So you're the width of spoiler, ace of bass boiling. I play ball like Billy Hoyle. Now I need a Sydney Dean to help me start this rifle and the Philippines. I stay aflushin like I'm Dylan G. You ain't got to open the climate.

Good morning and welcome to episode 599 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcasts from bass ball perspectives presented by the play index at baseball reference.com. I am Ben Lindbergh of Grantland joined by Sam Miller of baseball perspectives.

Hello Ben. How are you? Good. How are you? Okay. Excellent. To listen to your email show in a play index segment show, but before we begin we have some banter.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the Dave Stewart thing. You saw the Dave Stewart thing. I did. Do you have it in front of you by chance? I do. Can you read the quote? Yeah. So this is from Nick the Coro. He is quoting Dave Stewart, the new GM of the Diamond Vax in the Arizona Republic. He was talking about many things, but specifically about James Shields and how the team is interested in James Shields. So Stewart said, I think James is a throat.

I think James is a throwback guy by the way he goes about his business and the innings he pitches. I think the fact that Tony LaRusse is here and that we have more baseball people. He probably sees us as a true baseball team versus some of the other teams out there that are geared more toward analytics and those types of things.

Sometimes their concessions, the player will make to be here. It's the case that he likes what we're doing with our organization from our end. All we can hope is that there will be enough concessions that he can be here.

So this was immediately for 40 minutes everybody was making their jokes about Dave Stewart and expressing their outrage and so on.

You can certainly, I think it's fair to say that if there was a team that escued any source of relevant information, they would be subject criticism. However, I don't really know why he said this.

I don't think that it is really supposed to be saying what we take it to mean because nobody really says what people were taking it to mean out loud. I'm not sure what exactly he is saying there and why he is saying it and who he is saying it to.

I think that there must be subtext to it that we don't understand or information behind it that we don't appreciate. And I just wanted to know what your best guess is for what he is saying and why.

And before I'd be back to just preemptive, I think that probably there's some justifiable reason. I mean, I didn't find it necessarily to be criticizing because we don't know, like I don't think we know the answers to those three things.

And if you don't know the answers to those three things, you can't really assume the worst possible interpretation of it, which is what I think we tend to do on Twitter.

But what would be your interpretation of it to answer those three questions?

Well, it's hard to come up with an interpretation that paints them in a very positive or different light.

Let me get, let me, for instance, though, we don't, he doesn't have to necessarily be, we don't have to assume he's speaking truthfully. He could be speaking directly to James Shields, maybe.

I imagine he is.

Yeah, so if it's an audience of one, then we have to think about what message is he trying to communicate to that audience.

And so what message do you think he's trying to communicate to that audience?

Because I don't think that there's no real, I mean, James Shields loved playing with the rays.

I remember after they traded him, I remember that he went to, like a week after they traded him, the team bus went down to spring training, left, you know, left the top or whatever.

To go down the spring training and he went to say goodbye to everybody and to like, you know, be the wife, sort of blowing kisses at the bus as it left.

So he clearly loved being there. So it's not as though you're going to convince him like, oh, all any team run by, you know, Wall Street Guy sucks.

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