It’s been OVER a year since my last podcast/fireside chat, but this week I was fortunate enough to sit down and virtually interview baseball writer Joe Sheehan, who writes extensively about baseball.  He co-founded of Baseball Prospectus, and currently writes for a variety of sports outlets.  He publishes a subscription newsletter, the Joe Sheehan newsletter, which provides high quality commentary and analysis about major league baseball multiple times per week. 

Listen in as we discuss the state of Major League Baseball and the lockout, whether Yadier Molina belongs in the Hall of Fame, our perspectives on passing down our baseball obsession to our kids, and more.  

You can watch the video on YouTube, use the embedded player below to listen from this page, watch on YouTube from this page, or go to your favorite podcast sites to download this one — just search for Rogue Dad MD. Below are links to some more popular podcastsites: Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn+Alexa, and iHeartRadio.  Click here to go direct to an RSS feed with the episodes. If you scroll down you can also find the full transcript of the interview.

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Below is a transcript of Podcast #3 — Fireside Chat with Joe Sheehan

Note — this podcast was transcribed using free software so please excuse the many typos. Editing a transcript is very labor intensive, and I simply don’t have time to do it (however if anyone wants to sponsor the site, some of that revenue could go towards a paid transcription service!). For the full experience, please listen to the audio or watch the video.

Rogue Dad, MD: Welcome everyone to the Rogue Dad MD fireside chat. This is your host Rogue Dad MD. We are here for my second annual rogue dad MD fireside chat. And my last one was actually a year ago in spring of 2021. When I interviewed Will Leitch am I one on prior podcast before that went online in spring of 2020.

So as current as always, I still have no advertisers, no sponsors. So if you’d like to hear more of my annual content, please reach out to me and let me know. If you’d like to sponsor me, you can be the sponsor for the 2023 interview, which hopefully will start lining up. Sometime later this year, my guest today live from New York city is Joe Sheehan

he is a writer who has written extensively about baseball for his entire career. He was co-founder of baseball perspectives, and now currently writes for a variety of news outlets. He publishes a subscription newsletter, the Joe Sheehan newsletter, and in full disclosure, I am not just a subscriber. I am a lifetime subscriber to his newsletter, but I will say provides very high quality commentary and analysis about major league baseball multiple times per week.

So without further ado, I want to say thank you and welcome to Joe.

Joe Sheehan: But I figure we’ll give you enough material for a year, so I’ll try to do this.

Rogue Dad, MD: Well, then we might have to go about 25 minutes. Cause at the end of this, also, by the way, I’m going to have some requests. I want you to try and link me up with my next guests, my ma my next request.

So we’ll get to that at the end, because at least one of them, based on your newsletters, it looks like, you know, so we’ll come to that at the end. So, Joe, I just want to jump right in and you know, I gave you a little bit of heads up about some of the topics we might discuss. And I will say because I’m not a traditional journalist or a writer or podcast, or I sometimes delve a little bit off beat and I wanted to go somewhat personal to kind of start with and something, jump into something that may be a little uncomfortable for you.

It’s a segment that after I did this with, well, last year, I’m now naming. How famous are you? What I want you to tell me and try to guess is how famous of a she had, are you so I’ve did some Googling and trying to find out the list of the most famous. She hands out there in the world. And I did find a list that does include your name.

And I want you to guess, I want you to tell me one. Do you think you’re in the top 10? No. No. Okay. Who would you think is first?

Joe Sheehan: Uh, the, the activist from maybe 10 years ago. Uh, I’m going to forget her name now. It was a woman P Patricia meaty. No, it wasn’t particular with somebody in that. I see.

Rogue Dad, MD: I do see a Patty on this list.

Okay. Patty is number three. So I don’t know name number one, but you are in the top 10. You are in fact number seven. So I’m going to share this with you. We’re going to put this up on screen real quick. So you can see someone named Neil. She hand was actually number one, born in 1936.

Okay. So he did not warrant a photo, but if you scroll down here, you can see yourself. Number seven. I’m pretty sure this is you. Joshi ham born February 26th, 1971. Is that. Yeah.

Joe Sheehan: Uh, Cindy was the activist actually patented the golfer, but yeah. So yeah, that’s not that

Rogue Dad, MD: settled. Yeah. I think that’s pretty good.

Cause I’m pretty sure if you looked me up, my last name is Ahmad or AMA depending on pronunciation, a H M a D. That is essentially the equivalent of Smith or Jones in the Muslim world. And so I probably wouldn’t crack the top 100,000 would be my guests. I’m hoping after this interview, that’ll bump up my rankings on the web a little bit, and I might come up to maybe top a hundred thousand, but we’ll have to see how good the content really is.

So now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk a little bit about baseball. And I mentioned, I am a newsletter subscriber, and yesterday you wrote a very long and impassioned piece, actually that you actually made publicly available, that you didn’t put behind the subscriber paywall, basically a plea to MLB, to end the lockout.

Uh, really, and we’ll delve more into this in a second, cause I want to get more of your perspective about why you chose to write this and why you feel like this is different than prior work stoppages. You really put out a plea out there saying that the differences between the owners and MLB is nothing like what they’ve dealt with before.

It’s not as fundamentally different as what they’ve had to deal with in the past. Can you elaborate a little bit about why you think this is different than actual work stoppages we’ve dealt with? Yeah,

Joe Sheehan: we met eight work stoppages, but we’ve only had three that have cost games in 1972 and 1981. And in 94 95, and each of those, you had kind of a fundamental issue to the game.

Other 72, 1 was over the pension, which before free agency and arbitration was the issue. The entire reason the players union came into beat and the only issue had fought bar really in the first two decades of its existence was the pension. So it was a very big deal at the time. Now, of course, players make a lot more money.

They still value their pension, but it’s not as essential. Uh, you go to 81. We have free agency for five years, the owners did not like that. They wanted restrictions on it. They wanted a system of compensation that would really have neutered free agency. That was the only issue holding up that CBA. They actually kicked it forward from 1980 to 1981.

That one issue couldn’t agree. And we had the 50 day strike. And then in 1994, the owners really wanted to implement the salary cap system. They’ve seen it in the NBA. They’ve seen the NFL agree to one, although it wouldn’t go into plat practice until late 94, they really wanted that system. So they were essentially bargaining.

In 1994 with an eye towards, uh, declaring an impasse and implementing their system, the players knew this. They went on on strike really the last minute that they could to at least take money away from the, the owners, try to get them to negotiate to a deal as opposed to an impasse. So the pension free agency, a payroll cap system, those were the three reasons we’ve had the three actual loss of games in baseball history.

This is nothing like that. There was no one issue central to the game central to the operations of the business operations of the game that are in play right now. If you look at the differences between the two sides where they stand right now, you know, the players have not, it came into this asking for less than I thought they would, and they even backed off their most.

Their biggest asks the differences between these two sides right now is largely. And it’s not relative to a $10 billion industry. It’s not even that much money, about $400 million at the outside. If we were, if the owners were to say today, we’re just going to accept everything the players have on the table.

It might cost them $400 million a year, maybe $600 million by the end of the CBA, but nothing structurally would change. Um, so it’s frustrating now to say we might lose games. We might alienate fans over just money. I understood the disputes in 72. Know I was one year old, let’s say been in 81 and 94. This isn’t worth it.

This isn’t worth a work stoppage just for the money.

Rogue Dad, MD: So let me follow up on that and ask him more. About the sort of this contentious issue. So what ha what is your perspective in terms of if they are locked out right now, but they end up only missing spring training games, or may you know, maybe only one or two regular season games.

Is, is this disruptive to you only if they end up losing regular season games, or is it just the fact that they are locked out over what seems to be a couple of percentage points, revenue difference to you? The issue? Well,

Joe Sheehan: I don’t think it’s worth losing any games, but from a tactical standpoint, I don’t think just losing a few games is on the table here.

If you’re the owners, you know, spring training is valuable to you. You don’t play the play, pay the players you collect, you know, it’s pretty profitable enterprise at this point. The first two months of the season are the least valuable months of the season. So I feel like if we don’t get a deal that saves spring training, the owners might just hold out until may and starting to look to start the season in June with a settlement.

So my concern is this what you’re saying? Could we might only lose a week of games like the 1990. Making 90 lockout where you push the season back a week and you make the games up with double headers. I don’t know that that’s necessarily on the table here. If you tell me we’re only going to lose a handful of games, it’ll be made up prophecies and I’m not as concerned, but I think it’s more likely that if we don’t get a settlement in the next two weeks, we’re not going to get a settlement the next two months.

And I’ve never been a baseball is dying guy. I mean, you see right all the time. It’s well dying. Baseball is dying and this has been dying my entire life. I think they suppose driving drunk. And it doesn’t, I don’t see, uh, an understanding right now of just what the fan sentiment is. Baseball has never been as troubled as it.

I don’t, I want to take that back. The game on the field in the family, the carriage fans relationship with baseball is different than it’s been throughout history. Um, so baseball’s not going into this from a position of strength and you’ve got the 20, 20 season. You’ve got a game at stagnant on the field of alienating people.

It’s not as much fun to watch. And I just don’t know that you can count on everybody coming back. If you take two months off again, now wasn’t their fault. They took two months off in 2020, but I think the average fan doesn’t remember that it was a pandemic. They remember the fights between the owners and the players, whether it was going to be an 85 game season or a 75 game season.

And it was eventually a 68 season. So it’s going to be seen as more of the same. I think two fractured seasons in three years was really derail kind of the continuity of baseball history as well. So there’s a, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at San opinion and I, my perception is that baseball is in greater danger.

Rogue Dad, MD: So you said a lot there and that’s really insightful. So no, no, no. That’s great. I want to unpack a little bit of that though. So there’s a whole, there’s a few comments I wanted to follow up. So going back to the beginning, you talked about how the beginning of the season is less important to the owner’s pocket books then later in the season, the first two months, is that because, you know, the attendance is lower earlier when it’s colder or what, what, what is the reason behind why they be less worried about losing April versus July?

And why would it not just shift back

Joe Sheehan: ballpark revenue? I mean, they’re just more people, even regardless of what the actual tickets sold counts are, more people are going to come to the ballpark in June, July, August that are in April, may and September. This is. You know, you’ll see, uh, people say, well, why don’t they have all the warm weather and dome teams play in April?

Well, because teams want home dates in June, July, and August. That’s when they want to play their home games. So if you just make those teams play all the home games in April, it’s kind of, it hurts them financially. So you have a bounce. So yeah, games in June, July and August are far more valuable than the other three months.

Uh, it’s also, you know, from a TV standpoint, I mean, everything before the all-star break Facebook doesn’t really have a large national television presence anymore. ESPN has gotten out of the game other than Saturdays, Fox will occasionally go. I want to say they have a game of the week, but it’s not every week, the first half of the season.

Um, it’s not really until the all-star break that TV contracts really kick in. So you’re not giving us up as much nationally until really Memorial day. I think that if the owners get through the owners lose spring training, they’ll target Memorial day is when they will start.

Rogue Dad, MD: Now, I’m curious how much of that sort of.

Speculation about potential start date. How much of this is sort of your inferential understanding of economics? How much of this is maybe from any discussions you’ve had with people who are part of team management who may be directly involved in some of these decisions? Have you had a chance to talk with people who are executives or, or is this sort of, kind of putting pieces together as you’ve researched the topic?

Joe Sheehan: One of the things I don’t do is report. And because of that, I do have relationships with people because they talk to me cause they know I’m not reporting things. So I guess what I can say to you as hot as I’m doing this, I’m giving you largely my inference and analysis with input from people. I trust that I talk to, uh, but unfortunately the nature of what I do, I just, I like having these relationships where I can talk to people and they know I’m not going to publish it or talk about it.

So there’s definitely some more of that in there that. Yeah, 15 to 20 years ago. Well, when I started out, we were the idiots on the outside perspectives. Nobody would talk to us. It took a lot of time for the outsiders to get a little more credibility. I have some of that now, which is nice, but I learned how to do this without reporting.

So it’s kind of different.

Rogue Dad, MD: So speaking, I was going to say speaking from a common fan perspective, but the common fan is not reaching out to interview their favorite baseball writer. So maybe I’m not quite the average common fan, but I am a born and raised Cardinals fan sort of obsessed over baseball. So I’m one of those folks that still follows the sport, despite all the problems that they have had is your perspective when you’ve sort of done fan analysis or looked into it too, do the fans care about why games don’t happen?

Does it matter to the average fan, whether it’s a lockout or a strike or a percentage or three percentages or to them, is it a missed game and therefore both sides that are blamed because you definitely hear. And I definitely read sort of a general popular perspective that it’s millionaires filing, fighting billionaires.

And that’s what it’s been like with every other work stoppage in every sport. Do you feel like there’s perception differences between the causes? Do you think the public will view this as the owners locking the players out and causing unfair advantage? Or is this really just going to come down on both sides and people will lose interest because of that

Joe Sheehan: more, the latter, more than above pox on both houses.

You see, you mentioned the millionaires versus billionaires, which is, you know, fundamentally untrue, but that’s the line. People use people playing kids, guys playing a kid’s game for a millions, all the cliches. I would say that there’s less of that than there was in 81 or 92. But that’s still the dominant outlook.

Um, if these are complicated subjects and people just, I can’t really play blame somebody who’s working 40 hours a week and raising kids, and I really want to get into the nitty gritty of why this luxury tax rate versus this luxury tax rate. And then that’s my job. Um, I do think that there’s this combination of younger baseball fans getting involved.

The coverage has got better over the years. I think I go back to, I worked with Doug pap as a baseball perspective and Keith law and Keith Waller, Derek dumpster. That’s a really wonderful work back of the deck. Um, I think perspectives moved the Overton window on this stuff. So if it was, let’s call it 90 10 against the players in 1994.

So maybe 75, 25, maybe it’s 65, 35. That’s probably not that long, but you know, two thirds to one third where players are getting more severe. From particularly a younger fan base, they’re getting better served by journalism that still by and large is pro owner or a pro both are both sides mindset, but there are writers who do a really good job of saying, Hey, look, this is a lockout.

This is false, a tough word, right? People, I don’t want use it, but if you will actually look at the shape of, Hey, at the lockout, the owners didn’t make an offer for six weeks. The players aren’t really asking for all that much. If you look at the last 10 years, the players have lost a lot of ground, that kind of argument has purchased in a way that never did until the last time.

Rogue Dad, MD: So let’s presume the best case scenario from a work stoppage standpoint and that we don’t miss spring training games. We don’t miss actual regular season games. You’ve written pretty extensively. And you just mentioned sort of about the things related to pace of play and the game itself, just being less engaging.

And certainly the public interest in major league baseball has waned and things like the NFL have just obviously reign Supreme. And the NFL is on king is king of the hill when it comes to sports and they, baseball is nowhere close to taking, taking that rain back if ever it may not even be possible structurally speaking.

But what specific things do you think need to happen? Not just in terms of changing how the game is played, but in terms of marketing the game and reaching back out and television broadcast, whatever it may be to actually make. Sort of back ingrained into the culture again, the way maybe I was back in, whatever the golden age of baseball ever was, if there ever really was one, you know, we talked about the golden age of baseball, but the golden age of baseball.

So it had all sorts of other problems that people don’t want to acknowledge. So I don’t know that there is such a thing as a true golden age, but I do think myself as someone who’s grown up watching baseball, the game is less interesting to watch. And I don’t put it around my kids nearly as much as I put myself around it when I was growing up.

So if you could list off five things or even just three things that you would change structurally about how the game is played or how it’s portrayed, what would you do to get people, you know, 20 years younger than you have 40 years younger than you into the game?

Joe Sheehan: I think the real key is to have a prop that’s available at all times during your broad, if you do that, that’s going to be, I mean, that’s what they were saying.

We’re going to fix this with gambling and, uh, that’s not the way to go. I think there’s room for that within the game. But yeah, baseball’s jumped into this with both feet up to their waist and it’s just not, it’s not a good idea. No, it doesn’t. The biggest thing to me is. When I was, and again, this is a generational thing, not beyond baseball, just everything, but we played varieties of baseball all year long, Stu fall, you know, baby baseball box wall, all kinds of stuff.

Well, basketball, wasn’t baseball, but curve, ball, wiffle, and actual baseball. I think what you learn to care about as an adult starts with what you played as a kid. You can’t force kids to play baseball. Baseball’s a harder sport to play. You need to find a bunch of people. These used to play basketball.

There’s more money for youth football. Um, you know, it’s usually more sponsored by schools and a lot of places. So that’s a tough problem. Baseball to me is put incredible amounts of money and effort into this, but you can’t just rune kids at the playing baseball. It’s just not gonna kind of live with that.

Um, chess park, you know, getting more kids to play baseball. And we’ll be certainly tried that. I think you’ve got to fix the game on the field. You know, I’ve been writing for years about the increased strikeout rate, the increased walk rate, and you know, so many, what is it up to 43, 40 4% of runs being scored on home runs.

Um, that’s not the design of baseball. You go back 150 years. It’s called the ball in play. The pitcher was supposed to be the guy who almost like a softball. You know, LOBs the ball up to put the ball in, play the action, supposed to be in the field. And on the base path, I can, you know, baseball had a balance for, you know, a hundred years or so, but if you start in the 1990s and you see what’s right, got rates have gone and you see how much of the game has really become about power, as opposed to, you know, run base, running and defense.

Um, it’s made it a less watchable game. It’s a pitcher batter game now, and that, you know, HGTV has been a big part of the popularity of that. We can see what the pitchers do now. Statcast has been a part of that. We can see what the pitchers do now. Uh, this, the framing that people who love framing, I mean, that’s a great thing for them to see what the catch do.

But if you’re sitting in section 3 42 with your kid, I don’t see where any of this is making the game more exciting for you. Now I took marina to a game. My daughter, ah, the only game I took her to it before the pandemic two, three years ago. And it was a four and a half hour Yankee Bluejay game on a Saturday afternoon, God lovers stayed through it and we had some.

But there were also stretches where just nothing happened for 15 minutes. And that’s a hard thing to ask an eight year old to really get invested. I can tell you something, the hard thing for us for 48, you know, if I go to a game and sit in the stands, now you’ll see sometimes FOD, you know, you must see the thing where like simply get caught on their phone and everybody, the internet will pile on them.

You know what? I’m on my phone because it’s two minutes between meetings. It’s a pitching change. It’s a visit to the mound. There’s just not a lot happening.

Rogue Dad, MD: So, well, let me ask, let me ask this real quick show. If you are very well-versed in sort of the pluses and minuses and we’re talking mostly and I’m, I’m bringing up mostly sort of the issues with the game.

What do you think is going well with baseball? Putting aside the fact that they’re currently locked out prior to that, what has been gone well, what’s uh, what would you market as the draw of the game? Right?

Joe Sheehan: Well, you can watch more baseball than ever before. I mean, I remember I would, literally, when I was in college, I would pick up the LA times every day and look to see what games I was getting that day WGN with the Cubs WPBS, with the Braves with the Asian Dodgers were going to be on TV.

What national games. I don’t do that anymore. I get every single baseball game sent to any device in my apartment. Um, B access you have to the game now is incredible. Honestly, we don’t talk about this enough, the access to the game at the. Look, yeah, you can’t buy a boxy ticket for $5 anymore. I know that enrages people older than I am, but if you just want to go to a ballpark and have a good time and get a hot dog and a Coke, every team in baseball has that as packages for that, we can go to the game and enjoy access to baseball is better than it’s ever been before the players, the individual skills of the players are better than they’ve ever been before we just saw 2021 would show hail Tawny did nobody.

I don’t see nobody alive, but nobody under the age of a hundred ever saw anything like that, like what Otani did last year. And I would make the argument that nobody’s ever seen because they wrote last year, what they Bruce did in 18 and 19, I had, he didn’t really, he’s never really a great at both tasks at once.

Or Connie was, um, people who are more educated than the history of the Negro league, you know, took real, bring up full of Joe Rogan. Okay. So we’re talking about 75 years, 75, 80 years ago. Um, I, I’m not as educated in and then Negro leagues, I’m working on that. But anyway, you slice it. You know, whether it’s Otani, whether it’s Mike trout, Ronald wants soda, we have this incredible crop of talent.

And I was on a effectively wild the other day. And we had a conversation like this, where the focus right now is on the negative stuff. But at the end, I said, you know, the reason we’re having these conversations, the reason we’re so frustrated is we want to get all this out of the way so we can watch all of these incredible players.

Like I think about third base stations here in St. Louis, and you get to see no one hour in Ottawa. If you look at the crop of defensive third base and we’ve gotten to see you go back the last couple of yo good luck to the end of Adrian, Beltre his career. And on now into Chapman and aeronautics, um, guy like geo or shallow, doesn’t get a ton of credit, but it’s an incredible third base.

Manny Machado, basically short playing third base. I want to watch those guys. I want to not be talking about Rob Manfred and Tony Clark and den hell of it. So

Rogue Dad, MD: speaking of which I want to transition, this is a great time to transition to my next question for you actually talking about the positives, the things that draws as a St.

Louis fan. One of the things that gets us really worked up is talking about our great players from history, great players that we have currently. So I’m currently wearing a Jersey here. So I want to hear, and this is going to be, you’re going to get me killed. This is a leading biased question, but I want to hear your perspective on whether.

Putting aside your personal opinion on current hall of fame voting trends, whether he is or is not, or should be voted into the hall of fame.

Joe Sheehan: I haven’t looked at this in prep for this meeting. The last time I looked, it might’ve been earlier this year, or I should say earlier last year when it came up. I think that I would vote for him.

But one of the nice things is that, you know, we get to think about this a lot in a lot more detail over the next five years. Um, if I’m looking at the catches of this era, I would have an hour and poses out of him. That’s one of the things, you know, where are you the best catcher of your era? And I think both of those guys are ahead of,

Rogue Dad, MD: well, hold on, hold up there though.

Hold on. But with malware, I mean, malware has spent how much time actually at catcher versus first do you put stock in and Yachty basically being, I mean, even Posey, right? He’s spending a lot of his time at first base. And now with the DH coming, he’s probably any remaining games he has left will probably be DH.

Jada has been nothing but a catcher. And I’m putting on my Cardinals, Homer hat here as a Cardinals fanatic, you know, whatever. I have no journalistic integrity since I’m not a journalist or a reporter and no one’s paying me for this. So I can be as biased in one side. It is, I want to be, uh, you know, I have, I’ve had the conversation recently with folks who are not Cardinals fans who have said that, that Jada is just the next iteration of.

Great, but not super purlative defender who could hit okay. But below average, but what he has going for him is the fact that he spent his whole career with the Cardinals. And there’s a reputational aspect that may not be born out by hard numbers or actual evaluation on the field. Now I, of course think that’s a bunch of BS.

I think Yachty is one of the best fielding catchers and position players in history. And his offense is basically a league average. If you look at his, uh, if you look at his relative stats, his ops pluses, right around a hundred give or take, I think it’s like 97, 99. So right around an average, um, wha you know, Marwa had a great, great, great stretch before he got sidelined and became a first baseman and same for Posey.

Uh, they’ve not had the longevity. Do you put stock and longevity in a position to decide about whether they should be hall of fame? Oh, absolutely.

Joe Sheehan: That’s one of the reasons I like war in these conversations as a framing device because wars accounting step. So longevity should actually benefit a player like Molina, and he’s still 20 war behind.

Now, Joe Mauer. Now war doesn’t work as well for catchers because we know catchers typically only play 120 games a year. So you got to have, you have to make an adjustment. There’s an argument that the hall hasn’t adjusted enough for catchers. You know, we just saw Ted Simmons go in through the veterans committee.

Uh, bill freehand has his, uh, supporters. Thurman Munson has a support. You can make an argument that we’ve kept more catchers out than we should have. And that’s something we should correct going forward. I want to be clear here. I don’t know that I’m just pick a similar player. Who’s been on the ballot who had a baseball case until this last year.

I thought, oh, more of a scale had no business being anywhere near the whole. Similar player, longevity, defense didn’t have really good offensive numbers. Didn’t really have good war numbers. And I thought he had no business being near the hall of fame. I think Molina is ahead of that on the scale, there’s an invisible one thing people will talk about, you know, handling pitchers and he deserves credit for that.

I think it’s less that I think the invisible stats in Molina’s prac record are the base runners who never tried to steal on him. And I’ve been writing about this for years. You look at the attempts against Molina versus the league average versus other characters. And it sounded really ridiculous. How much value was there in that if you were a pitcher on the mountain, knowing that they weren’t even gonna try to run, um, and whatever the year, whatever his big year was, I did a piece, him and Posey were neck and neck for the MVP battle.

And I did a piece of NSI where I, I picked Molina and I had like three reasons, but one of them was just not running on him. And that has value that we actually don’t have a way of making into the statistics. So I don’t want to come off as a Molina hater here. And I think one of the things that happens is.

We frame these discussions as if you don’t think the guy should be in the hall of fame, you must hate the place. I went through this with Jack Morris. I went to Luxor sandwich and rice. It’s not that there’s nothing. Well, somebody’s gotta be the, some players have to be the best ones, not in the hall. Hey, um, otherwise

Rogue Dad, MD: the line Joe has to be drawn at the Cardinals players.

You know, so that, you know, there’s always a line

Joe Sheehan: one marginal catcher ring.

Rogue Dad, MD: Oh, I mean, I love Ted Simmons and I’m, I’m glad he is going to be going into the hall of fame or is in the hall of fame. But, you know, I, so this is obviously I’m partial. I grew up in, I grew up in the age of Yachty being sort of peak Yachty I’m I’m 41.

I was my, I was, I’m basically a couple of years older than Jada and Albert pools for that matter. I’m just right around a little bit over them. Fair enough. We’re not going to go into that. I’m not going to go into any birth certificate controversies on this show or discussion relatively speaking. I’m in the neighborhood age of those guys.

And so I have a personal, emotional connection to watching yadi play and Albert play and all those guys. And certainly I have not even a hiding my bias in that regards, but I will say as a base,

Joe Sheehan: you’re saying, and this is what I’m not supposed to look. It took me a long time to accept the Don Mattingly.

Wasn’t a hall. But for a lot of before, I really became a professional at this. I wanted to on that and lean the hall of fame. And I had to recognize, at least not hall of fame, I get that fans are supposed to advocate for their guys. It’s not their job to get to sit down with war and jaws. And Jay Jaffe is Cooperstown casebook and say, well, you know what, you’re right.

The objectives merits. He’s not on there. You’re supposed to advocate for Yachty. It’s my job. And I think that gets, we need to just be able to say, look, sands can have their own. Or they can’t, they can’t have their facts. You can’t sit here and tell me why Jada has 70 war or a Yachty was worth a hundred runs a year to the coaching staff.

Like you can’t say things like that. I will,

Rogue Dad, MD: I will say though, you brought this up in one of your recent newsletters, you were talking about how facts serving fat people are not being swayed by facts when it comes to things like the pandemic. And essentially people will say, now my emotions don’t care about your facts, right?

I mean, that’s what, that’s what it means to be a fan. So I certainly, you know, the reason I bring this up is when it comes to reasons to love the sport is this kind of debate is what gets fans into the sport. Having Gadi stay with the Cardinals this long, I will say having Yachty and edible. You know, on the team last year with the team stunk really up until the last couple of months, when they had that big winning streak, they were terrible to watch.

They were not fun to watch. There was boring all around, even with all their great talent people stuck around and watch because Jada is on the team and Wainwright’s on the team and he’s got his uncle Charlie curve ball is those are the stories that keep people coming back when they’re not otherwise hardcore attached to the game.

The way I am, I probably still would pay attention either way, but a lot of fans wouldn’t and Yachty coming back for maybe his final season and the same for Wainwright, it’s going to get a lot of people in the local area, in the St. Louis, Metro area, watching the game. Even if we win 65 games, hopefully that doesn’t happen.

Um,

Joe Sheehan: but we need more of that. We need team. We need teams building, keeping their gods, not for like, you know, loyalty reasons from the player to the, to the team, but loyalty reasons from the team to the player and the, the player. Um, I, I, one of the things I read about. We used to not care so much about the playoffs.

We care don’t get me wrong, but what only fourteens were making and you had to win your division. If you won 88 games and your favorite player had a big year, that was a good year. And we’ve lost that. Now we’ve lost that idea that you can have a good year that in short of the playoffs, there are plenty of players off baseball history who were good and popular and played on teams that never won a championship and had wonderful careers and great attachments to their city.

Now, in this particular case, they’ve also had a lot of team success, but I, I feel like we framed so much of baseball popularity. Now is, did you make the playoffs? Did you win the world series? Oh, if you didn’t the hell with it. And there’s a lot of stories that go beyond that, where fans have connections to players and that’s how they come to me.

Rogue Dad, MD: And I will say, so I’ve got three boys. The oldest is 12. The youngest is five. None of them are, none of them are as obsessed with sports as I am. Um, they, you know, they sort of, the oldest one plays baseball in the middle one, occasionally does the youngest, the youngest has never played baseball, but he actually has the best swing.

The three, I think when I see him hit off a tee, the, the boy can crank it. But I will say from a parent perspective, I take them to games. I don’t actually have the games on TV very much locally only because I don’t pay for cable satellite subscription. And it’s pretty hard to be able to watch a game otherwise.

But every time I take the older two in particular to a game, even if they have no idea what’s been going on, they love just to sit and they’d love just to watch. And you talked about trying to leave, you know, staying for four and a half hour games. My five-year-old does not have the attention span for four or three hour game or even a two hour game after one hour, he’s ready to bug out.

You know, I used to take it as a point of pride growing up in as a young adult. When I went to a sporting event to a baseball game, it didn’t matter how bad the weather was, how bad the game was. I would stay until the bitter end. And surprisingly, my older two boys have taken that perspective as well. And they got mad.

The last time I went to a game with a younger brother of the youngest, cause the five-year-old demanded to leave early because he was tired and the older two wanted me just to sort of drop them off on the street so that they could stay watching the game. Oh, that’s true. They’re they’re boys and they fights and I’m the middle of three boys and now I’ve got three boys and there’s a lot of fighting happening.

And I will say, you know, I don’t obsess about baseball the way I did growing up or as a young adult. And I don’t have as much around the house as I did when, in terms of when I was obsessing about it, but they do get into it and I, I will say. One of the things I was really big on when I started having kids, it was just, even though I wasn’t taking them to baseball games all the time, it’s not on TV all the time is sharing that passion with them.

And one of the memories I will never forget is 2011 Cardinals ran, made the run to the world series and we made it to game seven. And I was, uh, so I’m a physician. I was a physician in training at the time with not making a lot of money. And we were in the national league championship series against the brewers.

And I bought tickets off StubHub before we even qualified for the world series for a game seven, hoping we would make it to a game seven that would be played at home in St. Louis and the hopefully I’d get to go. And it turns out we made it to game seven and I got to go and I got to go with, at that time, all I had one kid who was two and you know, it was me, him and his mom.

We all went to the game and it was, and I spent a lot of money that I didn’t have. It was $800 or something ridiculous for someone who wasn’t making a lot of money to buy those two tickets. Thankfully the two year old is free. And my justification was one, obviously I’m a baseball fanatic. I love the Cardinals, but it was my way of trying to sort of pass on that.

Hey, even if I die tomorrow, my son will know how much I love baseball that I took him to a Cardinals world series game, which I certainly never got to a playoff game growing up ever. You know, I also remember that game six, the, the David freeze magical game with the walk-off home run. I had a chance to go to, uh, to buy standing room tickets.

And, uh, my, one of my friends and I said, oh, you know what, we’re losing three games to two in the series. Uh, we don’t want to go to this game cause it’s, what’s the, you know, the best case scenario is that we’re just going to win and go to game seven. And a worst case scenario is we’re going to see them lose the world, season our field.

So we chose not to go. And holy shit, that was a

Joe Sheehan: terrible, the Robin Williams.

Rogue Dad, MD: Yeah. That’s not exactly how it worked out for me, I guess. Uh, cause I am divorced, but

Joe Sheehan: let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Would you trade being at the clinching game for being at the historical?

Rogue Dad, MD: So I think so. I would have, yeah, I think I would it’s. I mean, you know, for those, you know, for the, for the tens of people listening to this in the future, that don’t know the context in 2011, the Cardinals made a run to the world series and on game six it looked like they were down to their final strike about to lose the world series to the Texas Rangers and twice they had dramatic hits to tie the game.

And then David frees a hometown player from St. Louis who was our starting third basement, had a walk-off, uh, a walk-off home run to center field to win the game in extra innings. For sure. Like we were about to lose in extra innings. After Josh Hamilton had hit a home run to take the lead. I remember in my living room pacing back and forth, just going crazy saying, I can’t believe we’re going to lose this game.

I can’t believe we’re gonna lose this game. We’re going to miss a chance to win the world series. My older brother who lives in Texas actually flew up, adjust for that game and he bought fantastic tickets and sat in that right next to the side of the field. So we’re all, we’re all raised in St. Louis.

We’re all Cardinals fan. He flew up here by himself, went to this game by himself, but. You know, cause I couldn’t afford to, that couldn’t afford the tickets he was buying since he had a real job. And I will tell you when I, when we talk about him being a game six and me being a game seven, you know, he like older brothers do like to rub it in and it’s like, oh, I was a game six.

You were only at game seven, the clinching game. So, you know, that’s how brothers are. And obviously at this point, this is first world

Joe Sheehan: problems.

Rogue Dad, MD: So that brings me to another question I actually wanted to ask, because I was going to actually ask you that question directly. I think you’ve already answered that.

So let’s just, let’s just delve into that. So the Cardinals as an organization have had a pretty sustained runners success. Going back to the mid nineties when their new ownership came in, totally the Russo came in and then early two thousands really we’ve only had one losing season in the last 20 years, Cardinals fans, in some ways they’re spoiled because we’ve had 20 years of success that only the Yankees in terms of winning seasons can really match and competitiveness.

And there’s been a culture that sort of built. I, I think, you know, I say this as a fan living locally in St. Louis I’ve expectations. We shouldn’t be competitive year in, year out. We are constantly one of the top gates draws in, in the major league baseball, despite being 20 or 25th and market size. And, but we’re still a mid-market team with mid-market revenues.

Theoretically though, we have a lot of national review, the owners do, do you think Cardinals fans expectations are too high? Are we actually spoiled? And should we just accept that we may have a few losing seasons and let the ownership have that? Is that what, what’s your view on that?

Joe Sheehan: I think Cardinals fans are spoiled and this was a fight I had online every and every few years.

If you talked about going back to the nineties, you went to 1950, the Cardinals have basically never had three losing seasons. Since the fifties, they had that stretch from, I want to say 67 to 68, when they lost a series of the tigers through 82, where they weren’t very good. But even those teams were never like, you know, Marlins or Poggio more marriages bad for five, six years in a row.

There were some competitive teams in there. And, you know, eventually like when basically once Herzog took over, kind of starts this run, you go back to 82, you know, like the 40 years of Cardinals baseball and you’ve pretty much never been bad for extended period of time. Even in the playoffs, 20 something times, what is it?

Four world championships. And again, you mentioned the 21st century success as well. And yet if the Cardinals are 53 and 52 in June, If you guys sound sometimes like the worlds and this is what I’ve been pushing back. So I have a lot of Cardinals readers or Cardinals followers, because I’ve been going on the radio in St.

Louis for years with Bernie Nicholas, um, with Kevin Wheeler, I just, I’ve been on, that’s a park where I’ve done a lot of media for 20 years now. Um, and I get the people, I just want to fire Mozeliak and, or , um, or they’re mad at the owner for not spending money. I mean, relative to market, you’ve got spend pretty much at the top of the, any mid-market team in baseball.

Um, yeah, they didn’t assign shares are a few years back and that was frustrating, but you move on, you look at all the other good things they do. They develop well, um, they do spend money and, you know, they do things like trade for, for Goldschmidt and extend them. You go back to the nineties, they traded for McGuire and extended them.

They traded for rolling and extended him. I mean, there’s just a lot of success. In this franchise. So yes, when they go, they have a C on the, missed the playoffs one year and there’ll be nibbling along in the summer, the next year it’s oh my God. We got to tear it all up. I just, I do this then. Look, it’s not just Carla’s hands.

I do this with Yankee fans, red Sox, fans, pumps, fans, Cubs fans. And then in 2015, we’re just pleased. Let’s win one before we die. And they won. And like two years later it was completely forgot. I was like, where’s our next one? So I do, I do think a lot of head basins are spoiled, but the car was, look, I it’s awful to say this and I know I’m going to get some brief words, but I just, I do really think that when you’re talking about a franchise, that’s never bad.

You have to be in your like forties. Even remember when the Cardinals weren’t good. Basically since the strike they’ve been good, that’s almost 30

Rogue Dad, MD: years. So, I mean, I mean really though what you’re saying, given this 40 ish year run of success is. We should be expecting this because it’s really just our birthright at this point.

Right? Like I am God, no, please let’s end that conversation right there. Cause that is one thing I never want to be. I, I don’t have a lot of friends that say, yeah, I know, you’re you, it sounds like from your writing that you used to be a diehard Yankees fans. Now you become a fan of baseball since you are a writer.

And you’ve had to put some of the fandom to the backseat. I definitely in the nineties as a Cardinals fan, I hated the Yankees and the Jeter era of media hype that he got. And I certainly don’t want to delve into that, but certainly I do think. You know, and I’m saying this entirely biased with no actual reporting or journalistic integrity investigation behind this, but back when the McGuire era happened around the turn of the century, there was a lot of hype from people like Peter Gammons at ESPN and base baseball tonight, actually pushing a narrative about St.

Louis being the best fans in baseball that has become now sort of an insult towards St. Louis fans, you know, being sarcastic about it. But the number of times, Peter Gammons went on national TV and said, it’s the best fans in baseball. I will say probably a little hyperbolic, but it certainly, I think local fans internalized that and they said, Hey, yeah, we’re fantastic.

We’re fantastic. And we deserve, we deserve some recognition because I don’t know what else we’re getting recognized for our football team just left and won the super bowl a couple of days ago. And I can tell you, no, we, we, they were stolen away from us this time. We’d legitimately bought them out of LA very different

Joe Sheehan: and just independent.

Cartel chance have always punched above their weight. I mean, they’d been a regional franchise going back to the middle of the last century, right? That’s one of the reasons they’re popular today because they had came off. I guess you can hear Cardinals games in Manitoba or something.

Rogue Dad, MD: Um, from what, and everyone also came a wax on am 1120 back before there were teams on the west coast had a huge broadcast signal that would literally make it all the way to California.

All the way to the south. We were the Cardinals were the furthest west and almost for the south team for many years in baseball, on camel wax with a 10,000 watt signal. And I know this because I grew up listening to KMOX locally, and that was advertised. This may baseball fans, thousands of miles away, thousands of miles away from people who never came anywhere near the city.

So established a fandom around the country that didn’t exist with a physical presence. So, sorry.

Joe Sheehan: No, I definitely that’s what made the Cardinals, what they are. And that’s what they’ve been building off now for generations tonight, the Cardinals are one of the best run franchises in baseball, on the field, off the field.

I think that maybe when you’re close to, when you’re a fan who is living and dying with every game, with every season, you’re not going to see that necessarily as much, but when kind of from the outside eye, who’s got it better than the Carlos.

Rogue Dad, MD: So let me ask this because this is actually the dovetails into one, the other topics I want to talk about, and we’re going to run out of time before I ever get through all my questions here, but talking about fandom and generational fandom.

So I’ve mentioned, I’ve got three boys. You mentioned that you have a daughter that you’ve taken to games. So first question is, does your daughter get a free subscription to the newsletter?

Joe Sheehan: I can’t even imagine marina caring about anything I’ve ever written about. So maybe her eye, she’s a performing arts theater dance.

Um, and she’s really passionate about it. I think her game, she enjoyed herself. She’s got baseball bloodlines in the family and it’s kind of, it’s something that I don’t necessarily need her to be a baseball fan on a spectrum to sit with me. I would just like her to be able to enjoy the game, to be able to go to a ballpark, to be on a date or with me and enjoy three hours and have some fun there.

Um, I hate it if she just hated baseball, but she’s just not a team sport. So,

Rogue Dad, MD: yeah, that goes directly to what I was about to ask about generational fandom, because as a father of three boys growing up in St. Louis who grew up obsessed with baseball before I had kids, I just sort of assumed that I would somehow make my kids baseball, obsessed, and whether or not they would or would not, you know, wouldn’t be their choice as their father growing up.

And the growing up in St. Louis, hopefully, you know, I’m fortunate that they’re just sort of around the Cardinals. There’s not many other team sports for them to be interested in as there would be in New York or Chicago or LA. My, none of my kids are obsessed with sports at all. My oldest is very creative artsy into writing comic books.

My middle one is very athletic, but prefers TaeKwonDo and trying to punch things then baseball. And my little one is just sort of little and, and so they love, they love watching baseball with me if I take them to a game. And if I put a game on, they’ll watch it, but none of them care about it. Even a fraction of the amount that I do.

And. 15 years ago before I had kids, I would have said that that was a, that would have been a failure for me as a father, 20 year old, me looking at 40 year old me would’ve said, oh man, you failed thing. Number one, like this is why I took my two year old son to a Cardinals playoff world series game. When he had no idea what was going on is I had this earnest desire to convey to my kids how important this was to me growing up.

And I wanted this to be important. And, and I’ve not, you know, certainly ended up realizing that that’s not how parenting works. Not that I have written the book on parenting or written any books on parenting. I’m a pediatrician by trade, but I certainly have many, many things to learn by about parenting.

So I’ve done, you know, I’ve done little things and I’m being in St. Louis it’s become easier because they have fewer things to worry about. But I have. Tried to get Carlos paraphernalia for them. I got each of them may signs a poster or a picture of a Cardinals player. So one of all, I’m actually the middle child.

Who’s very tough. As nails, as assigned Yachty Molina photo. My oldest one has assigned Stan usual photo and they, and the youngest one actually has an Aussie Smith one. And so this is just like a little piece. I figured if I give this to them, this will stick with them when they move away. It doesn’t matter if they love baseball, some little piece that they can take with them growing up and move on.

And, you know, even if they don’t end up loving baseball, which they’re not going to cause none of them are gonna obsess over it. The way I did like my older brother and I who’s my older brother’s three years older. We used to actually, when I was seven, we used to actually read the baseball encyclopedia, like the 500,000 page baseball encyclopedia.

Just for fun. We would just flip through pages, read stats, memorize top 10 leaderboards from 1930 top batting averages. We played a baseball game called Earl Weaver baseball that we obsessed over. We played sweet, played that game so much. Um, and I’m not joking. My parents actually banned us from playing it.

They actually put a ban on baseball, electronic baseball, cause we were playing it so much. And then we snuck around the band and played when we weren’t supposed to. And I’ll tell ya that didn’t go over while violating that band. So that’s not the top of those things. My kids obsess over and I’ve sort of come to terms that I think they, they accept my fandom.

They tolerate my fandom. They’ve got a little piece of tape with them. You know, it sounds like from what you’re saying for, is it marina, he said your daughter’s name is marina marina. Uh, it sounds like that’s sort of the same thing. You, you want her to have an appreciation of it, but she’s going to be her own person.

The fact that her dad lives in breeze and bleeds baseball. That just means that’s what her dad does, but she doesn’t have to do so as well, which is great. I don’t know if

Joe Sheehan: I would have been different or keeping a boy if I would’ve have wanted her to have it more, but I didn’t. She’d been a big baseball fan.

That would have been great too. But knowing I was having a girl.

I don’t know. I just, I never really was a thing for me. I wanted her to be passionate about something, but from the jump it was, I just didn’t want her to be a good kid. You know, she loves her, she loves performing arts. So that’s worked for me and, you know, things change too, you know, you get older and, you know, you start to develop different interests.

Maybe we should circle back to it. Um, I think the fact that I’m not, uh, uh, so what I’m looking for custodian, um, she lives with her mom. Yeah. If I was with her all the time, every night, you know, maybe things would have been different as well. I would have, I gained, she would have seen me with games on the TV.

And what have you, she’s an appreciation for the pace of a baseball season though, because she knows Martin October or months where she might not see dad as much. She literally knows that now. Like he, she, I remember she was seven turning one day, so I don’t see you this month. Right? Mostly. Well, you get the newsletter, you know, you know what I’m like and I’ll tell them, but yeah, it’s just, that was, I think, you know, kids are different now.

Um, I don’t remember a time when baseball. One of the very, most important things in my life, playing it, playing with football, reading about it. You know, I got Stratimagic when I was 10 and that became kind of the center of the universe for a long time. Um, and just, you know, the achy game every night was what my, my, my site was built around.

Yes. I was great with the ladies. I know you’re thinking right now. Uh, and it just, and then again, I ended up being fortunate enough to make a career out of it, but it’s just, kids are different now and he’s kind of like, okay, well that’s the way it is. I’m sure there are kids who are they’re ten-year-olds who care about baseball, the way you and I did baseball encyclopedia.

And for me, it was micro league and Stratton instead of role Weaver. But it does feel like there are fewer and far between,

Rogue Dad, MD: so this actually segues great to the next thing I actually wanted to ask you about baseball is your profession. You know, you’re reliant on it. You are upset, you would love it. You would know the ins and outs of very well.

If major league baseball closes doors at this lockout never ended. If there’s just no more major league baseball. And putting aside chop, you know, the baseball leagues in Japan or elsewhere, but you needed to make a make out. You needed to make a living still, as you know, what do you stay writing about sports?

Would you transition to something else entirely? What would you do if baseball just didn’t come back.

Joe Sheehan: Okay. I’m going to just curl up here in the fetal position. It’s basically my nightmare because you haven’t seen, I’ve been doing this. I haven’t had a go to the office type of real job since 97 and an attempt for a few years in different places after that.

But I’ve been working at home and writing up baseball full time for 20 years. Like I don’t have any other human skills. If you told me tomorrow, I’ve got to go to a place 40 hours a week. I might start. Um, I’m not even, I mean, I’m not, I’m making a joke about it, but it’s actually the truth, right? I can white and I’d probably be able to make a career that way in one way or another, but I would also start looking really hard at my social security payments and figuring out, start getting up.

Um, one of the hardest things is tying your own career to an industry that is on is unrelated. It’s basically, if it doesn’t go away entirely, but if it lost popularity that affects me. I see it now. I see in the renewal rates, I see people literally writing in to say, I enjoy reading you. I just don’t care about baseball.

And I’m sure there are people who aren’t bothering to send me that email, who aren’t renewing. I mean, don’t get me wrong. They’re not liking me. Isn’t a character flaw. But if baseball is unpopular, I’m going to have a harder time making a living and a lot of people. So, yeah, I mean, it’s something, I think we, this was a big concern in 98.

So we came off 94. We did the first baseball perspective annual in 96. And it wasn’t clear in 19. Whether they were going to go out on strike, there was going to be another workshop. We were really worried about this. And then in 2002, we went through the same thing. Um, and none of us were really established at that point.

So yeah, there were some, some concerns there and, you know, we’ve seen the NHL, if you’re an NHL writer, you’ve gone through this. Yeah. The NBA has had a lockout and the NFL hasn’t had a broken season sometime we got a taste of this during the pandemic, but at least there was an external reason that was affecting everything.

Um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what I would do. I, you know, I felt like I don’t, I don’t have any, any other. But I don’t know that I have very many other expertise.

Rogue Dad, MD: Well, I mean, we’re going to the gig economy, right? So I suppose there was always temporary things just to make, you know, go hop in an Uber and started, you know, driving places.

But that’s probably a last resort. I would imagine. It does give you the, and they give, they don’t,

Joe Sheehan: they pay like 11% of the gross to their drivers.

Rogue Dad, MD: It’s something pretty awful. And you know, I’ve certainly had an opportunity to use enough. Uber is to talk with the drivers. Some of whom love it because of the flexibility, but certainly, you know, it’s not necessarily an easy job to transition to when your entire, you know, when your career is predicated on one thing, you know what?

My I’ve worked in the healthcare industry and I work in emergency department. I work in a pediatric emergency department and it’s interesting. It’s, you know, with COVID our, you know, our volumes of patients and I, I only take care of kids really generally under 18, when COVID first hit our volumes dramatically declined for pediatric patients.

The adult volumes were high. The acuity of sick adults was really high. The adult hospitals, new yards are having lots of issues. Keeping up the pediatric hospitals were having a lot of struggles and they were canceling surgeries. And it never occurred to me that in a pandemic, uh, that my income could be at risk.

And so, you know, what end up happening is they had to start cutting and furloughing staff at the hospitals here and across the country. They started cutting benefits and things like that. And. And reassigning people because of a pandemic. And you would think that as an essential healthcare worker working in an ER, this wouldn’t be an issue, but I had some benefits temporarily cut.

I’m fortunate that I’m in an industry where that kind of has rebounded, but even as a physician who, you know, you know, as a good south Asian guy, kid who grew up and followed my parents’ wishes and became a doctor, you know, this is part, one of the things that you’re always told growing up is, oh, it’s, it’s a, it’s a stable job.

You’re always gonna have an income. But one thing I’ve learned and I’ve looked, I’ve known for awhile, you know, particularly cause I have a lot of interest in managing personal finances is there’s no such thing. It really is a secure job. And even though, even in a pandemic, a doctor can lose their job.

And so, you know, a baseball writer

Joe Sheehan: certainly it’s fascinating because that’s exactly the thought I have. Like how are you telling you that being a doctor is a bad idea. It just it’s astounding to me that. You assume that you go to medical school and you get a job being a doctor in some field and you’re set for life.

And I’m, I had no idea

Rogue Dad, MD: it was that bad. I don’t, I don’t want to overstate that it’s a bad gig because I, I mean, I think compared to a lot of jobs compared to most professions, that because of the type of work I do, and I worked for, I worked for a big institution here locally. That as long as I am competent and showing up that I will have a, have a job because I have a skill that’s needed, but it certainly, most physicians don’t go into medicine thinking that a corporation or a university or a hospital system could just decide to fire them because of number of patients coming in, not being high enough.

That’s not something you think about when you choose this as a career. You think that if I work hard and I take care of people, there’s always going to be a need for doctors are always to be a need for nurses. You know, this, this ho this country has a huge nursing crisis right now. And we’ve gone through phases where, uh, nurses, I know, and nurses from here and elsewhere have not been able to get shifts and jobs because there wasn’t enough, uh, open there wasn’t an, a patients.

And so they’d be cutting hours for nurses. Well, now there’s a national nursing shortage. And nurses are doing. I’ve seen nurses leave our own hospital and become travel nurses and travel across just the state and make triple the amount of money. And now there’s a whole controversy about nurses getting paid too much because that they’re in such high demand, which is crazy.

That’s the way he

Joe Sheehan: is. That’s the way the economics work in supply. The thing that we’ve turned basic functions of a market into like a bad thing. People are making more money. That’s terrible. People were leaving their jobs for better jobs. No, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. If you want employees pay them more.

Sorry.

Rogue Dad, MD: No, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s neither here nor there directly, but I mean, just talking about sort of job security, this is not certainly why we got them to come to this topic to talk about baseball, but it’s yeah, certainly. I mean, again, I’m fortunate that I compared to most, most positions, most jobs out there, I have a stable income and as long as I’m healthy and doing the work I’m supposed to, I should be okay.

But at the same time, I was caught off guard when the pandemic hit and suddenly they were talking about cutting staff, furloughing workers, cutting benefits, not knowing if they’d ever not knowing if they’d ever come back. Even at the same time that we had to show up and still do the work, right. This is not something you think about as a physician or a nurse or a healthcare provider.

And I think for a lot of people in healthcare in general, a part of why you’re seeing some of the stuff with travel nursing now. And I, and I support them is because I think. We’ve always had some precariousness to it. We just didn’t realize it. And now the, now the economy intervened in our little bubble world.

More, more physically on the day-to-day than it ever has. Healthcare has become a business and an industry and has been for a long time. When you’re a worker who are going through the training and you want to go into healthcare, you don’t go into it because of the business side, you go into it because you want to take care of people and help people and help people through difficult times or help them stay healthy, depending on where you’re working on, whatever it may be.

You go in there for those connections and you don’t worry about the business side is, you know, you don’t go into you. Don’t go into medicine to become rich, though. If you work hard and stay there, you certainly can do very well. Most of the people I know who went into medicine basically will tell you if they wanted to really become rich, they would have gone to business school and gone to wall street or something.

They could have worked 80 hours a week and gotten no sleep and been sleep deprived and abused, but made seven figures for it, as opposed to doing it, you know, working and spending every third night in the hospital and getting yelled at by patients or superiors or whatever it may be. So certainly there’s a lot of perspective.

My own perspective on my job as a physician has changed a lot over the last several years. And I’m still very thankful for the role I have in the work I get to do. I love it, but. That’s also part of what’s motivated me just to get, to see the world and talk with folks like you who have nothing to do with my day-to-day world, because I think it’s pretty easy to get close to it and forget that there’s a whole world around us, whether you’re a baseball writer or a physician, I think we got close to it in our own world, talking to the same kind of people with the same perspectives.

And that’s why I love having a chance to do this interview. So I think we can probably wrap up around there where clocks are closing in on almost an hour. So my last request for you is to see if you can help me set up my next interviews. So a couple of possibilities that people that you, I think you probably know, or at least know more than I would, because I don’t know at all, if there’s any way to get a chance to try to interview Rainey, I would love a chance to interview a dermatology physician slash baseball for the.

Um, locally Bernie Micholas, I’ve been listening to him as long as he’s been here on air. I love Bernie and also Joe, because Nancy, if you know him at all, he’d be a great person to talk to. I’ve met him once before. He’s not going to remember. Cause I was one of 8,000 book signings. He did when I was in college and he’s, and he wrote a book called the soul of baseball about buck O’Neil and the Negro leagues, and actually got them to sign it.

And then I lost the book moving away from university of Missouri, and I need to get another signed copy, but I’m gonna see if we can make this. So that way my next interview is not in 2023,

Joe Sheehan: Randy and 23, Joe and 24 and Bernie and 25. That’s what you’re

Rogue Dad, MD: looking at. I mean, we can certainly stagger it that way.

That’s a doable pace for me once a year is probably about all I can actually keep up with at the pace I’m going. But if we can at least make it to like, you know, Halloween 20, 22, that’d be a great, you know, let’s, let’s double the pace and go for two per year. That’d be a fantastic, like about,

Joe Sheehan: I can read.

He’s one of my best friends and um, um, I just, I think that’d be a fun conversation. I can tell you that I know all three of these people. Well, Reach out and see what I can do. I pretty sure I’d get Randy to do it. I can vouch for the schedules of the other two guys there. Joe is, Joe is incredibly busy, just, just did the baseball 100 and a blog and he’s working on another book.

So I started to write

Rogue Dad, MD: books. I got it. Yeah. Joe has a New York times bestseller. So certainly getting a chance to interview. It might be challenging. I do have a copy of his book right around the corner. Actually. I bought it and I’ve worked my way through bits and pieces of it. It’s fun to read and write.

And we’re grateful to read that way

Joe Sheehan: actually. How did you pick up and go through three or four guys and slip it’s. It’s great. That way I can.

Rogue Dad, MD: Okay. Awesome. Well, Joe, thank you again for spending the time to talk with me and hopefully we can do this again in the future. And just to wrap up for everyone, who’s listening again.

Joshi, Hanna has the Joshi Han newsletter writing about baseball and you can reach him actually. How can, what’s the best way to find a way to reach you if they want to follow you online or email you to get on your newsletter?

Joe Sheehan: So the newsletter information is@joshiand.com and then I also have a Twitter Joe underscore

Rogue Dad, MD: sheet.

Okay. Fantastic. And whatever I put online, I’ll make sure I put that in the notes as well. Okay. I’m going to go ahead and end here. I appreciate your time. Thank you.