How are you approaching this deadline with an eye on being better next year?

Well, the, what I'd be looking at is the stat, the state of my farm system is not very good right now, and it's not because of a bad thing.

It's because you graduated some very good, exciting players.

You know, they have an exciting outfield going forward.

But you need to replenish that farm system, and, and I just don't see a lot of the deals out there where you're gonna bring back Major League players who are gonna make an impact right away for your team.

So I think you need to look at selling off those short-term assets, the free agents, Peraltas, the relievers, uh, maybe some of the relievers that have some additional control, to see if you can restock some of your farm system to position you better to make trades in the off-season or next year to improve your club.

So I think that would be the approach is like, okay, how, this is our opportunity to replenish.

[laughs]

Who makes the lineup, the day-to-day lineup? Is it the manager? Is it the front office? Or maybe you can give a percentage of each of them for the contribution to what is the daily lineup? How is it constructed?

It probably depends on who you ask because I think the idea of this narrative of the front office writing out the lineup has become a bit of a myth.

Um, but it's, it's become that story because different people, different perspectives.

And so, you know, over 20 years ago when I was first in the game, one of my jobs being the lone full-time in office analysts.

And I say that in quotes because it's kind of laughable what I was doing compared to what kids coming out of college can do in data science today.

But when I was doing that work, part of what I did was, was to talk to Terry Francona and bring, give him some tools.

And so, you know, Theo Epstein had me essentially, it was very simple.

The better organizations are the ones who do that, and I don't know why that's not prevalent in the major leagues.

Why do you feel like it would be different for Pete?

You know, obviously that's tongue in cheek with that whole tweet, but I do think there's a real risk, mostly with Scott Boras' clients, of overplaying your hand, because the formula with Scott is kind of always the same, right? It's, it's ask for the moon, so you get people kind of off their maybe lowball vision of a player before they start really negotiating, and it works a lot at the, like, aggregate level, right? The portfolio level, the portfolio of his players, right? So that's a good business model for him.

He's been very successful.

But in individual cases, sometimes it doesn't fit, and I think with Pete in particular, he's in a better spot than he was a year ago in a lot of ways, right? He had a much better year after showing two years of decline, and people wondering, "Is this gonna be continuing?" So he breaks that narrative, which is huge.

Um, he's, you know, got great career numbers.

Uh, but he is a year older.

He is in a position that, you know, for whatever reason, whether you agree with it or not, is valued differently.

So your take on that series and how it permeates through the rest of the industry.