Hi, it’s Hannah, thanks for being here! If you’re not sure where “here” is, we have a rather robust “About” page — for both this newsletter and the people behind it. So I won’t waste any (more) time on preamble.

What a weird part of the baseball calendar, huh?

is a thing I could say that would not be especially insightful. But it is! The season has started and yet Opening Day is not until later this week. When asked to make predictions — a topic we’ll address in greater detail in this space soon — lately I’ve taken to saying “the Dodgers are tired!” by way of explaining why I didn’t go with the obvious best team in baseball to win it all. I don’t mean as a a pick, I mean literally. The Dodgers played the last game of 2024 and the first game of 2025 — more than 6,700 miles apart. Probably they can’t complain much to their compatriots, though.

And I can’t very well blame MLB for continuing to pursue these pre-Opening Day international series after this latest one was such a success. From an MLB press release late last week:

The two-game Tokyo Series averaged more than 24 million viewers making it the most-watched MLB series ever in Japan. Viewership for the series eclipsed the previous high of the 2024 Seoul Series by nearly 7 million (17.2 million over two games) and the 2019 Tokyo Series by more than 16 million (7.7 million over two games)

Plus:

The Tokyo Series recorded the best merchandise sales of any MLB international event in history with sales eclipsing the previous biggest international event, the 2024 London Series, by +320%. Operated by Fanatics, the MLB Official Store at Tokyo Dome also surpassed sales of all MLB All-Star Weeks beating the biggest previous All-Star sales high, the 2022 All-Star Game in Los Angeles, by +105%. With more than 30,000 square feet and 140 registers, the MLB Official Store at the Tokyo Dome averaged more than 1,000 transactions per hour and sold more than a half million products.

For what it’s worth: All 30 teams benefit equally from all that clamoring to get (presumably, mostly) Shohei Ohtani gear. MLB receives a percentage royalty on all merchandise sold. That revenue — just like it is with national media, international media, etc — is evenly distributed among the 30 teams from MLB’s central revenue. (When teams sell merch at their own ballpark, they get whatever the retailer’s cut would be — same as if they were Foot Locker or Dick’s Sporting Goods.)

Today, Zach and I both went essayish. He writes about approaching the many numbers that now proliferate in baseball discourse as descriptive, not definitive. Meanwhile, I compare Jerry Dipoto to Kim Kardashian. Then we’ve got a round of interesting tidbits around the internet for you.

I won’t always do this in the intro but I want take a moment to remind you all again that you can email us at hellobandwagon@gmail.com. I would love to know what’s on your mind as we simultaneously approach the start of and are already in the midst of the 2025 MLB season.

Let us now praise famous numbers

Baseball’s stats are treasures, not weapons.

by Zach Crizer

Growing up in Virginia, the Atlanta Braves were the easiest team to watch. Always there on TBS, always in contention, the Braves were the baseline. Which meant I spent the nascent stages of my fandom comparing shortstop arms to Rafael Furcal’s. Not many measured up.

It seemed that with every groundball, he took an extra beat for emphasis. A double-clutch to make sure you were watching when he sent the ball zinging across the frame, daring the camera to keep up. Alas, there wasn’t really any way to document the excellence of his arm, at the time. Which is how we got columns comparing Furcal to Scott Rolen that started like this:

“Some people like Bach, some like Bachman Turner Overdrive. Some people like the city, some like the country. Some like chocolate, some like vanilla.”

It didn’t get any more precise. At the time, the reading public would have clamored at the gates for an objective solution, an absolute answer. By the time Statcast came along with all-encompassing tracking of the players and the ball, we were awash in answers. Clamoring was replaced by a series of clashes about which method of answering was best. Stats from batting average to Wins Above Replacement to exit velocity have become flashpoints.

I’m here to ask: What if we used the sport’s many advancements to make you better at finding what you like? Chocolate or vanilla, or maybe mocha cookie chip?

Writing intended to increase understanding and appreciation of a cultural pursuit, in all arenas except sports, is called criticism. The viewing public long ago accepted the premise of competition as an end unto itself, and has perhaps more recently become conversant in the calculations that inform the state of play. So, in sports, everything that seeks to shine a light on the action is lumped under a different term: Analysis.

There are obvious good reasons for that label, and some infuriating ripple effects.

An almost unlimited flow of baseball discussion gets boiled down to “Is this guy good?” Some answer the question with numbers your grandmother knew from the radio. Others do great work with high-tech tracking metrics or complex models mirroring the calculations of front offices. Where the streams cross, anger often springs from lack of understanding or misaligned motivations or, you know, the heightened everything of anyone saying anything on the internet.

Baseball possesses a great advantage in its proclivity for record-keeping. The sport’s rich capacity for quantitative recall empowers fans to become connoisseurs, to appreciate the brushstrokes of a player’s art in addition to the value it fetches on the market. Objective measurements, embodied in varied combinations, can and do inspire distinct subjective reactions.

There’s a real joy in the Tony Gwynn-ish stylings of Luis Arraez or Steven Kwan. And there’s a potent anticipation embedded in the experience of watching Kyle Schwarber uncork a swing that could bring down a tree. There’s a good conversation to be had about which carries more on-field value, but we can also enjoy the juxtaposition for its entertainment value.

From two steps back, statistics aren’t just for counting and ranking, they work together to conjure a fuller understanding of what we’re watching, how it works and why we like what we like.

It’s a tremendous luxury, the way this game has evolved to offer such robust guidance for finding and appreciating what’s interesting to you.

“We don’t need a number for everything.”

It’s true, right? Rafael Furcal’s arm emblazoned itself on my consciousness without quantitative assistance. The matter of an infielder’s arm talent, however, is one of a great many additional questions worth asking about baseball that can now be answered in more satisfying fashion not because the numbers are definitive, but because they are descriptive.

What is special about that swing? Why is that pitch so great? Who else is like that guy? How does he stack up in history? When did that trend start? Where is the sport going next?

That’s going to be the starting point for analysis on The Bandwagon. I hope you’ll let us know what you want to appreciate, to understand. There’s probably a number that can help.

Other people have a point too, Jerry

On effort, good intentions, and Kim Kardashian

by Hannah Keyser

I think of it as the Kim Kardashian fallacy. And in this case, Jerry Dipoto is Kim Kardashian.

Three years ago, Kim Kardashian implied unsuccessful people are unsuccessful simply because they are lazy. I say “implied” because those were not her exact words. Her exact words were much worse.

“I have the best advice for women and business. Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” she said, and not even on some sort of hot mic. In an intentional, televised, promotional setting. Many people were rightfully pissed and in their critiques they attacked not the message itself but the perceived hypocrisy: Isn’t that just rich? Famous-for-being-famous celeb implying salt-of-the-earth Americans don’t work hard.

But in the battle of who is lazier — Kim Kardashian or people who felt targeted by her comments — both sides are wrong.

I’m cribbing the initial inkling of this take from an old tweet or an offhand comment on a podcast or an article I read at the time, but it has become a core part of how I think about inequity. The critics who jumped on Kardashian’s perceived lack of talent or even her presumed abundant support staff to question what she could possibly know about hard work are wrong. Of course Kim Kardashian works hard. That’s not even a value judgement. This is supposed to be about baseball so I’m not going to Google things like Skims valuations or how many seasons she’s been an executive producer on the family’s reality show.

But. Plenty of less successful people — people struggling to make ends meet — also work just as hard.

The fallacy comes because Kardashian knows she works hard. She sees how her hard work has paid off. It feels causal because it is. But, of course, hard work does not guarantee a ludicrously comfortable life.

Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto thinks he knows why Seattle fans didn’t appreciate his “54 percent” comments1 from a year and a half ago.

“My guess is that 98 percent of people didn’t actually listen to it. They just read it off a tweet,” he told The Athletic’s Sam Blum this spring.

Here’s some other things he said about the fans to explain why they don’t always agree with his expressed vision for the team:

• “Truly, I could say ‘hello,’[...]and it would turn into a thing right now.”
• “I don’t want to continue to constantly apologize to people for not winning the World Series in 1979, ’89, ’99.”

In short: they’re critical of what I have to say because they are uninformed, unreasonable, biased against me in particular, or else not sufficiently distinguishing my role at all.

In the Kardashian analogy, here “work ethic” is more like “baseball savvy” or “getting it” or, to put it more crudely, “intelligence.” The fallacy — one that we’re all prone to — is that successful people can become didactic about how their particular virtues manifest.

Dipoto knows that his approach — methodical, measured — is rooted in rigor. He knows he wants the Mariners to win. He knows he’s trying. And he knows — I’m sure agonizingly so — that even still, baseball can be mercurial and unpredictable. Crucially, he also knows the budget. He is working within some kind of constraints both financially and in a zero-sum arena where the other actors are going after the same wins or even players he’s pursuing. The mitigating factors he’s facing feel exculpatory to him because he sees his own perspective as expert and his own effort as pure, in spite of the results.

All of which is completely true.

Where he goes wrong is in assuming anyone who thinks he should take a different tact to team-building must do so because they don’t get it. Their criticism is rooted in ignorance or irrationality. The fallacy in Dipoto’s response is a lack of empathy or imagination or respect for the masses. Just because he has a point doesn’t mean the fans don’t as well.

I don’t want to go too far down the path of analyzing the actual Mariners moves — or lack thereof — but suffice to say the fans who think the team would benefit from adding a bigger bat are demonstrably not wrong. It’s reasonable to look at the team’s projected winning percentage — somewhere in the .522-.535 range (notably not clearing a certain bar 👀) — and feel good enough going into the season. It’s also OK for fans to expect more.

Making this my first piece of content for the revamped Bandwagon is patently absurd. Parsing the quotes of a piece from several weeks ago in which the subject complains about people parsing his quotes. But I simply cannot stop thinking (or talking, apologies to people who know me) about it. Maybe that’s because, the truth is, I like Jerry Dipoto just fine. And, what’s more, I care way more about whether he likes me than whether most Mariners fans do. That’s my fallacy. I’m a snob and an elitist.

Even though I have a genuine fascination with the phenomenon of fandom, the fervency of it doesn’t come all that naturally to me. That’s where bandwagoning as a personal brand came from in the first place — my rooting interests are malleable and more for fun or personal benefit than the kind of fandom that inspires agony. This makes me sympathetic to the sort of thinking I’ve projected onto Dipoto based on his public comments. For him, it’s a job and he’s done his best based on a reasonable approach, and so is it really fair for people to be pissed just because the team they love is falling short in a totally predictable manner?

If I was talking to Dipoto I’d be chummy and say I get it! Don’t ever read the replies! Because for me, it’s just a job too. I find my own professional grievances to be incredibly legitimate and sympathetic as well.

But increasingly, I feel that it’s important to hold people in positions of authority accountable for real results even if it makes them uncomfortable. Even if it’s a little unfair. I think a lot of very successful people believe that working hard and having good intentions should insulate them from blowback in the event of mitigating circumstances. But if you’re not interested in appealing to the public or being judged on actual efficacy, what are you doing running a sports team?

(Or working as senate minority leader.)

Links that piqued our interest

• Tokyo Dome Pikachus vs. Galapagos Gang game of Red Rover when? -ZC
• Via a delightful friendship with Ha-Seong Kim and some serendipity, Blake Snell is apparently the semi-official welcoming party for KBO stars? -ZC
• Some behind-the-scenes intrigue on the data and technology side of the game: The Phillies are suing Zelus Analytics over the company’s attempt to offer its suite of software outside of a one-team-per-division limit that had been in place. Among the interesting nuggets in Matt Gelb’s reporting: Just how much teams pay for these platforms to fuel their research, upwards of $1.2 million per year. -ZC
• On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver did a deep dive on the predatory tactics of legalized sports betting sites. Within sports media, criticism of the omnipresence of gambling affiliations often focuses on how it compromises the product itself, but I’m much more interested in the way the sudden boom of being able to bet virtually anytime anywhere is impacting vulnerable people. So even if you’re already cynical about sports betting (but especially if you’re not) worth watching for the member of Gamblers Anonymous who describes the way those companies target bettors who are susceptible to unhealthy behaviors as follows: “When you don’t go to your drug dealer, he doesn’t usually show up and knock on the door and say ‘hey, do you need something?’ And that’s what they do.” -HK
• For The Guardian, I wrote about two women, 20 years apart, in the Cleveland Guardians front office, pursuing solo motherhood. I’m incredibly ambivalent about the celebration of women in baseball that focuses exclusively on their value as a source of inspiration for the next generation. It’s something I want to write about in this space. But this story was such a heartening example of how that is a real and valid and important part of progress. -HK