Pouty and welcome to the Three shout Comes podcast presented by Baseball Perspectus. I'm
your host, Dan Leftgowitz, and I'm joined as always by Ben Marphine and
Jared Weiss. I guess I know how you guys are doing. I assume
if anyone has read the introduction to this podcast or the title, you know
how we're doing as well. And it's been kind of a rough day here.
Just in case you played this without looking at the title, we all
received pretty rough news. I guess, like yesterday that our friend and probably
the most valuable member of this podcast, through Rob mcun passed away yesterday unexpectedly.
And it's been, you know, pretty strange and rough for us,
and so we're probably just going to talk about that. Sorry, it's going
to be a little bit of a downer, but hopefully, you know,
we'll also get into some good stories DeLine and kind of explain, you know,
what he meant to us in scoreset as well. Ben, I think
I'll turn over to you first, just I guess for some thoughts and like
how you got entangled with VP in the first place, because you certainly have
the longest history of us. Yeah, apologies, to all the listeners because
I'll probably end up talking more than charitar Ian for this episode, which is
not the best situation but maybe appropriate here. So I joined VP when I
was still in college. I think it was in two thousand and four,
and if memory serves, Rob actually wasn't on board at that point, but
I was helping in a technical capacity and working with Keith Wilner back before Keith
Wilner left, and when Rob joined, he was sort of helping support us
at first. And then you know, when I joined, I guess I
should say like Keith was sort of the most technical person there, or at
least like the person most in charge of the technical inner workings. And Keith
left many years ago now, and when Keith left, Rob basically stepped into
his shoes and sort of helped orchestrate all of the technical inner workings. And
I guess maybe it's hard to describe exactly what that entails, but it ended
up becoming, you know, a full time job before anybody realized it.
And then I think was you know, basically like Rob's full time job for
a while. And you know, if you haven't already, I'll link I'll
send the link out that Ian that you shared, but it's basically just like
a Twitter thread of threat of responses to the Baseball Perspectives anouncement, and I
think that's worth reading it, and I don't want to go through and reiterate
it, but it's you know, dozens of people responding basically talking about how
kind and helpful and patient Rob was. And I think that was certainly my
experience, and I think if there's a somewhat unique perspective or at least uncommon
perspective that I can shed some light on it. That around when I finished
college, so it's two or three years after I joined Baseball Perspectus, I
was still helping out fairly frequently, but I was in the middle of going
through all kinds of things as a lot of people do, finding a job
and getting married and then getting divorced and getting dogs and getting a new job
and traveling and all that kind of stuff. But I was sort of dipping
in and out of Baseball Perspectus the whole time, because I really appreciated the
community of folks there and enjoyed the work that I had done with them.
And you know, once Keith left, Rob was the most helpful person there.
And was the only reason that I was ever able to get back up
to speed after being you know, out of sync for six nine, twelve
twenty four months. You know, as you know, stuff with my life
came and went, and I was sort of in and out. I can't
count how many times I emailed Rob to be like, can you send me
the connection information to all the servers again? Because I've just you know,
forgotten them or they've changed because it's been so long. And he was always
super patient and super helpful, and I knew everything off the top of his
head because he was in charge of coordinating at all. And you know,
I think it's a tribute to who he was as a person that you like,
see all the responses and outputting on Twitter. But if there's something that
I can shed some light on is that the stuff that he did was technically
fairly difficult, and he was struggling a lot of things all at once.
And the fact that Baseball Prospectus was capable of churning out so much content and
keeping the website going and you know, maybe not updating it as often as
all the readers would like, but actually going through several site refreshes in that
decade plus generating all the content for the books. You know, all of
that stuff was all orchestrated by Rob, and everybody that ever interacted with him
had only good things to say about how all that went. So, you
know, think of all of the hundreds of thousands of words that have spilled
onto the Internet and onto the pages of Baseball Perspectus, and it's maybe only
a slight overstatement to say that most of them wouldn't have been there without Rob's
help in some capacity or another, either from the website itself or the publishing
process for the book and what have you. And I think a lot of
people that mentioned stuff on Twitter sort of talked about how unheralded he was,
and I think that was most by his choice. You know, he got
a lot of credits and appreciation at the bottom articles and stuff like that,
and mentions in the book, but you know, he was always in it
just to be helpful, because this is what he wanted to be doing,
because he loved it. And and when I was reading through the tributes of
the thing that sort of stuck out to me and sort of struck a chord
in me was, you know, I don't know, I'm not. I
don't want to go too far, but I don't really know that I've ever
seen anybody else that could support all the technical things that Baseball Prospectus needs like
Rob did, and above and beyond missing him as a person and a personality
and as a friend, which I think you will definitely get if you go
through and read the things that people have said about him and the way that
they talk about even people that only knew him for a year or less,
you know, all the way up to all the people that knew him for
you know, a decade or more. Everybody has good things to say,
and I think, you know, in reading through those things, the thing
that I sort of came back to is like, this is obviously somebody who
is an awesome person, and that's something that we can all aspire to for
sure. And I think in a company that's seen dozens of people come through
and do all kinds of amazing things in baseball, it's possible that Rob was
and is going to remain the most important person to ever work there, you
know. And that's I mean, I think that's really easy to substantiate and
a pretty tremendous accomplishment given all of the other people that you know would also
be considered for that sort of thing, And yeah, you know, I
don't know. I don't know if I don't know how the site keeps going,
I don't know how the refresh has happened, I don't know how the
data gets updated. And it was I mean, maybe a little bit fitting.
I'm gonna throw a little bit of negativity here, but like, I
so I got the email that they sent out for the announcement, and I
wasn't on Twitter, so I didn't see that thing on Twitter. But I
pulled up the VP website and there's this kind of like lame banner thing at
the top of the website that's like a nice tribute to Rob, but in
terms of like it's technical design is lame, is what I mean. It's
like it's a nice thing that somebody wrote. But it's like if if things
had unfolded a different way and Rob had been the one to like make the
banner, it would have looked really nice and it would have like had the
right funt and it would have been like well coordinated with the site and all
that stuff. And you can just sort of see right in the immediacy of
everything unfolding and like it's like, oh, like nobody could have done it
like Rob did it, because Rob was the one that did everything. Yeah,
I mean, like, I don't you know, we're we're not really
like you know, we're BP adjacent if anything, at this point. And
you know, there are a lot of great people there and the site will
keep running. But you know, from where I stand today, I don't
understand how you know that the work he did was incalculable and without complaint and
just making it look so easy, yeah, which is really you know,
the effortlessness allowed him to I guess be friendly or I don't know which one
drove the other. But like, because he was able to take on these
incredible tasks, he was able also to bring his personality yeah too good and
and extend that so far out right into the scoresheet community, which you mentioned
before. You know, I think there are people that never opened the BP
website but knew Rob through the mock draft or his other scores sheet leagues,
and are you know, equally devastated by the news. It's no exaggeration whatsoever
to say that we would certainly not be here doing this podcast or any of
the ones this year without Rob's help and support and encouragement. You know,
in a time when the podcast had gone dormant, Rob was the one that
reached out and was like, Hey, you guys should start that podcast up
again. You should really start doing more episodes. Is there anything I can
do to help? Is there any you know, like all the way up
to offering to do all the like technical production stuff, and I was,
I mean, I couldn't do that. I would feel so guilty having him
do that for us. But that was like, you know, that was
the extent of his generosity. Was like, and he you know, he
was genuinely excited about the possibility of the podcast happening again, and so he
initiated all that to happen. And so, you know, I guess in
the aftermath of the news about his passing and sort of dwelling on it earlier
today, I was like, you know, it's not going to be easy,
and it's not going to be the best episode that anybody listens to,
but we have to make sure we get together and at least talk about him
for a little while. And obviously I'm not great at just sort of extemporaneously
talking about how awesome he was. I'll say it again, like you can
see the measure of who he was by the outpouring that happens, you know,
in situations like Twitter where everybody's stepping up and everybody's saying wonderful and glowing
things because they're all true, because that's who he was. And I think
it's something for us to keep of mine this Like, at the end of
the day, being a really nice, generous, caring, thoughtful person is
probably the best thing that any of us can aspire to. So yeah,
yeah, um, and I'd like to just really well said, I'd like
to you know, expand him two points. And Jared, you know,
certainly feel free to jump in as well. Um. You talked a lot
about what he meant to BP and something about what he meant to us,
but you know, I want to talk one about what he meant to score
Sheet as a whole, because you know that's the world a lot of you
were in, and what he meant to us personally. Um, and to
score Sheet like again, just like just like Savor Metrics. You know,
I think he held a lot of Saber Metric committee together, and you know,
he held a lot of Scoresheet together. I think outside of like the
Bartons and Brian du Barry Jones and maybe a couple like I don't know that
anybody gave as much to Scoresheet as Rob and certainly that was through his enthusiasm
for it. But you know, we have talked many times about how the
Baseball Perspectives tools are the best on the site or the best anywhere for score
Sheet, and they're the reason to subscribe to BP, even if you don't
like listening to us, which we certainly understood, and that it wasn't that,
and that was you know, one hundred percent, well maybe with some
assistance from you, but like one hundred percent him and his passion for this
product in this game. And you know, I think he had more passion
for this community than literally anyone including us, maybe the creator, like just
you know, anyone out there. And you can go down the line from
that team tracker to SSM to line up developer or two like the the thing
that always got me was like the Minor League stand or the minor league game
tracker, which he would update every year, and I'm convinced I am the
only person who ever knew that and every I like in every where, I'd
be like, you know, I don't want to disturb you from the eight
thousand more important things on yard radar, but you know, the whatever the
Gwinnette stripers changed their day, Yeah, I'm on it. I have a
quick anecdote about that, at least like a tension off of that that.
Um So, I was like poking around in some of my emails and stuff
and I have some you know, random nostalgic moments earlier today, and one
of the things that I uncovered was a list of ideas that Rob and I
had brainstormed at one point for like things we wanted to develop for the site.
And there's a folder out there on one of the servers that basically has
like I don't know, I'll say, like a dozen little side projects that
he and I spun off at some point thinking like, oh, maybe this
is something that people would enjoy. And I'm very confident that after I left
that, like minor league scoreboard is a good example of these types of things.
Was like Rob has an idea, He's like somebody will think this is
useful or cool or helpful or whatever, and he would just stand it up
and make it happen and put it on the site because he could. You
know, Yeah, it's like all those those the ratings of the team tracker
which are hidden in this like very strange place. You know, you can
all find that about how your team ranks compared to others, like just his
idea and right, he just put it up ss Sam, I don't know
if you want to talk about that development again. I know you've mentioned it
before, but certainly the most important metric and score sheet. Yeah, like
you guys, I essentially rebuilt it, right. It was like, yeah,
I don't want to I don't want to rehash it too much. It's
basically something that Nate Silver originally like had the original idea for. And part
of the reason I don't like talking about too much is because I don't have
to talk about Nates Silver. But he built it an Excel because that was
what he knew, and Rob and I were both like, well, this
will not do. This is not a thing we can do every year in
Excel, and so he and I sort of went through the process of rewriting
it for the website. And then you know, this was definitely after I
was not doing a whole lot of stuff to help out BP very often,
and so Rob took it over and fixed all the little bugs that I had
put in there, and like went through fairly rigorous testing to make sure that
everything tracked all the way through just right, and did a lot of debugging
on all the different steps for all the different calculations and comparing them to the
Excel spreadsheet, and and then once it was you know, pretty much done
in terms of the development, he was constantly spearheading ideas to improve it functionality,
additions, different types of you know, like all the different parameterization and
settings and stuff that are in there were almost all his idea, and I
would say vast majority of the implementation work was his work. You know,
all the updates every year, there's like there's a bunch of different little things
that you really want to like tweak and review every year, and he was
always either doing them or like asking me to review them, or you know,
like saying, hey, Ben, like what do you think A lot
of the email threads that I found in my email when I was like poking
through there were things that things that he was thinking about SSM or had her
mostly John Mayne saying about s SIM is like, hey, I think we
can fix this if we you know, try to tweak a little bit or
like what if we you know, change this parameter to be instead of being
hard coded, we can just impute it from you. Like all these kinds
of things that were you know, work above and beyond and um definitely contribute
to the value of the metric itself, but also you know, multiple data
points over the course of every year of like how much he cared, how
much he wanted it to be as excellent as it could be, how much
he enjoyed what he was doing, and how interested he was in you know,
pushing that out to as many people as possible and making it as helpful
to you know, as much of the community as possible. And um,
yeah, it's it's like a gift to people based on the things that he
was passionate about. Yeah. I think is a thing that ms up over
and over again. Yeah. And I think, you know, we're fortunate
in a lot of ways that will have a lot of ways to remember him
because he did so many of these things that are going to be useful to
so many people for so much longer after he's um, you know, not
able to keep working on them. Yeah. Um. Yeah, and you
know I do think I do see this podcast again as one of those things
like a project that he was passionate about and wanted to work on um which
is amazing and it has been a gift, especially over the last year,
and definitely wanted to reiterate, like you know, I cancer something like not
only you know, as somebody who has been a reader of BP for a
long time, like you were involved in it, I've kind of just been
a person reading and like everyone there is like on the other side, yeah,
that they are like the geniuses who I grew up reading essentially, and
to have that veil be pierced through an you know, through a number of
people who worked at PP the first time, but especially throughout the second and
to have him welcome us in to this world and with you know, with
a graciousness that I do not extend to myself honestly, and generosity is you
know, that was about the most incredible thing I could experience. Like,
you know, I was looking at some of this and it's like, you
know, seeing the tributes come in from like heavy hitters of the industry such
as it is you know, Jay Jaffee, Ben Lindbergh and so she all
had nice things. You know, all we're helped and like to have like
us clowns also be helped by him. It's like like just for me,
like I you know, like why are you spending? Like why do you
value my opinion along with that? And you know he did, you know,
I think on some level genuinely, you know, this is what we
were saying today. I would probably say it any day, like we were
making the podcast for him, like almost almost literally in something. I think
we even said that once or twice. Yeah, and we were happy to
do it because we felt like he deserved it and right like he brought us
back because he wanted to listen to us, which is just a tremendous honor
and gift. Yeah, and you know, hard for me to even believe
in myself to that degree. And you know that is certainly the thing that
I have taken from speaking with him, just briefly, like valuing my hockey
jokes once or twice, like you know there is like you changed the VP
slack chat like one of the line to like a joke that I made,
yeah, which I believe was a slam on Jerkson profar. Actually, so
we are like on rand I was going to support a slam on Jerkson profar.
Yeah, let me check any of the pub is line real quick.
Yeah, but like yeah, but like seeing that is like, oh,
like you know I am a part of this. You know. I think
I've said to everyone who listens, you know, to all of you,
like you're definitely the people who keep us going, you like, respond to
us even in our moments of self doubt, of which I have frequent,
all of them. Um. And you know, I think having somebody of
that reputation, like you know, talent, just like asking us questions about
what he thought of what he thought about his team. You know a lot
of people have brought up like he would ask a lot of questions about baseball.
Yeah, and just like what you think about a trade, um,
and you know, just like keeping the conversation going. Um. You know,
and I think right uh, like Jared, I think you know that
may have been someone what you like, how you interacted with them, it's
through just him chatting to us off offline. Yes, yeah, no,
um, I agree, And you all said it better than anything I could.
I guess just a couple more things I wanted to to fill in up.
I was going back piece some old emails, and I think Rob was
in the larger responsible for us getting the podcast on VP and in the first
place. Yeah, he was the one who made the introduction to bread and
suggested and it was it was a team thing. But I'm not sure we're
on VP with that. With that, Rob and I was looking back,
we invited him on the podcast Liliver five years ago and he said that he
really stunk at podcasts. He respectfully declined, and I guess about you,
Like, one of my big regrets is that we never we never took the
time to follow up and knowing that he probably wouldn't want to be on if
there was a way that we could have got him on it, I think,
Yeah, I do recall it as being the only guest who has ever
turned us down. Amazing because we should have been turned down by everyone,
like it's been gracious, but it right, It wasn't out of like,
it wasn't out of busy answer like he I guess did not whoa No,
I think that like he didn't feel I don't know what whatever it was,
but whatever he felt, he wasn't. I mean, he certainly was and
yeah, maybe maybe should have, but it's done a better job telling him
that, I mean he was he was, um, he was on the
score sheet at baseball respect is email right right? Yeah, like those those
emails went to him and he responded at least to us too, I guess
we Like what always struck me about Rob is just how how present he was
and seeing all these other tributes commended. It blows my mind that he had
the the time and energy and willingness to get so deep in the mousha of
like silly questions with us about this, right, and then like everyone else
like I could. It's stunned me that everyone else was like yeah, like
Rob was helping me too. I I couldn't believe he had time to all
day. It blows my mind, right, and to have like uh you
know, like and not to get start straight, but like all of the
big names in VP and throughout like Savan Rotricks like right again, like he
has time for us, and he had time for like we're not the only
one, Like there are a lot of little fish who he was helping along
the way. It is just, yeah, I don't understand how you could
give that much talk to that many people. And I never remember hearing him
complaining ever about anything with our stuff. Yeah, he's always complete opposite.
Yeah. The only thing I remember him complaining about was like trades that he
made that he wished he hadn't made. You know, I'll i'll echo slightly
that, like, I have some regrets that he was never on the podcast.
I think I think in some ways it's kind of fitting that we didn't
try to talk him into it or whatever, because it's sort of like,
well, this is of his doing in enough ways that if he really doesn't
want to come on, then you know, who are we to try to
talk him into it. I'll share one other regret and I sort of voice
this privately to Jared, and I think it's maybe a little of a vulnerability
for me, but I think it's worth sharing. Is that, um,
in the VP slack, there's a scoresheet channel, and I would venture to
guess something like eighty percent of the messages on that channel came from Rob,
and it was always Rob looking for conversations just about scoresheet and his players and
his teams, or current events or something like that. And I sort of
jokingly called it Rob's scoresheet support group at one point because it was you know
so often that he was reaching out and and I I mean I meant the
comments sort of good naturally, as like a sort of a joke amongst the
three of us. But it makes me regret that I didn't put more energy
and effort into engaging him, because I think he certainly had more than earned,
you know, my time at that point. Not that I necessarily had
anything super useful to say, but you know, sometimes you could tell he
was just looking for a you know, he would mention, you know,
some unlucky outcomes in the sim or something like that, and he's just looking
for somebody to you know, yeah, just chime in and be like,
yeah, that stinks, Like I hate it when the secretcing breaks the wrong
way for you or whatever. And I had chances to do that and miss
them. And I think, you know, as I was thinking about if
there's anything useful to take away from something like this, you know, I
mentioned how universally positively he and back to people, and how that's like something
that can inspire us. I think there's also at least for me personally,
and like possibly for other people. You could think of similar settings and situations
that happened to you, like I have a certain amount of regret about not
engaging with him more fully and not reciprocating in a lot of ways the energy
that he put into, you know, the things that I was thinking about
or talking about or whatever, to sort of reciprocate that energy back for him
about the things that he was thinking about and talking about carrying about. And
you know, I definitely regret the imbalance of that creative in a relationship where
like he was constantly giving and I was doing more taking than giving, and
I I should have done a better job of that. And so you know,
maybe that's also a thing that can come out of this little at least
be an opportunity for people to think about, like, you know, take
that extra few a few minutes to have that conversation with somebody about how tricks
and profile really isn't good at baseball if that's what they want to rant about
or whatever. Not that Rob would do that. So that's like me projecting
myself. Rob would never say anything bad about baseball players, I don't think.
I mean, I'm sure he did, but like, yeah, yeah,
yeah, I you know, I connected that, Like I feel similarly
in my own way, where you know, you would ask questions and you
know, I would take more time to respond than he did to ask them.
And you know, I think just in the last week we were chatting,
we were chatting offline about not baseball, but music, which was the
two a very large degree one of his passions. And I think you'll see
that in a lot of reminiscences as they I think come out on the site.
So I don't want to steal other people's thunder, but I definitely,
you know, something that was important to him as well and is important to
me. And you know, I don't want to cut this off prematurely,
but I did have the best thing I saw this week, which is very
you know, I just came back from the Carlier Jackson concert and I won't
talk about her again except to say that, Um, you know, we
were chatting. I was chatting with Rob last week and the conversation turned to
music and he said, uh, he said to me that I'll pull up
the exact line, which I have somewhere here, um, but that his
obsession was in finding great female vocals, great and energetic female vocals. Um.
And uh, Jared, you know me, I met you, Yeah,
and you know what I listened to um and energetic female vocals. Yeah
that you know. He uh was the h the only person I met with
a bigger paramore fan than the two of us, you know, and it
was just you know, which I have met and other people, but like
this encyclopedia knowledge of music, but I think accompanied by this joy and interest
in like everything for like Prague to like EDM to you know, loud music
and just putting women first, which I definitely relate to. You know that
a lot of people talked about playlists that he shared with them, and I
got my first one in his last message to me, you know, and
that is tough. I had this thought then. Even now I'm like,
oh, this is somebody who I'm going to be talking to for a long
time about this, and you know, it is very rough to realize that
I'm not going to and that has been weighing on me in the last day.
But you know, what I guess I can do on some level is
go out to see Carly and to see all of all of my favorite women
and meet his obsession for great female vocals and you know, live that for
him to some degree in my own way, and to be passionate about the
things that I love and hopefully share them with others, and that that is
to a degree, what I've taken from him, and hopefully y'all get to
experience that as well in your life. Yeah. Yeah, Um, I
don't know anyone anyone else have things to say. I don't want to cut
the party short here, but um, like I said, it's been a
rough day for us. We're recording this pretty late, but I think we
all wanted to take some time out of our day, no matter when,
for him. So yeah, um, all right, we'll be We'll be
back at some point with you know, the dumb stuff that we talk about
normally. I'm sure you know. I can't say when. Send us send
us your thoughts, comments, questions, scoresee at baseball perspectis dot com.
You know, if you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like us
to share, we'll read them. If you want to send dumb trade questions
and like random nonsense, believe me, that is what Rob would have loved
as well, So please please send along. It's just anything that you have,
you know, it's it's always good to hear from you. And like
we said, you know, we were doing this for him to some degree
and to all of our lists and for all of our listeners, and um,
you know we'll be we're down one and we're down somebody who supported us
and entered us. Um. But you know we want to keep going for
everyone else and to keep him happy in some way. So uh I guess
with that said, um again, UM you know, uh restI is your
Rob. We'll mess you. And yeah, I think I want to thank
you, perhaps on behalf of allow us, for all that you have given
us. Um and yeah I'll given this community. Yeah yeah yeah, So
um, thank you again for listening. Thank you to Rob, and thanks
to Benasher. Thank you both for pushing this and making this happen because it
was worth it. But on behalf of all of us, thanks again and
have a great day.