CubsPS+ Episode 68 — Falling Down the Rabbit Hole with Michael Cotton

Nothing's happening in the offseason and spring training isn't here yet — so I brought in reinforcements. Michael Cotton, co-host of the Sun Ranto Show and host of Baseball Rabbit Hole, joins me for a wide-ranging conversation about the soul of the game: old stats versus new, the artistry analytics is slowly erasing, and whether any of it matters when baseball is still just beautiful and stupid in equal measure.

This episode:

• Michael's origin story — 10 seasons on Sun Ranto, a Bears podcast he'd rather forget, and how a podcast from the Quad Cities kept him connected to the Cubs from Colorado
• How watching 162 games a year changes you — why the 15% see the game differently, and why that's both a gift and a burden
• Henry Chadwick: the journalist who invented the box score, the baseball guide, and — possibly — the K, and why his stats stuck for 150 years
• WAR explained for the Cotton-brained among us — and why 48 wins is the floor, not the average
• The old stats tell you what happened; the new stats try to explain why — and both matter
• Javier Assad's Baseball Savant page is a puzzle, Kyle Hendricks' is a masterpiece, and what the difference tells us about contact-based pitching in the modern game
• Why PCA's best plays might not look like plays at all — and what Darwin Barney and Jason Heyward have to do with it
• Analytics as player development tool vs. analytics as player limiter — and where Michael draws the line
• Joe Maddon, game seven, and the pull that still haunts us
• Jed, Theo, and what actually changed when Craig Breslow came to town