I can't even get to know, sad is a fashion.

I can't even get to know, sad is a fashion.

Hello and welcome to episode 1554 of Effective Wild, a fan-graphed baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Raleigh of Fan-graphs and I am joined this evening by two special guest co-hosts.

First is Shakyah Taylor, whose work can be found most often at baseball prospectus Shakyah Hario.

I'm good, how are you?

I'm doing okay. We are also joined by Bradford William Davis of the New York Daily News,

who also hosts a podcast to a baseball prospectus, so be sure to check that out.

Bradford, how are you doing?

You know, better?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think like two to three weeks ago, I'll give you the answer, but you know, better.

It's a strange question to be asking, I think it's one that prior to March and certainly prior to the last couple of weeks has often been a perfunctory one.

And is now kind of a loaded one, so sorry for starting with that.

We asked both of you to join me this evening because we would like to talk about baseball's response, and we will interpret that broadly to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

So we thought that the two of you who have given really terrific insight into your own experiences in baseball have written on baseball topics that are wide ranging and certainly have been vocal in your sort of, I think, disapproval at times is the right way to frame it, and certainly frustration with baseball's sort of institutional response to this moment,

and that you would have some really valuable perspective and insight for our listeners.

So I appreciate you both taking the time to join me.

And I think that where it might make sense for us to start is to ask, for me to ask this, which was, we saw baseball sort of MLB as an entity take a very long time to respond to the murder of George Floyd and the protests.

And I'm curious what your reaction to the team and league statements that it put out in response to that event and the subsequent protests were.

A lot of them seemed to be designed to get the org's credit for not being racist while also not pissing off any of the racists who might root for their teams.

And so I'm curious if any of them read to you as being particularly useful or sincere, and I guess we could ask the same question of the player statements.

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