CubsPS+ #118: Still Chasing the Same Answers, Ben Lindbergh (Ep. 37) Revisited

Two years ago I sat down with Ben Lindbergh — co-host of Effectively Wild, co-author of “The MVP Machine” — to talk through the player development revolution remaking baseball.

I’m re-airing it with a new intro. The reason: two years later, baseball is still chasing the same answers, and still hasn’t solved the same problems.

We get into:

• Why pitching always stays a step ahead of hitting

• How chasing every edge turned the whole league into the same team

• Whether the rule changes were ever going to work

• Ben’s fix: cap the pitchers on the roster, make guys pace themselves, and you get back deeper starts, more contact, fewer blown-out arms

A few references are frozen in 2023 — Hosmer getting DFA’d, Morel being all the vibes. Enjoy the time capsule. The heart of it plays sharper now than the day we taped it.

The thread to hold onto: every adaptation has a price — what it costs a player, and maybe the game itself, to become something different than it used to be.
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