Effectively Wild Episode 1488: Wrinkle, Wrinkle, Little Star
Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2020
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller review a wild, rumor-filled Thursday in baseball, touching on Jessica Mendoza’s comments about Mike Fiers, the end of Carlos Beltrán’s brief tenure as Mets manager, the Mets’ handling of his exit, the saga of not-Beltrán’s-niece, Twitter detectives following alleged leads about buzzers, Alex Bregman, and José Altuve, how efforts to document the banging scheme fueled the search for suspicious jerseys, MLB losing control of the sign-stealing narrative, comments on sign stealing by non-Astros players, how bad the scandal will be for baseball, and (on a happier note) the Giants’ hiring of Alyssa Nakken, the first female major league coach, then answer listener emails about how the Astros’ performance in 2020 will affect perceptions of sign stealing’s effectiveness, how many games the Astros would win if they were barred from the playoffs, the baseball equivalent of Ed “Straight Arrow” Gennero from Necessary Roughness, and Beltrán’s chances of making the Hall of Fame, plus a Stat Blast on striking out every hitter in a game.
Audio intro: Dr. Dog, "Buzzing in the Light"
Audio outro: Donovan, "Jersey Thursday"
Link to Mendoza comments
Link to Michael Baumann on the spread of sign-stealing rumors
Link to Jeff Passan’s recap of Thursday
Link to Alyssa Nakken story
Link to Bregman’s 2018 comments about Beltrán
Link to Cora’s 2018 comments about Beltrán
Link to Verlander’s 2017 comments about sign stealing
Link to Jay Jaffe on Beltrán’s Hall of Fame chances
Link to Will Leitch on the sign-stealing scandal
Link to Congressional letter
Link to order The MVP Machine
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Only in the light, I'm causing in the light of this world |
| 0:10.0 | I'm causing in the light, I'm causing in the light of this world |
| 0:21.0 | I'm not alone in the mystery, I'm not alone in the mystery |
| 0:29.0 | I'm not alone in the mystery, I'm not alone in the mystery |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to episode 1488 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from fan crafts presented by our Patreon supporters. |
| 0:45.0 | I am Ben Limberg of the Ringer joined by Sam Miller of ESPN, Hello Sam. |
| 0:50.0 | Hey Ben, we're going to do some emails today, but before we do, I want to do a bit of banter |
| 0:56.0 | and I think this will be good because you missed everything that happened on Thursday, you're on vacation |
| 1:02.0 | and you were not online on probably the busiest, saltiest, most rumor-filled baseball Twitter day I can recall |
| 1:10.0 | and some of our less extremely online listeners may have missed most of that entry, which frankly may not have been a bad thing |
| 1:17.0 | but because you were away from your computer, this will be largely new to you too, so I can explain it to you as if I were an explorer |
| 1:26.0 | recently returned from some strange land and you can stop me at any point if you have questions about what happened. |
| 1:34.0 | Oh, okay. |
| 1:36.0 | It'll be like that time when you didn't see the playoff games and you asked me about the playoff games and you were surprised when I told you who won. |
| 1:44.0 | This time I think the winners were people who were bored at work on a weekday. |
| 1:47.0 | Alright, hit me. |
| 1:48.0 | Okay, here we go. |
| 1:49.0 | So the day began with a debate about Mike Fires and his role in all of this, so Jessica Mendoza said she disapproved of the public way. |
| 1:58.0 | He went about blowing the whistle on the asterisks, which she later walked back a bit in response to a big backlash. |
| 2:04.0 | I saw people calling Fires a hero and while I'm not sure I would go that far, to me it depends a bit on what his motivations were. |
| 2:11.0 | I do think that regardless of his motivations, he performed a very valuable service and the public approach proved important and to criticize him for ratting out teammates who were cheating, |
| 2:21.0 | just encourages other people to keep quiet about unethical behavior that's going on. |
... |
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