to the major leagues. Jazz playing centerfield. But only one player got their own category here and that is Shohei Ohtani. And not just that, the responses for the Ohtani category all centered around him not being on the Angels anymore.
ALEX: Yeah, it’s Ohtani to the Dodgers season in the Slack, apparently.
BOBBY: Bro, Ohtani’s not gone to the Dodgers.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: We can’t let that happen. Ohtani to the A’s.
ALEX: No, no, free him, come on. He doesn’t deserve that.
BOBBY: The prediction question, will the team be sold? 63% of people said no. 33% of respondents said yes, and it will be the Nationals. And only 4% said yes it will be the A’s. Bad beat for you, Alex.
ALEX: Yeah. Frankly, higher than I thought, I didn’t even realize it was on the table. So–
BOBBY: I don’t think it is, I don’t think it is. In terms of team predictions for the 2023 season. Your NL champion this year will either be the Mets or the Padres. 35% of respondents choosing the Mets or Padres tied. And it turns out that the Astros are definitely winning the AL again. 46% of people thought the Astros had been the AL. And for the World Series, Mets and Padres title 21.7%, Astros at 17.4%. Should we plot this against the FanGraphs odds at the end of the year and see who’s better? Tipping Pitches Slack for FanGraphs.
ALEX: I think we should, we’re gonna have to revisit all of these really and, and see how we fared. I gotta say that the, the AL picks get a little chaotic further down the list you go. Tied for getting the third most votes for 2023 AL champions are the aforementioned Seattle Mariners.
BOBBY: Okay, yeah.
ALEX: Sure. Okay.
BOBBY: Good progression there. but yeah.
ALEX: Yeah, and one Baltimore Orioles. He, I mean, hey, we have yet to see John Angelos’ influence. So I don’t want to put it past them. He’s been very clear that, that next year is going to be the year, right? Now he said that last year so this is next year.
BOBBY: I thought he said a lot about this year too. Next year is still the year. Listen, as we’re gonna talk about with Evan, the Orioles are the spiritual successor to the Astros. So that could mean a lot of things. It could mean that they get bogged down in scandal. It could mean that they win the World Series. It could mean that the owner still doesn’t invest in the team, but they win the World Series anyway. It could be anything.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Oh, okay, we’re getting to the end here. Most realistic guests you’d like to see in 2023?
ALEX: Lots of very creative interpretations of the word realistic.
BOBBY: Receiving votes, Foolish Baseball, JLo, Craig Goldstein, David Ross- some of these people we’ve already had.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And other, other these people are JLo.
ALEX: Are like A-list celebrities.
BOBBY: David Roth, Richard Staff, John Cusack.
ALEX: Actually, I mean–
BOBBY: We could do it.
ALEX: –outside chance of getting him.
BOBBY: Then he passed Quintino. Mike Duncan, Meg Rowley, Tony Clark, Scott Boras, of course A-Rod, Joe West, Bernie Sanders, Sean Doolittle. And the number one desired guest for 2023, Spencer Strider.
ALEX: All Right!
BOBBY: Is it realistic that we get Bernie Sanders on the pod? More realistic, Bernie Sanders or JLo?
ALEX: Probably, Bernie, honestly. JLo is like filming, filming a rom-com like every six weeks right now.
BOBBY: I think so too.
ALEX: However, I think Joe West tops them both. I, I genuinely think we could get him on.
BOBBY: I mean, it’s not about could it’s about should we get them on. What ripple in the space time continuum what we’ll, cause if we have Joe West on the podcast?
ALEX: Look, I just want to know about the creative process behind Blue Cowboy, that’s all. I just have some questions.
BOBBY: Honestlym I think he would probably come on if we told him that it was only going to be about Blue Cowboy.
ALEX: I agree.
BOBBY: Do people want that? I don’t know if you really want that. Can people really responded that in this survey, but I don’t know. Spencer Strider obviously is, is a, is a no brainer. But I don’t know how we get to him, how do we get to him? Anybody listening, please put us in touch with Spencer Strider. Collin McHugh had them on and their teammates. We could reach out to Collin.
ALEX: Yeah, well, Foolish had him on. So I think what we need to do is have Foolish on and then leverage that connection.
BOBBY: Foolish doing fine, foolish doing fine. He doesn’t need our bump.
ALEX: No, we need his, that’s the point.
BOBBY: Well, then he needs to invite us on baseball [47:58], that doesn’t work to have him on. No one’s gonna be like, who are these guys? I’m gonna go listen to Foolish talk- Foolish talks everywhere, including on his Tesla livestream when he lost control of his YouTube account.
ALEX: Brutal stuff.
BOBBY: So happy he got it back. Okay, final two questions, what comes first, an emp- the MLB CBA for the 2023 World Series, wrapping up. Alex 83.3% of people think that the 2023 World Series will end before we receive the 2022 Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Players Association Collective Bargaining Agreement. Do you agree with this?
ALEX: Regrettably, I think I would count myself in that group.
BOBBY: Are we sure we’re ever going to get it? Isn’t- there’s no like legal requirement that they put it online. We just had the last, we’ve, we’ve had them all up to this point.
ALEX: I had thought that they, that like the Department of Labor published these sorts of things, though.
BOBBY: I don’t not that I know of. See, we post our CBAs because it’s helpful to have it online, and for other people in media to be able to look at it and say, this is what people in my field make. But the MLBPA doesn’t seem to be in any rush to post their CBA so that you and I can talk about it.
ALEX: Incredibly rude if we’re being quite honest.
BOBBY: We’re just trying to admire the legal ease, you know. Just send us a little shadow copy. We won’t–
ALEX: I think–
BOBBY: –anywhere we just want to read it. Just–
ALEX: I think–
BOBBY: –want to read it, [49:33].
ALEX: –my question is, are we going to see a major league CBA or a minor league CBA first? Like, which one are we actually going to lay eyes on first?
BOBBY: I mean, I have to assume if they get a minor league CBA we’re, we’re not going to see that for the same amount of time. Like why would it be any easier to actually create the document to post the PDF for that one than for the major league one. So we’re looking at not seeing the minor league CBA until 2028 at–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –this point, you know.
ALEX: At which point they will be negotiating a new one.
BOBBY: Will we be doing a podcast when we see the minor league CBA?
ALEX: I mean, if even if we’re not we’ll have to come out of retirement just for that. We can’t let that slide.
BOBBY: We sell this feed to like some Fiverr account. We just make like 50 bucks a week on it. We’re like, wait, we need access back to it for a week to talk about the Minor League Baseball CBA. Okay, the final, the final question for the Tipping Pitches fan union and this one is for the patrons themselves. The Tipping Pitches Slacker of the year, being crowned for the greatest contributions to the Slack workspace of the Tipping Pitches podcast. Receiving votes, Brit, Francesca, and Becca, all who have contributed to this podcast in wonderful ways. But the far and away winner 70% is our friend Nick Taylor.
ALEX: Our analytics aficionado, our, our chief news breaker as well. I think if, if Nick didn’t post it, it didn’t happen.
BOBBY: True. Ailing Brewers fan.
ALEX: Before we move on from this entirely, I do want to, there was a, there was a question about bold predictions for 2023. And most of them just kind of run the gamut. And we’re not going to run through all of them. But I did want to point out two that, that caught my eye. And, and the first is that the Tigers suddenly get good this year. And the second is that the Tigers will have a giveaway night where a fan wins a real tiger. And I would give those about an equal chance of happening 2023.
BOBBY: Wow! Gauntlet thrown, Tigers fan, somebody else who predicted that the A’s will get good. So I don’t know how many people were taking this one seriously.
ALEX: Yeah. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Different interpretations of the word bold.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Just like there are different interpretations of the word realistic when it came to the guests that we could get. Okay, thank you to everybody for participating in that survey. Thank you again to Owen for organizing it. Congratulations to Nick for winning Slacker of the year. The bar has been set for whoever is going to win Slacker of the year next year. If you would like to become a member of the Tipping Pitches fans union, you can sign up for any level of our Patreon, patreon.com/tippingpitches, you can participate in stuff like this. More importantly, you can just participate in the Slack day to day, it’s a really fun place to be. It’s where I learned about most things happening in the baseball world and where I hear people make better jokes than I would have made about those things. The truth is that the Slackers are funnier than we are. So that’s a bad beat for us, I guess.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: We’re all funnier than Pete Alonso, and that’s, that’s what brings us together. It’s time to go to our conversation with Evan Drellich. Before we, before we officially throw to Evan, I wanted to say, we didn’t get a chance to talk too much about our, you know, honest reactions to the book in our conversation with Evan, because we were asking him questions about writing it and reporting it, and some of the concepts in it, and how he thinks they’ve evolved over time as he’s been covering the industry. I wanted to say, I was kind of exhausted with sign stealing stuff, and I was pretty exhausted with like the rush to write a book about it. You know, anytime that there is something that happens in culture, in the business world, that is like a huge story, there is a gold rush on being the person to write the book about that thing. It just so happens that Evan is the person that should have been writing this book the whole time. You know, like all of the people who wrote their own version of the sign stealing scandal. I can’t speak to those books necessarily. But what I can do is I can say that Evan was there while all of this stuff was happening. And he was reporting some of the impropriety of this organization before it was obvious that what they were doing was crossing lines. While it was still kind of like, culturally accepted in the baseball world, the way that this team was crossing lines, he was raising questions about whether they should have been crossing those lines. And how they should have been crossing them. And I think that that lends an incredible credence to the book, to the reporting in it. And also, like, you will learn new stuff from this book, even if you–
ALEX: Absolutely.
BOBBY: –don’t, even if you think you know everything about the sign stealing, like I’ve read all of his stories about the sign stealing. I’ve listened to all of the podcasts about the sign stealing, you will learn stuff about how a front office work specifically. That I think is valuable to this perspective that we have on the show. I think confirms a lot of the thoughts that we have about ways that team op- teams operate on this show. The brazenness, the cold calculating nature of it. The self-seriousness. The almost like unbelievably immoral drive to save money at all costs in a sport that is in theory supposed to be like for societies greater good. So I know, I know plenty of you have already bought this book, started reading it, finished reading it, or have no intentions of buying it and reading it, and that’s okay too. Because I think the conversation that we had with Evan is digestible, whether or not you’ve read it. But, you know, we don’t do like flogs for stuff like this often on the podcast. But we get asked a lot of the time, what are some of your favorite baseball books? And this immediately vaulted itself into being one of my favorite baseball books. Not only just of the last few years, but just generally speaking of all of that, I would like I would put this up there with as enjoyable of a read as Moneyball for different reasons.
ALEX: It definitely kind of feels like the sequel to Moneyball, in a way, right? The sort of logical extension of a lot of the seeds that were planted in that book about evaluating players and front office makeup. And again, this is not a book about the sign stealing scandal. It is it is–
BOBBY: The sign scandal doesn’t come into like the 210th page.
ALEX: Right, exactly. It’s, it, it is about the structures that enabled actions like that to take place. It is far more about Luhnow rise in the baseball world, and sort of the really unique and often toxic and divisive culture that he cultivated in the Astros. With the thinking that it, it didn’t matter what, you know, facts don’t care about your feelings, bro, right? The, the wind–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –column never, never lies. But it really is just such an interesting insight into how far so much of this stuff was pushed, right? How heavily they relied on McKinsey. How they like flirted with eugenics here and there, right? There were like, there are some really wild revelations in this book that have not been reported elsewhere. And really, like make you sort of take a step back and I think reevaluate. A lot of what we’ve come to understand about the modern front office in baseball.
BOBBY: And honestly, if there’s one thing that recommends this book the most, it’s the way that Evan gets people to openly talk about or situates the timeline of events to prove that the number one thing that a baseball front office that, that a quote unquote, “good successful winning baseball front office”, cares about pursuing is market inefficiencies. However, market inefficiencies is like the, the rosy blanket language for under paying anyone who you can find to underpay. Sometimes that plays out in the case of under paying a free agent who other teams don’t think is as good as you think they are. Maybe that’s like Moneyball 1.0, sometimes that takes shape in the form of a draft pick who you are high on that other teams or not, so you can pay under their slot value, to save money to get another draft pick. Sometimes it takes place in the form of underpaying the people who actually work for your front office. Like the assistant GM was making under six figures, you know. But all in all, for like the Tipping Pitches-minded listener, the way that it nakedly, nakedly lays out that the notion of inefficiency is really just a way to save the owner money and allow them to profit off of their investment. Because that’s really all they care about in the end. I think is, I think, is very illuminating.
ALEX: Yeah. and it’s really illuminating how divisive some of this stuff really is, right? When we’re kind of used to thinking of front office’s as a sort of collective hive mind. There were a lot of people, both inside and outside the Astros organization that really chafed at a lot of what they were doing. And did not hold back when talking about it. Obviously, I think some of it was, hey, you’re saying the quiet part out loud here. And what you’re doing goes against our unwritten rules. and I do think some of it was at least internally, like shit, we’re, we’re playing with people’s lives here. And, and, and some players and employees say as much, right? Talked about being treated like numbers on a Spreadsheet. And at, you know, at one point there, they’re talking about employees moving from one front office to another and, and the amount of people that loon out took with him from the Cardinals and, and one anonymous employee says, yeah, it’s not a free labor market here. We don’t really get to sort of choose where we end up. Where it’s kind of at the discretion of our employer. And that was like kind of a throwaway anecdote, but it was also very illuminating to me that there’s so much about this sort of underbelly of front offices that we really have very little awareness of. And this is a really good job to shine a light on, on a lot of those improprieties.
BOBBY: It’s the baseball front office story as satirical espionage thriller. That these people are acting, you know, like, it’s the space race. I’m like, at the end of the day, we’re going out and we’re throwing a baseball and someone’s trying to hit it with a stick.
ALEX: Yeah, you don’t need to go to jail for corporate espionage over this, man.
BOBBY: Yeah, except people did, which is why it’s so ridiculous. I, I kind of loved thinking about it as as that. Thinking about it as a satire because of how absurd the events are. Like, like reality is honestly, too absurd to be parodied. And that’s something that we say a lot on the show. And in the case of the Astros, it’s like, they brought in this ragtag group of former investment bankers and people who wanted to get into baseball front office’s because they like playing fantasy baseball when they were in college. And astrophysicists and all of these people, and they all sat around and sat around and started, they all sat around and told each other how smart they all were. And it ultimately resulted in most of their careers ending. They were like, a lot of their careers ending because of the way that they went about it. You know, like, it’s just, I, I it’s, it’s, it’s very funny, it’s funny.
ALEX: Yeah, you got to read the book, man.
BOBBY: I found myself laughing. I found myself laughing. Okay, let’s go on our conversation with Evan Drellich.
[1:01:39]
[Music Transition]
BOBBY: Long awaited, Evan Drellich, to talk about his book, Winning Fixes Everything. Evan, the fanfares through the roof, in the Tipping Pitches community for this book and, and for the conversation about it. First off, how are you doing? You’ve had about 1000 conversations about this book in the last month. How do we make this not super boring for you?
EVAN: No, no, no, it’s good. It’s good that people want to talk about the book. It might mean I don’t shower as much as I’d like, but it’s good that people want to talk about the book.
ALEX: What, what is the sort of reception that, that you’ve been seeing when you’ve been like talking to people? Like are there certain sort of strains of, of shock? Is there like around the baseball community? Is there kind of a sort of, you know, this is a very well laid out sort of, you know, archaeological, almost exploration of the Astros? Like, how are, what are people coming back to you?
EVAN: Yeah, I think, you know, angry Astros fans aside, which, which is well expected. I’ve been pleased, I think people have seen and understood the larger story that I was trying to tell. Like I, you know, I’ve really only had positive responses about kind of the overall of the book, you know. The, the composition and the like, broader story, and stories that are being told. So that’s satisfying, I, I wanted, you know, I stayed very quiet. During the time I was working on the book, even while other people were talking and writing about the Astros. How we broke the story, all the stuff. And it was very tough, but I wanted to get to a point where people could have the full picture. And I, and I glad that people are reading and, you know, several people have been, I get the notifications on Twitter, that said, you know, it was a page turner. And that’s, like, really satisfying. You know, that, that–
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: –that’s what you want. You want people to want to read and digest the whole thing.
BOBBY: When I was reading it, I found it to be like, very cinematic, you know, like, it moves from scene to scene very smoothly. And just it felt very satisfying to like, see everything I know all this stuff, you know. Like, for the most part, obviously, there’s stuff in–
EVAN: Yeah.
BOBBY: –the book that has never been reported before. But a lot of the stuff you’ve reported already, throughout various articles, either when you were with the Chronicle or with The Athletic. I, I guess, you know, I wanted to start by asking you how much of this book was reported sort of in real time? Like pre you and Ken breaking the story versus how much does you need to double back with sources? Because I imagine the tenor of those conversations was definitely changed after the, the story broke officially.
EVAN: Now there was, there was a ton of new reporting for the book. I mean, there’s also old reporting, including stuff that I hadn’t needed some stuff in interviews that I’d never published. You know, so it’s like, it’s really drawing on 10 years of my reporting career, you know. It goes back to when I got to Houston in November of 13. And so, the book took, I guess, roughly two and a half years to do the first year was 2020. That year was all recording and then I set out to write, I hold myself away in Joshua Tree for a month.
BOBBY: Wow. Like [1:05:08] of the baseball media world.
EVAN: Yeah, it was, it was, it was in technically in something called Morongo Valley, which is in between Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. But I needed to, I’m, I’m kind of a tunnel vision type. I needed to get away, you know, still during the pandemic. And so yeah, as the years worth reporting a lot of the stuff is, you know, some of the stuff I, I knew, but had been able to dig into. And some of the stuff is truly just all new. I mean, so it’s a mixture. But I learned a lot during the reporting process. It wasn’t like it was, you know, I had to sketch out a sense of where it could go, but you still needed to, I still needed to have conversations and figure out exactly where it was gonna go.
ALEX: What was the kind of sense of people’s response when you were sort of talking with them about this? Was there a, because there’s a lot of really frank conversations that are had in this book. There are a lot of people who were there at the time who do not mince words, when it comes to that. So was there a sort of a sense of relief, almost? Like, you know, I there’s a story to tell here? Was there, you know, friction because people didn’t want you sort of unearthing some of this dirty laundry? Like how did that kind of, kind of go throughout the recording process?
EVAN: Yeah, probably both of those. I think, you know, you had this major thing happen, right? But it falls apart, and yes, the team it’s maintained success in the field. But the front office fell apart, right? It there’s no, you can argue was, was there a fall? Yeah, there was a fall, you had four people who were associated with the team fire two of them, were still in Houston two the [1:06:53]. But this is major disrupting event. And I think you add that up with the sense among a lot of people that the narrative around the Astros previously, was not full or fully accurate. And I think the book shows that really what people understood about what was going o,n was just a slice. And so I think there was people were just not everybody, But, but you know, many were kind of ready to explain here. You know, here’s what really happened here. And, you know, baseball in general, I guess, such as baseball specifically, I think baseball is pretty, it fosters this kind of environment where people just don’t want to talk and put themselves out there. But yeah, maybe that’s I don’t know if that’s changing generally. But people can reach a boiling point with that, where you want to tell the truth and explain what really goes on. And, you know, there was a lot of mythmaking. And there’s always been a lot of myth making and baseball and sports in general. but, you know, I set out to to not be a myth maker.
ALEX: Yeah. Well, it was verym there was very calculated mythmaking with this Astros organization too, right? It was not, it was sort of not the same vibe as the sort of closed door, you know, old boys club that, that baseball had sort of been for decades at this point, right? It was almost like a, like a sort of incubator or like a think tank that, you know, of course, you’re gonna ruffle some feathers when you, when you come in that way.
BOBBY: It’s also interesting when the mythmaking goes from, like the players on the field to the front office, or to the business side of baseball. Because, you know, I feel like that shift, which has happened in the last 15 years, which you chronicle in one organization in this book, has just for lack of a better phrase have broken a lot of people’s brains, you know. Like that we are so, we, I mean, me and Alex, as much as anybody are so obsessed with these larger trends in baseball and who is starting them? Who is following them through? And, and why are they pursuing them to what end? You know, something I was thinking about while I was reading it, Evan was that this idea of disruption, which clearly is like the driving force behind what happened in Houston. Jeff Luhnow wanted to come in specifically, he didn’t care about being liked. He wanted to do things this way and see how it would play out. And Jim Crane empowered him to do that, because he wanted to buy this team and completely turn it around, ultimately delivering them a World Series, obviously. I just, I find it interesting how this notion of disruption is always just we have to disrupt this so that we can save money, you know. And I wonder if like throughout the course of reporting this was, where people like self-aware about that notion that this disruption was really just like a financial game this whole time? And do you think that there is a possibility for this idea of disruption, which is a very Silicon Valley driven notion that has taken over kind of like our entire world at this point. That this idea of disruption can be applied to anything other than basically saving the owner money. Like basically saving some executives some money in the end of it.
EVAN: Yeah, I think the book kind of fits in to degree with the larger awareness that people are having, of what disruption means and what comes along with it, generally. Or at least that I, I hope and sense some people are, are having. We, we, we, in general, just the general we kind of fetishized disruption for a long time. And, you know, I’m very, very proud of breaking the science dealings stuff. But the, you know, the story that in some ways is most important to my career might be you can argue is what I did nine years ago. When I was saying, when I wrote a piece, presenting all these questions industry stakeholders had about the Astros way of doing business. And, you know, the Astros attempted to paint it as just well, these are Luddites left behind, you know, disgruntled. And look, there’s some element of yeah, there were some people who didn’t want to change and there were things that probably rightfully should have been changed. But there was still this underlying question of, of how they were handling people and treating people. And, yeah, I am myself, you know, I look, I’ve done stories that are kind of like, wow, look at how innovative this team has been. I mean, you could even argue this one I did on ground control. I was the first reporter to write about ground control, the Astros database. Nobody had written about it. I, I had covered the Red Sox, I knew they had had Carmine. So I said, oh, this is interesting. I, I bet the Astros have won two. And lo and behold, they did and lo and behold, they were willing to talk about it. They loved positive attention around their, their innovation. I was smart enough to ask and include in the story. Well, what about digital security? And you know, the IP side of this? I’m very glad I, I didn’t overlook that. But yeah, I, I, I think, you know, there’s just there’s, there’s a trend for a long time. And I think I was ahead of this trend of just slobbering over innovation and not considering what innovation. What comes along with it, the totality of it. And who It benefits, as you point out often it’s, you know, the book is in a way, the showing people the outgrowth of Moneyball, It, it is, this, this is what Moneyball has wrought, it has wrought some smart things. And it has also created a lot of other things. And I, I, I don’t think people were sitting there thinking about it in those terms for a long time. It was simply, wow, look how smart these guys are being! Well, gee, what else comes along with how smart they’re being?
ALEX: One of the, one of the striking things about this book to me is like how many familiar faces there are? Like, like people who sort of dot various front offices across the game now, right. And are considered maybe some of the, the foremost minds in the sport. And I’m wondering, you know, to the extent that Luhnow and his ilk sort of represent this new wave of thinking about baseball, ho- how much would you say they’re kind of winning that broader fight against the old sort of methods. Like a lot of these guys have gone on. And, you know, hold really high important positions across the sport of baseball. So I mean, is it fair to say that, you know, Luhnow has sort of changed the makeup of front office’s not just with the Astros but like, more broadly speaking?
EVAN: Yeah, I don’t think that’s unfair. I, you know, you, you can get into a debate about how much of that next wave of Moneyball or, or the third wave of Moneyball wherever you want to, however you want to look at it. And how much of this Luhnow alone, it’s not like the Astros were the only team Freedman with the Dodgers, you know. It, it, there, there are other examples of analytics minded forward thinking teams. The Astros might have been truly the leader in player development, and, you know, they they wanted to move quickly in general. They, they felt that the speed of adoption was going to create advantage for them. And you know, more than that are underlying all this, they were loud. Other teams were not as publicly trumpeting. A- just how smart they thought they were, and B- their, their adherence to, you know, all, all this new thinking. So yeah, I mean, I think the book is I think it’s in the marketing copy of the book. You know, I think the book does make clear the, the Astros way isn’t, is not going anywhere. And there is an inevitability to that when, when people when business owners are exposed to ways to save money. Don’t, you know, that one way or another that was gonna eventually come into baseball and, and go into any form of business. The, the scouting versus statistics debate, it’s, it’s a in some ways very silly, you know, and you hear GMs today will while we use both. And actually think the Astros were rather smart to kind of pause at this question of well, yeah, anybody can use both, it’s how do you use it? How do you actually put it together and then make decisions off of it, right? I mean, you get, you know, Scout says this, number says, say this. But then how do you meld them? And then ho- what is actually the decision making process? But, you know, there’s this big fight in the Astros for an office over the future of R&D and how do they keep innovating. And you have Luhnow and [1:15:43] on one side and Mike Fast and Brandon Tom, and [1:15:47] on, on another side. And in, in a way, it’s the, the that ladder trio was is, is advocating for scouting information. Like what is track man and Andrew Tronic. It is scouting information, obviously captured a much more robust way than just looking at it with my eyes. But, you know, the concern Luhnow [1:16:09] had and wasn’t totally invalid. Was, was, you know, we’re working on probabilities and odds here if the, if the model doesn’t know how to incorporate, or we don’t know how to, you know, assign the odds to these new streams of information, how do we trust it? And so kind of what, what those three Fast, Tom, Patil are advocating for us. Like, look, we’ve got to use this scouting information. in this scouting information gleaned from high speed cameras and advanced technology. But it, it is at the end of the day, it’s still scouting information that they weren’t sure how to incorporate quite yet. So, yeah, I’m in many ways tired of the scouting versus statistics debate. But there’s still very legitimate discussions to be had within it. It, it’s not that, it’s in some ways tired, but, but there are there are some real topics within it still.
BOBBY: Evan, I’m going to do something annoying, which is asked you a question that definitely doesn’t have a clean answer, but I’m gonna do it anyway. Why does baseball take itself so seriously? Like, why, why are, why is everybody so paranoid, so intense? And in, in the case of this book, as you lay out, like so conflict-oriented within the Astros front office. Like what about baseball, whether it’s like the business side of the on the field side, the competitive aspect of it, the history of it throughout America lends itself to this type of thinking and this type of acting, being normal? A lot of what the Astros, you know, front office, was doing was, was not normal to people who had been in the baseball world for a long time, but the goal was normal. Like they wanted to win at all costs. And every all 30 organizations would probably tell you that that’s what they want anyway. And then like the rest of our lives, the way that these people are behaving is, is, is weird. Like it’s, it’s not how you would act at your job. So what about baseball makes it so self serious and conflict oriented?
EVAN: Yeah, and I guess some of the conflict in the in the Astors front office, I do think was inherent specifically to the Astros. There was a management a specific management style or lack thereof that was that unfolded, you know. Luhnow liked having Todman drop in, in the way a management consultant would into different departments, departments that weren’t his. Well, that’s naturally going to create conflict, when you bring in McKinsey and company to evaluate baseball operations in the middle of 2017, that’s going to create conflict. So other front offices don’t have, I think the Astros are an extreme example of that. At least just, just the general internal conflict they have. But I think your point overall, still stands, you know, to the self-seriousness part. I tweeted this the other day, I, I had gone on a podcast with Derek Gould, who’s great beat writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. And we had talked about the, the efforts for all these teams to label everything is proprietary. And how it can get it is over the top at times, and I think unnecessary at times. I’m sure these front offices will all tell you no, no, no, it’s very necessary. And then a day or two later, is it Mets camp, and they asked all the reporters to leave the field for a proprietary drill. And, you know, it’s I’m, I remember being in Houston, this is a fun story. I think I told on, on Gould’s podcast was the only replace I’ve told it’s not in the book. That I was talking to pitching coach Brent Strom, and it was Spring Training, and I was doing so we were in Florida, and I was doing like a notebook for or something. It wasn’t a major story. I was writing about Asher Wojciechowski. And so you know, you, you talk to the pitching coach about hey, what are you working on with this guy? What do you see with this guy? And Strom mentioned that they were trying to have him pitch to the middle of the plate that everybody thinks, well, that should be the good. Like the inside corner outside corner, but actually there, there’s reason to pitch to the middle of play. Which was interesting, and I, I put it in the story and I don’t think he got a headline, you know. It was just, it was in the story. And like, I think literally the next day the Astros decided your media is not speaking to our coaches anymore. Unless, you know, it’s cleared ahead of time with Hinch or Luhnow. And I think this was a joint Hinch-Luhnow decision. It reaches a point of absurdity, because this, this is an entertainment business where, you know, fans do want to understand how and why things work. It is literally part of the marketing of the sport, and creating fans, I think, to explain what is happening and why? And as we’ve entered this realm of everybody being so self-serious, you know, it’s diminished. And I, and I think the book is really, I’m very proud of the fact that I think it does get under the hood of what actually goes on in the front office in a way that, I don’t know, doesn’t, you know, doesn’t really happen. I don’t think there many parallel examples to, to to, you know, what the book shows. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, this question of why is it in baseball, like as, as more of this kind of business ethos, you know, what, what’s the, what’s the goal for corporations to deliver value to the shareholders, right? That’s the least what most of them believe and was and what’s the goal of the team? It’s to win. And so, you know, they, they get wrapped up in it becomes very myopic. You know, without kind of seeing the, the other effects. But yeah, I’m very, like, big eye roll for me at a lot of the oh, we can’t tell. I mean, one more example, like at the GM meetings this year, there was a general manager, I was asking about the rule changes, and how is this changing, how you’re evaluating players? Some GMs answered it, and I remember one didn’t. And I’m just thinking in my head to this one, it’s like, dude, like, like you’re not sitting on a goldmine here. Like, it’s it, you know, it’s part of the converse, it’s just. You, you can understand from their perspective, where they’re coming from, but I think it can also understand the observer, and media, and fan perspective of, of, come on, like, let’s get, let’s get over ourselves a little bit here.
BOBBY: I found myself thinking so often I was reading this, I was like, why are we treating this like the CIA versus the KGB? Like, we’re playing fucking baseball here, guys. Like the actions of these people who, I mean, are adult human beings. Who, like otherwise understand how society works, and understand that baseball is ultimately inconsequential to the, you know, future of human existence as to whether the Astros won 84 or 88 games this year. So I don’t know, I just, I figured it was worth asking because the entire time I was reading it, it kind of I mean, it felt like sort of like absurdist comedy. Like a satirical comedy with the way that these people acted. Obviously, here, we’re not like, you’re just telling the events how they happened. But from the outside perspective, with years, years removed later, it’s just, it’s like, almost satirical, the level to which these people take themselves so seriously.
EVAN: Yeah.
ALEX: Yeah. And we’ll, and the just the, the amount of stuff they were throwing at the wall at the same time, right? Like a lot of the time, they really did not, not that they didn’t know what they were doing. But they didn’t, there was no foundation upon which a lot of this. One thing that really struck me was when they talked about getting an x ray machine and taking it down to the Dominican Republic. So that they can take a look at player’s hands. And figure out–
EVAN: You know, you know the first person to bring that up, and I’m surprised that was one of the anecdotes that I thought was pretty wild, too. I’m surprised that that one didn’t, you know, you could, you try to send them out. Or what are people going to write about or, you know, put into a new store. I thought that one was pretty wild.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. They’re like, let’s, let’s pull out the calipers. You know, let’s see–
EVAN: Yeah.
ALEX: –what we can do with these kids. But like, but like that was very representative, right? Of just how they operated? Which was with a just sort of cavalier kind of, yeah, who cares if this is morally savory, or if this is legal? It’s kind of like what we’re doing here is running this insular baseball operation that wants to win games. And, and again, like, if we win, it might fix everything.
EVAN: That’s Right.
ALEX: One might say.
EVAN: It, it, it might, yeah. I, the, the, the levels that they would go to, I, I think kind of to the earlier point of the discussion. You’re right, people did, when you read the book, you, you see how they really were kind of just figuring things out as they went along. And you know, ground control was this really minimal vi- minimally viable product that didn’t have great security. And, and you, people have this instinct to kind of sit there and look up at people and go, wow, they’re so smart. And you know, at the end of the day, not to be to kind of, I don’t know cliche about it. But like people are people, you know, like this notion that they had it all figured out. They’re so much smarter than everybody, come on! You know, it’s, it’s how many of those stories prove sure? It’s really–
BOBBY: And how many of those stories like how, how much could you really say that if the Astros just had not ended up winning Game 7 of the 2017 World Series? You know, like, these things are so fragile and how we construct these like this mythmaking that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation. It is obviously a different myth, if they do not win in the year that they said that they were going to win by. Just this, it’s happenstance in a lot of cases.
EVAN: This is an important point, because I think about this quite frequently. And it was one of the you know, there was a period of 13 months for the story of the sign stealing that comes out in, in 2019. And little bit of I was shell shocked at that time had been fired. And you’re sitting there going, who’s gonna believe it? Who’s gonna believe that this really, you know, well-renowned franchise that keeps winning games is so screwed up behind the scenes? And I think about well, if the sign stealing doesn’t happen, or if you just put that all aside, all this other stuff was going on. And yet, the thing that makes people pay attention is oh, the cheating.
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: And yet, even if you, even if you never get to the point of the cheating, the culture was still really screwed up. And, and I think that’s the, the conflict between the result on the field, and the means to the end, I think should be unsettling for people. That, you know, this notion that really all you do want is the title. You know, how, does how you get there matter. And I think, and the Astros ended up being this extreme example, well, yes, because they cheated. But even if they didn’t cheat, there, there’s still a lot to unpack there. And there’s a lot of unsavory stuff beyond just the cheating.
BOBBY: Obviously, what is driving, at least as they tell it, their decision making is this ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Which is very common in the sort of McKinsey style of thinking is that the reason that McKinsey exists is to make everybody else more efficient. Nevermind the fact that it’s incredibly inefficient how these consulting companies usually are deployed throughout society, and that they are very expensive. And they’re an inefficient use of funds for a lot of companies that, you know, either don’t want to pay taxes or don’t want to pay their employees more or anything like that. So I’m wondering like when you look at the rest of the league, and this idea, that efficiency, as, as Alex pointed out, at the beginning of our conversation, efficiency has kind of spread itself to all 30 teams in certain ways, in Astros in ways. Is there a team that, a team or a handful of teams that reminds you of, of being at the spot that the 2013 and 14 Astros were at right now?
EVAN: Well, I mean, if you’re not leading me to the Baltimore Orioles, I don’t know where.
BOBBY: Well, it’s interesting–
EVAN: Yeah.
BOBBY: –the Orioles are interesting question, because it’s a lot of the same brain trust. But obviously they can’t act as brazenly as that the Astros were doing at the time. Because we now know how brazenly the Astros are acting, right?
EVAN: Yeah, I, I you know, at this point, I, I think tanking is a grift. I think it’s, it’s really a genius bit of marketing that., and I might have said this when I was on with you guys last time, it, it, it convincing people that it is good for them to not spend on their product, that that’s actually good for the fan and the consumer is really it’, it’s, it’s remarkable. I mean, where’s the parallel? I’m sure we could think of something, maybe in, in the outside world. But it’s, it’s really pretty unique, you know, that, hey, we’re going to be bad, and that’s actually good. Keep buying our product, keep following our product. Yeah, the, the, the cost saving element of what the Astros did is certainly being replicated in Baltimore. You know, even, even when people talk about sustainability with the farms, what does that mean? It means cheap players, it’s all it is, right? Building from within means we’re not spending market prices, or at least we’re not spending market prices on a, you know, core large amount of, of players. And, and that, that is part of baseball system, it’s not as though like I’m saying teams shouldn’t build from within. But it’s just it’s all oriented around money. And, and, you know, I I’ve said it, really when I was more talking about like labor stops i, in baseball. But 95% of what I write in my day job, the answer comes back to it’s about money. I mean, I, I just wrote a column now that maybe will be up by the time this is out. Kind of parsing MLBs you know, economic reform committee and you know, it’s really, really pushing for itself.
BOBBY: Love the committee. Look, we got it, we just have to have a committee, Evan, let’s get–
EVAN: Right.
BOBBY: –a committee on it.
EVAN: And set up a committee on a committee. And, you know, the, the, the takeaway really at the end of the day is at the bottom line of every story is it’s about money. And I actually think that it is unlikely because it would take such a massive work stoppage and such a large amount of money that the owners would have to forego, as well as the players. To get a cap, right? Assuming it would take a year or, or more and knowing that even if you had a year of work stoppage that you might not still get the cap. It’s a huge risk, it’s a huge gamble financially. And I, I, like it doesn’t, it doesn’t fit in with the practical way that Rob Manfred often approaches things to me that he, that they would actually go forward with this for the cost that would come along with it. So yeah, just a, just a non sequitur to it’s, it’s all about money. What, you know, Orioles or, or whoever. That’s all it’s about.
ALEX: Money Fixes Everything, baby. That’s the, that’s the real story, right? It’s like, I mean–
EVAN: I called it [1:30:55], right? I mean–
ALEX: Right, exactly.
EVAN: And then he, like we kind of did.
BOBBY: We did. We kind of ignored that part of it.
EVAN: Yeah, it’s, it’s people don’t really, you know, I think that word gets overlooked in a weird way.
BOBBY: They didn’t call it OBP ball.
EVAN: No.
BOBBY: Last really quick question for you, I wanted to ask about the writing style of the book, the specifically the dialogue. Because so much of this book is conversations with people or recounting conversations that happened with either, you know, anonymous former executives or Astro staffers. Something I notice about your writing is that it’s like, it’s really directly conversational. You know, you choose to leave in the likes, the pauses, the uhms, the ellipses, and that’s true of your writing in The Athletic. And I wonder if that was like a conscious decision with whis book? And with whoever, you know, you worked with the editor, whoever, just because of how either sensitive the subject matter was, or because of how, you know, unique and nuanced some of the like moral gray areas of it was? Or is that just how you style your writing?
EVAN: That’s an interesting question. You want the, you want the quotes to be readable. You know, there’s an interesting discussion to be had generally about, if you remove even the most basic verbal tick.
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: Should you be putting, should you indicate removal of that quote, by using a bracket or an ellipses and a dot, dot dot. You know, in different people, different editors would give you different perspectives on this. You know, you want the meaning of the quote to be conveyed if somebody misspeaks are start to sentence and another way. You know, do, do you include that M dash portion. I think, largely I did in for the reason that, you know, this is tricky, controversial material. And I think you don’t want people to be able to say, well, you misquoted me, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: And so, so I think, I think for that reason, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re better off with, with just the exact words or, or is exact as you can.
BOBBY: The reason I ask is because oftentimes it plays out in a way that you’re just letting the person kind of dig their own hole with the word soup. Word soup is a phrase that you use to describe one of Manfred’s statements about the Yankees sign stealing, and that then the Red Sox sign stealing. And so I was wondering if it was sort of like a conscious decision, or kind of like an editorial process decision? because, you know, even in like quotes that you’ve had from Manfred in the past, like, as he trails off, that’s part of the delivery of the quote is that they have nothing else to say here. And they can’t really justify what they’re doing, even to themselves out loud, as they’re saying in. So many times in this book, I found myself thinking, wow, this person, like really isn’t even making any sense. and yet, the quote, being here provides you the opportunity to understand that this person is not making any sense, even in their own twisted logic.
EVAN: Yeah, I, I, there’s kind of two ways you can do it. and I think the book does both in it’s, you know, it’s really up to the, I guess, the writer reporter to do it, how they see fit. You can be very explicit about how to interpret something. Or you can lead the horse to water to an it, or, or kind of leave it open. And, and I think I did both in there are def- you know, like, if I want it to have been, I could have been very explicit at the end of the Cardinals chapter or later in the book. Everything that happened in St. Louis is a parallel to what’s going to happen in Houston. I didn’t, I didn’t use those exact words. But my hope would even be like if somebody ever reread it, knowing what happens in Houston, you go through the Cardinal stuff and realize like, oh, like it’s, you know, there’s, there’s stuff early in the book where Robert Holloway, who was who was Luhnow’s colleague at, you know, this tech business before Luhnow gets to baseball. Is talking about, you know, the one area I thought Luhnow needed to improve was his external relations. And I had no doubt that he would, just a matter of time, right? And, and there’s a narrative choice there. I can say, well, you know, we’ll find out or just kind of let that linger. And, and so, you know, you try to make those decisions as best you can. And, and you hope people see the parallels where you see the parallels. And sometimes you’re explicit, I think I explicitly said. You know, Rob Manfred bringing in McKinsey at MLB was acting as an agent of change in a similar way to Luhnow. You know, I, I, I think I explicitly said that. And if I didn’t, I, I hoped people would realize that too, right? That you had this kind of parallel track between the commissioner’s office and, and Luhnow himself. There actually the similarities between the two. So yeah, you, you, you want to, want to let leads people to some things, let them make some decisions for themselves and see what they catch. And you also want to be really explicit about some things. And, you know, you can have a debate about what, what which ones you should do either track for.
ALEX: It certainly helps when the people you’re talking to are happy to, to self incriminate. Or at least talk very candidly about the somewhat unsavory tactics they were using. You kind of, you don’t need to, to lay it all out when they’re going to do it for you. And that–
EVAN: Yeah, when it was an executive compared to the Astros to Amazon at the end, you know. And I think I have said something afterward. and I called it a loaded comparison trying to suggest to people well think about what that you know, what does Amazon tail?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: I could have not done that. and then you run the risk of that people read that and go–
BOBBY: Great!
EVAN: –so that’s a good, that’s inherently good or is it not, right? So you know–
BOBBY: Yeah.
EVAN: –you, you rely on interpretation of, of readers, but you also try to assist in some spots, you know,
BOBBY: I think that’s part of what makes the book such an easy read, as, as many people have described it is that it allows the reader the points to pick and choose where they’re filling in their brains. Like what they, how they approach a certain aspect of the story. Evan Drellich, thank you, thank you for being generous with your time. We very much enjoyed this book. Best of luck with your 1000 more interviews with it, sir.
EVAN: Thank you guys. I appreciate it.
[1:37:00]
[Music Transition]
BOBBY: Okay, thank you, Evan. Thank you again to Owen for assembling the Tipping Pitches fans union survey. This kicks off the month of March, where we will be preparing for the 2023 season. As I mentioned on the show last week, next week, we have a fun one off style episode. Which we, you know, are hoping will be fun for you guys to listen to. Quasi Oscars related, which is all I will say about it. And hopefully this can be another kind of yearly thing that we do to preview the baseball season. Following that we will have the Tipping Pitches Banned Topics. The last week of March, we will have the Tipping Pitches All GIF Draft, as per usual. And then the baseball season is starting. If you’d like to call into the Tipping Pitches podcast, the number is 785-422-5881. You can email us at tippingpitchespod@gmail.com. DM us, @tipping_pitches on Twitter. The Patreon is patreon.com/tippingpitches, this, this laundry list is getting longer and longer of things that I have to say at the end of every podcast. Thank you everybody for listening. Thank you Alex for sticking, sticking strong on the other side of this marathon episode. Anything else to, to let people know about?
ALEX: I’m just gonna say that, there’s one final question on the, on the fan union survey that was your favorite Slack emoji?
BOBBY: Oh, yes, I left this off.
ALEX: The, the, the answer was eel. And I’m just gonna say if you know, you know.
BOBBY: If you know, you know.
ALEX: Join the Slack.
BOBBY: Thanks, everybody for listening. We’ll see you next week.
[1:38:36]
[Music]
[1:38:49]
[Outro]
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m Alex Rodriguez, Tipping Pitches, Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most, Tipping Pitches. So we’ll see you next week. See ya!
Transcriptionist: Vernon Bryann Casil
Editor: Krizia Marrie Casil
Tipping Pitches 
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