Effectively Wild Episode 1616: MLB’s Other Cheating Problem
Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2020
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Marlins hiring Kim Ng and the significance of Ng becoming MLB’s first woman GM, the Angels hiring Perry Minasian and the team’s ownership issues, Kyuji Fujikawa and an NPB unwritten rule, Ryan Tepera’s accidental MVP vote, and how FanGraphs readers feel about 2020’s new rules, plus a Stat Blast about Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, and the most prolific putout tandems in MLB history. Then (43:30) they talk to The Athletic’s Eno Sarris and former MLB pitcher David Aardsma about MLB’s problem with pitchers using banned foreign substances, touching on how foreign substances help, how prevalent they are, Aardsma’s personal experience with foreign substances, how players learn to use them, whether getting a better grip really helps hitters’ safety, Trevor Bauer’s possibly substance-enhanced Cy Young award, whether sticky stuff will be baseball’s next big scandal, what MLB can do to address its widespread rule-breaking behavior, the future of player development, and more.
Audio intro: Imperial Teen, "The First"
Audio interstitial: Della Mae, "It’s About Time"
Audio outro: Courtney Barnett, "Kim’s Caravan"
Link to Lindsey Adler on Kim Ng
Link to Christina Kahrl on the first woman GM
Link to Christina Kahrl interview episode
Link to Rosenthal’s report on Minasian
Link to Bill Shaikin on Moreno’s ownership
Link to Fujikawa unwritten rules story
Link to video of Saito’s last batter
Link to story about Mantle and McLain
Link to Tepera explanation
Link to Tepera tweet
Link to Jay Jaffe’s rules survey results
Link to putout tandems data
Link to Ben on foreign substances
Link to Eno on foreign substances
Link to Rob Arthur on foreign substances
Link to Eno on Bauer’s 2018 experiment
Link to Defector on Bauer’s 2020
Link to Pineda ejection video
Link to Angels foreign substance lawsuit story
Link to article about Blue Jays layoffs
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The first is the best and the best is the secrets. |
| 0:18.0 | The taste of the last is sour. |
| 0:34.0 | Hello and welcome to episode 1616 of Effectively Wild, a fan-graft spaceball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. |
| 0:48.0 | I'm Meg Raleigh of the Angrafts and I'm joined as always by Ben Lumberg of the Ringr. Ben, how are you? |
| 0:54.0 | I'm doing pretty well. How are you? |
| 0:56.0 | I'm doing pretty well. |
| 0:58.0 | We've got some huge and heartening news today. |
| 1:02.0 | We haven't had a whole lot of that lately. |
| 1:04.0 | No. |
| 1:06.0 | We woke up to or at least became aware of the news Friday morning that the Marlins had hired Kim Ang as their general manager. |
| 1:14.0 | The first woman to be a general manager in the majors or for a men's team. |
| 1:20.0 | I guess in any of the major American sports and also the second GM of Asian descent in MLP. |
| 1:28.0 | This is huge news. |
| 1:30.0 | It's just a very exciting thing to how do I want to put this. |
| 1:36.0 | It is very easy to know that a thing is literally possible that there are many, many qualified women who work in baseball, perhaps none as qualified as Kim in terms of her longevity in the sport. |
| 1:52.0 | She's occupied both on the team side and with the league. |
| 1:56.0 | The sort of resolve and resiliency of her interest in being a general manager. |
| 2:00.0 | It is one thing to know that it is literally possible for a woman to be the general manager of a major league baseball team. |
| 2:08.0 | It is quite another to see it literally happen. |
| 2:12.0 | And to know that that barrier has been broken. |
| 2:14.0 | To know that a woman is going to sit in that seat as you mentioned in Asian American woman. |
| 2:20.0 | Someone who has had to deal with the dueling challenges of being a woman in this industry and a person of color in this industry and having to navigate that and being so qualified for so long. |
... |
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