And so in the, I'm sorry I missed you at a secret meeting in the basement of my brain.

It went the stolen week, it all went very way.

It went the stolen week, it all went very way.

Good morning and welcome to episode 985 effectively wild with the daily podcast from baseball perspective.

Brought to you by the plane dex, baseballreference.com and our Patreon supporters.

I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer. Hi Ben.

Hello. How are you? Okay. Anything you want to talk about?

Well, as I'm sure you saw Mike Fitzgerald was hired by the Diamondbacks.

He is a former quantitative analyst for the pirates and wrote about him and the pirates are indeed department a couple years ago.

Grantland because they were doing something that seemed sort of novel at the time in that Fitzgerald was traveling with the team full time.

And he was in the clubhouse as kind of a liaison between the front office and the field staff.

And it seemed like a model that could be copied by other teams.

Anyway, the Diamondbacks have now hired him as the director of their new R&D department.

And of course they had an R&D department before under the old regime.

But it was led by like an old buddy of Tony Rourouss who didn't really have the background that you traditionally associate with someone who was running in our R&D department.

So it was kind of a Diamondbacks version of that.

And so I think we've finally reached the point now where I've been waiting for a while and wondering when it would happen.

But the point where there's no team that is a holdout or like notable for being a holdout or ever says anything that would suggest that it is in any way a holdout.

Like there's always been one or two of those teams even as every other team fell in line and started talking about those stats and scouts and we blend the two together.

And you know the whole usual rhetoric of the enlightened modern baseball team.

There was always at least one holdout somewhere. It was the Phillies.

You know, it was the Royals for a while. It was the Phillies. It was the Diamondbacks. It was twin.

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