Take me up and take me away

Inside me rolls a race

What my life been a wood and barks and say

Save me out to save

Talking about Rachel

Hello and welcome to episode 1796 of Effectively Wild, a fan graph space ballpark that's brought to you by our

patrons and porters, I'm Agralia Fandras and I'm joined as always by Ben Lumberg of the Ringer.

Ben, how are you?

I am well, how are you?

I'm well! Got a jam packed episode!

So last week we did a bunch of episodes that we collected under a loose theme of measuring the unmeasurable.

We talked to a lot of people about quantifying difficult to quantify aspects of the sport and I guess this episode sort of fits into that theme.

Maybe this will be the last of those for now, although we're kind of always discussing that uneffectively wild.

But today we are talking about some biases that exist in Major League Baseball and in Minor League Baseball, racial biases to be specific.

Later in the episode we will be talking to Shakyatailer who wrote and reported about a study that came out last year about the demographics of MLB managers and front office personnel.

Before we bring on Shakyat, we'll be talking to Rob Arthur, baseball prospectus and Rocky's minor league catcher AJ Lewis about the lack of black catchers in Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball for that matter.

But before we get to racial bias, I guess we could talk a little bit about gender bias or the lessening thereof, the slow and slight lessening because it's been a pretty big week for women getting cool jobs.

Yeah, professional baseball. So we should probably talk about a few of those hires the most notable of which was the Yankees promoting Rachel Balkovich to manager.

She will be the first woman to manage in affiliated pro baseball team. She will be the manager of the Yankees low a affiliate, the Tampa tarpens in 2022.

Yeah, this is just deeply cool news. Sometimes you get baseball news and you're like, hey, that's red. I feel like we don't get to say that unequivocally as often as we would like, which is a real shame because baseball as a sport is red like objectively.

I think we should all use rad as an aside as a descriptor. It's really good fun little word. So yeah, now we get to interact with very cool news.

I think Rachel has been sort of a rising star within not just the Yankees organization, but within baseball more generally in the last little bit here.

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