JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 5/18/20

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Ben Clemens

2:13

You'd totally believe me

Not about the COVID part but about the rest.

So this just feels like an escalation of that.

Or perhaps a continuation.

Morbo

2:13

Hi Ben, how have you been doing with the quarantine?

Ben Clemens

2:13

Hello! I've been doing alright, to be honest.

2:15

It's not easy, but I think that my setup is quite good as far as people affected by the lockdown go.

I'm already able to work from home, and I happen to really enjoy OOTP, which is giving me something to do with all of my time

Of course, it's been stressful, but it's been stressful for everyone.

I won't compare my having to write about baseball without baseblal to people losing their jobs -- theirs is worse!

2:16

And my wife has to work from home as well, but our apartment is of a size that makes it doable for us both to work here, which is another huge blessing.

I wish we had an extra room but hi! I'm a human! I wish I lived in a bigger living space without having to spend more money for it!

Sir Nerdlington

2:16

outside front office wages and debt obligations, what else is in "local expense?" 4.7B seems like an enormous 'misc - just trust us' line item.

Ben Clemens

2:17

Loads and loads of awkward local TV spots

More seriously, stadium upkeep is a real thing, those things don't run themselves by a long shot.

I imagine that they could slash those pretty heavily when they were running an empty stadium

2:18

But it's not free to run a giant building like that. Particularly when you need to keep it in peak-peak condition all the time.

I'm not really sure what else goes in there -- it's really a weird term that implies they're trying to obfuscate what they're spending on, which should raise some red flags.

But there are true local costs for sure.

Derek

2:18

I just got a card in OOTP Perfect Team for someone named Goose Goslin, which of course prompted me to go read his SABR bio... And man things were wild in the early 1900s.

Ben Clemens

2:19

The best part of Perfect Team is the old cards by far.

Incidentally, Perfect Team is incredible overall, and the tournaments are buckets of fun if you're an RPG player.

Because the game really feels like a baseball RPG with some really fun deckbuilding elements

But reading about the old players is just phenomenal.

2:20

I built a tournament team that's a bunch of old-school groundball pitchers and great infield defense, so you want really high-stamina guys, aka early 20th century pitchers

I have two guys with the respective nicknames of "The Goshen Schoolmaster" and "The Yiddish Curver"

Phenomenal!

My shortstop had 17 WS rings

How is that even possible!

Jeff

2:20

Speaking of backup catchers that hit...How low key real life good is that Contreras/Caratini duo in Chicago?

Ben Clemens

2:21

Yeah it's excellent

Caratini might be as good as Contreras honestly

It's really hard to know how much of Contreras's poor framing numbers is noise and how much is real

But they're both above average catchers, which feels very rare these days.

2:22

In our OOTP league the Cubs traded Caratini for pretty good value, and that made a lot of sense to me. He's really overqualified as a backup.

Jeff

2:22

Will Derek Jeter's Player Tribune ever take off or is it to American for 21st centry 'Merica? I think it suffers the fatal flaw if trying to reach the masses of celebrating people rather than the machines they work

Ben Clemens

2:23

I'm honestly unsure.

I'm not really sure that hte problem is that it celebrates the players.

It does that, but in a both-teams-played-hard-and-I-love-baseball way that is really a common throughline in baseball stories over time.

2:24

Some of the problem is that it's stuck in a weird place where it tends to get these stories that are a mix of human interest and nitty gritty

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