Scott, thank you for the time. Hey, Jared. Happy to do it. How are you? I'm very well.
Good to chat with you again. I guess here we have it. Biggest markets in the United States of America. We got the Yankees. We got the Dodgers. What has really captured your attention about this series? There's so many different storylines.
Yeah, it is. I mean, you know, oftentimes I think, you know, people wind up rooting for underdogs. You know, it's always the Cinderella stories that are captivating. This is a reminder that a heavyweight title match can be captivating too. I mean, there's nothing underdog about the Yankees or the Dodgers. One thing I like about this World Series is in an age of expanded playoffs where 12 teams out of 30 make the playoffs.
We're kind of back to old school. The two teams meeting for the World Series are the teams with the two best records over the 162 game season. I think that's meaningful that you get through the gauntlet of the season and the two best teams end up standing at the end.
I think that's a great thing. Yankees, Dodgers, the uniforms, the aura, the history, all of it is intriguing. Six former most valuable players will be playing in this series. You know, we've never had that many before in a World Series. You know, Shohei Ohtani versus Aaron Judge, you start right there with how great those two are. But making it even more cooler, that particular match is both are going into their first World Series. Neither Judge nor Ohtani has ever played in a World Series before. Now, here they are going head to head in their first World Series.
That's cool. You know, Juan Soto of the Yankees getting there after he helped the Nationals win in 2019. Garrett Cole is going to be huge. He's the one guy in this series that's a throwback starting pitcher, kind of an old school guy that goes as long as he can go, versus, oh, we're only going to let him go 80 pitches and pull him before the lineup, which turns around the third time. The Dodgers top three, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, that's as good of a 1.3 as there is in the game today. There's just so much about this World Series.
Well, Scott, let me let me ask you this. We know we haven't had a repeat champ. We have the two teams that were in the World Series last year and the Diamondbacks and the Rangers not even in it.
And now this year we got the heavyweights. Is this now pretty much par for the course with the World Series that maybe next year, I don't know, would you be shocked if all of a sudden it's the Tigers and I don't know, fill in the blank, and we don't have Dodgers, Yankees? Like, when you have all this this payroll discrepancy, isn't this what the new baseball looks like?
See, it is. And it's not just with payrolls, though. I mean, as you mentioned, we have not had a back-to-back champion in the World Series since the Yankees won three in a row in 1998, 99, and 2000. Since then, since 2000, every year it's been a different team to win the World Series.
No repeaters at all. It has to do some with payroll. More than that, I think it has to do with the grind of getting through a 162-game season. Then if you win the World Series, you're playing an extra month. So what happens is your pitching gets ground to dust and the next season, and we've seen this for two decades now, the next season the pitching is just not that sharp.
You know, some guys are off and that's a lot of it, I think. It's so taxing to win a World Series because of how long the season is and in October how every pitch is high leverage. And you know, so I think that more than anything is why we are not seeing back-to-back championships in our sport of baseball as opposed to the other sports. As Scott Miller is joining us, contributor, author, writer, New York Times. When you look at the series, we got a lot of offense, we got pitching in different forms and varieties.
You mentioned Gary Cole. What do you expect? I see a seven game, but I go back and forth about who's going to win. I think they're that close. Yeah, I do too. I think it's a total coin flip, JR.
I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, I've been going, excuse me, the Dodgers in seven because I do see a long series. I don't see a heavy favorite and game six and seven are at Dodger Stadium. And so that kind of tilted it to me that I think the Dodgers are, you know, will win in seven, partly because of home field advantage, partly because I think also the Dodgers have, their team this year is a little different than it's been. You know, I mean, they got to the 2017 World Series and they still to this day feel they were cheated by the Astros, who obviously were in their cheating scandal that year. 2018, the Dodgers lost to Boston and, you know, the last two years they were knocked out in the first round stunned by Arizona last year in San Diego two years ago.
And as a result, I think these Dodgers are, you know, they're tired of all that and they are their mental toughness, their mental degree. It's as good as I've seen from a team lately. They've overcome a lot of things this year. They've overcome injuries, all kinds of injuries, and they haven't let anything stop them. So, you know, it's a coin flip. The Yankees are really, really good and they've obviously got the mojo as well.
But I'll go Dodgers in seven. And Scott Miller is here with us, a writer and contributor to The New York Times. You think about the money that Otani got, even though a lot of it is deferred over half the contract, $700 million.
You mentioned Juan Soto, who is still ridiculous. I think he's only 26 years old. Is he really going to get his hands on a $600 million contract? Are the Mets going to wave that in his face? What do you think his deal is going to look like, whether it's with the Yankees or elsewhere? It's hard to say.
600 seems high. I know he's shooting for the moon and Scott Boris is his agent and Scott Boris is as good as there is. Boris usually, you know, until this past year, Scott had an off year last winter. But, you know, he traffics in record-setting contracts. But you know, I don't know. I mean, you wonder especially, you know, a lot of teams are cutting back because these regional sports networks, like Valley Sports, is declaring bankruptcy. And these, you know, teams are worried about where the TV money is going to come from. So there are some teams that are reluctant to spend. But, you know, $600 million, you've only got about five or six teams that can spend that anyway. You're not going to see, you know, the Chicago White Sox or the Miami Marlins spend $600 and most other teams. I mean, you've got the Yankees and the Mets.
You've got the, I doubt if San Francisco would go that high, but they're a big market team. The Dodgers, but the Dodgers already have Joe Hayotani at $700 million. So they're not going after Juan Soto. The thing with the Mets, Steve Cohen's got the money. They're going to be really interesting because, um, Cohen, they're one of the few teams that can pay that to Soto.
And Cohen's got the dough. And until this past year, he showed some willingness to spend. But the issue here, and this is why I don't think the Mets are going to go after Soto, at least not very hard. Um, I think Cohen learned his lesson when he signed, he got acquired Max Scher, excuse me, Scherzer and Justin Verlander last year, and then traded them both. Um, he took a whack at spending big on some free agents and it didn't work. But more importantly than that, and but tied in with that is the front office move he made last winter to bring in as president of baseball operations, David Stearns from Milwaukee. David Stearns is in the boat, you know, he's, he had great success with small market Milwaukee.
Um, as an analytics guy, you know, they, they look for inefficiencies, players that fell through the cracks, cheaper players. And, you know, they didn't spend a lot of money and Stearns had a lot of success. And I think the reason Stearns, or the Mets, Steve Cohen hired David Stearns, it wasn't to run things on the cheap, but it was because he had success on the cheap. So now if you give him a little bit more money, kind of like Andrew Friedman in Los Angeles, you know, Friedman ran Tampa Bay for a long time and did did it with no money there.
And then he went to Los Angeles and look what he's done with more resources. That's the model that Cohen's looking for by hiring David Stearns. So I think Stearns, you know, he may spend some money eventually, Cohen certainly has a lot of it, but it's going to be smart money. And, you know, the analytics people love Soto because of his on base percentage. So maybe Stearns will say, this is the guy we should go after, but I don't think he's a slam dunk. You could see the Yankees resign Soto, but probably one of the New York teams is the best bet for him. And I say maybe the Yankees keep him.
Well, Scott, let me ask you this. You ran through a lot of teams and some good, well, most good with a lot of money. We just saw something that nobody listening to the son of my voice has ever seen.
We saw the White Sox have the worst season in one hundred and twenty four years. We've heard that you've heard that Jerry Ronsdorf is just getting ready to sell. Is that like best case scenario for the franchise to move forward?
It may be. I mean, Ronsdorf, you know, he had his day and his place in time and he loves his team and he's loyal to his guys and all that's good. But he does look like an owner who where the game is passed him by. You know, I don't I don't know how, you know, I think they're slow to move into analytics. You know, their ballpark was built early and they haven't taken full advantage of it. You know, they weren't able to what they built their ballpark right before the boom of these new retro ballparks, you know, like camping yards at PNC Park at Pittsburgh. So they're not playing in the best part. You know, they haven't really moved in the analytics movement.
I say all this. These are all reasons why they don't the right players don't come to Chicago to play for the White Sox or they haven't been able to either decide to bring in the right players or convince free agents to come in. And so I think it's probably reached a point. I know Chicago White Sox fans are furious and then, you know, I know a few of them personally, but can't wait for Reinsdorf to go. And it probably is reaching that time where it's going to be a good thing for the White Sox when that happens. The question is how soon will it happen or will it drag on?
Well, I know for the fan base, they are hoping that they can get back to, I don't know, 500. And it's probably going to take huge. Yeah, that'll take a long time.
That might take years. Well, Scott, let me ask you this. I know you got a new book out, Skipper, while managers are still mad, why they still matter and always will. One of the managers here, what kind of both of them, whether it's Dave Roberts or you want to take a look at Boone, they are always criticized.
People are always calling for their heads. Explain the book and why you got it going. All right. Well, it's not quite available yet. It's available for preorder right now on Amazon. You know, wherever you go to order books, it's called Skipper, Why Baseball Managers Matter and Why They Always Will. And it's published May 13th.
So we're still a few months away from publication date. And incidentally, both Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts, as you rightly say, get crushed by critics. Both of them I have featured in the book. I've done almost 200 interviews. I talked with Aaron Boone for a while.
I spent a lot of time with Dave Roberts. And they, among many, many, many other managers, are in the book. And it's been something, I think it's just come out of cover baseball for 30 plus years. I've seen the changes of the job.
I've known many of these men personally and seen what they do and what they go through. And I just thought the evolution of the job has reached a point where it's worth explaining and diving into. And basically, I start the book with those strongman managers from like the 70s and 80s, guys like Earl Weaver and Sparky Anderson and Billy Martin, who, you know, they had ultimate authority. And then you flip over to today's guys, and they all have to collaborate, to use Dave Roberts' work, with the front office, with the analytics people. Now, we have computers now that they didn't have back then.
We have data now that we didn't have back then. And so basically, the book, it looks at, in the era of the strongman manager of Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver, all that, what the job was then, what the job is now, how we got from then to now, and why we got from then to now. And so it takes us through, you know, the changes, the economic changes in the game. It takes us through the Moneyball era. You know, it takes us through the era where suddenly managers are hired with no experience. Just if you recently played, we'd like to talk to you about managing our team.
You don't need experience. And so all of this, you know, there's a lot of meat on the bone, and I enjoyed doing it. It's been about a two-year project, two and a half years. And, you know, I've talked to current managers, ex-managers, current players, ex-players, current executives, former executives, a whole lot of people to get to the bottom of, you know, what goes on today, what went on then, and how it's changed and why it's changed.
Well, we know baseball is a game that is forever changing. Hey, Scott, where can people follow you and all of your works and publications and the New York Times, your books? Where can we keep up with you? On the platform formerly known as Twitter, I guess it's X now, at Scott Miller BBL, like baseball, at Scott Miller BBL.
That's probably the best place. I've got a Facebook page as well under that same title, at Scott Miller BBL. And usually, yeah, when I put it back, I just had a story in the New York Times online yesterday. It's still up there on an appreciation column for the late, great Fernando Valenzuela of the Dodgers. So, you know, yeah, when I write, you know, that's up in the New York Times now.
So I post that on Twitter and on Facebook and that way. So there you go, at Scott Miller BBL. Hey, Scott, we appreciate the time.
We'll catch you on down the line. Enjoy the World Series, OK? All right, buddy. You too, Jared. Thank you.
