Bobby and Alex discuss the whiplash effect the Oakland A’s are starting to have on Alex and the rest of A’s fandom, Max Scherzer’s suspect suspension, and Rob Manfred’s Luncheon World Tour. Then, they’re joined by author and podcaster Mike Duncan (49:30) to discuss Alex Rodriguez a centaur, the state of Mariners fandom, and baseball’s relationship with its own history.
Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeDuncan.
Links:
Evan Drellich on Manfred wanting shorter contracts
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Songs featured in this episode:
Paramore — “Rose-Colored Boy” • Beach Bunny — “Cloud 9” • Dog Ears — “Sink” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
Theme
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, as you and the listeners of the Tipping Pitches podcast well know my relationship to Mets fandom has been a roller coaster ride. I’ve, of course, remained a steadfast fan and love the team this whole time, but my working through it in real-time as to how invested I want to be in the day-to-day wins and losses has been an ongoing plot and ongoing through the line of this podcast. In the past, I’ve talked a little bit about my superstitions for the year, you know, what do I—what do I wear? What’s my lucky shirt? What’s this? What’s that? So I wanted to—we’re now—it’s April 23rd, Mets have been playing baseball for almost a month and so I thought it might be high time to tell you and everybody else what my current Mets superstition is—
ALEX: Yeah
BOBBY: —for this baseball season.
ALEX: I want to know.
BOBBY: So, um, uh, as listeners of the show, no, I have a dog. Her name is Stevie. She makes an occasional—occasional appearance on the podcast, vocally. But she is always on the podcast and that she is often laying on your lap while we—
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: —are recording the episodes. Uh, we’re remote today and so she is laying on the floor behind me. The superstition this season is we have a—a bandana for her that she wears. And this bandana is reversible. It’s a great item. On one side, it’s the Mets home jersey design and on the other side, it’s the Mets away Jersey design. It’s blue with an orange Mets logo. So, the superstition is that we need to line the bandana up with whether the Mets are home or away.
ALEX: Hmm.
BOBBY: So, on this long road trip, she’s been wearing blue. It’s been on the away side, and so far, they haven’t lost a series with—
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: —with us lining it up this way. That’s basically—
ALEX: Um—
BOBBY: —that will not sustain itself for the whole season, but there’s some kind of—there’s some kind of juice there. There’s something there. It started working after their slow start.
ALEX: So it sounds like you’re—you’re kind of putting your eggs into the basket of just whether or not the—the Mets are traveling or not, right. I mean, Stevie
BOBBY: Well—
ALEX: —is just—is just effectively kind of following in their—in their footsteps.
BOBBY: She’s almost being like the clubby for them.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: You know, like she’s—when they’re home, she’s got the home jersey on. When they’re away, she’s got the away jersey on. She’s tracking their every move—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —you know, and she’s got—she’s got kind of a good energy, a good luck charm about her.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I don’t know why that is, because she’s—she’s kind of a devil in many ways—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —but she does seem to have a sort of supernatural effect on them. Last year during the playoffs, um, for, uh, about a game and a half, when she would jump up and lay on the couch, they would play a lot better than when she was laying on the ground. So, you know, I mean, that’s—that’s analytics right there. That is the arms race to nowhere that Rob was talking about.
ALEX: That’s honestly—the only—the only reason I—I asked about that is because I was gonna say, “Well, is there a way to sort of track, you know, how the super—superstition is working?” But I think the tracking of that would just be the Mets record—
BOBBY: Yeah, the record.
ALEX: —at the end of the year?
BOBBY: Yeah, I see what you’re saying in that, like, the variable factor in this superstition is just are the meds home or away?
ALEX: Just—right. Did we remember to change Stevie’s bandana?
BOBBY: I don’t know. I’m not willing to risk it. No, I’m not willing to risk a placebo group.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: You know, I’m not willing to take her bandana off.
ALEX: Yeah. So when we record the podcast, though, I do have to take her collar off because it jingles too much and the bandana is attached to the collar. So, what I’m telling you is that we have to wrap this thing up—
ALEX: okay.
BOBBY: —before the Mets game starts. Whenever we’re doing pods.
ALEX: That’s good to know, actually.
BOBBY: That’s just for your FYI, for your information.
ALEX: Right. That’s just little—a little—a little producing.
BOBBY: Are you working on, uh, any new superstitions for the Oakland Athletics this year? Got anything going?
ALEX: Uh-huh. Yes. When I, uh, do not watch them, um, they just don’t play. If I’m not watching them, they’re just not even there. That’s my superstition.
BOBBY: I thought you’re gonna say, “When I don’t watch them, they lose by 10.”
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: “And when I do watch them, they lose by 6 or less.”
ALEX: 6 or like 15, yeah.
[laughter]
BOBBY: 15? Because to tell you something when I—when I—I get score notifications for the A’s and the Mets. It’s—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —high time I shut the score to—uh, for the—for the A’s.
ALEX: You should really shut the A’s ones off. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But I do that for you because I love you and I love—I, you know, I love connecting with you through baseball. I—and in past years, it would be like, “Oh, Chris Davis, homer. A’s take the lead.” You know? Marcus Semien double to the right field gap. A’s take the lead.” And I could text you and I’d be like, “Let’s go, Marcus Semien,” you know? Because some of the best texts that I’ve ever gotten from you have been when you tell me stuff about the Mets before I saw that it happened.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like, I don’t know if we ever said this on the pod, but you broke the Yoenis Cespedes trade to me.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: You were the first person who told me because I was at work, so I was not on Twitter, and I got a text message from you. And I was like, “Oh, Alex is texting me. This is rare. It’s the summer. Usually his phone is, like, shut off for three straight weeks.
[laughter]
BOBBY: He’s—he’s hiking in National Park, he’s hiking in—
ALEX: Actually—
BOBBY: Yellowstone. I’m like, “Alex is texting me. It must be something important.” And sure enough it was. It was Yoenis Cespedes getting traded to the Mets. And so that’s why I’ve kept the score notifications on. And yesterday, I was like, “Oh, A’s is 2-0 lead, they’re fighting back again all of this —
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —bullshit—all these bullshit rumors about them going to Vegas. You know what? They’re gonna buckle down, resilience.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You love to see it. And then I—then I put my phone down, was hanging out with some friends. Getting back to the phone. I was like, “Oh, the A’s gave up a run. Let’s see what the score is now. It’s 16-2.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Texas Rangers in the lead.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. I started using like Apple’s new like—whatever dynamic like home screen widget, you know—
BOBBY: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
ALEX: —you can, like, add stuff on there. And you can add, like, baseball scores.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And I was doing that for the first couple weeks of the season and I’ve stopped, because I don’t want the A’s score on my home screen to kind of [6:35]
BOBBY: That’s—that’s just the devil. Yeah, that’s not—
ALEX: That’s not really is—
BOBBY: That was designed to keep us down, brother.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: I don’t need to see that. I need to opt-in to know about the—
ALEX: Right. Exactly.
BOBBY: —Mets and the A’s. Like, I don’t need it to be, like, just passively there anytime I open my phone. Uh, okay, we have a fun episode coming up. We, um, [6:55] out of left field today. We talked to historian and podcaster, Mike Duncan. And I’m sure many of you know from his podcast, either the history of Rome, or revolutions, or his many books about history. Uh, Mike Duncan is a huge baseball fan and incredibly fun and funny person to talk to. He’s a diehard Mariners fan, so we talked a little bit about that. We talked about baseball history and how it relates to—and how baseball presents its own history in the present and how that informs how we, you know, relate to the sport. And it was just—it was a great conversation and we were lucky to talk to Mike who we are both big fans of. Before Mike comes on, we’re going to talk a little bit about the recent news that maybe the A’s aren’t moving, but they probably are, but maybe they’re not, but—”Whoa, slow down. [7:39] slow their roll.” Uh, [7:39] suspensions because we didn’t have time to talk about that on our A’s reaction pod. And, uh, some more news about what Major League Baseball wants in the next CBA, even though we are one year into the current CBA. Uh, we’re gonna talk about all that in just a second. But before we do, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I am Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches.
[theme]
[8:14 – 9:11] Ads
BOBBY: Alex, you sent me a tweet from one Jon Ralston, a reporter at The Nevada Independent who wrote, “A follow-up article to The Nevada Independent article that broke the news that the A’s were buying a plot of land 49 plot—acre plot of land just off the Vegas Strip to develop a new baseball stadium in Las Vegas, instead of Oakland where the team actually is based.” Jon Ralston and his colleagues over at The Nevada Independent wrote a follow-up, “We have more details on the—we have more details on the deal to bring the A’s to Vegas, and it’s not so sure as the cheerleaders would have you think. Reporting from Vegas and Carson finds lawmakers and government suddenly not so gushy. and we have more info about the $500-million public financing.” Did we get duped? Have we been hoodwinked? Have we been bamboozled, led astray, run amok?
ALEX: I’m just so tired, you know? Like, I just—
BOBBY: Honestly—honestly, I feel worse seeing this story than the original story.
ALEX: Right, yeah.
BOBBY: Like if they’re just gonna do this again, if they’re gonna walk it back again—
ALEX: Just tear the band-aid off.
BOBBY: Literally, like just—you’re just stabbing the—just the tip of the knife just slightly into me, just like—just shake me, just do it. Like just—just—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —do it. I even said they had pulled the band-aid off on Thursday night when we did the pod.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And I guess they’re just smacking it right back on.
ALEX: Right. So I mean, it’s—it’s clear that maybe the A’s were not in as sure of a position with Las Vegas than maybe they intend to do—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —uh, communicate to the public, right? They signed this binding agreement to buy 49 acres of land to build the ballpark, um, and plan to invest about a billion dollars. That doesn’t take into account the fact that you still need money to buy the actual stadium, right? Just because you have a plot of land doesn’t mean you have something to build there. And obviously, as we know, as MLB owners want to do, the A’s are trying to see how much money they can squeeze out of Nevada taxpayers, right? So they want to basically raise $500 million in sales—again, I know a few days ago, I was so happy to be done talking about these, like, special tax districts and just doing rebates chat—right, exactly.
BOBBY: That’s what we should name this episode.
ALEX: Tax rebates chat. It’s just so ridiculous. And—and Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo has supposedly said that he’s done some backroom deals and, like, maybe he can pull the money together. But when you’re trying to bind them like—
BOBBY: A guy named Joe Lombardo doing backroom—doing backroom deals.
ALEX: Doing deals. It’s not what I wanna—
BOBBY: I’ve seen [12:04] in a Scorsese movie.
ALEX: What I wanna stake my Major League Baseball stadium on. Um, and in the past, we’ve had Nevada lawmakers say, you know, “We really aren’t comfortable giving public money for this, right?”
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: “We’re already—we’re already doing this for the Raiders at Allegiant Stadium.”
BOBBY: Sure.
ALEX: “We can’t put more of a burden on our taxpayers.” And, you know, I have to commend the lawmakers who have come out and said that sort of thing.
BOBBY: So that—that’s actually a good thing to note, by the way, because we didn’t really talk about that on Thursday, but the Las Vegas Knights was all privately financed. I—I’m sure they got some sort of, like, incentives and stuff from the county, but I don’t think they took any public money, um, any public funds to build that stadium. The Raiders did, but it’s kind of, like a different thing with the NFL, because they have just much more of a bully pulpit because of how popular they are and how dominant football is, and how game changing it really is to have a football team in Las Vegas, just for, like, the different entertainment interests, sports betting interests, all of that. And the Allegiant Stadium is kind of, like, a disaster of a project. And, like, nobody goes to it, except rich people and celebrities and stuff, and tourists. But like the NBA team, prospective NBA team that has been sort of, like, angling for getting a stadium there and whatnot, their communications about this have been—that they—were they able to get that bid adopted, it would be all privately financed. And that—that is—that is more par for the course for the NBA as well, where like they—they want to completely own the area, because the NBA is just frankly, like, flush with cash right now and they want to own everything and not have to follow all of the different things that come—come attach to taking public money in terms of, like, building affordable housing, and updating public transit, and, you know, doing all this foundational work for the area and whatnot. But—and meanwhile, MLB is just like, “We’ll do all that shit, because we want to do this for free.” You know? Like, “we don’t want to put any of our own money. That’s like our business philosophy.” And so it’s not like Las Vegas is just like, “We’ll give public money to anybody and everybody no matter what.” That’s an important distinction to make.
ALEX: Yeah, definitely. I just—when I think about it, I—I have to wonder why Las Vegas would be interested in giving public money to a team at a time when clearly sports leagues are interested in Las Vegas as a destination. Major League Baseball is already talking about expansion. I have to think that if you really wanted to build a baseball team there, which it’s clear that MLB does, that you could hold out until someone comes along and says, “Hey, we’re gonna build this privately financed stadium,” Right? like you don’t necessarily have to take the first offer that comes your way, especially, especially when it is the Oakland A’s like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Like, this is the team you’re gonna give $500 million to, like have you seen what they’ve been up to the last few years? Like I don’t—it just feels a little shortsighted and so I think that’s why we’re seeing you know—we’re hearing these reports about cold feet from lawmakers that—
BOBBY: I hate it when my lawmakers get cold feet. I do—I do—that’s the worst.
ALEX: That’s—it’s—
BOBBY: I want my lawmakers to have warm feet.
ALEX: Socks, you know?
BOBBY: Shoes.
ALEX: Slippers.
BOBBY: Sensible shoes, you know, you don’t want back pain.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It seems like maybe the A’s jumped the gun a little bit. And I know we were talking about how—hey, you know, they—they did the Wednesday night news dump, right, right before the A’s are out of sight, out of mind for two weeks. But it seemed like maybe they didn’t anticipate that Oakland was going to say, “Oh, so you’re moving to Las Vegas? Okay, we’re done.” Bye.
ALEX: “Here’s our—here’s our temporary plan for building a, uh, a soccer stadium, uh, for the Oakland Roots at the Oakland Coliseum site.”
BOBBY: Okay, that’s fine. We didn’t really need you. Do the Oakland roots exist yet or is that like an expansion franchise? I feel like they don’t exist. Type that into your—your Google, do the Oakland Roots exist?
ALEX: I don’t—I don’t think they actually exist yet. Their website says premiering in spring 2023.
BOBBY: Wow, they better built that stadium quick.
ALEX: They gotta go quickly.
BOBBY: I’m sure they’re building—I’m sure they’re playing at the Coliseum until they’re able to—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —to build their own thing there. Um, this reads like public negotiating.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And that’s gross. Like, if this turns out to be some sort of I read this in a—in the art of the deal bullshit from John Fisher and Dave Kaval, like, that’s incredibly dirty and dysfunctional, and just a total mess on behalf of Major League Baseball to attach their name to this plan to build a stadium in Las Vegas, because Rob co-signed this at every step of the way. And then literally was quoted in all of the articles about this move. And now, maybe it does—it smacks of desperation, honestly. Like trying to bring Oakland back to the table or whatever and—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —and get a more favorable deal from Oakland by saying, “We signed this binding agreement, when the agreement is not necessarily binding and not up to the terms that you alluded to it being in that—while you don’t have this $500 million of public funds from Las Vegas quite as wrapped up nicely as you think you do.” And I’d be curious to see how they thought this was going to play out in the A’s fan base versus how it actually played out, which—I don’t know. I’m—like, I—I’m mindful of trying not to overreact to, like, the people that we are already in circles with, but it didn’t really seem, like, anybody blamed Oakland for this. I’m sure, like, the silent majority of old fans who are not A’s fans like old—like old people who live in Wyoming were like, “This is great. Get them out of communist Oakland,” you know? We had a couple of those people in our replies and I’m like, “Are you a real person?”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I don’t really know. You got to—
ALEX: But they were verified.
BOBBY: —you got to—you got to pay for Twitter blue before I believe that you’re really tweeting shit like that to me. Um, and I, you know, I wonder if this is going according to their plan. And if it is, it’s a bad plan.
ALEX: I think for maybe the first, like, four to six hours they thought it was going to plan and then—
BOBBY: Depending on [18:27]
ALEX: [18:27] that the—the public opinion had, uh, handily shifted against them.
BOBBY: Yeah, it—I still think they’re going to Las Vegas for what it’s worth.
ALEX: I mean, you’re probably right. There’s a new—there’s a new mayor of Oakland who I think was—is far less invested in getting them to stay. The former mayor, Libby Schaaf, had kind of staked her reputation on keeping the A’s in Oakland and now she’s not an office anymore. And—
BOBBY: Well, yeah, because, like, she had already taken so many political hits from losing the Raiders and losing—not really, like, losing the Warriors, but the border is—
ALEX: Not like—
BOBBY: —moving across the Bay to San Francisco. Losing them—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —in the—for the sake of Oakland, right?
ALEX: Right, exactly. And so, uh, it does feel like maybe the A’s think they’re holding more cards than they actually are. And I don’t know—I mean, they’re kind of getting what they deserve at this point, right? Like—
BOBBY: My question is, what happens to this binding agreement if they don’t move? So, like, the A’s have to build a stadium and then, like, a new team comes in and buys that from them? Does the new— can the new team buy the binding agreement from them?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like, how does any of this work?
ALEX: I—
BOBBY: We need like a contract lawyer to come on the podcast and talk about this.
ALEX: I know, I know. Yeah. Again, this is one of those things where I’m like, “I’ll believe it when it happens.” When they—when they—when the shovels break ground. Okay.
BOBBY: I don’t think I’ll believe it when the shovels break ground. I don’t think I would believe it until they throw a pitch in Las Vegas stadium.
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: Like, I will—I—I would believe that the A’s—I would believe even if they were building a new stadium in Las Vegas. If they—if the Las Vegas lawmakers, if they ever pulled the $500 million out at the last minute, even if the stadium structure was already being put into place, I would believe the A’s would leave it as is not complete the stadium—
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: —and play it like a community college for 2025. Before they would actually move and have to pay for it out of John Fisher’s pockets. That is the truth, God’s honest truth. They would play at a local softball park before they would pay $500 million out of their own pocket.
ALEX: Yeah. Well, and—and they’re in this really awkward position where their lease at the Coliseum expires after next year, so it’s kind of on the mayor to say, “Hey, we’ll extend your lease or we won’t.” And then again, like you said—
BOBBY: And I thought they said they didn’t extend the lease though, because of what you’re talking about with—uh, where like they’re bringing in—there’s new projects that are being developed there that have already been promised they can start building in 2024.
ALEX: Well, it’—I mean—and that’s just it, right? It’s like this is where they’ve kind of overplayed their hand a little bit and said, “Okay, we’re headed out,” and the City of Oakland is like, “Okay, we have some plans for that spot, then.
BOBBY: Yeah, it’s actually a pretty good spot. I don’t know why you guys didn’t take more advantage of it. You know? There’s all these other people coming in who are like, “This is where I want to be.”
ALEX: Right. Yeah, we can actually do something with this.
BOBBY: Yeah. Unlike the A’s who pretended like the Coliseum was actually at the top of a mountain and you had to hike it to get there.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That’s why no fans were coming.
ALEX: Right. And like, hey, it’s not your downtown ballpark spot, right? It’s not—it’s not perfect. but like, you know—
BOBBY: I’m out on the downtown ballpark, bro.
ALEX: Uh, yeah.
BOBBY: Give me the uptown ballpark. None of—none of this bullshit downtown ballpark. All right, cool. What does that mean? I can go get a $32-sandwich after the game. Great.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Cool.
ALEX: Yes, it does.
BOBBY: That’s awesome. I love that. Wow. Cool bricks on the outside of the stadium, dude. That’s—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —what most people will see because they can’t afford to go on the inside.
ALEX: Right, exact—bricks with, like, graffiti that was commissioned by the team, you know?
BOBBY: Yeah. It has like a skate park in centerfield for some reason. They’re like, “You’re not allowed to bring in a skateboard, but there’s a skate park in the centerfield.
ALEX: There’s a skate park. Yeah.
BOBBY: You know what’s a good ballpark, though? Good downtown ballpark, San Diego.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yup. Yeah, out on downtown ballparks, although the ones that exist do happen to be pretty good. Camden Yards. Decent—decent place to see a ballgame.
BOBBY: I just think the downtown ballpark might as well be, like, the ad revenue that Elon Musk keeps talking about. That would be great if Twitter made $100 million a month in ad revenue, but it’s not gonna happen. So, like, I don’t know why you just keep saying it, because it’s not coming. Anything worse than the A’s?
ALEX: No, I—I’m done talking about the A’s.
BOBBY: Should we take a—should we take a two-week moratorium, one-month moratorium on even mentioning the A’s in any capacity?
ALEX: Right, like rolling band topics.
BOBBY: Yeah, I like that.
ALEX: Yeah. I like that, too.
BOBBY: Okay. Sold.
ALEX: Ban.
BOBBY: One month. Bark, Stevie. Ban. I don’t—I don’t know if she’s in here anymore. She is—she’s sleeping, um, but she supports banning the A’s.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Always has, always will. She’s never worn any A’s merch. Okay. From one dysfunctional situation to another, Max Scherzer was suspended for 10 games for using a foreign substance. Oh.
ALEX: Uh, uh, hang—uh, let’s just be clear. Not a foreign substance.
BOBBY: Not a foreign substance.
ALEX: Not a foreign substance.
BOBBY: It was classified as a foreign substance. According to home plate umpire, Dan Bellino, who was the umpire during the game of Scherzer’s subjection, as well as Phil Cuzzi, who has been maybe the only umpire who has ejected players for sticky substances.
ALEX: I think—I think he literally is, yeah.
BOBBY: Yeah, he’s ejected three different players for substance violations. Uh, they concluded that searchers’ fingers were “far stickier than anything they felt so far this season.” And in one ump’s estimation, that’s Bellino, “stickier than he’s felt in three years of checking.” They went on to say that the substance that was on Scherzer’s hands was so sticky that it stayed on their hands for multiple innings afterwards, according to them. Um, aside from the fact that this sounds like the way that police talk about fentanyl. I guess I should back up and say for anybody who hasn’t followed this situation, it was that, uh, Scherzer was pitching, uh, a day game against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. He was warned after the second inning when he was leaving the mound that his hand was too sticky. Um, he claimed that he was only using sweat and rosin, the rosin bag that was provided by Major League Baseball. He went back into the dugout, he washed his hands with alcohol as per MLB—uh, as per the umpire’s instructions, he washed his hands off with alcohol. He says that, um, an MLB official witnessed him do this. When he came back out for the third inning. His hand, according to the umpires, was sticky again. He said that he had used rosin and sweat, and that it was just rosin and sweat, and that he—he swore on his kids’ lives that it was just rosin and sweat, which is just an absurd thing that has to be done that we’re swearing on children’s lives and postgame press conferences. And apparently, the violation and what led to the suspension, even though there’s like no scientific way to confirm what he was using, is that you’re not allowed to use a rosin bag that’s not on the mound. So even if you use the same exact style, the same exact kind of rosin, the same bag, whatever, MLB provided rosin that you happen to have in the dugout for whatever reason, that is a violation of the rules. And it was expressly laid out to them when they reset before the season and they said that they would be enforcing these rules even more strict than they did last year when they implemented the hand checks. So even if he was using a perfectly legal—legal substance, the fact that he had reapplied it in the dugout before coming back on the field and his hand was just as sticky again, that was what led to the suspension.
But that’s what Domingo German said he was doing, like, two weeks ago.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: When the players were like—were like, “You’re going into the dugout and your hand is coming up sticky.” And he was saying, “Oh, I’m just putting rosin on there. I’m doing it in the dugout, not on the mound.” And they were like, “Oh, okay.”
ALEX: Yup. Exactly.
BOBBY: And I guess they made an example of Scherzer. I guess Phil Cuzzi decided that—
ALEX: But they just interpreted the rules differently like—
BOBBY: Exactly. And so like, that is what is so confusing about this, is that I don’t really know what the rule is. Like, I technically know the things that you’re not supposed to do, but I—I knew the things that you were not supposed to do before, which is use Spider Tack, and they just allowed pitchers to use that for, like—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY:—seven years before they decided to arbitrarily crack down because hitters got upset or something. And it became a huge whole controversy last year. If Yankees pitchers are doing it and it’s okay, and a Mets pitcher does it and it’s not okay, why is it being enforced differently and is it simply because the umpires wanted to be right-asses about this on this specific day? Because Scherzer is, like, not the type of person who takes—to being chastised well on the mound or being disciplined on the mound. And he was arguing back and forth with them. “It’s just rosin. It’s just rosin.” To the point where like—this is the thing that bothered me most about the situation. Phil Cuzzi takes Scherzer’s glove, he puts Scherzer’s glove on his own hand—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —and he’s like, “It’s sticky inside there.” And then he takes the glove back and he slams it in Scherzer’s chest. And I’m like—I’m—I’m not even really being dramatic either. He literally slammed it into his chest. He didn’t put it back into Scherzer’s hands. He slammed it into Scherzer’s chest. And I’m like, “First of all, you’re taking your life in your own hands. Second of all, this is just incredibly incendiary, childish behavior for umpires who are supposed to be there to, like, cool the situation down in theory.” Not like create a situation out of nothing, that then leads to Scherzer being ejected, and the Mets having to eviscerate their bullpen in the middle of a really long West Coast road stance. Like there was a way for them to get around this exact thing happening and I—I guess you can say, like, “Well, Scherzer should’ve followed the rules. Scherzer shouldn’t have applied rosin in the dugout,” if you believe what he’s saying. Um, if you want to say that Scherzer is actually using Spider Tack, or whatever, like that’s—you’re free to conspiratorialize [28:42] as much as you would like, like I don’t really care. I don’t—I don’t know enough to say that he’s not like, I don’t know Max Scherzer personally. I would—I would think that he’s not because he’s, like, a really smart guy and he has been warned about this a million times, and, like, he was warned about it in this game. So like he said he would have to be the stupidest person ever and I don’t think he’s the stupidest person ever to go back in the dugout, put more Spider Tack on him and come back out.
ALEX: Known to be relatively—relatively—
BOBBY: A smart guy.
ALEX: —a smart guy.
BOBBY: Yeah. And so whatever, that’s fine, but the different interpretations of the rule between him and Domingo German and the—the rule saying that umpire—it’s subjectively up to the umpires to decide what is too sticky and what is the right amount of tacky. Like, there’s no confirmation process to a sticky stuff objection. There’s no like, “You give us your glove and we send it to a lab. And we say, ‘Oh, this actually was rosin.’” There is a rule—uh, it says in the policy that you can make your hand too sticky with rosin. But rosin is a legal substance and provided by MLB, so you can’t overuse the rosin. So what is that? So am I allowed to toss the rosin bag up three times in my hand, but not five? Am I allowed to get sweat from my neck, but not from my hair? What is the rule is my question. I mean, they have—
ALEX: I’m really glad—
BOBBY: —had over a year to think about what the rule is.
ALEX: I’m really glad that this is not a recent rule change, because this is, like, a rule change that I feel like is still having more of an impact on the actual, like, enjoyment of the sport for me than, like, any of the ones that were introduced this year, which, again, your mileage may vary, but ultimately, it’s still the same game—but like this is—this is something that is actually impacting the game that you are watching on the field, right? Max Scherzer getting ejected and suspended for 10 games. That’s one of the league’s best pitchers on one of the league’s marquee franchises. And you’re doing it because you felt like his hand was a little too sticky. Like, they’re just—
BOBBY: Ultimately it comes down to the umpire thought it was too sticky.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: The umpire didn’t accuse him of using Spider Tack.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: The umpire didn’t say, “This was not rosin.” The umpire said, “It just felt too sticky.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. And, hey, maybe Phil Cuzzi’s right. Maybe Phil Cuzzi is the only one who’s right about this and all of them are too sticky, right? But, like, it just speaks to the fact that this is such a gray area and it doesn’t seem like there’s any consistency on how you apply this sort of thing, which, again, is why it would behoove Major League Baseball to actually set a standard for—this is a substance that you can use on the ball. This is how much of it you can use. In theory, they’ve already done that with rosin, right? So I don’t know why rosin—
BOBBY: It would behoove Major League Baseball to just get rid of all substances and make the ball tacky, but that would just be [31:42]
ALEX: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I don’t know. I—when Scherzer—when Scherzer went on the Foul Territory show a couple of weeks ago and talked about this in the—with regards to Domingo German situation, he kind of talked about how—how sticky rosin can become when you’re out there and you’re sweating. Um, and he—and he brought up—uh, what I think is a salient point, which is that the fact that all of this happens on the field after the pitcher comes off the mound, I think creates even more of a scene that’s really unnecessary when it comes to this, right? You really put the pitcher on the spot. You—you’re effectively reprimanding him for something he may or may not have done on the field, in front of however—however many fans are at the ballpark and watching at home. And it just—I think it creates a lot more drama than there really needs to—to be, right? Because then you have this, like, confrontation that’s taking place on the field that I think probably raises the stakes a lot and probably amps people up a little bit more.
BOBBY: What I can’t understand or like what I truly cannot square is how you can have a substance that’s legal, but if you use too much of it, it’s illegal?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Wrong substance then. If rosin can become too sticky—too sticky. Like, if rosin becomes more sticky, the more sweat you use, right? Which is true. Like in your experience, in my experience, like if you have some rosin on your hand, and you wipe it with sweat like that—that combination activates the rosin a little bit more and it makes it more sticky. And that’s like as normal as normal gets in baseball. But, like, so then it’s a competitive advantage for a guy to be sweatier? Like, this is just so silly. It’s so unserious. And this is a serious game, you’ve made it into a serious thing like this, and there’s millions of dollars on the line. Not to mention there’s like a billion dollars of sports bet—sports betting money on the line and you’re just randomly ejecting the Mets’ best pitcher in the third inning of a game that you are fielding—you are fielding monetary bets about the outcome of. So, like, the arbitrary enforcement of these rules has ripple effects that you’re not really concerned about as a league. And I’m like—I’m not trying to be—I know it probably sounds like I had sour grapes, because the Mets’ best pitcher is now suspended for 10 games, but it’s like, it doesn’t really matter to me that Scherzer is suspended for 10 games. It’s like for the—for the purposes of the New York Mets rotation, like I think it’s stupid and ridiculous. But if he had had a tired shoulder and missed 10 days, I—I wouldn’t have, like, freaked out about that for the Mets’ chances of making the playoffs. So, I’m not saying that like, “Wow, the whole season is ruined.” No. I’m just saying it’s a clown show. It’s a clown show, is what it is. And—and it’s like why are we so invested in something that is so randomly enforced like—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: So Scherzer went—not to mention the, like, labor implications of this which are admittedly not like, massive but not irrelevant, because Scherzer went on to say, you know, that he was going to appeal it and he was talking to different MLB officials or whatever, and his agent Scott Boras came out and said that we need to have a more universal standard rather than Phil because of his opinion. And I love when—I love—I love when I agree with Scott Boras. It’s like the—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —best thing ever. And thank you labor king Scott Boras. But, like, Scherzer can’t appeal this to a neutral arbitrator because rules, violations, and enforcement are not part of the grievance and arbitration process. This rule violation is not part of the grievance and arbitration process in the collective bargaining agreement and so Scherzer said if he would have appealed it, he would have appealed it in front of MLB’s rules enforcement commission and anonymous sources and the—then the Will Sammon article in The Athletic said that he would have a precisely 0% chance of winning this case. So it’s like, “Okay. So they can just decide who to suspend basically, whenever they want to.” It’s—I’m not trying to do, like, a bad faith slippery slope argument, but it is kind of a slippery slope of, like, you can suspend anybody based on it—just results in an automatic 10-game suspension based on what the umpire said. Not what the umpire, like, confiscated as evidence and turned in, and was reviewed, and enforced. It’s just my word against the umpires. And knowing what we know about umpires, like, it’s not exactly bulletproof what they say.
ALEX: Ultimately, I think that if you want to hold your bro’s hand, that’s okay. You shouldn’t have to say, “Sorry, dude, my—uh, your—your hand was so sticky that when my hand touched your hand, um, my hand accidentally stuck to your hand.” You know, like, just—just be you, be yourself.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: I want—I want to hold Max Scherzer’s hand.
BOBBY: Me, too.
ALEX: It’s cool. It’s okay.
BOBBY: I saw Meredith Wills saying on Twitter, Meredith Willis, who has done irreplaceable research into the—baseball itself, um, and has done a lot of reporting along with our friend Bradford Davis about baseball. I saw Meredith saying that the obvious solution to this would just be to create, like, a gravity test, you know? Like you have an object that weighs a certain amount that the umpires carry with them, and you put it—stick it on the pitcher’s hand, and you hold it, and if it sticks to the pitcher’s hand and does not fall to the ground, their hand is too sticky. And if it does fall to the ground, then they’re clear. That is like a quick scientific test that you could put into practice. Now, maybe Rob would be open to something like that. Maybe he wouldn’t. But the fact that just someone on Twitter, granted someone who’s incredibly smart, and whose opinion I value very, very highly, but just like for free is giving away ideas that are better than what we have now. Where supposedly this $12 billion industry is trying to come up with a solution to this sticky stuff situation. It’s like Meredith Wills thought of that in, like, an hour and yet Major League Baseball is still just taking the word of Phil Cuzzi feeling Max Scherzer’s fingers. It’s just like—
ALEX: Well, I should note it also wasn’t for free because Major League Baseball pays a thousand dollars a month to get their little gold checkmark. So they actually—that costs them thousands of dollars to view that piece of information.
BOBBY: No, dude, Rob probably saw that one through his burner.
ALEX: That’s actually true.
BOBBY: His burner, Rob’s burner is @a_bazeley on Twitter. That’s Rob Manfred’s burner account—
ALEX: Uh-huh. Yeah.
BOBBY: —if you want to go give that one a follow. Okay, final topic. Speaking of Rob, uh, Evan Drellich wrote an article in The Athletic this past week. Headline, “Rob Manfred’s says MLB owners want to limit player contract lengths. Tony Clark says MLBPA won’t approve. Tony Clark called the idea “an assault on guaranteed contracts.” “A reform that has been of interest to ownership for a number of years is a limitation of contract length,” Manfred said Tuesday evening at Sports Business Journal’s World Congress of Sports conference. I think I cut a couple of words out of that, in Los Angeles. “Obviously, players love it, it gives them financial security for a very long period of time. The difficulty, and I think players will come to appreciate this as time goes by, those contracts result in a transfer from the current stars to yesterday’s stars. At some point”—I don’t understand what he’s saying. “At some point that has to be true and I think it is an important—I think that is—I think it is an issue that is important for us to stay focused on, because it creates inflexibility that affects the quality of the teams that you put on the field.” That’s convenient. Rob’s take is that—
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: —we should have shorter contracts so that we can create more young stars. Interesting.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. I’d love—um, on that note, I would love contracts for, uh, owners, too. Should we put limitations on that as well? Because I think that results in a—um, I think that results in a transfer from the—the current owner stars to yesterday’s ownership stars.
BOBBY: That’s so true. John Fisher, retire.
ALEX: Your time’s up.
BOBBY: Your con—your contract is up, John Fisher. That’s a good idea, actually. You’ve been termed out. Every 10 years, you have to review every owner. It’s like—
ALEX: I mean, like what are we gonna do this Sunday?
BOBBY: Have you done the [40:22] thing for the franchise? Yeah.
ALEX: I just—
BOBBY: Uh, no, this is ridiculous. This reminds me of last week when we talked about the Jim Bowden article where he was like, “Player opt-outs are ruining the league.” It’s like, well, perhaps the team shouldn’t have agreed to that then. We’re all trying to find the guy who signed the other side of the 12-year contract.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’s just we keep seeing these contracts and it’s only signed by Scott Boras and they just keep going into effect. I don’t know that other signature on there, it must be forged. Oh, wait, no. What you’re telling me is that that other signature is from the owner who agreed to pay this contract for that length? That’s insane.
ALEX: Did I agree for this? Once again, free market for me, not for the—right? Like, this is—I mean
BOBBY: Yes, we could do—we could do an hour every week just on stuff that Rob Manfred says at conferences.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: What are we gonna do if he’s not commissioner anymore?
ALEX: I really don’t know. He’s just a content machine. I wish that like—I wish there were, like, MLB, like, pool reporters who would send out like—you know, how they send out like, “Eric Adams schedule for the day or here’s Joe Biden’s schedule for”—like I want to know what conferences Manfred is at, so—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX:I can show up outside if need be.
BOBBY: But that then—then they would be sharing his assassination coordinates [41:43]
ALEX: That’s—
BOBBY: Then you get banned from Twitter for that.
ALEX: I—I—I think that what Manfred is trying to say, right, it’s just like—
BOBBY: I’m so sorry, I’m laughing because I pictured Elon Musk’s quote tweeting Anthony DiComo sharing where—quote tweeting Evan Drellich sharing where Rob Manfred is going to be, like what conference he’s going to be and just be like—Elon Musk being like, “Sorry, @EvanDrellich, your account is permanently banned for sharing the assassination coordinates of Rob Manfred.
ALEX: Since the woke elite doesn’t want him to succeed.
BOBBY: Yeah. The woke elite doesn’t want him to talk to the business owners of the greater Atlanta area conference—
ALEX: Sports Business Journal World. Sports conference, Congress. Sports.
BOBBY: It’s just a bunch of buzzwords. The committee for progress on the business of sports in commerce, and weights and measures allegiance.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Luncheon [42:40] it’s a luncheon—
BOBBY: Yeah [42:41]
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: [42:42] sandwiches. Maybe a little [42:45] of a coffee afterwards, keep everybody awake.
BOBBY: I feel like what he’s trying to say here, when he says his contract was all in a transfer of current stars, yesterday stars, right? Is it like, “Well, there’s so much money, right, that are—that are going to these players and when you sign these long-term deals, that locks teams in, right? And it means they’ve committed money to the stars of yesteryear as opposed to the current stars. And, like, that assumes that MLB revenues are not skyrocketing that running a Major League Baseball franchise is not incredibly profitable.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And that there’s a salary cap.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like—like all of these things are—are fine. That actually teams can still exist doing this.
ALEX: I love this recent trend of, um, Rob saying all of the stuff that the owners want, one year into the current CBA.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm,
ALEX: Just slowly trickling out all of the stuff that they asked for that had no chance of going through in the CBA. Just to try and—just a little trial balloon for the next CBA. Just like, “Here’s everything we want. What if we had it? Open your third eye. What if the owners got everything they wanted? A thing that we’re favorable to is we want everything we want.” That’s his quote, sounds insane. Like—it’s like—
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: Well, a structure that we’re in favor of is having players make no money.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm. Okay. Yeah. And I—I’m in favor of not working but being paid a million dollars a day like same.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Thanks, Rob. Come back to reality.
ALEX: I love this notion that when he says it creates inflexibility on the field, do you think that the—the teams who are not competitive are the ones who are signing—who are, like, being pulled down by 10-year contracts? Do you think the reason the A’s can’t compete as if they’re hamstrung by, like—
BOBBY: Have too many good players?
ALEX: Have too many—too many good players on, like, aged-out contracts? Like, I don’t understand—the teams who are able to do this are the ones who can spend the money on it. So—and they’re the ones who are already ahead of the pack, so why is there inflexibility or whatever, so to speak, so you say? And [45:02] like, does that make any sense?
BOBBY: Yeah, it does make sense, because this is actually something that Rob and the owners are actually good at and I’m—I’ve after—after making fun of them for the last five minutes, I’m just going to kind of, like, kind of tip my cap, because that—what they do is they identify a problem that existed, like, six years ago, you know, that was really at its peak, like, a few years ago, that the lay fan still thinks there’s a problem in terms of actual competitiveness on the field. Like, the players getting long contracts now are young and good, and probably going to be good for the majority, if not all of that contract. Like, what we’re talking about now is, like, Machado, Harper, Trea Turner, Lindor who’s going to be like—only, like, 39 at the end of his contract. Like, these guys are going to add—they’re—they’re going to have surplus value, and what he is talking about is Miguel Cabrera, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez’s second contract. Like these guys who before sort of, like, the onset of sabermetrics prevented teams from ever giving long contracts to people who they didn’t think there was going to be some upside there. Back when there was just like the retain your star level of, like, quasi loyalty that existed and giving these long-term extensions for players over 30. That is not really the case right now, like over 30 players get, like, six or seven-year contracts now, which is still long, uh, when it—when compared to other sports. But it’s not like 13 years, like Harper getting it when he’s 26 or whatever. And he’s gonna be good for that whole contract for the most part. But he—Rob knows this and so—but Rob knows that if he’s vague enough about it, and he doesn’t bring up any specific players, which, uh, obviously beyond pale for him to name a specific player. But he knows that, when he says that there’s a decent percentage of fans who are going to see this quote—hear this quote and they’re going to think of Cabrera and they’re going to think of Albert Pujols. They’re not going to think of the current contracts that are not played out yet, because there’s so much that we don’t know about those contracts yet. Like, the smart people in the baseball world will point to those contracts and say, “This is still a boon for the team.” You and I last year were saying, like, these long contracts are probably actually going to end up being a deal for most of these teams.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Especially since when you factor in, you know, what Ben Clemens reported on at FanGraphs was, like, they take all this money and they put it in escrow or whatever. They put it in a high yield, uh, mutual fund, and it—they actually get more money at the end of this, that—it’s like an investment more or less. Like, it’s all ridiculous. But Rob knows that the normal fan doesn’t know any of that stuff, and so when he says this, he’s triggering this—this fear that they had like five years ago, knowing that that’s not really the case anymore. And he’s trying to get a—a big win in collective bargaining agreements based on a fear that fans used to have, which has just been the playbook, basically. Like they’ve been trying to get wins on salary caps since 1994, you know? Because fans are still processing that trauma or whatever of the—of the strike and not having the playoffs that year. And he knows that that’s a powerful thing and—and he knows that that is, like, the best card that the owners have to play, is more or less like fearmongering over things that are myths.
ALEX: I love how at this conference, the person who asked the question about these long contracts is, uh, is Peter Guber who is part owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Golden State Warriors, and he was like, “Uh, you know, uh, one of the—ones—one of the students pointed out the long contracts with players, um, and it has an effect on players, teams, leagues. Is there anything that there should be some outer limit to that?” And I’m like, “Don’t you have a direct line to this man? Like, why are you sitting in the audience at a conference?” Like, I mean, I guess it’s an opportunity to push him to kind of talk about this publicly and stake the owners claim, but I just love this idea that it’s all these owners and commissioners who are just chumming it up, just shooting the shit about the league—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —league.
BOBBY: You know, knowing that they don’t have to deal with the pressure of the public in this specific forum, right? They can actually speak candidly about what they think the future of their sport should look like.
ALEX: So, like, I appreciate these moments, right? I appreciate all the luncheons and rotary clubs, and—and all the journalists who have their ears pressed to the door who can tell us what’s, uh, what’s going on there, because they speak more candidly there than I think anywhere else.
BOBBY: I’m gonna go to my boss on Monday, I’m just going to be like, “A structure that I’m interested in is 10 hours of work per week and I think that working 40 hours has severe limitations on the future value of my health and performance.”
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Okay, Alex, I think we’ve gone on sufficiently long enough so that we make this podcast very long, but that is okay, because the rest of it is a very fun conversation with Mike Duncan, about the Seattle Mariners, and baseball history, and many other fun things. Oh, as a note, this was recorded on Wednesday, the 19th, so, um, we didn’t know about the A’s yet. So when Mike and Alex are joking about the A’s, it’s not like incredibly mean.
SPEAKER 3: Just let me cry a little bit longer. I ain’t gon’ smile if I don’t want to. Hey, man, we all can’t be like you. I wish we were all rose-colored, too. My rose-colored boy.
BOBBY: Okay, we now have the distinct pleasure of being joined by Mike Duncan, historian podcaster, host of the incomparable podcast history of Rome, and revolutions, author of Hero of Two Worlds. Mike, thank you for joining Tipping Pitches.
MIKE: Uh, thank you very much for having me, guys.
BOBBY: Uh, Mike, we’re really excited to talk to you about a lot of things, the Mariners, baseball in 2023, baseball history, but you’re really here for one reason, and that reason is to answer the very important question, do you think the painting of Alex Rodriguez as a centaur exists?
MIKE: It seems like it maybe did exist. Uh, it might not exist. Now, that’s an awfully specific thing to make up about somebody. Um—
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: —so if it was like an awfully specific thing, then hats off, because I think it was—was—it was like an ex-girlfriend, right?
ALEX: Yes. Yeah.
MIKE: Who is—is the one who said that and, like, it’s—I—it’s one of two things, either it’s real and that’s great. I doubt he has it anymore. But if that’s just like sort of this weird revenge thing that she did, that’s an awesome way to get revenge on somebody to say that they have a half-man, half-centaur painting of themselves in their own house, that sort of takes her—like, my hat is off to her creativity, basically,
BOBBY: I know I feel my brain working itself into this position where it’s like—but even if it’s not real, the fact that it could be real says a lot about our society, you know?
MIKE: Sure. Yes, yes, yes. It says—it says a lot about A-Rod that none of us are like, “Well, that’s impossible.” You know, like does—like does Mike Trout have a painting of himself, you know, as a centaur? No, of course not. That doesn’t—that doesn’t track, but Alex Rodriguez. Yeah, yeah, that scans.
BOBBY: Um, Mike Trout, although he has his own weird little quirks, you know, like how he was a SuperPretzel spokesperson for years and years into his career because he just loves SuperPretzels, so he was like—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —in those commercials and it’s like that’s very Mike Trout core. [52:23] Just like—
MIKE: Yeah, I—I believe that Mike Trout likes pretzels.
BOBBY: Exactly. He has a very pretzel liking type of personality. Um, Mike, you’re here—I’m—I’m—I’m obviously joking—jokingly asking you a very specific question to start this conversation, but you’re here because we saw you tweeting about that and we were like—as the—uh, we consider ourselves the historians of Alex Rodriguez as a pop cultural figure. And so once—
MIKE: Oh, okay.
BOBBY: —we saw you, um, a noted historian much more seriously than us, talking about A-Rod, we felt like this was a great opportunity to get you on a podcast to talk about baseball, which seemingly you have a loving relationship to.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah, I’m—I’m a diehard baseball fan. I’m a diehard Mariner fan. I’m a diehard Alex Rodriguez apologist ultimately at this rate.
BOBBY: That’s right.
MIKE: Um, and I—I will—I will caveat this by saying that, like, I don’t really watch national broadcasts of baseball games anymore. Like even if I’m watching, you know, like Cardinals raise—like I’m listening to the local broadcast, so I don’t—none of this speaks to Alex Rodriguez as a analyst or baseball—or like a colored man, which apparently he started off great and then really collapsed into—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Or I guess collapsed up his own ass, um, maybe—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —is what happened to him. Um, but, look, I am a—uh, you know, I’m a Mariners fan from the 80s. You know, like, I started going to games in ’85. And, you know, I got the first six years of Alex Rodriguez’s career. You know, Alex Rodriguez—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —is a 20-year-old, 21-year-old, 22-year-old like—so we loved him. And then there—there is a segment of the Mariners fanbase, of course, that still, like, boos him when he comes to town, um, which I really—I have not understood really since about May of 2001. I have not understood how you could continue to be mad at Alex Rodriguez for taking a quarter of a billion dollars to go to someplace else and play baseball, while the Mariners—like—because my big thing in 2000 was that we made the playoffs in 2000. We made it to the ALCS and we lost to the Yankees. And then A-Rod left and I was very briefly upset about this, because he was very, at that moment, you know, the best shortstop in baseball, probably the best player in baseball full stop because this is right before Pujols comes into the league. And probably the best shortstop of all time. I think I would put him as my—as my starting shortstop of any all-time team. And, uh, and so him leaving takes this team that barely makes the playoffs and probably makes them mediocre again. And instead, like, what happened in 2001 is—April of 2001, the Mariners went, like, 20-2. And then in May, we went like 24-3. And, like, by the all-star break, we—we barely had double-digit losses. Um, then people were trying to boo Alex when he came back. It’s just like, “Dude, who cares? We rule.” Like, we have Ichiro, we have Bret Boone, who, you know, was obviously on—on a massive—
BOBBY: On the [55:20]
MIKE: —on a massive cocktail of, uh, of steroids, but it was so fun to watch. And, like, that season was so great that, like, I got over the A-Rod thing a long time ago and I’m—I love the part of the fanbase, uh, that thinks that the Mariners are doing a real disservice to themselves and—and to all of us by not putting him in the Mariners Hall of Fame. Because he’s—he’s like—he played there for six years. He’s like fourth on the all-time war list, right? Like, that’s how good he was for us.
BOBBY: Oh, my God, I can’t—I—I—sports fans just have—need to have shorter memories. You know, like it’s not that serious if the player left 15 years ago. Um, how are you—how are you feeling about the Mariners this year? Are—do you think that that magic is, like, recaptured? Are they back on the come-up? Like, what is your kind of perspective on it right now? And do they have an A-Rod equivalent character who you think can—can lead them, um, uh, as you—as you [56:19]
MIKE: Maybe—maybe a player whose name starts with a J and ends with an O, you know, like [56:22]
BOBBY: Right. Spitballing? I don’t know.
ALEX: Or a similar last name.
BOBBY: Yes. Yes.
[laughter]
MIKE: Here’s a—here’s a—here’s a softball question. Are there any players who you think are—are great on the team right now? Um, where I am right this moment is that we are kind of—hmm, I’m—I’m holding my breath a little bit. Um, this season didn’t get off to, like, the most spectacular start. Um, 2021 and 2022 were both fueled a lot by magic pixie dust. Um, you know, 2021, we almost made the playoffs with a -50 run differential, which was, you know, as fun as fun can be, um, but not actually something that’s sustainable. And so there were—there were things that, um, that—that happened last year and over the winter that made me hopeful, right? Teoscar Hernandez, um, uh, coming on and, uh, just things like that. But there’s lots of, like, who’s our, you know, who’s our left fielder, You know? Um—
BOBBY: Who’s our DH is the real question right now.
MIKE: Who’s our D—yeah, exactly. Like, who—why do we—like can we just go get Nelson Cruz again, please? Like, that’s—all—all I want is for Nelson Cruz to come back and hit more bombs. Um, and then like Robbie Ray went down on, like, the 12th pitch of the season effectively, which is—like, he—you know, Robbie Ray is never gonna be his, uh, young self again, but, like, reliable quality starts for a 175-200 innings like—that’s like a super valuable component of a team that’s trying to be in that wildcard hunt. Um, so in the—in the big picture, I’m ultimately disappointed the Mariners are not better than they should be and could be, uh, given their market, given how much wealth is in the Pacific Northwest, given how—they should be able to be—they should be able to hire the smartest people to run that team and it just doesn’t seem like that’s—of interest to them. So big picture, it’s like a little disappointing, but I do, um—you know, I’m watching the games, like we’re losing to the Brewers right now. Um, and I would—uh, I hope they make the playoffs, but I could very easily see them not, um, make—
BOBBY: Yeah. We, um, we did a—like a—like a survey of our listeners who are in, like, our Slack channel of—of our community here, of our patrons and they chose Julio as the player that they—I guess—how—how was it phrased, Alex? Like, it was like the best vibes of any player in 2022.
ALEX: Right. Yeah.
BOBBY: And Julio kind of won in sort of a landslide. And so, Mike, as a fan of the Mariners—and also the Mariners being this franchise that has had various sort of, like, cult of personality type players, like whether that is A-Rod, and of course, Griffey before that. Like, is Julio in your sports life the biggest thing since Griffey?
MIKE: Um, not necessarily since Griffey, but he’s—he—we want him in that pantheon, um, because, like—for a Mariners fan specifically like it’s Griffey, it’s Ichiro. Uh, you know, Felix means a lot.
BOBBY: Felix, yeah.
MIKE: Felix means a lot to all of us. Um, and then there are other guys who are sprinkled in there, like I’m—you know, I think Randy Johnson was the greatest left-hand picture of all-time. We had him, we had Edgar, we had Alex. But in that sort of, like, uh—uh, franchise defining face, that—that who’s going to have a Hall of Fame career, uh, yeah, that’s what I want for Julio. And certainly, he’s—he’s the most excited that I have been about a position player since Ichiro probably came on board. Um, you know, like I—like I enjoyed Robinson Cano on the team, I do. I love Robinson Cano. And I enjoyed Nelson Cruz and I love Kyle Seager, but, like, none of those guys when we were getting them and when they were on the team, we’re like, “This guy is so young, and so good, and so fun, and such a great—he—and like Julio just seems like a great guy, you know, like, on top of everything else, which is like a—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —terrible thing to sort of rest your hat on, because nobody knows anybody as—
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: —as surrounded by pr. Um, but he genuinely seems to be that sort of like a ebullient, you know, figure who’s—who has brought a lot of fun and enthusiasm, uh—uh, to the team.
BOBBY: Yeah, I mean, I’m—I’m an A’s fan, um, uh, which is not something I admit to—to very many people.
MIKE: Oh. So—so you—so you maybe—you maybe don’t like Felix as much as we do, because, uh—
BOBBY: Like when we got on, Alex turned to me and he goes, “So I turned on the A’s last night and, um, Tyler Wade was hitting cleanup and that was bleak.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah. I feel bad for you, man. Like, the—you know, the Oakland A’s—of all the [60:48] AOS teams, they’ve always been the [60:50] AOS team that I’ve disliked the least, so— BOBBY: Yeah, well, I—I—I was gonna say I feel very similarly about the—the Mariners who I think are often—often very overlooked up in the Pacific Northwest, despite the fact that—it’s kind of remarkable when you think about they’ve had like—again, like we were just talking about four or five of the best players of this generation or like the last generation or two, right, within the last 20 years, which is not actually something that many franchises can say. They’ve had Griffey, they’ve had A-Rod, they’ve had Ichiro, Randy Johnson, right? And Julio coming up. That’s quite a resume, like you’re doing something right there to the point where it kind of makes you wonder, why—why can’t you just do—why can you do more of that?
MIKE: I—
BOBBY: Like, is there another Julio out there that—that [61:36]
MIKE: This—this—this is what I do not understand, um, and it does have something to do, I think, with the culture of the Mariners’ franchise and that, like, their front office, um, like, why we can’t put things together on top of this thing that I have? Which is like—when I—when people asked me about how, you know, like painful it is to be a Mariners fan, you know, uh, some of the—some of what I’m about to say is pure and obvious cope, right? and I do understand that, because, you know, we’ve never even been to the World Series, right? We’re the only franchise left that has not ever been to the World Series. Um, and so it has been in that sense, um, you know, just decades and decades of failure. But when I think about the guys who have worn the uniform and who have played for my baseball team, been doing what baseball actually is, which is a daily activity to throw it on in the background like—yeah, like I was nine years old and Ken Griffey, Jr. got dropped on my team and I watched him play. He would get three or four bats, like, every day of my childhood. I—um, Griffey was on my team, and the same is true for Ichiro, and Randy Johnson, and Edgar. And then, you know, even though the Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, Kyle Seager years, like those—they were great. You know, that— was—for—for those—people do not understand this, but for a couple of years that—them hitting .345 was as good .345 as existed in the league. It’s just—you know, if the hitting is good, the pitching is bad. And if the pitching is great, the hitting is bad, and that just seems to be—we can’t ever quite put it all together except in 2001, um, which, then, you know—that—that’s the one that like—that one actually hurts. But the—the rest of it is just like—I don’t know, it’s—it hasn’t been a bad baseball, like, for me. I—I’ve rooted for some great players, um, then I just—I wish we could have gotten more out of it, uh, but, you know, it is what it is.
BOBBY: You sound like when I tried to convince myself that I feel, being a Mets fan, like—but it’s just so much bleaker over here on this side of the country. Like we try to take—we try to take the joy in certain things and I feel that way, about like a guy like Pete Alonso or a guy like Francisco Lindor or in previous eras, David Wright, but it just always feels like—
MIKE: Rob—Robinson—Robinson Cano.
BOBBY: Robinson Cano, right. Legendary.
MIKE: I— [63:43] legendary and he was a—
BOBBY: Legendary [63:44]
MIKE: Robinson Cano.
BOBBY: Um, but, like, it—there’s this like a feeling of fatalism that I don’t necessarily feel from the Mariners fans, is that true or is that just me being on the outside looking in? Like, it just feels like there’s a, uh, ability to, like, be optimistic about certain things with that fanbase?
MIKE: I—I think we’re just, like, a little bit more laid-back about the whole thing. I—I do think that that’s true.
BOBBY: Yeah. A little bit less annoying than us. Yeah.
MIKE: Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mets—Mets fans, like, really love to wallow in their own misery and you’re like—you know, you guys have often done quite well for yourselves. I don’t know if you knew that. Um, but, you know, living in—living in the shadow of the Yankees is—you know, is going to give Mets fans a huge, um, you know, inferiority complex. And then I think the team really—like especially, like, over the last decade, it just—it was just so dysfunctional, you know, from—from the—uh, from the very tippy top, all the way down, it just seemed like a completely dysfunctional, um, uh, organization. Whereas the—the Mariners like— the Mariners have this vibe—I said—I said—I wrote a baseball prospectus thing, uh, about the 2021 season and I described the Mariners as like just this never-ending corporate retreat like that—that’s what sort of the executives think of it. Like—it’s like the team is a backdrop for their various corporate junkets and that’s kind of—
BOBBY: The luncheons.
MIKE: Yeah. Exactly like—
BOBBY: Rotary club meetings.
MIKE: That’s—yeah, that’s what—that’s mostly what they’re getting out of this, it’s kind of like being like low-key aristocracy in the Pacific Northwest, um, and, like, hobnobbing with chambers of commerce, um, which is—I would—I—I—I want somebody psychotic with, uh, billions—billions of dollars to buy my—my baseball team, um, but it’s not going to happen. And—and I think just like the years of never even getting quite close except for, you know, 2000, 2001, and, you know, ’95 was obviously magical for us.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: But the rest of it like—you know, Red Sox fans before everything happened, and Mets fans and Cubs fans before they won. You know, it was a lot of just like getting—getting to someplace and then losing tragically, which the Mariner—we don’t—we don’t really have that kind of record. Um, it’s just—the—the Mariners are a fun team to watch because some of the players are fun in-between advertisements for, like, local plumbers, right? That’s Mariners baseball.
BOBBY: I mean, if you’ve never had any hope to begin with, you—you can’t lose it, right?
MIKE: Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: I mean, that’s—that is the upshot.
MIKE: Yeah. I—I will certainly not raise on a team where my expectations were high.
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: I’m still—I’m still annoyed I have to, like, sit next to people if like—if—if it’s like a good game, because, like, we would go—we would go to games when I was a kid in the 80s, um, and, you know, like literally have, like, the entire right field bleachers to ourselves. Um—
BOBBY: A dream.
MIKE: Yeah, it was great. Just cheap—just cheap hotdogs and—and there were—there were, like, bench—there were—there—it was like high school—um, it was like high school [66:40]
BOBBY: Yeah, like wooden—wooden-painted benches. Yeah.
MIKE: They—they were aluminum. No, no, no.
BOBBY: Okay.
MIKE: So, it was—it was like—it was like football—like high school football stadium.
BOBBY: Right. Okay.
MIKE: Is what it was when they came down, which is this—this like huge concrete dome with, like, plastic—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —grass and, you know, the whole thing like—
BOBBY: The Yankees still have the aluminum benches, which is maybe one of the only cool things left about the New York Yankees and their stadium. They still have the—the—the bleachers out there that are actual bleachers out in the outfield.
MIKE: I don’t think—I don’t—I don’t think I—I don’t think I—I’ve only been there—I’m gonna go again in May. I’m actually, um, I’m getting tickets to—I’m going to be in New York in May and I’m—I’m going to see them again. Um, but never made it to the old stadium, but I don’t think I—
BOBBY: Yeah, yeah.
MIKE: I don’t think I remember, yeah.
BOBBY: Regrettably, it is a cool place to see a baseball game sometimes, when you sit out there in the bleachers. Like, Alex and I have been there when it’s like a little bit less fun and a little bit more bleak, and you’re kind of, like, with, like, the Staten Island, like, college-age bros who are like spilling beer on you. But then from time to time, if you get the right crowd around you, it can be really fun. And you do bake out there in the sun. I will say.
MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. The—the—the one—the one game I went to out there, I wound up, uh, chatting with some people that were just sitting in front of us, that were perfectly nice people.
ALEX: Um, and I should—I should note it’s easier when you’re not wearing the opposing team’s jersey, um—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —and I have learned that lesson the hard way, uh, multiple times.
MIKE: See, I—see—that—and the thing is, man, I do—like speaking of, like, cultural icon stuff like I have—like the—the Mariners hat that I wear around is the—the Mariners hat with the teal brim, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: You know, that sort of like classical hat.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: And like when I go, I—I just wear that hat wherever. Um, and when I go to other stadiums, I continue to wear that hat and it’s not—I get nothing, but, like—like glow—like glowing smiles, like, “Hi”—like, “Yeah, man. That’s the hat.” Like we love—we love those guys. We love that team. Um, so it is a nice thing about being a Mariners fan that, like, kind of our vibe—no—nobody really hates the Mariners, right?
BOBBY: Yeah. Right.
MIKE: There’s no—there’s nobody out—and—and even a lot of people like my age, um, who grew up on whatever team they were rooting for, plus the existence of Ken Griffey, Jr.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: It means that—it means that lots of people out there—like their second favorite team turns out to be the Mariners.
BOBBY: Yeah. And also, uh, um, I mean, the Yankees are kind of, like, the central point for a lot of opposing fan bases where you can all kind of agree in the fact that you hate the Yankees.
MIKE: Correct.
BOBBY: But I think Ken Griffey Jr. coming out so staunchly against the Yankees and saying he would never play there made—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —him and the Mariners just beloved to so many different franchises.
MIKE: That’s—yup, that’s a clip I’ll watch at least once a year.
[laughter]
BOBBY: With the, uh, with the Mariners City Connect, uh, jerseys coming out in a couple of weeks, what do you, uh, what do you want to see them incorporate? Like, um, like, do you want—go back to like the—the turn forward, the clock jerseys that they did like a couple of decades ago?
MIKE: Oh, those were sweet.
BOBBY: Those were amazing. Um—
MIKE: [69:34]
ALEX: It’s a beautiful—a beautiful car crash of a jersey.
BOBBY: Yeah, I think orange is—
ALEX: It was just gorgeous.
MIKE: The—uh, what they really need to do is have everybody wear their hats backwards, like that’s—that’s the thing.
BOBBY: That’s good. That is great, yeah.
MIKE: That’s—that’s—that’s the thing I would like to see them do in terms of like what kind of defines this. But other than that, I mean, those City Connect jerseys, that’s like—uh, that’s when you talk to the guys at the Chamber of Commerce, like what do you want? It’s like—like put an Amazon [69:58]
BOBBY: Right. Yeah. And—
MIKE: You know, that City Connect like—I don’t know. Those jerseys aren’t, like, my favorite [70:05]
ALEX: Oh, I have to—the—I don’t know if you—I don’t know if you saw the Rangers ones that—that came out—
BOBBY: Those are—
ALEX: —a couple weeks ago [70:10] they are tough—
BOBBY: —tough to [70:11]
MIKE: No. No, I—I really did not. I didn’t pay attention to it at all.
ALEX: You’re better for it.
MIKE: Thank you. Of course, Google it as soon as we’re done talking.
BOBBY: Right, right. What was it like when they broke the, uh, streak last year? They made it to the playoffs, what was that like for you?
MIKE: Phenomenal, honestly. Um, because 2021 was—was hard. Uh, that—that one was actually hard. That was—that was the—because they—they were good in 2014, and 2016, and 2018. Um, and we—we fell short—2016 was the last one that kind of broke my heart. And 2021 was hard because they got so close for no good reason.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: No good reason at all. Like, it—like the -51 run differential, um, which I don’t know if this made it out into the wider baseball world, but we all refer to it as the fun differential.
BOBBY: Yes.
MIKE: Um, okay. I—I think that made it out there. But, uh, getting that close and falling short, it’s just—the not making the playoffs thing was mostly just like an irritation. Um, it did—it wasn’t—uh, there wasn’t a lot of pain involved with it anymore. It was just—like, I want to just stop having this be a thing that I have to repeat about my team. Can they just make the playoffs? And so when they didn’t do it in 2021, I was like, “God, friggin’, hmm.” And then they did it in 2022, and then not only that, but went to Toronto, and we got our weekend in Toronto, um, which immediately—you know, that weekend in Toronto is instantly like a top 10, maybe even top 5 sort of set of moments for the franchise. And so if they had just, like, sort of made it and then fallen on their faces, I—I think I would ultimately have just been like—uh, it barely even counts. But the fact that they did beat—and if there’s any Blue Jays fans out there, a much better Blue Jays team than us, right? Like I—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: We do get that, right? But we got Luis Castillo now, so that’s cool. Um, and, uh—uh, so that weekend in Toronto was—was really, really special and then, you know, of course, we went to, like, the Astros and that went less [72:23]
BOBBY: Um, that went kind of—
ALEX: For—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —for—for most teams, yeah.
BOBBY: Exactly.
MIKE: Yeah. Yeah, I still have not seen the homerun that Yordan Alvarez hit fall. Um, I was—I was—I was watching that game while making dinner in my kitchen on my laptop and I was—you know, I—I was—I was probably actually, like, burning dinner at this point, because I was just pacing around the kitchen. And then, like, hands on my knees, you know, watching this game. And then as soon hit—
BOBBY: Out of breath.
MIKE: As soon as—yeah, exactly. As soon as he hit it, I closed my laptop. And still I have not seen the ball come down. I’ve never seen him around the bases. I don’t know—I have no visual memory of their celebration, because I just closed the laptop and was like, “Well,
that sucks.”
BOBBY: That’s what we call it protecting your peace as a baseball fan.
ALEX: Yeah.
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: Right there.
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: Doing what you need to do.
MIKE: That’s right.
ALEX: If the—if the Astros win the series and no one is around to actually watch it, did they win?
MIKE: And—and luckily though, uh, I do actually love Yordan Alvarez a lot. I think he’s just a sensational player and I think he’s great for baseball. And I think that a guy like that, having a moment like that, um, you know, burnishing his own resume and his legend, and, like, everything that he’s bringing to the game, to have him go out there and club something that dramatic is, like, kind of objectively great for baseball. It just sucks that it came against my team like that.
BOBBY: Sucks to be on the other end of that, yeah.
MIKE: Yeah. It really—it really, really sucks to be on the other that, but if it was anybody on that team, he’s the one who I’m glad it went—like if it—if it had been, you know, [73:52] or like Bregman or something, I would have been deeply—
BOBBY: God. Yeah.
MIKE: —deeply, deeply annoyed. Uh, but Yordan Alvarez, it’s just like, “Yeah, man, go do it, dude.” Like, “Great.”
BOBBY: He just goes out there and he crushes, and then he’s—
MIKE: He’s—
BOBBY: He was not involved in the 2017 stuff at all and it’s just hard—
MIKE: Yup.
BOBBY: —to not like that guy.
MIKE: And like that—and that series, too, they were like—like, it was like the first time his parents, like, had watched him play Major League Baseball, because, like, the State Department got involved in bringing him—
BOBBY: Right. Yeah.
MIKE: —bringing them over. And so it’s, like—the whole thing is like, “What am I going to do to, like, be mad that Yordan Alvarez hit a homerun to win a game in front of his mom?” Like—but that’s—
BOBBY: Right. It would be really funny—
MIKE: No, I’m not—I’m not mad at him for that.
BOBBY: It’d be really fun if you cut the other direction. You were just like, “Nah, F that guy.”
MIKE: Yeah, send him back.
[laughter]
BOBBY: Uh, Mike, uh, a—a soft pivot here. I wanted to talk to you about—as—as the historian that you are, I wanted to talk a little bit about baseball and its relationship to its own history and, um, like its mythmaking, and its archiving. Um, like what do you think it is about baseball that makes us as fans, as, like, the stewards of the game, like be so obsessed with its relationship to its own history and, like, romanticizing it as a—as a pop cultural item?
MIKE: I wish I actually had a good answer to this.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, it’s not something I’ve never thought about before. Um, but it’s very clear that baseball, of all the sports, um, is obsessed with its own past and loves its own past. And as a—as a—as a historian myself if I, you know, can, you know, lay credit—or lay claim to that title, you know, I’m as interested in baseball history as I am in any particular season that I happen to be watching. Um, so I don’t know exactly what it is or, like, why soccer doesn’t sort of operate the same way. But, like, when I got—I got really, really into soccer like five years ago.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: Um, and even though soccer has this, like, amazing history, and people like Pele and Maradona, you talk about them, there really does seem to be this thing that like—soccer really doesn’t exist before the 1990’s, especially like—if you’re talking about, like, the Premier League, they just—they’re like—nothing matters before the Premier League became a thing, practically. Um, and in baseball, you know, I—I can almost guarantee you that what I said earlier about putting Alex Rodriguez on—as the starting shortstop of my all-time team, there’s gonna be somebody who comes in and goes like, “I can’t believe you wouldn’t put Honus Wagner [76:14]
BOBBY: Honus, yeah. Yeah.
MIKE: Like Honus—like Honus [76:16]
BOBBY: It—literally, it crossed my mind.
MIKE: It was like 1913 and, of course, he’s the—
BOBBY: Too many Honus—Honus Wagner joke, like it didn’t cross my mind when you said that.
MIKE: Yeah.
ALEX: Luckily—luckily, Keith Olbermann does not listen to this podcast.
BOBBY: Not that we know of. Not that we know of. Not yet he doesn’t.
MIKE: Yeah. But, you know, the fact that we still take seriously the accomplishments of Ty Cobb and, you know, and Honus Wagner and Eddie Collins, and those guys. And—and, you know, that’s a—like it’s a weird quirk of it. And you could say like, “Okay, well, it was the national pastime.” And it was so much a part of American culture for, like, 50 years that we do, you know, we do look back on it as something that was—continues to be important and inform what it means to be a fan. But like, basketball, football, soccer, even golf these days, like golf is kind of like—you know, you talk about Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, but, like, hmm, it’s not really—like people are not talking about, like, 70’s golfers with great reverence anymore. Um—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —so I don’t—I don’t actually know exactly what it is about the sport that, um, allows for this sort of thing. I could speculate wildly, um, but not—uh, most of the things that you would say seem to also apply to other sports like, “Oh, well, you know, we’ve been accumulating all these records and, like, that has something to do with it.” But like every sport has records.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, so why do we care so much about it? I don’t know. So, it’s—it’s very possible that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —that we love baseball history, because loving baseball means loving baseball history, and I’m not sure it gets more complicated than that.
BOBBY: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really astute point. I mean, something that we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is the idea of baseball, is it sort of—um, I mean, again, this, you know, century plus long history, you can actually really sort of use it to trace the broader contours of kind of American culture, right, and society. And it’s really interesting to see the way that it sort of interfaces with the outside world at various points throughout the years, right? I think especially back to kind of the—the late 1960’s when there’s a civil rights movement and—and baseball is kind of this—um, I don’t know. You’re sort of seeing that dynamic play out on the field in real-time. Um, Is there—say you were to do a—a podcast about the history of baseball or whatever, is there a [78:38] like—
MIKE: I’ve never thought about doing that, so I won’t—
BOBBY: Which I’m sure you’ve never—
MIKE: I’ve never even considered the possibility of doing.
BOBBY: No? Not—not at all?
MIKE: Well, I’m not sure what I’ll be able to say.
BOBBY: Right. Um, is there an era or—or two, or whatever, that you’re kind of particularly drawn to, that you think that there are some really sort of interesting strands that can be—kind of uphold that?
MIKE: I think every generation of baseball is interesting in its own way. Um, and if I were to do this, I think baseball is divisible into about six or seven distinct eras, um, that you can point to. Because like, you know, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, you know, era of—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —the 18—you know, ’60s 1870s, 1880s, that’s—that stuff is fascinating. Those guys are maniacs.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, the—the characters in those days are great. But also like, you know, immediate post-war, you know, integration, baseball is, uh, the most—one of the most important things that’s happening in American history, full stop at that moment, the integration of baseball was—well, you know, with the—with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum [79:42] and I think that they’re probably right, is that Jackie Robinson is the beginning of the civil rights movement, um, that you can pinpoint that. So that’s fascinating. Um, I—the crazy days of AstroTurf and, um, you know, everybody wearing polyester and stealing a million bases. Um, you know, the 1970s and early ’80s, that stuff is all great. I think baseball today, as of this moment, is good.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: The last five years, I was—yeah, and I know you guys have declared a moratorium on—on talking about the rules, which I think is great. But the—
BOBBY: Well, I think the moratorium is only for you and me, so if you would like to [80:17] poetic yourself, we just can’t [80:19]
MIKE: No. No. I don’t—and I don’t—I don’t have anything new to say except that it’s great, it’s overdue, and I can’t believe that Major League Baseball actually did the right thing here, um, but that—that’s the most shocking thing of all. Um, so for the—so this season—you know, this is the first time that I’ve seriously considered putting sort of, like, social capital on the line to try to talk somebody into becoming a baseball fan. Which I—which I haven’t done for, like 10 years, I would—like, honest to God, like, people would say like, “You’re a baseball fan?” I’m like, “Yeah, um, I love baseball. You know, it’s—it’s this great thing in my life.” And they’re like, “Well, should I get into baseball?” And I’m like, “Ah.”
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: I don’t know that I can really want to talk somebody into watching this particular version of the game, which was very slow. There wasn’t a lot going on, um, and was increasingly frustrating even to me as a great baseball lover, um, to watch. So, uh, being—to answer your big question, it’s like, you know, every—every 30 years or so, you can kind of put brackets around a particular era and every single one of them has interesting people, interesting dynamics, uh, interesting styles of play, um, new equipment, new places players are coming from. You know, um, and so none—none could really stand above any of the others. You know, when the Mariners win the World Series, I’ll say, that’s the era that baseball was the best.
BOBBY: Yeah, I mean, uh, what you said there about, like, being able to sell the game to one of your friends who’s asking you about it, who’s not a big baseball fan, like Alex and I encounter that all the time, because we are huge baseball fans, but we went—like took to a college, frankly, where there wasn’t a lot of other people who are into sports. Like we went to NYU, a lot of people were into, like, arts and movies and stuff like that. But not—there was, of course, other baseball fans there, but we weren’t, like, constantly surrounded by people who were super into baseball. And so when our friends would ask us about this, or, like, as our friend group, we were trying to convince them to come to games with us, we would always try to sell like that in-person experience of baseball, like that community vibe of actually—what you were describing, Mike, like your childhood sitting—sitting around in the bleachers and just being able to watch the game and have a place to be and develop the relationship over time like that. But honestly, over the last 5 or 10 years, like you’re saying, like, that part of it has become harder too, because they’ve just made games harder to get to because of the price of it.
MIKE: Yup.
BOBBY: And the way that they’ve corporatized the game. And so while I’m encouraged by, like, some of the real changes, I think that part of what—the part of the reason that we’ve been less interested in talking about the real changes, frankly, is because like that improves the TV product, but also we need to get back to the point where we can let people go and have that in-person experience too, because that is what makes a lifetime baseball fan, is—
MIKE: I’m—
BOBBY: —being able to be at the ballpark and be around the game and immerse in it.
MIKE: Yeah. And baseball is meant to be a, uh—you know, it’s a daily game, right? It’s meant—it’s meant to be kind of background for our lives. And ideally, if you were a baseball fan and really got into it, you should feel comfortable going to 7, 10 games a year, you know, because they—there’s so many of them, but, like, it’s a Tuesday night, let’s go see a game. But if you—if you—if you make the price package of going to see a baseball game, just like one random baseball game, not dissimilar from like a football game, then, like, what are we doing here? You—you need to make it so that people can just be like, “Let’s just go. You know, let—let’s, just you know—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: “We’re not doing anything else today, let’s just go catch a game. Um, spend 15 bucks, you know, 10, 15 bucks to get a ticket. Um, spend a little bit on concessions, but not, you know, through—not through the roof, and get in and get out, and enjoy yourself. And that’s—that was my experience growing up. Uh, these days, I you know, I took my kids to one game last year, around one Major League game. I went to a couple more of myself. I’m actually gonna take my son this year. I’m—uh, I live in the Midwest now and all the Midwest stadiums, I’ve never been to. And so in August, I actually plotted out a thing that’s gonna take me, like, from Kansas City to Pittsburgh and back.
BOBBY: Nice.
MIKE: And I’m gonna—I’m gonna check off, like, seven stadiums, but I’m already, uh—
BOBBY: Kansas City—Kansas City is awesome.
MIKE: So I’m—I’m doing the math right now and just like, “God, how am I gonna get out of this without, like, you know, breaking the bank?” But I—I’m also trying to give my son, like, that kind of—because he’s 10 right now.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, and he—and he will be 11 and he loves baseball. And he—he loves—it’s so funny, like speaking of Julio, um, my son’s favorite player is Juan Soto, because—
BOBBY: Nice.
MIKE: —he’s a—because he’s a bright kid, right? I’m like, “Well. Great. What—what—what an absolutely fantastic choice, man.” Like, just nothing but validation. And then the Home Run Derby last year happens and he’s like, “Dad, I’m gonna root for Juan Soto,” and I’m like, “Come on, man, like—”
[laughter]
MIKE: “Come on.” Uh, yeah, what are we talking about? Oh, yeah, it’s—it’s too expensive to go see games which I’m [85:09]
BOBBY: Too damn—yeah, the price is too damn high—
MIKE: It’s too damn—yeah. And in Seattle, there’s—uh, there were this great, um, sort of like standing room only, like, uh, um, sort of out in left field and in centerfield, where you can just kind of get beer and gather with people. So, like, you could buy tickets to different places and, like, if you had friends there, you could kind of gather there. And they’ve—dude, they’ve roped all that off for—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Again, the—the never-ending corporate retreat.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, so, like, you get to—you get to go to those places if you’re now linked to a corporation, which wasn’t true three, four years ago. You could just go hang out there, um, which is all very annoying. Yes.
BOBBY: Yeah. I mean, it feels like every couple of years, right? There’s a conversation—an existential conversation about, you know, the future of baseball, right? And is baseball dying? And—and you know, what’s going to happen in 5 or 10 years from now? And—and I generally don’t give very much value to those because I think that baseball is fine and doing well. And if you watch a game, it’s a very exciting product. But if there is one thing that feels like a barrier to kind of growth in the future, it is this exact thing, right? it’s like, how can you actually get people in the ballpark?”
MIKE: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Like that—it’s not like, uh, you know, people are any less interested in baseball, I don’t think, and they were—or any less disposed to being interested in baseball than—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —they were 20 years ago, right? It’s just that, why—why would they participate in that right now? Especially with more and more competition from forms of entertainment, you got to like—you got to put something out there that people wanna engage with, right?
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: In—in, like, actually accessible, affordable way.
MIKE: And again, especially when there’s literally—like, your home team is playing a game 82 times, you know, it—you should be able to just kind of drop in and catch a game, and have the ownership group be like, “Yeah, we’d rather have your 15 bucks,” and fill the stadium, and create a good vibe than just doing our, like, aggressive corporate strategy, which it was—it was like 10, 15 years ago now that, uh, they accidentally—you know, the—the guy, uh—uh, the guy with the Angels did a Kinsey—do you guys know what the Kinsley gaffe is?
BOBBY: No.
MIKE: Does that phrase mean anything to you? So Kinsley gaffe, it’s named after Michael Kinsley, um, who was a political reporter—uh, writer in DC for a long time. And a Kinsley gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. And so there’s a—there was a Kinsely gaffe like 15 years ago, a guy with the Angels who was like, “Oh, yeah, the whole point is to get, uh, get fewer—we’ll—we’ll do fewer fans as long as they’re richer.” Right? So like, the—the ideal scenario for a lot of these owners is to have, like, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos be the only two people in the stadium, but they—
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: —paid $5 million for their tickets, and they’re paying $10,000 of beer. And like, that’s—that’s the ideal for a lot of, like, the ownership and, like, sort of the—the business side of the franchises rather than like a more kind of, like, Bill Veeck style of ownership, which is like, “Let’s—let’s create like a rowdy awesome, you know, environment for the team and have that atmosphere be the fun part of it.” Um, which I don’t think paying $25 for a crab sandwich is what I’m looking for when I go to a baseball game.
BOBBY: See, on Tipping Pitches, we—
MIKE: It wasn’t even that—it wasn’t even that good. Yeah, it wasn’t even that good.
BOBBY: See on Tipping Pitches, we don’t call that a Kinsley gaffe, we call that a Manfred moment, because he seems—
MIKE: Oh, right.
BOBBY: —to find himself doing that quite often these days.
MIKE: Yeah. Yeah, Manfred. We could use an—we could use a new commissioner, but, like, you know, whatever—all the commissioners have been bad, basically.
BOBBY: Yes. Well, that’s the job. The job is to be oppositional to everybody—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —except to the owners, you know? Like, um, Mike, we’re gonna let you get out of here, but, uh, I did want to ask you before you go. Uh, we were joking in the—in the Twitter DMs about your—your famous, um, bit from history of Rome about Aurelian and Sandy Koufax.
MIKE: Um, sure.
BOBBY: So, uh, you—you dug up your—your spreadsheet or your file of all of the comparisons that you did for every Roman emperor. I wondered—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —if you wanted to give, like, an updated version of that or—or resurface that? Or Alex was wondering if there is a Rob Manfred Roman emperor that you can relate him to?
MIKE: Um, I—I would have to think about it harder.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Um, I—this is something I did, like, 10 years ago.
BOBBY: So pre-Manfred.
MIKE: Uh—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is—this is pre—this is pre a lot of things. So—so anything that’s—that’s in this, but for those—for the uninitiated, uh, in the history of Rome, there was an emperor named Aurelian who, you know, was—was an emperor for a very brief period, for five years, before he was assassinated. But what he accomplished in those five years was actually, like, of world historical importance. Like, he is the pivot of—the Roman Empire is about to fall in the Third Century and they pivot kind of back to life on their way to Constantine and the Christianization of the empire. And so I said if—that he’s basically the Sandy Koufax of emperors, because he was only around for five years, but, man, those five—what a—what a peak, you know? And he’s never—he’s never gonna show up on the list of greatest emperors of all-time. That’s always like Augustus and Diocletian and Constantine, guys who—
BOBBY: Right.
MIKE: You know, the Strumskis of the world who play such a—
BOBBY: They [90:07] more war over, right, longer careers.
MIKE: Exactly. Their—yeah. Their wins—the—you know—
BOBBY: Ah.
MIKE: —but their—but their wins above average, you know, maybe—
BOBBY: Right. Right.
MIKE: —maybe sometimes pedestrian, but their wins above replacement, quite high. Whereas Koufax and Aurelian were—were really, really high. So, you know, some of this is not like, um, uh, you know, the most, you know, surprising stuff, like who’s Julius Caesar? He’s Willie Mays—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: —um, because just good at everything, like the best at everything. Who’s Augustus? He’s Babe Ruth. But then like I said, like, so Nero, right? We all know Nero, famously, you know, a teenage emperor. Um, Joe West, umpire Joe West.
BOBBY: Wow!
MIKE: And I—and I—I wrote here—why I wrote, “An overly sensitive, childish egomaniac who just makes everything worse, and also fancies himself a great musician.”
BOBBY: Wow. Oh, my God.
MIKE: So that’s pretty perfect. Um—
BOBBY: That’s—yeah. You know, I gotta tip the cap for that one. That’s—we—
ALEX: Yeah.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: We—we’ve talked so much here. We’ve talked quite a bit about him. We’ve actually done a full review of his—um, not released on streaming musical album. So, yeah—
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: —we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Joe.
MIKE: Like, what, uh, what else do I have here? Oh, um, oh, Domitian is Dick Allen, who was volatile and misunderstood, but way better than anybody cares to remember. Um, uh, but Dick Allen in the hall of fame and Domitian as an emperor, I think gets a bad rap. Uh, there’s a guy called Nerva who was—who was, uh, the predecessor for the Five Good Emperors. He’s—he’s somewhat associated with them, but he was only an emperor for, like, two years, so he’s Wally Pipp, whose singular accomplishment is giving up his job to somebody way better.
[laughter]
MIKE: Um, who was Trajan? Trajan is Mickey Mantle, who’s one of the greatest of all-time and also a raging alcoholic. Um, Hadrian is Tony La Russa because he’s an infuriating micromanager and pompous know it all, but also undeniably had some success.
BOBBY: Had some success. Yeah, exactly.
MIKE: Yeah, yeah. Antoninus Pius, these are the Five Good Emperors, um, is Bobby Cox who’s just a man presiding over a golden age. Oh, Marcus Aurelius is Greg Maddux. Yeah.
BOBBY: Oh. Ooh.
MIKE: Yeah. Overly cerebral, but always focused on, uh, his—on practical application.
BOBBY: Precise. Precision.
MIKE: Oh, God, and then this—I—like I scanned this last night. I’ve forgotten a lot of this. So—you guys know Commodus?
BOBBY: Yes.
MIKE: Okay, because he’s—this is—if—if you’re listening to this, if you saw Gladiator, the Joaquin Phoenix character is Commodus and—and Commodus is widely viewed as sort of the moment, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, like, truly begins. That’s—that’s where Gibbon [92:37] says. So, uh, so the comp is Commodus when CBS bought the Yankees.
[laughter]
MIKE: What else do we got here? Alexander Severus. Oh, Maximinus Thrax is our Hrabosky, right, because he was the first barbarian emperor.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: Um, oh, this is a good—this is a good one, too. This is another Yankee joke. Um, during the crisis of the Third Century, there was this period where there was like—there was kind of a new emperor like every six months. Um, they—the guys were just getting assassinated and they dropped off. So I wrote all emperors from A.D. 244 to 260, Bill Virdon, Billy Martin, Dick Howser, Bob Lemon, Billy Martin II, Dick Howser II, Gene Michael, Bob Lemon II, Gene Michael II, Clyde King, Billy Martin III, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin IV, Lou Piniella, Billy Martin V, Lou Piniella II, Dallas Green, Bucky Dent, [93:30], Buck Showalter.
BOBBY: Amazing. That’s like—
MIKE: And then—and then—and then Valerian is Joe Torre, um, who I wrote—
BOBBY: Yeah. Yeah [93:40] yeah, re-stabilizes.
MIKE: Who finally—yeah, finally some stability, but is then captured and held hostage by the crapshoot that is the playoffs, um, because that’s—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: —that’s what happened. Gallienus is Gene Tenace. I wrote, how good can a lifetime .241 batter hitter be? Um—
BOBBY: This is really flushed out. Yeah.
MIKE: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you—
BOBBY: [93:57] just given all this stuff away for free, so the [93:58] what’s going on there?
MIKE: Yeah. No, this is great. And then—oh, and then so Aurelian is Sandy Koufax and then the guy who follows Aurelian where—like there was a little blip, there’s Probus. Uh, and Probus was actually quite good too, and he was, like, second in command to Aurelian, so he’s Don Drysdale—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: —um, because he’s Aurelian’s wingman. Um—
BOBBY: Imagine having Koufax and Drysdale at the same time.
ALEX: That’s crazy.
MIKE: Yeah. My dad grew up in LA on those teams. Yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: [94:19] God. Wow, I’m jealous of your dad then. That’s insane.
MIKE: Carus, Carinus, and Numerian. Jerry Hairston, Jerry Hairston, Jr., Scott Hairston. A family of replacement level emperors directly.
[laughter]
MIKE: Uh, oh, Diocletian is Branch Rickey, um—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: —because he—because he invented the imperial farm system.
BOBBY: Uh-huh.
MIKE: Um, so that’s good. Uh, Constantius Chlorus is, um, that’s Constantine’s father.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Uh, so he’s Ken Griffey, Sr.
BOBBY: Right. Uh-hmm.
MIKE: Who has a good career in his own right, but is destined to be overshadowed by his son. Um, oh, God. And then I—oh, I took a real shot at Albert Pujols right here.
BOBBY: Oh, no.
MIKE: Constantine, Albert Pujols. Brilliant early career, then moves halfway across the world. Outwardly pious, but often masks selfish and unpleasant behavior.
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: Wow.
MIKE: Wow. That —I took a real—I must—I was mad at Albert Pujols [95:15]
BOBBY: Yeah, I guess we have to situate ourselves 10 years ago. This must have been, like—what Albert Pujols did, was he, like, leaving the Cardinals for more money? Was that—was that the angle of that?
MIKE: He—no. Well, he—I think it was right when he left the Cardinals for the Angels and I think he was doing this, like, this routine about how the Cardinals, like, disrespected him. Um—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: —and then he’s—he’s one of those guys that really has that, like, sort of, like, “You must respect Albert Pujols, um, and I’m a great person and I’m—I’m—”he’s—he’s very, you know, overly Christian about, you know, sort of everything that he does, and so I think I was just, like, kind of annoyed at his, um—
BOBBY: His antics.
MIKE: —you know? Yes [95:54]
BOBBY: We’ve come all the way back around, though. He’s cool. He’s cool.
MIKE: Moral grandstanding—I mean, shit, man. I—Albert Pujols might start first base for me. Um—
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE:—when he—when he—when he was in his prime, I mean, there’s maybe not a better first baseman who [96:07] for sure.
BOBBY: That’s the reason he got the nickname, The Machine. Yeah.
MIKE: Julian the Apostate, he’s the guy who after, uh, the empire Christianized. He’s the one who tried to, like, undo the Christianization—
BOBBY: Okay.
MIKE: —and return to, um, return to the old days. So I wrote Comerica Park 2000 to 2003. In an age of exploding offense and attempt to bring back the dead ball era. Which is awesome, which is—that’s all—also not like a deep cut, right? Like Petco Park probably would—would have worked better for that joke.
BOBBY: Yeah.
MIKE: Valens is the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies. I don’t even remember why I wrote that.
[laughter]
MIKE: [96:45]
BOBBY: It was in your bag.
MIKE: Man. Valens is the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, man. And then—oh, and then—and then we’ll, uh, we’ll end it right here. Theodosius was Alex Rodriguez.
BOBBY: Hey. Yeah.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
MIKE: Who was a—who was a giant and, uh, who was once excommunicated by St. Selig of Milan [97:05] and forced to serve 211 games of penance for his sins.
[laughter]
BOBBY: Well done. A round of applause for that.
MIKE: Yeah. Uh, thank you.
MIKE: This is—this is what I get up to in my spare time.
BOBBY: Yeah, get—wild and crazy stuff, Mike Duncan.
MIKE: Yeah.
BOBBY: Um, thank you so much. Would you like to plug anything specifically for the listeners of the Tipping Pitches podcast?
MIKE: Well, I mean, buy my books, please.
BOBBY: Yeah,
MIKE: That’d be great. Um, but I am actually about to start a new podcast, uh, that will be focused on history books. Um, it’ll be kind of like a—a weekly history book show with a—a woman named Alexis Coe, who wrote a great biography of George Washington a couple years ago called You Never Forget Your First. Um, and we are going to—we’re getting together. Um, that’s actually starting now. Uh, so the show doesn’t exist quite yet, but probably in the next like, six, eight weeks, we’ll start dropping episodes. And it’s—it’s like a book of the week thing. We’ll just—we’ll pick a book, hopefully a new book. Um, you know, get—get some new author, new historian to come on and talk about their book and what’s coming out, and hopefully just kind of become the place you go if you want to know, um, what the new history books are and what you should be, uh, what you should be reading out there.
BOBBY: Love it. Thank you so much, Mike.
ALEX: Thanks, Mike.
MIKE: Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER 4: Even when we fade eventually, I’m nothing. You will always be my favorite form of loving.
ALEX: Okay, thank you, Mike Duncan.
BOBBY: Thank you to you, Alex. You continue to just—you’re putting up, like, 30 and 10 about the A’s, you know? Incredible efficiency in the face of adversity. You’re just getting up—you’re getting up shots. Still efficient. I appreciate it.
ALEX: I appreciate you and I appreciate you, uh, letting me, uh, sit on the sidelines for the next couple of weeks with regards today. I need a rest.
BOBBY: Oh, I thought you were saying in general. I thought you were—you were just consigning me to do the podcast by myself for a few weeks, so you just take some time away to search, you know—
ALEX: Well—
BOBBY: —search within yourself.
ALEX: I might need to.
BOBBY: That’s a funny idea. Podcast sabbatical, just like off for a week.
ALEX: If there would ever be a time to do one.
BOBBY: Alex is, uh, playing his podcast sabbatical card this week. Vetoed. Denied, denied. Denied sabbatical.
ALEX: Man.
BOBBY: Thanks, everybody for listening. We’ll be back next week.
SPEAKER 4: [99:30]
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!
SPEAKER 5: I gotta go somewhere.
[1:39:55]
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