It is the policy of Defector that co-owners who are on vacation should, when on vacation, try their best to be on vacation. There are complicating factors to this simple-sounding rule—it is both easy and tempting to pop into Slack during lulls or just out of habit, and that is only made more so by the years of damage or just slippage related to the idea of what are and aren't working hours—but it is a good policy. I say this as someone who wrote a decently long story for the site during my recently concluded vacation, although I can at least partially credit some untenably disgusting weather along with the aforementioned bad habits for that one. But some time away from work is an important and good thing no matter who you are, and I was glad to have it. Which is why I feel compelled to explain why I took a few moments out of my vacation last week to send Drew some questions about the San Diego Padres for him to ask Justin Halpern.
Should I have done this? By the policy described above, absolutely not. But Justin Halpern appearances are very valuable to me, and if I was going to miss one, I wanted to make sure that my questions about his aesthetically unpleasant, objectively mediocre, completely baffling baseball team of choice made it into the episode. As it happened, Justin had to push his appearance back a week, which means I got to ask those questions myself. And if it was not my best work to spend my precious and limited time in Maine thinking about how best to ask what is wrong with Manny Machado, it was gratifying—after Drew told a story about recognized at the beach due to his distinctive noises, and Justin told a story about retiring Jose Canseco via groundout in a men's league game, to Ozzie Canseco's dismay—to get to hear Justin's answer.
That is, to the extent such an answer is possible. The Padres are one of the weirder teams in baseball, and while the MLB-centric first half of the episode hews pretty close to what's weird about them, it also covers some other baseball-related points of interest. These include but are not limited to what makes hitters weird, the peculiarities of the redass tinkerer mindset, the question of what a hitting coach even does and Padres hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. in particular is doing, and the importance of having at least one normal veteran person on your roster. We also discussed the inimitable A.J. Preller, who has made the Padres a hot ticket and an interesting club while running them in a way that I likened both in this episode and in my team essay in this year's edition of the Baseball Prospectus Annual as an exceptionally well-managed and implausibly long cocaine binge. We talked about what Preller is actually good at, the thrill of trading with a guy who is absolutely willing to lose a trade, and the ways in which this wild, reckless, exceedingly busy way of running a team is preferable to more outwardly reasonable ones.
After the break we turned to Justin's debut novel, Get Lost, which Drew loved and which I am very much looking forward to reading, and not just because one of the main characters was described by Justin as A Rob Deer Type. We talked about the idea of scouting projection as a metaphor, taking the dreary dirtbags of outer baseball and bleakest California as literary inspiration, and how Justin brought a TV writer approach to the challenge of writing a Carl Hiassen/Elmore Leonard-style novel. I also got to do one of my favorite bits, the mileage of which may vary for those listeners who are less into writing than I, and asked Justin and Drew about their processes in writing novels, the role of genre reading in genre writing, and where stories come from. Drew talked about crafting a mixtape/soundtrack for what he's working on; Justin laid out the utility of the whiteboard.
This left enough time for one Funbag question, which in this case concerned what MLB teams owe to their minor leaguers in terms of guidance beyond player development. This was a good question, and the answer that Justin and I combined to give was broad enough to include the dubious life skills of minor leaguers and ballplayers in general, the best cities in which to be a lout, and a more serious consideration of what player development actually means for the organizations that take it seriously. A big takeaway there is that a lot of teams want to be the Rays, but far fewer are willing to do the actually careful stuff the Rays do. We did not really end on a joke—it was too hot in Drew's office, and our hour was up—but in every other way, we are inarguably and incredibly back.
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