ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Two years ago I sat down with Ben Lindbergh — co-host of Effectively Wild, co-author of “The MVP Machine” — to talk through the player development revolution remaking baseball.
I’m re-airing it with a new intro. The reason: two years later, baseball is still chasing the same answers, and still hasn’t solved the same problems.
We get into:
• Why pitching always stays a step ahead of hitting
• How chasing every edge turned the whole league into the same team
• Whether the rule changes were ever going to work
• Ben’s fix: cap the pitchers on the roster, make guys pace themselves, and you get back deeper starts, more contact, fewer blown-out arms
A few references are frozen in 2023 — Hosmer getting DFA’d, Morel being all the vibes. Enjoy the time capsule. The heart of it plays sharper now than the day we taped it.
The thread to hold onto: every adaptation has a price — what it costs a player, and maybe the game itself, to become something different than it used to be.
