Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Backflips and Nerds, the Baseball podcast
Speaker 1: with a British twist. I am your host today, Russell Lisam,
Speaker 1: and I am joined by my interview partner of the hour,
Speaker 1: John McGee.
Speaker 2: How are we doing?
Speaker 3: John?
Speaker 4: Very well, Russ, I'm very well excited about this one.
Speaker 4: Can't wait to get going.
Speaker 1: Yes, we have been hitting twenty twenty five with a
Speaker 1: force that we haven't seen in a while. But we
Speaker 1: have another great person to go with us, and those
Speaker 1: who have viewing us on YouTube, we'll see that we
Speaker 1: have Zach'scott here.
Speaker 2: Welcome Zach.
Speaker 3: Hey, guys, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: No, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: And for those who don't know Zach, Zach worked from
Speaker 1: all the Boston Red sots from twenty four to twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: going from an intern to the assistant GM, with many
Speaker 1: jobs along that journey. He spent two years with the Mets,
Speaker 1: including seven months as the acting GM, and he's gone
Speaker 1: on to found a consulting firm, the Four Ring Sports Solution,
Speaker 1: which has worked with multiple MLB franchises and other American
Speaker 1: and major sports teams. But we brought Zach, as John said,
Speaker 1: to discuss about the front office like what would be
Speaker 1: the teams be doing during the off season to get
Speaker 1: ready for the next season. We're going to chat about rosters,
Speaker 1: We're going to check out the front offices. But before that,
Speaker 1: John has a very important question for Zach about his
Speaker 1: favorite player.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, Zach, I have a confession to make you
Speaker 4: are you are wholly responsible for one of the most
Speaker 4: hideous man crushes of all time. So my favorite player
Speaker 4: of all time, I'm a huge Red Sox fan. I
Speaker 4: want to see if you can guess who that is.
Speaker 3: First off, your favorite Red Sox.
Speaker 4: And it's pretty niche, it's pretty nice.
Speaker 3: Going to say it's not David Ortiz, then if it's.
Speaker 4: Neat, I mean I love him. I love him. But
Speaker 4: you know, I'm thinking very much in your wheelhouse. I'm
Speaker 4: going I'm going to put you out of your misery
Speaker 4: because it would be pretty bad audio if I was
Speaker 4: just asking you to name any player in the sixteen
Speaker 4: years that you were with the team. So, my favorite
Speaker 4: player is Coji San. I adore him, so I wanted
Speaker 4: to And obviously, you know you were pretty instrumental as
Speaker 4: that great article by Tim Britton when you were with
Speaker 4: the Mets about how he was one of the guys
Speaker 4: who you were pushing to bring to the Red Sox.
Speaker 4: And you know, I'm not going to have another opportunity
Speaker 4: to ask you about what it was you saw in
Speaker 4: this sort of you know, mid thirties Finesse Japanese picture
Speaker 4: and what you guys did to unlock the phenomenon that
Speaker 4: became became Cogi time in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5: I don't think we did anything that you know, I
Speaker 5: think it was all him, But we did identify that
Speaker 5: he may be an undervalued player for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 5: One age you mentioned health. He had had some health
Speaker 5: issues in the past, so that took care of the
Speaker 5: market a little bit, and you know, we ended up
Speaker 5: getting him on one year deal and then retained him
Speaker 5: for longer than that. But the reason he was available
Speaker 5: was because he doesn't light up a radar gun. So
Speaker 5: he's someone that I think people now you know, have
Speaker 5: been able to quantify more than they could at that time.
Speaker 5: He's the kind of guy that has that special fastball
Speaker 5: that plays faster.
Speaker 3: Than it actually is.
Speaker 5: You know, he'd throw in the low nineties, but it
Speaker 5: played more like ninety five ninety six because he just
Speaker 5: could really backspin the baseball, and so it had that
Speaker 5: that rising effect of hitters. It looked like, you know,
Speaker 5: they thought it was going to be in one place
Speaker 5: and they'd swung in it. They'd either hit the bottom
Speaker 5: of the ball and pop it up or swing and miss.
Speaker 5: And then he had a devastating splitter to go with that.
Speaker 5: So he had this, you know, what's very common in
Speaker 5: Japan actually at least, was this North south way of pitching.
Speaker 5: And so he had that fastball that played up in
Speaker 5: the zone and that splitter that played below the zone
Speaker 5: that would get swing and miss.
Speaker 3: So and he just pumped strikes.
Speaker 5: He just attacked hitters, which is always my favorite kind
Speaker 5: of pitcher, especially closers. And when we at the Red
Speaker 5: Sox had really good teams, we won championships with closers
Speaker 5: that were similar I'd say Keith Folk and four was
Speaker 5: actually kind of similar to Cogi in that he had
Speaker 5: the devastating change up instead of a splitter. But he
Speaker 5: didn't throw hard, but he got you know, that pitch
Speaker 5: played up. He also got a lot of pop ups,
Speaker 5: just like Cogie. They were both very extreme and there
Speaker 5: if you looked at their rates of strikeouts and pop ups,
Speaker 5: they were unusual in that way, so it didn't give
Speaker 5: up a lot of hard contact, got a lot of
Speaker 5: swing miss in the fastball, and then the change up
Speaker 5: played down and Jonathan Papplebond was the same way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, where he had you know.
Speaker 5: He had the velocity on the fastball that was more
Speaker 5: what you see these days, but he also had that
Speaker 5: extra explosion on it because he backspinned it, and he
Speaker 5: had a devastating splitter. So it was interesting that three
Speaker 5: of the championships that we won were very similar style closers,
Speaker 5: and they all three of those also just attacked, attacked attacks,
Speaker 5: so they threw strikes they weren't. You know, we one
Speaker 5: and eighteen with Krek kimberl is a closer who was
Speaker 5: a different kind of you know, more of a slider
Speaker 5: fastball slider guy with some control issues at times. And
Speaker 5: obviously we actually ended the eighteen World Series with Chris
Speaker 5: Sale on the mound. But those three guys were I
Speaker 5: think were actually very similar in a lot of ways,
Speaker 5: and today those are the kind of pictures when people
Speaker 5: look at the metrics, that's what they're looking for, is
Speaker 5: those fastballs that play that way, and you know, obviously
Speaker 5: a secondary pitch that's as good as what they had.
Speaker 5: So yeah, Cogi, And you know, besides that, Kogi was
Speaker 5: an awesome guy and a lot of fun, a very
Speaker 5: funny guy and someone that we just loved having in
Speaker 5: the clubhouse. So yeah, we thought it was a bilow opportunity,
Speaker 5: and you know, he delivered way more value than we
Speaker 5: could have actually expect ever expected.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of those that I guess from your perspective
Speaker 4: as someone who's gone in there making the case for him,
Speaker 4: was like a slam Dunknden. So that twenty thirteen series
Speaker 4: season was just astonishing, Like his pitching line is almost
Speaker 4: unprecedented in recent Red Socke history. And then, as you said,
Speaker 4: you know, he becomes this sort of larger than life
Speaker 4: character in amongst those all those you know, burly bearded men,
Speaker 4: You've got this little, tiny dude who's just joking around
Speaker 4: and then he grows a beard and it looks stupid, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, that's why I absolutely love him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, he was.
Speaker 5: He was a lot of fun and sometimes, you know,
Speaker 5: as an organization, you got to get a little lucky
Speaker 5: to win championships, and definitely that year we had a
Speaker 5: lot of good things go our way.
Speaker 3: Including his incredible performance.
Speaker 4: Right, So I mean that that had to be that
Speaker 4: had to be done. Thank you for humoring me, Zach.
Speaker 4: If if you listen to the podcast before, as as
Speaker 4: many people will have, it's not the first time that
Speaker 4: I've been indulged on that, So thank you Russell for
Speaker 4: allowing me to start the conversation in the appropriate way.
Speaker 5: So So's He's one of my favorites of all time
Speaker 5: that we ever had, So I'm happy to always talk
Speaker 5: about Cochi.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think I have a thing for
Speaker 4: relief pictures. You know, you're talking about Jonathan Paplevon and
Speaker 4: Keith Foka was definitely get me there as well, I
Speaker 4: have to say. I mean I could go on. We
Speaker 4: could do a whole two hours about Red Sox relievers
Speaker 4: of your tenure, if you like, but probably that would
Speaker 4: be a pretty niche concern. So we'll get onto some
Speaker 4: more general stuff about print offices and yeah, we brought
Speaker 4: you one, Zach to talk specifically about being in a
Speaker 4: front office during this period of the year. Right, every
Speaker 4: part of the inner baseball front office is intense, but
Speaker 4: this one is the one that you're really earning your corn, Right,
Speaker 4: This is when there's roster turnover, there's loads of moves
Speaker 4: at the margins, but there's some really big set piece
Speaker 4: events where GM's assistant gms and other members of the
Speaker 4: front offices are effectively the stars of the show. You're
Speaker 4: the only story, right, You're keeping Jeff Passon in a job.
Speaker 4: So we wanted to get your insight as someone who's
Speaker 4: worked in those environments for such a long time as
Speaker 4: to what the sort of rhythm and the pace and
Speaker 4: what you guys are doing. And it felt like the
Speaker 4: right place for us to start is not act at
Speaker 4: the start, it's it's in the middle, right, It's at
Speaker 4: the winter meetings, which to fans on the outside is
Speaker 4: a set piece, right. We're also out there waiting for
Speaker 4: our alerts from from Jeff Passon and Ken Rosenthal and others.
Speaker 4: They're really mysterious. So I wanted to get a Frint
Speaker 4: office perspective at the outset of this conversation about how
Speaker 4: they felt for you, like whether whether you dreaded them,
Speaker 4: was that was that your version of you know, being
Speaker 4: on the diamond or and kind of what goes on
Speaker 4: in those you know, it's not on the diamond, but
Speaker 4: in those enormous enormal dome, hotel complexes that you all get,
Speaker 4: you know, air conditioning sickness in over the course of
Speaker 4: six to eight days in December.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a lot more of people in front offices,
Speaker 5: you know, checking out Twitter and waiting for Jeff pass
Speaker 5: and then you know, you think we drive all the actions.
Speaker 5: That's true, but it's not happening constantly. So there's a
Speaker 5: lot of you know, refreshing of MLB trade rumors and
Speaker 5: looking at Twitter and staring at each other sometimes, but
Speaker 5: there's also a lot of work that The Winter meetings
Speaker 5: has definitely changed over you know, the twenty years that
Speaker 5: I've been attending, although I haven't actually haven't attended in
Speaker 5: a few years, and you know, it's it's been a
Speaker 5: nice break because they are pretty intense and they can
Speaker 5: be counterproductive because you can feel a momentum or some
Speaker 5: sort of pressure to get something done that could lead
Speaker 5: to a more emotional decision than is ideal. But for
Speaker 5: the most part there, I mean, that's what I did
Speaker 5: this job for, right like the times of the year,
Speaker 5: the trade deadline, and for me mostly my career is
Speaker 5: focused on the major league side of it, towards the
Speaker 5: end being leading and analytics. You know, there was a
Speaker 5: draft component. I was always in the draft room at
Speaker 5: different times in my career. But you know, so that's
Speaker 5: a huge moment for baseball together, but for me, it
Speaker 5: was the trade deadline and the off season and specifically
Speaker 5: the Winter meetings that that's our opportunity to make an
Speaker 5: impact to build that next team, and that's the excitement.
Speaker 5: That's why I got into sports, and and that's the
Speaker 5: fun part. So the Winter meetings is kind of the
Speaker 5: key point when you get everyone together. It used to
Speaker 5: be more where you had a lot of meetings in
Speaker 5: person at the Winter meetings with agents. You know, the
Speaker 5: GM meetings happened in November. That's a little too early
Speaker 5: to get things going with free agents. So a lot
Speaker 5: of the you're in the peak part of free agency
Speaker 5: at the Winter meetings and so there's a lot of
Speaker 5: conversations with agents. Same thing with teams. You'd meet with
Speaker 5: teams to talk about trades in person. There Over the years,
Speaker 5: there was a lot less of that, to the point
Speaker 5: where we're like, why are we here all together if
Speaker 5: we just texting each other anyway, But it's also an
Speaker 5: opportunity to see people, you know, friends that you have
Speaker 5: in the industry that you only see a few times
Speaker 5: a year maybe, So that's it's a fun there's a
Speaker 5: fun part of it too, and it's you know, it's
Speaker 5: it's a great development experience for your younger people on
Speaker 5: your in your baseball operation staff to kind of just
Speaker 5: just observe and see how things kind of go down.
Speaker 5: But yeah, no, it's i'd get an adrenaline rush leading
Speaker 5: into that. I mean, a lot of my time was
Speaker 5: spent on being the person in charge of making sure
Speaker 5: our decision makers had the most important information at their
Speaker 5: fingertips so we could move with agility if necessary at
Speaker 5: these key points in the off season altogether, but also
Speaker 5: at the winter meetings and so you know, the weeks
Speaker 5: leading into it, there was a lot of preparation going
Speaker 5: on to make sure everyone had everything they needed before
Speaker 5: when we got there. And then being there was a rush,
Speaker 5: it could be exhausting. You're, like you said, you're you're
Speaker 5: in a hotel room a lot. There is a lot
Speaker 5: of time where you can't control the action, so you're
Speaker 5: waiting a lot and it's a high anxiety level because
Speaker 5: you really want some stuff to happen, but there's only
Speaker 5: so much you can control, and you're you. You try
Speaker 5: to eat healthy, but there's we always have like you'd
Speaker 5: always have like a bunch of snacks in the room.
Speaker 3: Some would be some years we'd try to be healthy.
Speaker 5: Other years, you know, we just cave and just go
Speaker 5: all junk food. And there's a lot of good conversations
Speaker 5: going on. There's people sometimes at the winter meetings that
Speaker 5: you weren't normally in the office, scouts, people like Bill
Speaker 5: James that would be there that weren't in the office
Speaker 5: all the time, that you'd have good conversations with and
Speaker 5: be able to catch up, but also talk baseball.
Speaker 4: That's awesome, y Gun Russ.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was gonna say, like just the quick
Speaker 1: thing that you talked about there is that the front
Speaker 1: offices sometimes get are living on those tweets of paston
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Did you ever have occasions where
Speaker 1: either when you were at the top level, that your
Speaker 1: team found something out due to or your front office
Speaker 1: found something out because Jeff pass and tweeted it and
Speaker 1: not because you actually told them that something had happened.
Speaker 3: About our front office or about other.
Speaker 1: Either way like this, Yeah, I think obviously, like sometimes
Speaker 1: what happens to other teams that's maybe actually the source
Speaker 1: of themes. But did you ever happen that, Like you
Speaker 1: would just done something and there was like three or
Speaker 1: four or if you knew about it, and then suddenly
Speaker 1: before you could tell everybody else what happened, there's a
Speaker 1: passing tweet.
Speaker 5: That would happen, and it was frustrating because you really
Speaker 5: want the people in your organization to find out first
Speaker 5: what's going on. If we could get to a place
Speaker 5: it was almost like a competition within ourselves to like
Speaker 5: could we get a press release out of a move
Speaker 5: before it gets out there on Twitter from a reporter,
Speaker 5: Like I think you did it? Like five percent of
Speaker 5: the time you could do that, and if you did,
Speaker 5: it was like this great feeling of accomplishment. Now part
Speaker 5: of that is because all these moves have like you know,
Speaker 5: if it's a trade, you're doing medical assessments, if it's
Speaker 5: a if it's a free agent signing, it's there's a
Speaker 5: physical that has to happen, so like you're not going
Speaker 5: to announce anything until it's official, but oftentimes you have
Speaker 5: an agreement pending physical that will leak out either from
Speaker 5: the agent or someone from the team, and all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, it's out there, and it's like, well, we
Speaker 5: can't really comment because what if something happens during the
Speaker 5: physical which has happened, and you have to, you know,
Speaker 5: either renegotiate the deal or back out of the deal
Speaker 5: altogether because something's you So.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that definitely.
Speaker 5: I always hated when that would come out before we
Speaker 5: could communicate it internally, even if it's not the press release.
Speaker 3: It's like we would send.
Speaker 5: Out an internal email to our entire baseball operation communicating
Speaker 5: something we had done, and if it wasn't pending physical,
Speaker 5: we might send it to a smaller group, so we're
Speaker 5: not blasting it out to you know, a couple hundred people.
Speaker 5: It's just like a smaller in the office thing, so
Speaker 5: people would be aware just in case someone reached out
Speaker 5: to ask them about it. But yeah, it was always
Speaker 5: a great feeling of accomplishment if we could keep something
Speaker 5: out of the media. And again, we could only control
Speaker 5: so much of it. There's another team involved in a
Speaker 5: trade or an agent involved in a free agent signing,
Speaker 5: so you know, we we could only do our part.
Speaker 4: I've kind of got this idea in my head, so
Speaker 4: I spent a lot of time working in the government
Speaker 4: here in UK and if things get out, it's like
Speaker 4: the worst thing that can happen, and you have something
Speaker 4: called a leak inquiry and you get like dragged in
Speaker 4: and you get pulled over hot calls. Is there a
Speaker 4: version of that where like who told Jeff you go
Speaker 4: around there, get everyone's phone. Who's got Jeffs number in here? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well so everyone has different feelings about that. It's funny
Speaker 5: you mentioned the government because I always say we need
Speaker 5: to not take ourselves so seriously, like we were not
Speaker 5: holding Pentagon secrets, you know, like we're It's not government secrets.
Speaker 3: It's baseball. It's entertainment.
Speaker 5: So if something gets out, you don't want it to
Speaker 5: You want everything to be confidential until it's appropriate to
Speaker 5: put it out there. But it's not the end of
Speaker 5: the world. Ultimately, this is entertainment. Let's you know, chill out.
Speaker 5: You do want to make sure that you don't want
Speaker 5: to upset players a bunch stuff coming out or agents,
Speaker 5: but you can only do so much. So I have
Speaker 5: always felt like it's not worth the effort to try
Speaker 5: to track down leaks. I'll say this, like I definitely
Speaker 5: believe in some instances the leaks come from above the
Speaker 5: GM's head anyway, when it comes like ownership might put
Speaker 5: stuff out. So they're the owner, they can do whatever
Speaker 5: they want. So I'm not going to all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: you know, try to investigate my baseball operation to figure
Speaker 5: out who's leaking what. But I've heard stories that other
Speaker 5: gms are very different, and I've heard stories that people
Speaker 5: have gotten fired for being found out as leaks. I
Speaker 5: think that's extreme, and you know, I think there should
Speaker 5: be conversations about it. Maybe, you know, you get only
Speaker 5: a certain number of chances, and maybe that happened in
Speaker 5: those instances.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's just a rumor.
Speaker 5: I don't know, but I think that intensity is a
Speaker 5: little much and it's a waste of time. We have
Speaker 5: too much to do to be tracking down.
Speaker 3: A leak of a baseball move. It's just not the
Speaker 3: end of the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I can see trying to get a
Speaker 4: bit of perspective in those situations is exactly the right
Speaker 4: way to be. But similarly, if something's gone against you,
Speaker 4: the temptation is going to be there, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, I think you know, the way I look at
Speaker 5: dealing with that was to try to be proactive. I
Speaker 5: feel like people within your organization, if they're going to
Speaker 5: leak something, it's often because they don't feel connected to
Speaker 5: what's going on, and so when they get a nuggative information,
Speaker 5: they're more likely to share it because there's maybe an insecurity.
Speaker 5: They want people to know they're in them No, they
Speaker 5: know what's you know, they're in the inner circle if
Speaker 5: they're not, or so you have that if you make
Speaker 5: your people feel more connected to what you're doing, like
Speaker 5: I was. I was incredibly transparent with the Mets and
Speaker 5: with the Red Sox to the extent that it could be.
Speaker 5: I wasn't in the GM seat there, but my teams.
Speaker 5: I would always tell my groups, the people I was
Speaker 5: leading what was going on because part of that that's
Speaker 5: why they work in baseball, it's the exciting part of it.
Speaker 5: Part of it's I want some different opinions on things.
Speaker 5: If we're working towards it, they may have a different
Speaker 5: perspective because they're not as close to it as maybe
Speaker 5: I was in the moment. But I also felt like
Speaker 5: if we were very transparent about what was going on
Speaker 5: and shared things, people were going to feel like you're
Speaker 5: empowering me with this information, So I'm going to keep
Speaker 5: it to myself. If you're not doing that and they
Speaker 5: get a piece of information, they may be in my mind,
Speaker 5: it's my theory is that they'd be more likely to
Speaker 5: actually put it out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes total sense. So sort of circling back
Speaker 4: to the Winter Meetings as a set pieces, is there
Speaker 4: any sort of move that you recall being involved with,
Speaker 4: either one that came to fruition or one that didn't,
Speaker 4: that that was was that sort of this is what
Speaker 4: I'm here for. This is you know, back to the
Speaker 4: point that was that was when you were in your element,
Speaker 4: That's when the adrenaline was flowing. What was what was
Speaker 4: an event? Assigning a trade that during that period either
Speaker 4: did or didn't come to pass for you. That that
Speaker 4: sort of sums up what that feeling's like.
Speaker 5: There's so there's a lot, There are a lot. We
Speaker 5: did a lot of things at the Winter Meetings. You know,
Speaker 5: you mentioned at the top twenty thirteen we signed most
Speaker 5: you know, I think we signed seven free agents that
Speaker 5: off season. We were very fortunate we hit on all
Speaker 5: seven at least for year one, which led to the championship.
Speaker 5: You know, for some of those guys that had multi
Speaker 5: year deals. They didn't hit after that, you know, like
Speaker 5: Shane Victorina was great in year one but injured the
Speaker 5: last couple of years and didn't really contribute. But we
Speaker 5: got our value because we won a World Series. But
Speaker 5: that meetings we signed like four or five of those
Speaker 5: guys or agreed to terms with four or five of
Speaker 5: those guys, which is to me, that's by far the
Speaker 5: most that we've ever done in one winter meeting, and
Speaker 5: so it was incredibly productive, and so that's memorable because
Speaker 5: it was just like, wow, we're we were just really
Speaker 5: good at jumping the market on some of these players.
Speaker 5: Like that was our It was one of the times
Speaker 5: where we executed our plan exactly the way we wanted to.
Speaker 5: We wanted to bring in guys. You know, we had
Speaker 5: gone through a lot of turmoil. The year before the
Speaker 5: Bobby v year. The year before that was the year
Speaker 5: we had the historic collapse in twenty eleven and the
Speaker 5: chicken and beer narrative around some of our pitchers, and
Speaker 5: you know, each year it you know, we the last
Speaker 5: couple of years had been pretty negative in the clubhouse,
Speaker 5: and so we went into that off season with a
Speaker 5: focus on improving our club us culture and bringing in
Speaker 5: good players. But we had just if you recall, in
Speaker 5: twenty twelve unloaded a lot of money to the LA Dodgers,
Speaker 5: All Crawford, Josh Beckett, the Nick Punto trade. So there
Speaker 5: was that we didn't want to then jump right back
Speaker 5: in and make the same mistakes that we did by
Speaker 5: giving two large contracts to players that didn't you know,
Speaker 5: one of them especially didn't work out, and so we
Speaker 5: wanted to go shorter term. So we had this plan
Speaker 5: and then we pretty aggressively we recognized that there was
Speaker 5: an inefficiency in the market of these players who weren't
Speaker 5: top tier free agents, you're kind of second tier or
Speaker 5: even in some cases like a Johnny Gumes, more of
Speaker 5: like a you know, depth piece. And we decided, okay, well,
Speaker 5: the market's kind of underpaying them relative to their production.
Speaker 5: Top of the market's always getting paid well, so we're
Speaker 5: going to actually it's going to probably the trend is
Speaker 5: that it's going to go up eventually. Let's jump the market.
Speaker 5: Let's be aggressive on those guys and lock him in.
Speaker 5: And we locked in David Ross really early, and then
Speaker 5: Johnny and then the rest of those guys were some
Speaker 5: of them were opportunities, but also they were more like
Speaker 5: second tier guys, and so we were just more aggressive.
Speaker 3: But it was just one of.
Speaker 5: Those times where we really executed on our plan going
Speaker 5: in and it's hard to do that because there's so
Speaker 5: many other variables and factors that can influence what you do.
Speaker 5: So to do that and kind of check all the
Speaker 5: boxes on what we wanted to do was a good feeling.
Speaker 5: And so much of that happened at the winter meetings.
Speaker 2: Did you have one that came out of nowhere?
Speaker 1: You talk about having a plan and going into it
Speaker 1: being like these are maybe our targets. You've probably done
Speaker 1: that work on a lot of people because you still
Speaker 1: need to know like are we going to make offers
Speaker 1: or even have conversations about pretty much most of the
Speaker 1: free agents or the people that you think are trade available.
Speaker 1: Was there ever a moment where somebody became available that
Speaker 1: you hadn't even thought about and then there was a
Speaker 1: lot of effort to be like, oh, this is this
Speaker 1: something we should we do?
Speaker 2: Can we get this over the line?
Speaker 5: And I can't really think of a time where we
Speaker 5: ended up getting very involved in something like that that
Speaker 5: we're a player.
Speaker 3: We didn't think.
Speaker 5: Usually, you know, like you have before those meetings, the
Speaker 5: GM in assistant gms are typically you know, you divvy
Speaker 5: up the teams and you call your counterpart at the
Speaker 5: teams and you're getting a feel for what they're looking
Speaker 5: to do. So it's rare that you have a surprise
Speaker 5: because usually they're very transparent and say, hey, you know,
Speaker 5: we could really use a first baseman and some bullpen help,
Speaker 5: and you kind of share what you're looking to do,
Speaker 5: and you're trying to find where you may match up
Speaker 5: on things you know, and you're also by doing that,
Speaker 5: gathering information about the market. Now, maybe they're not completely
Speaker 5: forthright and that who knows, there could be some games
Speaker 5: and ship some strategy going on. But I think for
Speaker 5: the most part, people are pretty open about what they're
Speaker 5: looking to do, so there aren't that many surprises. I
Speaker 5: will the one thing that comes to mind that we
Speaker 5: didn't get involved in, but it was one of those
Speaker 5: things where we were really unhappy about the fact that
Speaker 5: this player got moved and we weren't involved, which is
Speaker 5: when the Marlins traded Miguel Cabrera to the Tigers. That
Speaker 5: was something that was like, well, I wish we knew
Speaker 5: that they were actually willing to move him. I mean,
Speaker 5: we you talked to all the teams, and you know,
Speaker 5: it's just it's one of those things that you expect
Speaker 5: if someone's going to make a move that large, that
Speaker 5: they're going to make sure they know what everyone's willing
Speaker 5: to pay before they'd sell, right before they sell a
Speaker 5: player like that. And from what I could tell that
Speaker 5: that was actually done fairly quietly within the industry, and
Speaker 5: so we weren't alone in that, but it was kind
Speaker 5: of like, you know, wouldn't you want to see what
Speaker 5: we'd give up for?
Speaker 3: You know, maybe they.
Speaker 5: Just were, you know, in love with Cameron Mayman and
Speaker 5: Andrew Miller and what they got in that trade, those prospects,
Speaker 5: but it was one of those things we were like,
Speaker 5: a player of that caliber, you know, you want to
Speaker 5: be involved in.
Speaker 3: And so I remember us being pretty unhappy about that.
Speaker 4: Now you go, Russell, that's a slam dug for my
Speaker 4: favorite player and yours in the same podcast, Andrew Mill,
Speaker 4: that doesn't happen very often. Just sort of fast forwarding
Speaker 4: it to the present day, Zach. I mean from an
Speaker 4: outside observer, and I know some people have tried to
Speaker 4: push back on this narrative a little bit. This year's
Speaker 4: Winter Meetings did feel really important and like a lot
Speaker 4: of business got done. So maybe sort of winding back
Speaker 4: some of what you said earlier about it it feeling
Speaker 4: like you needed to be in person. It's not all
Speaker 4: texts or or certainly that's how it felt looking from
Speaker 4: the outside. Was that your perception and from your perspective,
Speaker 4: why do you think that might be? Is it just
Speaker 4: the sort of Soto factor because you had free signing,
Speaker 4: the crochet trade loads happened over the course of those
Speaker 4: few days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think. I think the timing of it.
Speaker 5: So I think when you have a solo situation you
Speaker 5: have a player of their magnitude represented by Scott boris
Speaker 5: m the most predictable thing, so that this is not
Speaker 5: the kind of player that's going to have a have
Speaker 5: to wait too long on the market, right and pretty
Speaker 5: quickly compared to some other guys, And so it was
Speaker 5: one of the most predictable things at the start of
Speaker 5: the off season that this is going to happen right
Speaker 5: around the Winter Meetings, either at the beginning or the end.
Speaker 5: But like there's going to be a big press conference
Speaker 5: for this player involving Scott Boris because he does that
Speaker 5: a lot, He's got a pattern.
Speaker 3: Of doing that.
Speaker 5: It makes sense, that's around the timing that getting a
Speaker 5: deal done will make sense for a player of that caliber,
Speaker 5: and so that didn't surprise me that that's when it happened.
Speaker 5: I think you see a lot of deals like that
Speaker 5: happen around the winter meetings, the top of the market,
Speaker 5: where they just don't need you know, you get enough
Speaker 5: interest in enough people putting their best foot forward pretty
Speaker 5: early that you don't have to wait and drag it out.
Speaker 5: That said, there's still this pattern here we are, you know,
Speaker 5: end of January, there's still some good players out there
Speaker 5: and free agency, there's still Bragman and Alonzo and Flaherty, like,
Speaker 5: there's still some very good players available. And so that's
Speaker 5: kind of the thing that I think we used to
Speaker 5: not see earlier in my career. We'd see almost like
Speaker 5: you get to around Christmas and almost everyone would be
Speaker 5: off the market. And now this is more normal where
Speaker 5: there will be some big signings around the winter meetings
Speaker 5: and some big moves usually at the top of the market.
Speaker 5: Trades are a little different because you know, teams kind
Speaker 5: of they're especially a crochet trade that is the same
Speaker 5: thing like top trade piece on the market. You're pretty
Speaker 5: quickly going to get the potential teams to ante up
Speaker 5: as soon as possible. Now, there can be some dependencies
Speaker 5: on other free agent things that they're doing that may
Speaker 5: impact timing there, but I think that this is fairly
Speaker 5: normal for what we've been seeing recently, some big moves
Speaker 5: at the winter meetings and then some guys just hanging
Speaker 5: around till the start of spring training or maybe even later.
Speaker 4: And just moving on to that, I did want to
Speaker 4: ask you about Bregman and Alonso. So this is a conversation.
Speaker 4: The conversation, the narrative that we're hearing now is that
Speaker 4: there's a mile get consensus on these guys. Everyone knows
Speaker 4: who they are, and a lot of people are starting
Speaker 4: to insinuate that this is because of sort of group
Speaker 4: think in the way that for an office is a run.
Speaker 4: I just wanted to get your sense on whether that's
Speaker 4: the case. I mean, you guys had a situation in
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen with with J. D. Martinez where
Speaker 4: you successfully waited out of the market. But it's a
Speaker 4: little different then, right, you were probably his only suitor
Speaker 4: in that situation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think that's the fear that teams have
Speaker 5: if you're the New York Mets and you know you're
Speaker 5: Steve Cohen have all the money.
Speaker 3: You could have met.
Speaker 5: The downside of that is that you know, people want
Speaker 5: to hold your people on the other side of the
Speaker 5: agents want to hold your hostage because.
Speaker 3: It's like this guy's going to cave eventually.
Speaker 5: He's shown to be a little emotional and wanting to
Speaker 5: get things done at times. Obviously, the SODO thing was
Speaker 5: a different scale. So I think that's a dynamic that
Speaker 5: exists where it's like people.
Speaker 3: Don't want to bit against themselves. So with the JD.
Speaker 5: Martinez, it was like we got to a place where
Speaker 5: we're like, we think we're confident we're the highest bid.
Speaker 5: We don't know for sure, you never know. It's blind,
Speaker 5: but we're pretty confident we don't. You know, it's at
Speaker 5: the time there was he's seen as a DH. There
Speaker 5: were there was no d H in the NL, so
Speaker 5: it was different. So his market was limited organically by that,
Speaker 5: and so we were willing to wait it out. Waiting
Speaker 5: it out's hard because you can't like he went into
Speaker 5: you know, well into spring training before we got a
Speaker 5: deal done, and that was hard. That was hard for
Speaker 5: you know, Dave Dombrowski is someone that's still does his
Speaker 5: work primarily before Christmas.
Speaker 3: You know, he's very aggressive.
Speaker 5: Right right now is when Browski does physically exactly, So
Speaker 5: for him to wait was not his normal move. And
Speaker 5: we joked that we've had to tie Dave up to
Speaker 5: make sure we didn't you know, bit against ourselves. But
Speaker 5: I think that's what's going on. But I think to
Speaker 5: your point on the group thing, I do think there's
Speaker 5: this effect that most those teams in baseball are using
Speaker 5: the same kind of analytical tools and so pretty much
Speaker 5: every team, if not every team, has you know, what
Speaker 5: you might call an asset value model. They're putting dollar
Speaker 5: values on these guys, and those are useful, but these
Speaker 5: decisions are not formulas, right, Like, there's context involved of
Speaker 5: where your team's are, where you know, your roster of players.
Speaker 5: If you want to stick with the kind of financial
Speaker 5: you know, way of view in the world, that's your
Speaker 5: portfolio roster.
Speaker 3: It's your portfolio.
Speaker 5: You want to have some guys that are young players
Speaker 5: that are making, you know, earning far less in salary
Speaker 5: than what they're producing. So then you can take those
Speaker 5: bigger risks in free agency where you know you're going
Speaker 5: to be paying most likely going to be paying more
Speaker 5: for what they're going to be producing.
Speaker 3: So I think that.
Speaker 5: Because everyone has these kind of similar tools, you get
Speaker 5: to this point where an agent needs someone to really
Speaker 5: very you know, veer off those things. What those what
Speaker 5: the model's telling of this player is worth, and I
Speaker 5: think everyone's are probably roughly this are roughly the same
Speaker 5: when you're talking about major league players, and so you
Speaker 5: know that you need to find the one team if
Speaker 5: you're an agent that's got Pete Alonso value significantly higher.
Speaker 5: And I think the types of gms that exist in
Speaker 5: the game are less likely to stray too far off
Speaker 5: of that. They will stray, but I don't think that
Speaker 5: they're they're definitely not ignoring things like that. So there
Speaker 5: is this fine line between you know, if you're using
Speaker 5: if you have a tool like this, but you're just
Speaker 5: like arbitrarily giving a guy, you know, thirty million dollars
Speaker 5: more than what your model says he's worth, then are
Speaker 5: you actually using a tool to help you? But I
Speaker 5: don't think these things are formulaic and that you should
Speaker 5: use them as frameworks to inform you. But there are
Speaker 5: appropriate reasons to stray away from that, but it's also
Speaker 5: good to have those tools. So they're kind of a
Speaker 5: they're an objective anchor, right, So if you're you know,
Speaker 5: I use our Pablo Sandoval with the Red Sox. We
Speaker 5: valued Pablo Sandoval objectively at the start of the off
Speaker 5: season around forty five fifty million dollars, which, by the way,
Speaker 5: in hindsight, that was wrong too. He didn't provide that
Speaker 5: kind of value. But somehow we offered him ninety five
Speaker 5: million dollars. And you know, I was involved with that,
Speaker 5: so I know how, but I do and I don't
Speaker 5: when I look back at it's like, God, how did
Speaker 5: we go from all?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: This this guy doesn't have much of a market. You know,
Speaker 5: we're hearing maybe the giants are around forty million, so like, okay,
Speaker 5: maybe we get him for his market, like what we
Speaker 5: think is fair market value. Somehow the momentum got away
Speaker 5: from us and it just turned into this thing where
Speaker 5: you know, some of us were out after it got above.
Speaker 3: A certain number.
Speaker 5: But somehow we just kept We bought into this guy's
Speaker 5: You know, championship pedigree or or you know, we had
Speaker 5: a good meeting with him. I don't know what it was,
Speaker 5: but the power of momentum just kept us bidding up
Speaker 5: and bidding up up, and you know, it got away
Speaker 5: from us and ended up being obviously a bad contract
Speaker 5: for us. But I think there is something to the
Speaker 5: group think because everyone's using similar tools.
Speaker 1: And do you think the reason people using similar tools
Speaker 1: is that we've now had fifteen twenty years of analytics.
Speaker 1: We've seen three, four five teams be known to be
Speaker 1: like the best, and then everybody gets taken away from
Speaker 1: them and they probably share their knowledge to all the
Speaker 1: other teams that they go to, and we see cycles
Speaker 1: about like it was for the Red Sox for a while,
Speaker 1: and then you can see this happening with like the Dodgers,
Speaker 1: or you can see it happening with the Rays. Does
Speaker 1: that basically just bring the ideas that exist in the
Speaker 1: league all together and then you almost have to be well,
Speaker 1: we roughly know what everybody else is doing.
Speaker 2: How do we zag when everybody is zigging?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think every sports league is a copycat league. And
Speaker 5: my theory on why, and I don't mean this in
Speaker 5: a pejorative way. I think owners that make these decisions,
Speaker 5: especially of who's at the top of their baseball operation,
Speaker 5: they they're just they they don't have a deep level
Speaker 5: of knowledge of how everything works, right, It's like fairly
Speaker 5: high level. And that's fine, Like, that's that's why they
Speaker 5: hire a GM, right, is that persons supposed to be
Speaker 5: have the knowledge at a very deep level. But but
Speaker 5: their knowledge is somewhat superficial. That so they go based
Speaker 5: on narratives or results, and so it's easy to see, well,
Speaker 5: you know, the Tampa Rays consistently get more out of
Speaker 5: their you know, get more for less, right, Like they
Speaker 5: they are so efficient in their payroll, and you know,
Speaker 5: we know they have the heaviest investment in analytics. You know,
Speaker 5: so this is a way to do it. So I
Speaker 5: think that makes sense for teams like the Marlins hire
Speaker 5: Peter Bendix from the race, that makes a ton of
Speaker 5: sense because they're in a similar market, in a similar
Speaker 5: payroll situation. I think on the other end, you know,
Speaker 5: the Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman away from the Raise and
Speaker 5: that worked out great because Andrew was able to make
Speaker 5: an adjustment. I think for some other teams it doesn't fit,
Speaker 5: you know, like him, Blum struggled, I think in Boston
Speaker 5: because I think it was just a different set of
Speaker 5: circumstances and wasn't really kind of what he was used
Speaker 5: to at the Rays. And how to you know, the
Speaker 5: understanding that when you are a big market team, you're
Speaker 5: not getting a trophy for having the most efficient payroll.
Speaker 4: You sorry, just on him, Zach. It was interesting that
Speaker 4: where him did succeed was in the stuff that he
Speaker 4: would have been good at at the race in the
Speaker 4: amateur draft and players at the margins. Right, absolutely, but
Speaker 4: again it doesn't work in every single circumstance.
Speaker 5: Well, and that's how the Rays had to do things
Speaker 5: because of the constraints. When you go to a team
Speaker 5: like the Red Sox or the Dodgers or the Yankees,
Speaker 5: you don't have those constraints anymore. But so that what
Speaker 5: does that mean? It means we by definition, are going
Speaker 5: to be inefficient on how we spend. And that means
Speaker 5: we're going to go into the highest risk pool of players,
Speaker 5: the free agents, and we're going to take some big risks,
Speaker 5: you know, and and those are the kind of things
Speaker 5: that can make you sink or swim with those deals,
Speaker 5: right Like, that's how does a big market organization kind
Speaker 5: of fall apart? Well, oftentimes it's over committing to too
Speaker 5: many dollars, right, Like, we were looking at that in
Speaker 5: twenty twelve. You know, all of a sudden, it's like,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh, what did we do with Carl Crawford
Speaker 5: and Adrian Gonzalez and you know some other players were
Speaker 5: We were looking at it thinking we are stuck. These
Speaker 5: guys need to perform or we are stuck for several
Speaker 5: years and we just as a team that always valued flexibility,
Speaker 5: we just killed our flexibility. How are we going to
Speaker 5: get out of this? And we got very fortunate that
Speaker 5: new Dodgers ownership wanted to bail us out because they
Speaker 5: wanted to bring in, you know, some star names. And
Speaker 5: so that's that's the hard part of going And I've
Speaker 5: heard Andrew Freeman talk about that, that's the hard part
Speaker 5: when you go from you know, the Rays, where you
Speaker 5: have a very limited pool of players that you can
Speaker 5: focus on, you can really drill down on those players,
Speaker 5: to a place like LA where you have access to
Speaker 5: all the players. You know, David Stearns is going through
Speaker 5: that now with the Mets, and so I think. I
Speaker 5: do think though, that's what's happening with owners is that
Speaker 5: are looking at who's had success. You know, like you said,
Speaker 5: there are a bunch of guys I worked with at
Speaker 5: the Red Sox that became GMS, and you know, Cleveland's
Speaker 5: always the team. I think owners love, especially the ones
Speaker 5: that come from the financial background, which was most of them, right,
Speaker 5: They love the efficiency. They even Steve Steve Cohen told
Speaker 5: me at one point, you know, I want to be
Speaker 5: like the Rays. And then when I told him what
Speaker 5: I thought the Rays were like, he was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: maybe I don't want to be the Raise, and I
Speaker 5: was like, you do to an extent. We will do
Speaker 5: things that they do and we will do them well.
Speaker 5: But you know what that really means is you're aggressively
Speaker 5: churning your roster. You're trading a Blake Snell with three
Speaker 5: years of control left because you're if you're looking, everything
Speaker 5: is how to turn value into longer, you know, focusing
Speaker 5: on future value and always kind of doing that. That's
Speaker 5: the best way to do that. And where the Rays
Speaker 5: actually have had the most success is in their trades.
Speaker 5: You know, they've been good in international, their drafts, results
Speaker 5: have been just okay over the years. But what they've
Speaker 5: been great at is their trades. And sometimes you know,
Speaker 5: they've missed on some but most of the time they
Speaker 5: do a great job of trading their major league players
Speaker 5: at their peak value and then getting a lot of
Speaker 5: future value. And so you know, sometimes I think that's
Speaker 5: what owners get excited about. They want the Cleveland model,
Speaker 5: the the Tampa model. But it doesn't mean just because
Speaker 5: you're poaching someone from those organizations that you're going to
Speaker 5: get the same thing. And you know, they all have
Speaker 5: to keep in mind who the people are that are
Speaker 5: actually you know, making those decisions, because sitting in that
Speaker 5: seat is very challenging, and not every number two could
Speaker 5: be a number one.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting you talk about that last point because
Speaker 1: we just interviewed Cale Body a week back and he
Speaker 1: was very much talking about the cultural side of how
Speaker 1: you kind of introducing analytics. But I mess and it
Speaker 1: works the same way in that front office. That is
Speaker 1: that when you're near at the top of that front office,
Speaker 1: you have to build a culture and an infrastructure that
Speaker 1: will survive any one person being taken out of that system,
Speaker 1: and that you need to be able to be like
Speaker 1: we have built this system that will work almost without
Speaker 1: any of the key people being here in three or
Speaker 1: four years time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'd always at the Red Sox focus on.
Speaker 5: You know, we'd say, if you're in a position that
Speaker 5: people where people report to you, your jobs develop someone
Speaker 5: to replace you, not because we're going to fire you,
Speaker 5: but because hopefully our success leads to you getting an
Speaker 5: opportunity somewhere else, or we can provide the opportunity here
Speaker 5: and you get promoted here, and then that person can
Speaker 5: step up into that role that's been left vacated. So
Speaker 5: I do think that's really important, and I think, you know,
Speaker 5: some teams are great at that. I will say, you know,
Speaker 5: especially as a consultant these last few years, culture is
Speaker 5: a big part of what I focus on, both in
Speaker 5: the analytics space because you know, I'll go back to
Speaker 5: the Rays because I do think they're the gold standard
Speaker 5: in sports. I actually call them the platinum standard across
Speaker 5: all sports of analytics. And I don't think it's because
Speaker 5: they have better tools than everyone else. They have great tools.
Speaker 5: They have great analytics, you know, data scientists building those tools.
Speaker 5: What makes them so great is that their process from
Speaker 5: going from analyzing the data, identifying the insights and then delivering,
Speaker 5: communicating those insights and executing on them to actually make
Speaker 5: players better or to make better decisions than player acquisitions.
Speaker 5: They're a well oiled machine that no one else is
Speaker 5: as good as them at doing that, so you know,
Speaker 5: I could use it. A good example of that was
Speaker 5: that the Red Sox we acquired jeff Springs, Jeffrey Springs,
Speaker 5: and we and then the Rays, and then I was
Speaker 5: gone and this happened, but they traded him to the
Speaker 5: Rays and he ended up having this breakout season with
Speaker 5: the Rays. And it was interesting because we were looking
Speaker 5: at the same thing, the same attributes that the Rays had,
Speaker 5: and you know, him was there and we talked through
Speaker 5: and I was like, Yeah, this guy, we like, this
Speaker 5: guy's got a lot more upside. Here are the things
Speaker 5: that he would need to change in order to tap
Speaker 5: into that potential. The problem that we had we didn't
Speaker 5: have good infrastructure in place to actually execute on that.
Speaker 5: Whereas then he goes to the Rays, who are looking
Speaker 5: at the same thing to identify him as a potentially
Speaker 5: undervalued player, but they now have the systems and processes
Speaker 5: in place where they can just get it out of
Speaker 5: him as quickly as possible, and that's a huge advantage.
Speaker 5: And part of that advantage comes with, you know, good people,
Speaker 5: really good communication and in good culture cultural alignment, but
Speaker 5: also stability. You know, yes, Andrew Freeman left the Rays
Speaker 5: and went to the Dodgers, but they promoted from within
Speaker 5: multiple times, and really since like two thousand and six,
Speaker 5: it's been the same front office and the same philosophies
Speaker 5: and the same processes in place, with making adjustments as
Speaker 5: time goes on and evolving, but everyone knows when you
Speaker 5: work for the rais what's expected, they know how they're
Speaker 5: going to do things. There's no real mystery there, and
Speaker 5: everyone can pretty quickly get aligned and focused on achieving
Speaker 5: that common goal. At the Red Sox we had a
Speaker 5: different GM every four years and in some cases big
Speaker 5: swings in philosophies, and so that's really hard and so
Speaker 5: I think the challenge what was really hard for him
Speaker 5: was to try to do the things that made the
Speaker 5: Rays so good in a culture that wasn't used to that.
Speaker 5: And there were some of us, like, you know, especially
Speaker 5: in the analytics side, like yeah, we get that, we
Speaker 5: speak that language, but it wasn't how we were doing
Speaker 5: things on the player development side and the major league
Speaker 5: coaching side, and so there was going to be this
Speaker 5: you know, prolonged learning curve to get there, and that's
Speaker 5: challenging and getting people on the same page. So when
Speaker 5: I work with clients on that analytic stuff, I always
Speaker 5: tell them it's twenty percent technical and eighty percent cultural
Speaker 5: because you know, having the greatest tools and finding all
Speaker 5: the important insights is one thing. But actually being able
Speaker 5: to you know, make better decisions or get more out
Speaker 5: of players by using it, that's a whole different story.
Speaker 5: And that's really the challenge because you have so many people,
Speaker 5: so many touch points with the players, both in your
Speaker 5: organization and outside it, with their own hitting gurus and
Speaker 5: pitching gurus. That's a very challenging thing.
Speaker 4: I mean that sort of touches quite nicely on some
Speaker 4: of the conversation that we had with Kyle, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Russell.
Speaker 4: So he was talking about his experience with Craig Breslo
Speaker 4: and how that's a lot of what he's focused on,
Speaker 4: like building that culture and building that architecture that can
Speaker 4: get them start with every player. And this is a
Speaker 4: trend that we've seen quite a lot recently. So you know,
Speaker 4: we've got Craig breslo in at the Red Sox Buster
Speaker 4: Posey and at San Francisco, and I got it. There
Speaker 4: are others that just not springing to my mom to
Speaker 4: mind the guy who's Dave Dombrowski's number two, Samfold at
Speaker 4: the Phillies. So there's more and more, you know, past
Speaker 4: players that that seems to be like a very recent trend,
Speaker 4: I mean an old trend that's come back. You know,
Speaker 4: there's no new ideas under the sun. Do you think
Speaker 4: that that might be why? Zach in your opinion that
Speaker 4: you know, clubhouse culture is is something that these guys
Speaker 4: understand and you can project that into a front office
Speaker 4: in But I mean you need the right guy, right,
Speaker 4: You need a samd Fold or a Craig breslow who
Speaker 4: understands the real complexities of the strategy and the analytics.
Speaker 4: But perhaps that is that. Do you from your perspective,
Speaker 4: is that why we're seeing this trend come through recently?
Speaker 3: I think possibly?
Speaker 5: I think there's some you know, I had the opportunity
Speaker 5: to work with the Texas Rangers in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: and Chris Young is one of those guys who played
Speaker 5: obviously and it was great working with him. I loved
Speaker 5: seeing that balance play out because I had never until
Speaker 5: working with Chris, I had never worked for someone that
Speaker 5: had been a former player, and so that was a
Speaker 5: new experience for me, and I saw the real value
Speaker 5: in it. Now Chris is his own person, Like I
Speaker 5: know Sam Fold really well. I don't know Craig very well.
Speaker 5: I know him a little bit as a player when
Speaker 5: we had him. I know Sam pretty well.
Speaker 3: Sam.
Speaker 5: Just use Sam as an example. Sam and Chris Young
Speaker 5: are completely different personalities.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: I'd say Chris is probably more prone to getting him
Speaker 5: fired up and emotional, which you know, is great, but
Speaker 5: also something he knows he has to keep in check
Speaker 5: at times, so he doesn't you.
Speaker 4: Know, I can't imagine what a six foot ten guy
Speaker 4: getting fired up looks like. Terrifying.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, he's a very smart guy and he know
Speaker 5: what he's great at. Is this guy who's had a
Speaker 5: very good big league career. He's very humble. He knows
Speaker 5: what he knows and what he doesn't know. And I
Speaker 5: think that's what makes him really good, is that humility
Speaker 5: to know, you know, It's one of the reasons I
Speaker 5: was working with him, is like, I don't know I
Speaker 5: don't know what a good analytics department looks like. I
Speaker 5: don't know how, you know, how best to use this
Speaker 5: in my decision making, and so he wanted some advice
Speaker 5: from someone from the outside, a different perspective, who'd been
Speaker 5: in a different organization that obviously we.
Speaker 3: Had success, so but I did.
Speaker 5: I think there are a lot of benefits to having
Speaker 5: been a past player, especially your interaction with players, and
Speaker 5: I think sometimes it's hard to relate to major league players,
Speaker 5: whether that's you know, real or imagined, it's just can
Speaker 5: be you know, there can be a disconnect there. And
Speaker 5: I was in a position at the Mets. I was
Speaker 5: not there very long, and part of it was COVID still,
Speaker 5: so there was a lot of challenges as far as
Speaker 5: even just being in the same room with people for
Speaker 5: a certain amount of time. I'm but yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: I think as someone that wasn't a player, I viewed
Speaker 5: the major league clubhouse as you know, their space. I'm
Speaker 5: going to be down there, but I'm not going to
Speaker 5: be down there all the time, and you know, I
Speaker 5: have to have conversations with the manager. I want to
Speaker 5: have some conversations with players at times, but I want
Speaker 5: to give them their space, and you know, maybe that's
Speaker 5: wrong that I did it that way, but that was
Speaker 5: kind of how I handled it and what my philosophy was.
Speaker 5: I want to be available to them. I want to
Speaker 5: be approachable for them and I and I would kind
Speaker 5: of do that and not have office hours, but kind
Speaker 5: of informally, you know, post up at times that you
Speaker 5: know as clear at an open door if players wanted
Speaker 5: to talk to me, and sometimes they did. But yeah,
Speaker 5: with Chris, it's like he's completely comfortable in the clubhouse
Speaker 5: and it's not. It's probably not as odd for people
Speaker 5: to see him in the club as the players the club.
Speaker 5: So I do think there's an advantage and I but
Speaker 5: I also think part of that is just going in
Speaker 5: opposite directions, right, Like the Giants had far Han as
Speaker 5: their president of Baseball option, Farhan is like one of
Speaker 5: the few actually true analytics guys that's been in that position.
Speaker 5: We love to talk about all the gems that are
Speaker 5: analytics guys, whatever that means to people, but the reality
Speaker 5: is the only people with that background that have been
Speaker 5: in that seat are far Home, James Klick, and me briefly,
Speaker 5: most of the Jeff Leunau, to some extent, although it's
Speaker 5: more of like a management consulting background than analytics. But
Speaker 5: you know, it's more that people that value analytics are
Speaker 5: in those jobs that can apply it, but they're not
Speaker 5: not their expertise. But so they had kind of more
Speaker 5: extreme on the analytics spectrum, right, They had someone that
Speaker 5: was their background, and so you know, it didn't work.
Speaker 5: He obviously lost his job, and then they go in
Speaker 5: a completely different direction. And I think you see that
Speaker 5: and I lived that with the Red Sox. To go
Speaker 5: from Dave Dombrowski to hind Bloom is two opposite ends
Speaker 5: in the spectrum. And it doesn't mean it can't work.
Speaker 5: It's I just think that there can be real action.
Speaker 5: And that's also when we talked about Copycat League. It's
Speaker 5: also reactionary too. This didn't work out, so I'm going
Speaker 5: to go in a completely different direction now. I actually
Speaker 5: think Craig Breslo, it's more like my senses, he's more
Speaker 5: like high Bloom than he is Dave Dombrowski, you know, thoughtful, measured,
Speaker 5: you know, he's he's an intellectual player. You know, he's
Speaker 5: he was, you know, always the smartest guy in the
Speaker 5: clubhouse type of thing. Because of his background. So he's
Speaker 5: not your typical he's not your typical player in that sense,
Speaker 5: doesn't mean he can't relate to players. He's been there,
Speaker 5: obviously he's got that built in credibility, but he strikes
Speaker 5: me as a different guy. Like I said, they're all
Speaker 5: different people. And I think that's how how owners need
Speaker 5: to evaluate these these things is to get to know
Speaker 5: kind of what's going to work, both on how they execute,
Speaker 5: how they make decisions, but also culturally. And I think
Speaker 5: that's the challenge because there's two cultural issues. There's kind
Speaker 5: of what you touched on and what I touched on before.
Speaker 5: There's the getting everyone on the same page the architecture
Speaker 5: of what we want to do, what we're about, getting
Speaker 5: everyone to say, this is what's important to us, and
Speaker 5: in Red Sox case, it's you know, we're going to
Speaker 5: measure you know, these are going to be our our
Speaker 5: key performance indicators that we're going to focus on for
Speaker 5: player development plans and for decision making, and how we're
Speaker 5: going to you know, measure success. There's that piece of
Speaker 5: it and getting alignment and clarity to everyone who so
Speaker 5: they know this is what we're about. But there's also
Speaker 5: the human culture part of it, and when you work
Speaker 5: in an industry that's very demanding, I think it's important
Speaker 5: that people are motivated and inspired when they come to work.
Speaker 5: I mean, you work for a baseball team because it's
Speaker 5: exciting and fun. You don't work for a baseball team
Speaker 5: to get rich. You know, there's so many people, especially
Speaker 5: on the analytics side, that you know they could go
Speaker 5: work in a lot of interesting industries and probably make
Speaker 5: a lot more money. But it's the excitement of trying
Speaker 5: to build a championship team. It's that the mission of
Speaker 5: a sports team is so clear that you can feel
Speaker 5: attached to it, whereas most corporate environments, the mission is
Speaker 5: something you often don't care about. So having people recognizing
Speaker 5: they're going to sacrifice a lot to work for a
Speaker 5: baseball team, having them be excited and motivated to come
Speaker 5: to work all the time is a key thing. And
Speaker 5: I unfortunately think and I blame myself to some degree
Speaker 5: for this analytical movement. I think part of one of
Speaker 5: the negative or unintended consequences of becoming so analytical is
Speaker 5: that we've almost become a little too clinical at times
Speaker 5: and have lost a little bit of the people.
Speaker 3: Part of it.
Speaker 5: And part of that is just tremendous growth in the
Speaker 5: size of baseball operations that's created a management challenge, but
Speaker 5: and also people feeling that they don't have enough time
Speaker 5: to kind of think through these things. And so there
Speaker 5: haven't been a lot of teams that have tried to think, Okay,
Speaker 5: as we've grown, like, how are we going to.
Speaker 3: Actually keep people engaged? How are we going to keep
Speaker 3: people motivated?
Speaker 5: How are we going to keep people feeling like this
Speaker 5: is not only, you know, a place I want to
Speaker 5: work hard for, but it's interesting and fun place to work.
Speaker 5: And I think that I found from talking to a
Speaker 5: lot of people with different teams that that's kind of
Speaker 5: declined a little bit. And so, you know, that's another
Speaker 5: thing I focus on as a as a a leadership coach,
Speaker 5: is trying to help leaders, you know, not forget about
Speaker 5: certain things like that, even though I know they're overwhelmed.
Speaker 5: I know they're pulled in a bunch of different directions.
Speaker 5: But the things that tend to go when you're overwhelmed
Speaker 5: and pulled in directions are communication throughout your organization and
Speaker 5: kind of checking in with your people, caring about their
Speaker 5: career paths and their development, Those things tend to go
Speaker 5: by the wayside a little bit sometimes, and I think
Speaker 5: it's important that that teams remember that.
Speaker 2: No, that's that's great to hear.
Speaker 1: It is like working anyway like that cultural side makes
Speaker 1: a massive difference. I think now what I'd like to
Speaker 1: do is you're probably going to go a bit more
Speaker 1: quick fire through some other things that we think the
Speaker 1: front office like might actually do during kind of this
Speaker 1: this time period, and you can give us like does
Speaker 1: this happen all the way through the year? Is this
Speaker 1: focused kind of like mainly during this offseason? How many
Speaker 1: people like this is a big effort, small effort. So
Speaker 1: I feel like the start of the simpling one is
Speaker 1: like in my head, like extending players is something that
Speaker 1: usually happens more in the off season than during the season.
Speaker 1: But are you almost like constantly working on what we
Speaker 1: think that value should be?
Speaker 5: Well, I think, for in my experience, most contract extensions
Speaker 5: conversations happen in spring training after the off season's kind
Speaker 5: of dad down. Sometimes it's other times, but that's most
Speaker 5: of the time that's been the case. But you're working
Speaker 5: on there's always someone that you have working on figuring
Speaker 5: out what that could look like, and those things can
Speaker 5: change based on how the player performs from year to year.
Speaker 5: You know, Mookie Bets, we made him a contract off
Speaker 5: for every year for like three years to try to
Speaker 5: lock them up, and each year it seemed like he
Speaker 5: had a better year, so the number grew by like
Speaker 5: one hundred million each time. It is kind of crazy.
Speaker 5: So but yeah, that's usually the time that that happens.
Speaker 5: But there's always someone, you know, keeping track of what
Speaker 5: it could look.
Speaker 1: Like cool qualifying offers for the for free agents that
Speaker 1: are going out the door.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's something you know, you do. You talk
Speaker 5: about the off season. You know, you're always mindful of
Speaker 5: it during the season, but you know you want as
Speaker 5: much information as possible, so you want the season to
Speaker 5: close out. Part of that is obviously health related, so
Speaker 5: I think the timing of that is as late as possible.
Speaker 5: But you're thinking about it. You're always thinking about these things.
Speaker 5: You think about your roster, you know, your current roster,
Speaker 5: and then the roster over the next like three years.
Speaker 5: Maybe you're always trying to think about because they're related.
Speaker 5: You know, you if you sign a guy to a
Speaker 5: big contract, you're taking away an opportunity for something maybe later,
Speaker 5: So you always have to be mindful of the short
Speaker 5: and long term.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like one of those like arbitrary
Speaker 1: moments and time we have is with that forty bine
Speaker 1: roster around, like the Rule five draft, Like how how
Speaker 1: almost like there's seemed to be a certain a moment
Speaker 1: of finality there, Like do you feel that that is
Speaker 1: the case or is that something that we see from
Speaker 1: like the outside perspective might be a bit more.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure I completely understand your question, but I
Speaker 5: do think there's a point there's this period during the
Speaker 5: off season where you kind of have to freeze your roster, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: and so there's a lot of strategizing and maneuvering before
Speaker 5: that period kicks in, and then there's a sense of
Speaker 5: relief after that period's over because then you can do
Speaker 5: some things and then you know, if you need to
Speaker 5: take a guy off, you can take a guy off
Speaker 5: through a DFA. Certain guys, some guys you can't because
Speaker 5: they have to be on. It's based on the rules.
Speaker 5: So is that is that what you're getting now?
Speaker 2: Is? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so something yeah, Because then you have
Speaker 1: the Rule five draft, which is then like anybody that
Speaker 1: you've left unprotected, then come can be like like nicked
Speaker 1: by somebody, And maybe for you, has there been anybody
Speaker 1: that like you left unprotected and gottennabbed, then you maybe
Speaker 1: read the decision.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, he was just traded at the Cubs, Presley, and
Speaker 5: there were two actually right around the same time, Presley
Speaker 5: and Josh Fields, who was later traded by the Astros
Speaker 5: for Alvarez, which is crazy trade. But those guys we,
Speaker 5: you know, and why it frustrates me in particular, is
Speaker 5: we weren't where we needed to be analytically with pitch
Speaker 5: tracking data. And that's on me and other others in
Speaker 5: that area, but you know, I take ownership of that.
Speaker 5: If we were, we would have known that those guys
Speaker 5: had certain qualities if they're pitches, that would have clearly
Speaker 5: indicated that we should add them protect them from the
Speaker 5: Rule five draft.
Speaker 3: And we didn't.
Speaker 5: And obviously Presley's the bigger one because of the career
Speaker 5: that he's had. But you know, at the time, if
Speaker 5: you're not looking at that stuff, you tend to have
Speaker 5: a bunch of relievers or pictures that you think are relievers,
Speaker 5: and it's hard to separate them. And a lot of
Speaker 5: them kind of fall in the same value area, and
Speaker 5: if you don't, if you know, if you're not using
Speaker 5: all the information that you have, you're increasing your chances
Speaker 5: of making a bad decision. And that to me is
Speaker 5: as a perfect example of you know, where a team
Speaker 5: that was using that stuff would have an advantage, and
Speaker 5: you know we whipped.
Speaker 3: On that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the next one, which I think really goes
Speaker 1: back sometimes can maybe come back to the cultural question
Speaker 1: is arbitration. It feels like a really weird thing that
Speaker 1: exists in baseball that not many people really see outside
Speaker 1: side of this, and so you're left it this viewpoint
Speaker 1: that is like, oh, I don't know how I would
Speaker 1: feel at work if someone based I said, I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm worth this, and then my boss told me, no,
Speaker 1: you're not, and then spend maybe thirty minutes to an
Speaker 1: hour telling somebody independent exactly why I'm not worth that
Speaker 1: amount of money. Like, do you find that sometimes you've
Speaker 1: gone through philosophies of avoiding the arbitration as much as possible,
Speaker 1: or like I think we've heard of more people now
Speaker 1: just be kind of it's like there's one offer and
Speaker 1: it's basically taken or leave it, or we'll go into obitration.
Speaker 5: Yeah, more teams have adopted the file and trial. If
Speaker 5: we file numbers, exchange numbers, we're going to a hearing.
Speaker 5: I actually think in some ways that's helped that more
Speaker 5: teams have done that, because now it's like purely you know,
Speaker 5: I talked about being clinical before, it's purely this business equation,
Speaker 5: like if we don't have an agreement here, then we're
Speaker 5: going And it's not a personal thing, it's just the
Speaker 5: way it is. And you see some teams go over
Speaker 5: really for really small amounts because they have to stay
Speaker 5: consistent in their philosophy or else no one will believe
Speaker 5: them next year if they say that they're going to
Speaker 5: be a file and if we don't have an agreement
Speaker 5: by this date, we're going to a hearing. So but overall,
Speaker 5: it is an awkward process. It is designed that way.
Speaker 5: It's designed for people to want to avoid it, both sides,
Speaker 5: the team and the player, so it's unpleasant. I do
Speaker 5: think there's a way, and I do think at the
Speaker 5: Red Sox we were pretty good at this of I've
Speaker 5: sat in on some hearings where they were just the
Speaker 5: team side was just brutal. Like I sat in on
Speaker 5: k Rod the year after it was his last year
Speaker 5: and he had the year before he had given up
Speaker 5: at Homer to Many Ramirez. That was the walk off
Speaker 5: of the series against the Angels, and they basically, with
Speaker 5: him present in the room, walked through that scenario that
Speaker 5: at bat to Many Ramirez and basically blamed the entire
Speaker 5: season on him for blowing giving.
Speaker 3: Up that home run. That.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was like I was sitting in that just
Speaker 5: as a as an educational purposes, and I was just like,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh, like and I'm looking at Caro and
Speaker 5: he's looking around like is this really happening?
Speaker 3: And it was funny. It was his last year with
Speaker 3: the Angels, and it.
Speaker 5: Was like, well, he's not going to sign with them,
Speaker 5: you know, like he's and maybe they didn't want to anyway,
Speaker 5: and so they didn't care. But you know, so people
Speaker 5: are really brutal. I always felt like at the Redzecks
Speaker 5: we went we never went with few Epstein. He did
Speaker 5: not want to go in the US for a long time.
Speaker 5: When he went there, didn't go, but then they did
Speaker 5: because they adopted the file and trial approach. We did
Speaker 5: go after THEO multiple times, first with a reliever to
Speaker 5: kind of test the waters, a Fernando Abad. It was
Speaker 5: like a small number deal, but it was like, we
Speaker 5: need to show that we're willing to go because no
Speaker 5: one believes us. So we felt like we had to go,
Speaker 5: and we went on a low risk guy like that
Speaker 5: and we won that hearing. We eventually went with Mookie Bets.
Speaker 5: We had a three million dollar separation and really we
Speaker 5: didn't have much of a choice there because I think
Speaker 5: the agent was trying to, you know, make a bigger
Speaker 5: market point on superstar players, and probably the union was
Speaker 5: someone involved, and so there wasn't much negotiating. They just
Speaker 5: they were just sticking to this really high number, and
Speaker 5: it was like, okay, like we don't really have much
Speaker 5: of a choice. We don't want to go in a
Speaker 5: hearing with Mookie Bets. But there it's like if we
Speaker 5: don't go give them their number, they're not going to move.
Speaker 5: So at some point it just becomes a simple risk equation.
Speaker 5: It's like, well, they're so far on their side of
Speaker 5: the middle of the mid point of these two numbers
Speaker 5: that we may as well go.
Speaker 3: What do we have to lose?
Speaker 5: Because if we say yes, you know, we have a
Speaker 5: chance to actually save significantly, so at some point it
Speaker 5: becomes that equation. And so we went and and I
Speaker 5: think we we did a good job of saying, like
Speaker 5: a Mookie Bets is great and this number would make him,
Speaker 5: you know, be a record number. Why should he get
Speaker 5: that plus three? You know, it was basically the armists.
Speaker 5: It wasn't to say that Mookie Bets isn't a good player,
Speaker 5: but to your point, inherently you are saying you're not
Speaker 5: worth your three million worth three million dollars less. And
Speaker 5: he won, And there were some moments where was uncomfortable,
Speaker 5: but he's the kind of guy I don't felt like.
Speaker 5: I didn't feel like it had any influence on our
Speaker 5: relationship with him. He was very You came up from
Speaker 5: the through the organization, had great relationships with a lot
Speaker 5: of people in it, and it didn't feel like that change.
Speaker 5: There was some narrative that maybe it was wasn't gonna
Speaker 5: sign with us anymore after that. That wasn't true at all,
Speaker 5: and we felt like that didn't influence And he went
Speaker 5: out and won the MVP in the World Series that year,
Speaker 5: so it clearly didn't affect his performance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Cool, I think the last fun one, maybe for me,
Speaker 1: is that we see sometimes that teams are constantly looking
Speaker 1: to actually change the dimensions of the field. We've obviously
Speaker 1: seen it in the last couple of years with the
Speaker 1: Baltimore Oriols, with what we's been called Waltimore being moved
Speaker 1: out and moved back based on the construction of that lineup.
Speaker 1: Is that something that is happening across the board? Are
Speaker 1: you thinking about that regularly when you're at Boston or
Speaker 1: the Mets, to be like, hey, if we just adjusted
Speaker 1: this wall slightly by ten foot, that would actually be better
Speaker 1: for us than our opponents.
Speaker 5: I didn't think about it in Boston because you're not
Speaker 5: going to touch Fenway Park, right, it's a landmark. You're
Speaker 5: not going to do anything significant there. I mean, putting
Speaker 5: seats on top of the Monster was like a big
Speaker 5: controversy at the time and now everyone's happy they did it,
Speaker 5: but it was like, oh, the sacred, it's sacred the Monster,
Speaker 5: and it's like, no, this just makes more sense and
Speaker 5: now it's cool people can sit up there. But with
Speaker 5: the Mets, I thought about it because City Field is
Speaker 5: a really hard place to hit and they had been
Speaker 5: one of the teams that made your adjustments after they
Speaker 5: first opened. What I found funny in my career, I've
Speaker 5: never understood how certain ballparks like city Field, pet Go
Speaker 5: when it first came out, Call America and Detroit, the
Speaker 5: dimensions that when they were designed were so huge. It
Speaker 5: was very obvious that they were going to be graveyards
Speaker 5: for baseballs. And then they you know, like just they
Speaker 5: should have been able to figure that out through physics
Speaker 5: and just understanding the game. And then they come out
Speaker 5: and they play and everyone, you know, David Wright's complaining
Speaker 5: about City Field. He drops his home runs get cut
Speaker 5: in half, and you know San Diego is more extreme,
Speaker 5: and then it's like, oh, I guess we got to
Speaker 5: adjust this, Like it's two big. I don't understand why
Speaker 5: they can't figure that out beforehand, Like it should be
Speaker 5: pretty for Baltimore when they when Baltimore moved their fences,
Speaker 5: it was like, what are you do when you're going
Speaker 5: too far? You know, those things we were consulted and
Speaker 5: we built in Boston. When they moved TRIPAA from pot
Speaker 5: Tucket to Worcester, they were building a new ballpark and
Speaker 5: they actually consulted someone in baseball ops who as an
Speaker 5: expertise in physics and asked about, you know, fence heights
Speaker 5: and dimensions and how it would play, and he gave them.
Speaker 5: It was fairly easy for him to say, this is
Speaker 5: what you can expect in terms of home runs and
Speaker 5: blah blah blah. You know, you need to know wind
Speaker 5: patterns and other things like that. But whether but it's
Speaker 5: always amazed me that people haven't been able to stay
Speaker 5: ahead of that. And then you have fences moving in
Speaker 5: and out all the time. But that's been going on
Speaker 5: since you know, the eighteen hundreds in baseball.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one little question to that, it is like we've
Speaker 1: seen some teams that have made their dimensions in their
Speaker 1: minor league parks similar to like their major league parks.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's a pro or like getting people
Speaker 1: to overfit to where they may end up and eventually playing.
Speaker 3: Well, we did that in Boston.
Speaker 5: Greenville is like a little Fenway Greenville here. Yeah, you
Speaker 5: know down four Myers that's another kind of Fenwly it's not.
Speaker 5: It's very different actually, because there's seats in the wall
Speaker 5: and it's a higher line. It's a higher wall than
Speaker 5: fly And we did that for defensive development, right, if
Speaker 5: you're going to come up to Fenwick Park. We have
Speaker 5: this unusual ballpark with this thirty seven foot high wall
Speaker 5: that's only three hundred ten feet away. I mean it's
Speaker 5: it's so so extreme and unusual that we felt it
Speaker 5: would benefit our players to get more reps off of
Speaker 5: something similar.
Speaker 3: So that was the motivation behind that.
Speaker 5: So I don't know, I don't feel strongly either way,
Speaker 5: but I understood where we were coming from when we
Speaker 5: built Greenville that way.
Speaker 1: No kids, I think that's amazing, John, Unless you have
Speaker 1: any final questions, I mean I have dozens.
Speaker 4: I could sit un tik to Zach for hours. I
Speaker 4: mean it just just for my own amusement. But I'm
Speaker 4: conscious that this man has a life. He's got to
Speaker 4: go and own corn, he's got a family, so I
Speaker 4: think we should probably just release him to have the
Speaker 4: rest of his day.
Speaker 3: Zach.
Speaker 4: It's been an absolute pleasure and an honor to talk
Speaker 4: to you as a Red Sox fan. No least, thank you,
Speaker 4: thank you for all the rings it's been. It was
Speaker 4: all yeah, well yeah.
Speaker 3: It was all you.
Speaker 2: Well with you and what zero in one hundred years
Speaker 2: without you? So yeah, it was all you.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, you know some guys called Dustin and David.
Speaker 4: They may claim all the credit, but it's all down
Speaker 4: to you. So thanks so much for your time. I
Speaker 4: know that you do loads of media work yourself with
Speaker 4: with s N. Why you're you're a regular with with
Speaker 4: Albuddy Rob Bradford on baseball is boring. So if people
Speaker 4: want to hear more of this, this, this, this, gold
Speaker 4: where's the best place to be following you Zac to
Speaker 4: make sure that they keep up with you?
Speaker 5: Sure, I'm on pretty much all the social channels at
Speaker 5: Zach Scott sports Zach with a key, so yeah, that's
Speaker 5: pretty much where you can find me most active, probably
Speaker 5: on on X, but you can find me on pretty
Speaker 5: much all the channels at Zach Scott Sports.
Speaker 4: Zach. Thank you so much for your time today and
Speaker 4: hopefully we can speak again sometimes soon.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed it, guys, Thank you. Cheers all right, take care,