Effectively Wild Episode 1703: Yesterday’s Papers

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri banter about Ryan Yarbrough throwing a rare Rays complete game, then share their thoughts on the recent debate about media access in sports sparked by tennis star Naomi Osaka, touching on how access to athletes compares across sports, the dubious value of press conferences, athletes’ obligations and mental health, how media coverage can help players, reporters, and the public, the ongoing efforts to restore MLB clubhouse access, and whether it makes sense for baseball teams (and Joe Girardi) to dissemble and withhold information about tactics and player availability. Then they examine recent research that suggests that defensive positioning (but not the infield shift!) may be responsible for much of MLB’s offensive outage, and discuss Emma’s recent deep dives into newspaper archives to see what contemporary writers, players, and baseball officials said about the 1968 Year of the Pitcher and the 1917 spree of no-hitters, reflecting on the value of historical research, how baseball history (and coverage) repeats itself, how the 1968 discourse mirrored and differed from today’s, whether we’ve gotten better at diagnosing baseball’s problems, putting pitchers in holes, and much more.

Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "Yesterday’s Papers"
Audio outro: Split Enz, "History Never Repeats"

Link to Joe Posnanski on Osaka
Link to Bryan Curtis on Osaka
Link to Curtis on NBA press conferences
Link to Ken Davidoff on Girardi
Link to Devan Fink on Harper
Link to Rob Arthur on defensive positioning
Link to Rob on fielders playing deeper
Link to Rob on outfield shifts
Link to Russell Carleton on four-man outfields
Link to study on optimizing outfield positioning
Link to story on Fowler in 2016
Link to story on Jones in 2017
Link to Emma on baseball dying
Link to story on the 1963 strike zone expansion
Link to Emma on 1968
Link to Rob Mains on 1968
Link to Emma on 1917

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