One of our wonderful listeners brought us a dozen Pliny The Elders, which was a highlight of the summer.

About 98 percent of our effort would be in player development.

Different answer, but idea I was most excited to try that we didn’t end up trying (bandwidth) was working with cognitive scientists to figure out the best way to coordinate our fans’ cheering to disrupt the opposing team. Wanted to do something like the Curtain of Distraction for the opposing team’s pitcher, maybe. If…

Interesting idea, in some fashion. But I suspect at this point Ben is as eager to read my perspective on his performance as I am to read his on mine, which is to say not one bit. We had three months of that.

Yeah, but no. Wearing a team’s polo shirt and rooting for them is a great gift. I can’t imagine it not being an amazing job that I’d love to have. But the skills analysts these days have put them in a different universe than me. The extent of my contribution to a team would be “sometimes makes sense, not bad to have…

Ben and I both threw out ceremonial first pitches!

Preface by saying I’d be incredibly unhelpful to a major-league front office, so this is like asking whether it makes me more likely to to someday pursue a job as a mollusk. But I guess more. I grew a spine as the season went on, for example, which was sort of new. And which I guess makes it less likely I’ll pursue a…

It partly depends on how hard the nostalgia hits. It was the best summer of my adult life by a mile; there’s nothing like getting immediate judgment of your work, and caring with such passion.

This wasn’t totally irrelevant to how our team saw us, either. “Feel” is everything in baseball, the ability to act right, to not be weird. Ben and I are both weird for different reasons, and failed to have feel in different ways, but the deeper into the summer we got the more of our team brought up Ben’s, uh, energy…

Not totally sure anybody mentioned it to Jose Canseco, now that I think about it.

Plus, Goose was used exactly as we wanted to use our version of Goose in the bullpen!

It’s really not an inconsequential spoiler, so if you have any plans at all of reading the book...

Theo, the GM, brought it up at the opening banquet, when he introduced us, so everybody knew from minute one. And most players added midseason got a ride from the airport to Sonoma from me (I live near SFO), and I would always talk about it with them.

There was something I learned, a very small baseball thing, that I learned this summer but failed to get in the book. Once when we were playing Pittsburg, the starter tossed a ball back to the umpire to get a new one. He got a new one, then threw a fastball and got a swinging strike. So Andrew Parker, our catcher,…

Ben doesn’t sleep. I took the summer off from most of my duties at BP. A bunch of really talented people there—Bret Sayre, Jason Wojciechowski, Craig Goldstein, Rob McQuown, others—carried us through it.

I think we got basically none from the relievers. For one thing, most of these guys are starters in their hearts, and were starters up until just about the moment we signed them, so it isn’t as though they’ve spent 15 years facing lefties only or pitching in the ninth inning only. For another—I found ballplayers to be…

This might be naive, but going into this project one of our goals to treat these players like big leaguers—give them the same equipment, advance scouting, pitchf/x, etc. that big leaguers get, but that as indy ballers they never do. That’s why they’re doing this, after all: They want to be big leaguers! So I think…

One of our spreadsheet sherpas, Chris Long, was doing a lot of work with college volleyball stats at the same time he was helping us. It made me want to do this with college volleyball.

We were friendly with him for the vast majority of the time we spent with him, and I’m grateful for a lot of what he brought to the club. He was a great hitting coach, for instance. He made spring training extremely loose, which our team benefited from. He was extremely good at communicating to me what it’s like to be…

Judging by a few Facebook screengrabs, it looks like the rest of the league isn’t real happy now that they know we essentially kidnapped Baptista at the tryout.