Pouty and welcome to the Three shout Comes podcast presented by Baseball Perspectus. I'm your host, Dan Leftgowitz, and I'm joined as always by Ben Marphine and Jared Weiss. I guess I know how you guys are doing. I assume if anyone has read the introduction to this podcast or the title, you know how we're doing as well. And it's been kind of a rough day here. Just in case you played this without looking at the title, we all
received pretty rough news. I guess, like yesterday that our friend and probably the most valuable member of this podcast, through Rob mcun passed away yesterday unexpectedly. And it's been, you know, pretty strange and rough for us, and so we're probably just going to talk about that. Sorry, it's going to be a little bit of a downer, but hopefully, you know, we'll also get into some good stories DeLine and kind of explain, you know,
what he meant to us in scoreset as well. Ben, I think I'll turn over to you first, just I guess for some thoughts and like how you got entangled with VP in the first place, because you certainly have the longest history of us. Yeah, apologies, to all the listeners because I'll probably end up talking more than charitar Ian for this episode, which is not the best situation but maybe appropriate here. So I joined VP when I
was still in college. I think it was in two thousand and four, and if memory serves, Rob actually wasn't on board at that point, but I was helping in a technical capacity and working with Keith Wilner back before Keith Wilner left, and when Rob joined, he was sort of helping support us at first. And then you know, when I joined, I guess I should say like Keith was sort of the most technical person there, or at
least like the person most in charge of the technical inner workings. And Keith left many years ago now, and when Keith left, Rob basically stepped into his shoes and sort of helped orchestrate all of the technical inner workings. And I guess maybe it's hard to describe exactly what that entails, but it ended up becoming, you know, a full time job before anybody realized it. And then I think was you know, basically like Rob's full time job for
a while. And you know, if you haven't already, I'll link I'll send the link out that Ian that you shared, but it's basically just like a Twitter thread of threat of responses to the Baseball Perspectives anouncement, and I think that's worth reading it, and I don't want to go through and reiterate it, but it's you know, dozens of people responding basically talking about how
kind and helpful and patient Rob was. And I think that was certainly my experience, and I think if there's a somewhat unique perspective or at least uncommon
perspective that I can shed some light on it. That around when I finished college, so it's two or three years after I joined Baseball Perspectus, I was still helping out fairly frequently, but I was in the middle of going through all kinds of things as a lot of people do, finding a job and getting married and then getting divorced and getting dogs and getting a new job
and traveling and all that kind of stuff. But I was sort of dipping in and out of Baseball Perspectus the whole time, because I really appreciated the community of folks there and enjoyed the work that I had done with them. And you know, once Keith left, Rob was the most helpful person there. And was the only reason that I was ever able to get back up to speed after being you know, out of sync for six nine, twelve twenty four months. You know, as you know, stuff with my life
came and went, and I was sort of in and out. I can't count how many times I emailed Rob to be like, can you send me the connection information to all the servers again? Because I've just you know, forgotten them or they've changed because it's been so long. And he was always super patient and super helpful, and I knew everything off the top of his head because he was in charge of coordinating at all. And you know, I think it's a tribute to who he was as a person that you like,
see all the responses and outputting on Twitter. But if there's something that I can shed some light on is that the stuff that he did was technically fairly difficult, and he was struggling a lot of things all at once. And the fact that Baseball Prospectus was capable of churning out so much content and keeping the website going and you know, maybe not updating it as often as all the readers would like, but actually going through several site refreshes in that
decade plus generating all the content for the books. You know, all of that stuff was all orchestrated by Rob, and everybody that ever interacted with him
had only good things to say about how all that went. So, you know, think of all of the hundreds of thousands of words that have spilled onto the Internet and onto the pages of Baseball Perspectus, and it's maybe only a slight overstatement to say that most of them wouldn't have been there without Rob's help in some capacity or another, either from the website itself or the publishing
process for the book and what have you. And I think a lot of people that mentioned stuff on Twitter sort of talked about how unheralded he was, and I think that was most by his choice. You know, he got a lot of credits and appreciation at the bottom articles and stuff like that, and mentions in the book, but you know, he was always in it just to be helpful, because this is what he wanted to be doing,
because he loved it. And and when I was reading through the tributes of the thing that sort of stuck out to me and sort of struck a chord
in me was, you know, I don't know, I'm not. I don't want to go too far, but I don't really know that I've ever seen anybody else that could support all the technical things that Baseball Prospectus needs like Rob did, and above and beyond missing him as a person and a personality and as a friend, which I think you will definitely get if you go through and read the things that people have said about him and the way that they talk about even people that only knew him for a year or less,
you know, all the way up to all the people that knew him for you know, a decade or more. Everybody has good things to say, and I think, you know, in reading through those things, the thing that I sort of came back to is like, this is obviously somebody who is an awesome person, and that's something that we can all aspire to for
sure. And I think in a company that's seen dozens of people come through and do all kinds of amazing things in baseball, it's possible that Rob was and is going to remain the most important person to ever work there, you know. And that's I mean, I think that's really easy to substantiate and a pretty tremendous accomplishment given all of the other people that you know would also be considered for that sort of thing, And yeah, you know, I
don't know. I don't know if I don't know how the site keeps going, I don't know how the refresh has happened, I don't know how the data gets updated. And it was I mean, maybe a little bit fitting. I'm gonna throw a little bit of negativity here, but like, I so I got the email that they sent out for the announcement, and I
wasn't on Twitter, so I didn't see that thing on Twitter. But I pulled up the VP website and there's this kind of like lame banner thing at the top of the website that's like a nice tribute to Rob, but in terms of like it's technical design is lame, is what I mean. It's
like it's a nice thing that somebody wrote. But it's like if if things had unfolded a different way and Rob had been the one to like make the banner, it would have looked really nice and it would have like had the right funt and it would have been like well coordinated with the site and all that stuff. And you can just sort of see right in the immediacy of everything unfolding and like it's like, oh, like nobody could have done it
like Rob did it, because Rob was the one that did everything. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't you know, we're we're not really like you know, we're BP adjacent if anything, at this point. And you know, there are a lot of great people there and the site will
keep running. But you know, from where I stand today, I don't understand how you know that the work he did was incalculable and without complaint and just making it look so easy, yeah, which is really you know, the effortlessness allowed him to I guess be friendly or I don't know which one
drove the other. But like, because he was able to take on these incredible tasks, he was able also to bring his personality yeah too good and and extend that so far out right into the scoresheet community, which you mentioned before. You know, I think there are people that never opened the BP website but knew Rob through the mock draft or his other scores sheet leagues,
and are you know, equally devastated by the news. It's no exaggeration whatsoever to say that we would certainly not be here doing this podcast or any of the ones this year without Rob's help and support and encouragement. You know, in a time when the podcast had gone dormant, Rob was the one that reached out and was like, Hey, you guys should start that podcast up again. You should really start doing more episodes. Is there anything I can
do to help? Is there any you know, like all the way up to offering to do all the like technical production stuff, and I was, I mean, I couldn't do that. I would feel so guilty having him do that for us. But that was like, you know, that was the extent of his generosity. Was like, and he you know, he was genuinely excited about the possibility of the podcast happening again, and so he
initiated all that to happen. And so, you know, I guess in the aftermath of the news about his passing and sort of dwelling on it earlier today, I was like, you know, it's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be the best episode that anybody listens to, but we have to make sure we get together and at least talk about him for a little while. And obviously I'm not great at just sort of extemporaneously
talking about how awesome he was. I'll say it again, like you can see the measure of who he was by the outpouring that happens, you know, in situations like Twitter where everybody's stepping up and everybody's saying wonderful and glowing things because they're all true, because that's who he was. And I think it's something for us to keep of mine this Like, at the end of the day, being a really nice, generous, caring, thoughtful person is
probably the best thing that any of us can aspire to. So yeah, yeah, um, and I'd like to just really well said, I'd like to you know, expand him two points. And Jared, you know, certainly feel free to jump in as well. Um. You talked a lot about what he meant to BP and something about what he meant to us, but you know, I want to talk one about what he meant to score Sheet as a whole, because you know that's the world a lot of you were in, and what he meant to us personally. Um, and to
score Sheet like again, just like just like Savor Metrics. You know, I think he held a lot of Saber Metric committee together, and you know, he held a lot of Scoresheet together. I think outside of like the Bartons and Brian du Barry Jones and maybe a couple like I don't know that anybody gave as much to Scoresheet as Rob and certainly that was through his enthusiasm
for it. But you know, we have talked many times about how the Baseball Perspectives tools are the best on the site or the best anywhere for score Sheet, and they're the reason to subscribe to BP, even if you don't like listening to us, which we certainly understood, and that it wasn't that, and that was you know, one hundred percent, well maybe with some assistance from you, but like one hundred percent him and his passion for this
product in this game. And you know, I think he had more passion for this community than literally anyone including us, maybe the creator, like just
you know, anyone out there. And you can go down the line from that team tracker to SSM to line up developer or two like the the thing that always got me was like the Minor League stand or the minor league game tracker, which he would update every year, and I'm convinced I am the only person who ever knew that and every I like in every where, I'd be like, you know, I don't want to disturb you from the eight thousand more important things on yard radar, but you know, the whatever the
Gwinnette stripers changed their day, Yeah, I'm on it. I have a quick anecdote about that, at least like a tension off of that that. Um So, I was like poking around in some of my emails and stuff and I have some you know, random nostalgic moments earlier today, and one of the things that I uncovered was a list of ideas that Rob and I had brainstormed at one point for like things we wanted to develop for the site.
And there's a folder out there on one of the servers that basically has like I don't know, I'll say, like a dozen little side projects that he and I spun off at some point thinking like, oh, maybe this is something that people would enjoy. And I'm very confident that after I left that, like minor league scoreboard is a good example of these types of things. Was like Rob has an idea, He's like somebody will think this is useful or cool or helpful or whatever, and he would just stand it up
and make it happen and put it on the site because he could. You know, Yeah, it's like all those those the ratings of the team tracker which are hidden in this like very strange place. You know, you can all find that about how your team ranks compared to others, like just his idea and right, he just put it up ss Sam, I don't know if you want to talk about that development again. I know you've mentioned it before, but certainly the most important metric and score sheet. Yeah, like
you guys, I essentially rebuilt it, right. It was like, yeah, I don't want to I don't want to rehash it too much. It's basically something that Nate Silver originally like had the original idea for. And part of the reason I don't like talking about too much is because I don't have to talk about Nates Silver. But he built it an Excel because that was what he knew, and Rob and I were both like, well, this
will not do. This is not a thing we can do every year in Excel, and so he and I sort of went through the process of rewriting
it for the website. And then you know, this was definitely after I was not doing a whole lot of stuff to help out BP very often, and so Rob took it over and fixed all the little bugs that I had put in there, and like went through fairly rigorous testing to make sure that everything tracked all the way through just right, and did a lot of debugging on all the different steps for all the different calculations and comparing them to the
Excel spreadsheet, and and then once it was you know, pretty much done in terms of the development, he was constantly spearheading ideas to improve it functionality, additions, different types of you know, like all the different parameterization and settings and stuff that are in there were almost all his idea, and I
would say vast majority of the implementation work was his work. You know, all the updates every year, there's like there's a bunch of different little things that you really want to like tweak and review every year, and he was always either doing them or like asking me to review them, or you know, like saying, hey, Ben, like what do you think A lot of the email threads that I found in my email when I was like poking through there were things that things that he was thinking about SSM or had her
mostly John Mayne saying about s SIM is like, hey, I think we can fix this if we you know, try to tweak a little bit or like what if we you know, change this parameter to be instead of being
hard coded, we can just impute it from you. Like all these kinds of things that were you know, work above and beyond and um definitely contribute to the value of the metric itself, but also you know, multiple data points over the course of every year of like how much he cared, how much he wanted it to be as excellent as it could be, how much he enjoyed what he was doing, and how interested he was in you know, pushing that out to as many people as possible and making it as helpful
to you know, as much of the community as possible. And um, yeah, it's it's like a gift to people based on the things that he was passionate about. Yeah. I think is a thing that ms up over and over again. Yeah. And I think, you know, we're fortunate in a lot of ways that will have a lot of ways to remember him because he did so many of these things that are going to be useful to so many people for so much longer after he's um, you know, not
able to keep working on them. Yeah. Um. Yeah, and you know I do think I do see this podcast again as one of those things like a project that he was passionate about and wanted to work on um which is amazing and it has been a gift, especially over the last year, and definitely wanted to reiterate, like you know, I cancer something like not only you know, as somebody who has been a reader of BP for a long time, like you were involved in it, I've kind of just been
a person reading and like everyone there is like on the other side, yeah, that they are like the geniuses who I grew up reading essentially, and to have that veil be pierced through an you know, through a number of people who worked at PP the first time, but especially throughout the second and to have him welcome us in to this world and with you know, with a graciousness that I do not extend to myself honestly, and generosity is you
know, that was about the most incredible thing I could experience. Like, you know, I was looking at some of this and it's like, you know, seeing the tributes come in from like heavy hitters of the industry such as it is you know, Jay Jaffee, Ben Lindbergh and so she all had nice things. You know, all we're helped and like to have like us clowns also be helped by him. It's like like just for me, like I you know, like why are you spending? Like why do you
value my opinion along with that? And you know he did, you know, I think on some level genuinely, you know, this is what we were saying today. I would probably say it any day, like we were making the podcast for him, like almost almost literally in something. I think we even said that once or twice. Yeah, and we were happy to do it because we felt like he deserved it and right like he brought us back because he wanted to listen to us, which is just a tremendous honor
and gift. Yeah, and you know, hard for me to even believe in myself to that degree. And you know that is certainly the thing that I have taken from speaking with him, just briefly, like valuing my hockey jokes once or twice, like you know there is like you changed the VP slack chat like one of the line to like a joke that I made, yeah, which I believe was a slam on Jerkson profar. Actually, so we are like on rand I was going to support a slam on Jerkson profar.
Yeah, let me check any of the pub is line real quick. Yeah, but like yeah, but like seeing that is like, oh, like you know I am a part of this. You know. I think I've said to everyone who listens, you know, to all of you, like you're definitely the people who keep us going, you like, respond to us even in our moments of self doubt, of which I have frequent, all of them. Um. And you know, I think having somebody of that reputation, like you know, talent, just like asking us questions about
what he thought of what he thought about his team. You know a lot of people have brought up like he would ask a lot of questions about baseball. Yeah, and just like what you think about a trade, um, and you know, just like keeping the conversation going. Um. You know, and I think right uh, like Jared, I think you know that may have been someone what you like, how you interacted with them, it's
through just him chatting to us off offline. Yes, yeah, no, um, I agree, And you all said it better than anything I could. I guess just a couple more things I wanted to to fill in up. I was going back piece some old emails, and I think Rob was in the larger responsible for us getting the podcast on VP and in the first place. Yeah, he was the one who made the introduction to bread and suggested and it was it was a team thing. But I'm not sure we're
on VP with that. With that, Rob and I was looking back, we invited him on the podcast Liliver five years ago and he said that he really stunk at podcasts. He respectfully declined, and I guess about you, Like, one of my big regrets is that we never we never took the time to follow up and knowing that he probably wouldn't want to be on if there was a way that we could have got him on it, I think, Yeah, I do recall it as being the only guest who has ever
turned us down. Amazing because we should have been turned down by everyone, like it's been gracious, but it right, It wasn't out of like, it wasn't out of busy answer like he I guess did not whoa No, I think that like he didn't feel I don't know what whatever it was, but whatever he felt, he wasn't. I mean, he certainly was and yeah, maybe maybe should have, but it's done a better job telling him that, I mean he was he was, um, he was on the
score sheet at baseball respect is email right right? Yeah, like those those emails went to him and he responded at least to us too, I guess we Like what always struck me about Rob is just how how present he was and seeing all these other tributes commended. It blows my mind that he had the the time and energy and willingness to get so deep in the mousha of like silly questions with us about this, right, and then like everyone else
like I could. It's stunned me that everyone else was like yeah, like Rob was helping me too. I I couldn't believe he had time to all day. It blows my mind, right, and to have like uh you know, like and not to get start straight, but like all of the big names in VP and throughout like Savan Rotricks like right again, like he has time for us, and he had time for like we're not the only one, Like there are a lot of little fish who he was helping along
the way. It is just, yeah, I don't understand how you could give that much talk to that many people. And I never remember hearing him complaining ever about anything with our stuff. Yeah, he's always complete opposite. Yeah. The only thing I remember him complaining about was like trades that he made that he wished he hadn't made. You know, I'll i'll echo slightly that, like, I have some regrets that he was never on the podcast.
I think I think in some ways it's kind of fitting that we didn't try to talk him into it or whatever, because it's sort of like, well, this is of his doing in enough ways that if he really doesn't want to come on, then you know, who are we to try to talk him into it. I'll share one other regret and I sort of voice this privately to Jared, and I think it's maybe a little of a vulnerability
for me, but I think it's worth sharing. Is that, um, in the VP slack, there's a scoresheet channel, and I would venture to guess something like eighty percent of the messages on that channel came from Rob, and it was always Rob looking for conversations just about scoresheet and his players and
his teams, or current events or something like that. And I sort of jokingly called it Rob's scoresheet support group at one point because it was you know so often that he was reaching out and and I I mean I meant the comments sort of good naturally, as like a sort of a joke amongst the three of us. But it makes me regret that I didn't put more energy and effort into engaging him, because I think he certainly had more than earned,
you know, my time at that point. Not that I necessarily had anything super useful to say, but you know, sometimes you could tell he was just looking for a you know, he would mention, you know, some unlucky outcomes in the sim or something like that, and he's just looking for somebody to you know, yeah, just chime in and be like, yeah, that stinks, Like I hate it when the secretcing breaks the wrong way for you or whatever. And I had chances to do that and miss
them. And I think, you know, as I was thinking about if there's anything useful to take away from something like this, you know, I mentioned how universally positively he and back to people, and how that's like something that can inspire us. I think there's also at least for me personally,
and like possibly for other people. You could think of similar settings and situations that happened to you, like I have a certain amount of regret about not engaging with him more fully and not reciprocating in a lot of ways the energy that he put into, you know, the things that I was thinking about or talking about or whatever, to sort of reciprocate that energy back for him
about the things that he was thinking about and talking about carrying about. And you know, I definitely regret the imbalance of that creative in a relationship where like he was constantly giving and I was doing more taking than giving, and
I I should have done a better job of that. And so you know, maybe that's also a thing that can come out of this little at least be an opportunity for people to think about, like, you know, take that extra few a few minutes to have that conversation with somebody about how tricks and profile really isn't good at baseball if that's what they want to rant about or whatever. Not that Rob would do that. So that's like me projecting
myself. Rob would never say anything bad about baseball players, I don't think. I mean, I'm sure he did, but like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I you know, I connected that, Like I feel similarly in my own way, where you know, you would ask questions and you know, I would take more time to respond than he did to ask them. And you know, I think just in the last week we were chatting, we were chatting offline about not baseball, but music, which was the
two a very large degree one of his passions. And I think you'll see that in a lot of reminiscences as they I think come out on the site. So I don't want to steal other people's thunder, but I definitely, you know, something that was important to him as well and is important to
me. And you know, I don't want to cut this off prematurely, but I did have the best thing I saw this week, which is very you know, I just came back from the Carlier Jackson concert and I won't talk about her again except to say that, Um, you know, we were chatting. I was chatting with Rob last week and the conversation turned to music and he said, uh, he said to me that I'll pull up the exact line, which I have somewhere here, um, but that his
obsession was in finding great female vocals, great and energetic female vocals. Um. And uh, Jared, you know me, I met you, Yeah, and you know what I listened to um and energetic female vocals. Yeah
that you know. He uh was the h the only person I met with a bigger paramore fan than the two of us, you know, and it was just you know, which I have met and other people, but like this encyclopedia knowledge of music, but I think accompanied by this joy and interest in like everything for like Prague to like EDM to you know, loud music
and just putting women first, which I definitely relate to. You know that a lot of people talked about playlists that he shared with them, and I got my first one in his last message to me, you know, and that is tough. I had this thought then. Even now I'm like, oh, this is somebody who I'm going to be talking to for a long time about this, and you know, it is very rough to realize that I'm not going to and that has been weighing on me in the last day.
But you know, what I guess I can do on some level is go out to see Carly and to see all of all of my favorite women and meet his obsession for great female vocals and you know, live that for him to some degree in my own way, and to be passionate about the things that I love and hopefully share them with others, and that that is to a degree, what I've taken from him, and hopefully y'all get to experience that as well in your life. Yeah. Yeah, Um, I
don't know anyone anyone else have things to say. I don't want to cut the party short here, but um, like I said, it's been a rough day for us. We're recording this pretty late, but I think we all wanted to take some time out of our day, no matter when, for him. So yeah, um, all right, we'll be We'll be back at some point with you know, the dumb stuff that we talk about
normally. I'm sure you know. I can't say when. Send us send us your thoughts, comments, questions, scoresee at baseball perspectis dot com. You know, if you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like us to share, we'll read them. If you want to send dumb trade questions and like random nonsense, believe me, that is what Rob would have loved as well, So please please send along. It's just anything that you have,
you know, it's it's always good to hear from you. And like we said, you know, we were doing this for him to some degree and to all of our lists and for all of our listeners, and um, you know we'll be we're down one and we're down somebody who supported us and entered us. Um. But you know we want to keep going for everyone else and to keep him happy in some way. So uh I guess with that said, um again, UM you know, uh restI is your
Rob. We'll mess you. And yeah, I think I want to thank you, perhaps on behalf of allow us, for all that you have given us. Um and yeah I'll given this community. Yeah yeah yeah, So um, thank you again for listening. Thank you to Rob, and thanks to Benasher. Thank you both for pushing this and making this happen because it was worth it. But on behalf of all of us, thanks again and have a great day.