The Nerd Who Knew Too Much

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Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Barbie and Phil, he addressed it to both of us. I hope this is the first you are hearing of it.
Today is my 60th birthday, the last day of my life.

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Look, we have two Pepsi. When's the last time you had Pepsi out of a two-liter bottle?

God, sixth grade? Yeah, I was going to say. A birthday party at Pizza Hut or something?

Pre-pubescent.

I might even venture. We kept Mountain Dew in the fridge at home in high school.

You used to drink a lot of Mountain Dew. I did.
Then Diet, and then I was just, then I was done.

It was my 20s, long time. Mountain Dew is...

so Diet Mountain Dew, total side note, is the juice that so much of the sports nerd world runs on. I was addicted.

Oh, it is. He showed up at the office every day with a Diet Mountain Dew.
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what it's like to be addicted to a beverage.

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Rich and Nick is, was, remains Daryl Maury.

I am the guy who thought he knew everything about the world of sports nerds and the Daryl Maury cinematic universe. He's He's a friend of the show.
He's been on here a bunch of times.

But it turns out that when I was at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference presented by MIT in Boston this past spring, you guys were there too. We looked for you.
We did not meet up. No.

Because you guys were on a parallel but very different path. And you guys had a question for the people I thought I knew everything about.

What was the question that you were there to ask?

Do you know the name Martin Manley? Have you ever heard the name Martin Manley? No. Have you heard the name Martin Manley? Have you ever heard the name Martin Manly?

Martin Manley?

No. Martin Manley.
And it was a very consistent response, we should say. Have you ever heard of Martin Manly?

I have not.

That's the right answer, by the way, Brock.

I should say I had no fing idea who Martin Manley is. By the way, Daryl Maury.
No idea. No idea.

Martin Manley.

Manly.

I'm actually struggling to even find Martin Manley when I look on the internet.

Sorry, did I ruin the podcast already?

And that's embarrassing. For who?

Well, for me, for Daryl, for most everybody who it turns out owes something of, I don't know if the word is debt, I don't know if the word is courtesy, but just some recognition.

I think it's fair to say this. He was the first person to write in a book, the NBA should shoot more three-pointers.
Like, I think I feel very comfortable making that argument.

He was the first to have a book to say that. Yeah, the first one to point out three is more than two, and why aren't professional shooters shooting these?

In other words, the thing that Daryl Mori, the proprietor of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, has made his entire career on is actually first established by this guy he did not know about.

For this guy, the math was so simple, but no one else wanted to listen. His legacy, his identity has been buried like a tepid Pepsi bottle in someone's closet for decades.

He would apply math to basketball as he did, but he applied it to everything.

He came obsessed with efficiency in everything, efficiency in basketball, and then efficiency in like what he had for for lunch.

He just had to watch every local news channel every day to get the weather report from each one and see which

forecaster was the most accurate and would just keep data on that. He had to log and keep data on the efficiency of life.

And so the question then at the top here is why?

Why has nobody heard of him? You know, he's always doing the numbers and he made a calculation that's like, oh, wait, I think I can figure out how to to have the most efficient death.

And our story kind of goes behind the scenes of how he actually did that.

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So you should know that I'm numb to pretty much every story about statistics in sports. And that's largely because the war is over.

The nerds have gone from being stuffed into lockers to owning the entire building.

Famous jocks are now a constant presence at CES, for instance, the Consumer Electronics Show, every summer because their side gig now is investing in tech startups.

The star of Moneyball, which got six Oscar nominations in 2011, was Brad Pitt.

But today's episode is an exception because this story brought to us by these two guys

really got me. Nick Alchuler.
Thank you. Rich Levine.

Those are the two voices that in audio, if you're not watching on YouTube, you'll be tracking. So Nick, say hello again.
Hello. And Rich, say hello again.
Hey there.

Rich and Nick are two journalists, two friends, and lifelong NBA obsessives. who spent months reporting the strange lost story of Martin Manley.

And they titled the results of their full investigation, Chasing Basketball Heaven, which now lives as a multi-part audio series brought to you by 30 for 30 podcasts and Metal Arc Media, which I highly encourage you to check out, by the way.

There's a link in the show notes.

Because the thing about history, in all of its fogginess, is that it does tend to be written by the victors.

And Martin Manley wasn't a victor.

And also,

both writing and history these days are hard sells. Are at the point where I just don't know if the kids out there

even know like when the three-point line showed up in the NBA.

I think a lot of adults probably

don't even know that. Because it wasn't, I mean, for us, I guess, it wasn't that long ago.
For the kids, it's impossible to imagine a game that didn't have to be.

It's like World War II to us when we were growing up. It's like the same difference in time.
That's right. Let me tell you a little bit about a Boston Celtic named Chris Ford.
Ooh.

Good call.

Well, it's one of the great calls.

That moon landing ass call was Chris Ford hitting the first three in the history of the NBA after the three-point line got inserted in 1979.

And if you follow that trajectory, it turns out, you don't just get to Steph Curry and Daryl Maury and modern basketball.

You also get to Kansas

and the uniquely efficient trajectory

of Martin Manley.

He'd grown up in Topeka, which was sort of like a, you know, like a Pleasantville kind of upbringing a bit.

And then when he was 11 or 12 years old, his dad took a job and they moved like three hours outside of Topeka. Like we drove out there.

It's not just a field, a field and a granary.

And I don't think he ever recovered. Like he went from, yeah, kids next door for as far as the eye can see, even though that wouldn't be next door, kids down the street.
To moose.

To the middle of nowhere. And I don't think he, he just like shut down at that point.
And I don't think he ever like really had much of a social life beyond like two, three friends. Man.

The Kansas you're picturing.

Yes. Yes.

Castaway Kansas. Yeah, there's a house on top of a pair of red slippers.
You know, there's a, what else? What else happens in Kansas? Bill James

happened in Kansas. I mean, talk about luck.

I mean, like, it was in the middle of nowhere, but it was like a couple hours away from the guy that you want to live near if you want to have a future in analytics.

A couple of fun facts about Bill James. Number one, Bill James blocked me on Twitter.
Oh, I can see that. I believe it.
That's most people who know this world.

Having nothing to do with you, by the way.

I immediately was horrified because his name is like on the lecture hall at Sloan. Like the Bill James Lecture Room.
That's what they rename it at the Boston Convention Center.

And then I'm asking around, I'm like, why did Bill James block me? And they're like, that makes total sense. I'm like, okay.
That's a podcast, by the way. Yeah.

My investigation on that front continues.

But for those not initiated into the cult of Bill James, please explain. Bill James was a night watchman at a a baked beans factory.
Great lead-in. We're going to do a Sclar Brothers thing.

Finish your sentences. Big baseball fan,

English major, but somehow awesome at math as well. And he dug into the numbers to see how, what actually goes into winning beyond the stats that were provided at the time.

By the way, Bill James is the guy you know. If you're a sports nerd with any credibility, like that's the guy who you credit as this is the forefather of in any sport.

Exactly. Of sports advanced statistics in any vague sense,

football, hockey, Aussie rules football.

Who's the big guy? It's Bill James.

If anyone owns the, like, the still, the Moneyball, the actual book, Moneyball on Your Phone, go to the index or just search Bill James and see how many times he has references. Yes,

don't look up,

you know, Mark Mulder. Not a lot in the index.
No, but Bill James, chapters.

So Martin Manley, though, as he's growing up in Kansas and Bill James somehow lives geographically as close a couple of people. You could have dreamed realistically.

What was Martin Manley like in high school, growing up? His friend Charlie told us,

well, they were in church one Sunday and they both had girlfriends

and Martin's trying to come up with a way because they're good boys and they're in church. They don't want to have premarital sex.

And he's trying to figure out like how far he can go without having sex and still be like a good Christian.

So he was like, I think if I like, if we neck this way and like she does like one button on her blouse, like that were that's because he tried to figure out like an efficiency model for a teenage like making out.

And Charlie's telling us this and then this. And then the next Sunday, he says Martin sits down and he goes, well, that's not going to work.

I love the idea of Vorp.

Yes, exactly.

Value over replacement, you know, fill in the blank. Exactly.
As it were. So even back then, he was applying his math, his own brain to everything.
So his intelligence. Yes.
There you go.

How do you, how does one measure that?

Well, Martin measured it by taking an IQ test in the back of a science fiction magazine. Yes.
And this was like, he was kind of lost. He dropped out of college.
I think he was mid-20s. He dropped out.

He was just driving around the country. He was reading his book.
On the back, he sees the IQ test, like the silly, the world's hardest IEQ test is how he remembered it. Filled it out, sent it in.

Six weeks later, I think it was 156. 186.
156, I believe. And for him, that was the catalyst to to think that he could

be smart. So from that point on, or before then, he just like, I'm the smartest.
Like how he saw colors. Oh, yes.
His synesthesia. Is that how you said it?

But you had to work really hard on pronouncing that word. I've been obsessed with synesthesia.
Yes. I kind of want it.

I think I want it too, just because I can't wrap my mind around how

one who has synesthesia actually like

does perceive everything around him. Well, for Martin, what threes were yellow? I'm saying, like, this is like, like, like a

wallet numbers. Do you have synesthesia now? Like the wallet numbers look like this? Like, I'm like, what a beautiful way to go through life.
You should taste the song I'm listening to. Right.

It does.

It's a condition, affliction, I guess, is a term that he has sort of like turned over. But to speak to how closed off he was from other people, because I think he was just wired that way,

he didn't really realize other people didn't have that for like decades, decades. You know, he had that classic, we've all had it.

I don't even have to ask you if you had it, that dream where like you're back in college and, oh, you forgot you had signed up for like this economics class the first day and then you

showed up and you have the exam. I mean, a terrible, terrible I have it once a month.

He had it.

Oh, easily, easily. Have you talked to your therapist about that? I feel like at this point, that it's a cliche and I want to bring it up.
I got to be interesting for my therapist.

But he had that dream once and like had it and Googled it and was like, oh, I guess everyone else had like he had no idea that Google had that. Not everybody sees the number three as yellow.
Yes.

What did he do for work then? This guy, what was his day job? He was like

a couple credits away from his business degree after he'd gone back to college. And then his friend, millionaire Joe, founded a satellite TV business.
And he went to work for Joe.

So this was early 80s. So satellite TV was like a booming business and it did boom for a while.

And by the way, one of the benefits of working for a satellite TV business was that Martin got his own dish.

And when he was up late at night, not spending time with his wife, he watched NBA games from across the country.

So this is where he kind of, he'd always been a college troops fan, like he was a KU guy, like most people in Kansas. But this, with this dish, up late, he's getting games from all over the country.

He was like the first league pass owner among the first. Yes.
And he's like, oh, wait, I kind of love this game. And he, but again, starts starts noticing these inefficiencies.

And he's also reading Bill James, seeing what's happening to Bill James. He's like, this is a market that needs to be fixed.

He sees Bill James finally break through in 85, get famous, start making some money.

Finally, he says the satellite business, I think HBO started scrambling in like January of 86 or something, tanked the business. He's got this new passion for basketball.

So he goes to his friend Joe and says, here we go. Bill James is doing this.

They're going to kill.

No one's doing this for basketball. I can do it.

Which is to say that when Martin Manley is writing this book in the 80s, this would-be seminal text to shape the future of sports analytics and sports itself as a result.

Yeah, he calls it basketball heaven. Martin Hand wrote the entire basketball heaven.
Of course he did. This book, the first book that says shoot more threes.

And he puts out an ad for a software developer who can help him crunch some of these numbers.

And this guy, Todd, who would go on to become one of his best friends and poker buddy for years and years walks in to meet martin for the first time to interview for this situation

we're sitting there discussing um probably

details of what he wanted and he's sitting there eating with a letter opener you know like a silver letter opener these brownies and cutting them off and eating it and then all of a sudden he does this where he which is what

he scratches the back of his butt, you know, butt crack or whatever, and then continues to eat with it. And I look at him kind of funny, and he just kind of looks at me like, what?

But that was Martin.

He's the friend that you have that you always kind of apologize for. Or like you bring your friend to a party and you're like, just

give him an hour. Like you're not going to like him at first.

Three or four times. He means well.
Yes, exactly.

The insights in the book, right, which he decides to write at age 34, 1987, inspired by Bill James, fellow Kansan, the statistic that he comes up with is called what? Efficiency rating.

So EFF is the shorthand, how Martin was hoping that it would catch up. And he took this into consideration.
It's like, what is going to actually catch on with other folks?

Like, how can I make this the easiest for the NBA fan? He wanted, it's like the iPhone. He wanted every NBA fan to have this in their pocket to understand who actually

was the most effective player in any given game beyond just who scored the most points. Right.

So the statistic, the formula, EFF equals bracket, open parentheses, points plus rebounds plus assists plus blocks plus steals, close parentheses minus open parentheses, missed field goals plus missed free throws plus turnovers, close parentheses, close bracket, all of that divided by games played.

Actually, kind of intuitive in that regard, but also in the name, not dissimilar from, you know, what PER, player efficiency rating, a statistic I have heard about, attempted to do as well, which was made by John Hollinger, who is also a zillion times more famous than Martin Manley.

Yes. And I think the thing is that if you then, if you now read the equation for PER, it would probably take about 20 times as long.
I can do Martin's math. And I was an English major.

And I'm very bad at math. Yes, it's good things minus bad things divided by number of.
If you ask me to do like Hollinger stuff, I would dissolve into a puddle.

Oh, there are, it's, you know, there's a lowercase U.

I don't know what that signifies. Probably an upside-down letter, too.
I imagine.

Is it an unadjusted version? And then there's, yeah, there's so many more parentheses and brackets and LGFT and LGPF. And yeah, nobody actually understands how to do it.
And there's like

decimals difference between like someone's EFF. So he would show his top 10 lists.
Like, oh, according to my ranking, Barkley is seventh most efficient.

According to this one, Barkley's eighth most efficient. Like, it's what's the big difference? But Martin over here, yeah, again, did not know that there was a competitor at the time.

No, he was a close the office door and just do what I think is right kind of guy. Like, he wasn't looking for outside input.
I want to bring the book in

so we can look at it. It's the first edition.
Oh,

yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.

It's a classic, man.

The artifact. This is a genuine artifact, a museum piece that I'm holding in my hand to describe it for those who cannot see it.
Don't smudge it. That's mine.

By the way, how much are you going to sell this for once this?

We can get this authenticated.

It is. Is that

not him? That is him, though. That is Martin.
See, he's a stud. Dude.
So this red cover, but in set, photo, portrait. He's in cotton candy heaven.
He's sitting in a cloud, a lazy boy in a cloud.

There is a pepsi bottle

dude's right on a small side table he's wearing a magic johnson a pretty snugly fitting magic johnson lakers jersey holding usa today's sports section on his lap can we talk about the t-shirt tan that he's got like underneath that incredible incredible the thing underneath his t-shirt has not seen the sun uh ever it's been cloudy uh as well in that regard and he has just a gooseneck snapping wrist with a tiny basketball that he is

shooting into a mini who

to put yourself on the cover of what dude, like what like, I don't know if you imagine maybe you couldn't get the rights to like a Jordan or any basketball player that's

the first thing on top. It says it's basketball heaven, but it's Martin Manley's basketball.

Right. Martin Manley's basketball heaven, 1987, 88.
And the stash, the bangs, dark hair,

utter self-confidence.

That's the word for Martin. Just like, oh, man.
Like, I am jealous of the self-confidence that this guy had. The back cover, the inside photo, is the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Yep, in all its brutalist black and white glory. Absolutely.
But why not put that in the cover?

The text above, it kind of explains the question that you have because it says, finally, exclamation point, the ultimate book for the ultimate fan. And the blurbs, these are literally.

They're big time blurbs.

Can you please pass this this around and read the blurbs? He knew how to hawk a book. Again, shameless.
Basketball Heaven is thorough, fresh, and occasionally brilliant.

Manley's systematic analysis of basketball from the time of George Mikin to the present is unlike anything I've ever seen about the sport.

His research is massive, his writing lucid, and his approach novel. And that is from Mr.
Bill James.

How does one get a blurb from the guy who blocked me on Twitter? Love them.

When he started doing basketball heaven,

he wrote to me and I said, sure, come on out and see me. And we went to a couple of baseball games together as well.
So do you remember those games?

What do you remember about Martin?

Very bright young man. I thought his book would succeed to an extent that it did not.

I thought his book would catch on.

That's getting nighted right there. I mean, you can say whatever you want about Martin.
We've kind of been making some jokes about him. Bill James never said either of us is a smart young man.

If Bill James says you're good at sports analytics, you're probably pretty good at it. One thing, though, I will say is that, so second edition, we got a blurb from David Stern.

The commissioner of the NBA himself. The third edition, it is no longer there.

But the NBA did adopt his stat as an official stat. Well, I was going to say, so these endorsements, these blurbs happen.
This book is a thing. As much as we didn't remember it, it was a thing.

What did they do for Martin Manley? The sales figures were not what he wanted, but they did give him opportunity that perhaps he didn't capitalize on fully.

Like he was invited to the NBA All-Star Game in 89 in Houston.

The Astrodome in Houston, Texas, the site of the 39th annual All-Star Game. And there you see the immense crowd here.
The record attendance was in Indianapolis four years ago, 43,146.

And we could approach that or surpass it this afternoon. The officials weren't.
I mean, this is the Bad Boy Pistons.

88, 89. It's Maggie Johnson of the Jersey and the Tan.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his farewell tour. Michael Jordan is the scoring leader.
And what does Martin Manley get to do?

He's on national TV at the NBA All-Star Game, being introduced by Fred Hickman to a national TV audience as the Bill James of basketball.

Joining me now is a legend in his own time, and he's got a book to prove it. This is the book, Basketball Heaven.
It is penned by Martin Manley. Martin Manley is a statistician extraordinaire.

He has done for basketball what Bill James has done for baseball. And Martin, let's talk about it right now.
So he sits down for a 10-minute segment, just like breaking down the league.

It's a big invite. Oh, I didn't know they invited a stats nerd on Inside the NBA at any point.
It was the crack. It was the moment that analytics, I think that was the first call.
Oh, 88, 89.

Look, this is before I thought any of this

happened.

And in terms of how that appearance goes as a television concern

what's what was a scouting report like on how martin did on tv martin manly was a singular human being who

unlike many other people he had a his own distinct personality and after he was set up by fred he kind of just became this like boring shell of a man instead of the man he he is in his books where

he is on this cover yeah he didn't say the word efficiency once in the entire appearance.

Surprises on the Eastern Conference. Cleveland because they're so good, Indiana because they're so bad.
Well, definitely those two are true.

Along with those, naturally, Milwaukee and Philadelphia both overachieved this year somewhat.

There aren't too many other teams other than Indiana that have done that much worse than anybody bought, but then there aren't that many more losses yet to be given out besides what Indiana has accomplished.

It's jarring to see this cover, the personality, the utter self-confidence, and then hear

something quite different.

What about the Chicago Bulls, Michael and the rest of the guys? What are they ever going to be able to do to give this a good cohesive team type of look? It's difficult to say.

Obviously, when you've got a player like Michael Jordan, it's extremely difficult to think what kind of pieces do you put with him to make it work out perfectly.

With Magic or with Bird, for some reason or another, they have that ability to make all those other players fit into a cohesive unit.

But Jordan, they're trying to fit the pieces in rather than fitting in naturally.

Okay, Martin, that takes care of the Eastern Conference, but we've got the Western Conference to talk about here as well.

And didn't mention the name of his book, which is like, by the way, that's where it's like, Martin, come on, man. Like, he had one job.
A point of pride for him is:

I not only want to be unlike everyone else, I don't want to be like anyone else. I am Martin Manley alone.
Watch me.

And then on TV, he fades away.

What is the

result?

Well, he never appeared on TV again.

That's for sure. And I think he finished up.
He was already writing his next book. And that was it.

Basketball World never heard from him again. The third edition didn't sell very well.
Double Day, I think, bought out the rest of the contract.

And as a businessman, as a person looking to make profit, he was like, well, this is just not worth my time. This is an inefficient use of my time.
So he stopped cold.

And the stopping cold, one must imagine that this is, is felt. That temperature change is felt in other parts of this guy's life.

So twice divorced, he wasn't happy with the second divorce. I think that he, that that was a woman that he really would have been happy to spend the rest of his life with.

I don't think he acted in a way that was deserving of that, but he's like, what am I going to do?

He got to the point as he's approaching his late 50s, you know, he learns that, you know, his ex-wife is now dating someone else. And so he kind of can cross that off a little bit.

And he's just like looking at himself and he's like, nope, I'm able right now to give a lot to society. I still, I still think I can be a positive asset in this world.

And then he's like, as he's looking ahead, he's like, it's, but it's not going to be long before I'm inefficient, before I become a negative drag on this world. And that's where the math.

just kind of again took over a little bit and really he took all that that efficiency that he was pushing outwards to all different things in his life and really turned it on himself and started figuring out how to have the most efficient goodbye.

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The first time you heard the name Martin Manly, Rich. Hmm.

Do you remember it? Oh, I do. Yeah, yeah.
It was August 2013.

So it's covering the Celtics at the time.

A few months before that, they blew up the entire team. This is when they traded Pearson Garnett on draft night.
Doc Rivers leaves. They hire Brad Stevens.
So I'm like,

I'm irrelevant in my field of work for the next couple of years, you know? I was not feeling great. Like the Boston Marathon bombing had been, was a couple of months before that.

And I see like a headline on Twitter. I think it was like a Deadspin article about Martin Manley.
What was the headline? The headline was Sportswriter Commit Suicide.

And here I am, a sports writer, feeling horrible about myself in general, and just, again, the world around me. And I see it comes across just doom scrolling.
And I see it.

Sports writer commits suicide, leaves website was the headline.

And I just got to say that Martin's website, which Rich and Nick immediately proceeded to visit, is what hooked me on this entire story, too.

You can still go and visit. that site right now.
It's still up and it's sparse, just basic HTML,

but also immensely ornate.

You can read Martin's ranking of his favorite movies of all time. Number one, Little Shop of Horrors.
Number 18, Moneyball.

And he also lays out his personal synesthesia chart, in which he lists which numbers relate to which colors. So beyond yellow being three,

you can learn that green is six.

But I should warn you that the reason he was doing all of this, which relates to the reason that nobody really remembers Martin,

is jarring.

It's essentially a suicide letter. And you read it

and half of it, you're like, why would you put that in a suicide letter? Why would you put

your invention for like a cat litter box in there? Right. The text of this, Martin Manley, across the top, colon, my life and death.

And it's a bunch of hyperlinks, like a table of contents, and it's text and occasional images and some tables and subsections.

Fun facts, dude. There are bolded fun facts: riddles, poems.
Yeah, there's something called, I mean, a section called mom and dad, a section called the heavens, uh, two marriages, first two loves.

There's a link for other suicides, just in case you were wondering if anyone else did. He has like a list of famous suicides.

There's a page devoted to

X-Files.

Yeah, that's about a UFO sighting he had on an airplane once. Yeah.

A lingerie softball league. Kevin Johnson.
Part of me thinks is that he knew that once this website was done, he was done.

So it's almost like you don't want to hang up the phone. He's just trying to figure out things to talk about to keep this thing going because when he's done, he's done.
A digital legacy. Yeah.

By the way, it's hard not to see this itself as a map, as a series of clues.

Maybe it's because I'm indulging Martin's brain, which is essentially this thing uploaded onto a website, but the anagrams section. I mean, did you, the mother-in-law? Did you get that?

Mother-in-law equals, and this is again anagram, so letters, you know, on both sides are exactly the letters on the other. Mother-in-law equals woman Hitler.

I don't stand by that, by the way. I don't stand by that.
On the record, I absolutely do not stand by that.

Debit card isn't that. Debit card equals bad credit.
That one's kind of by the way, Christians, Muslims, and the Jews equals Jerusalem stands within schism.

And that is followed by, by the way, maybe the key to all of this, a skeleton key to all of this, Martin Allen Manley, mentally linear man.

So the subsection titled My Religion, he writes, quote, Even though there are many reasons why I might not have committed suicide, the reasons to do it were superior.

Having said that, the single biggest reason by a mile in parentheses not to do it is because suicide is considered a mortal sin by many religions and I can't fault the logic.

Followed by, you know, a treatise on how he knows that God exists. And the answer is, I know because I know.

So he said, he has the section, why suicide?

And he gives reasons, but you still have questions. And one thing you learn about Martin is like,

he's always keeping a little something to himself. You're never getting the full answer, perhaps.
You're getting a answer, but he's not giving you all of them.

And so, like, his parents, when they passed away, they had dementia, and his sister and Martin had to clean it up. And they was, they didn't, it sort of uh gave him nightmares, really.

Just like, I don't want to be like that. This is what happens when you age.
Yes, he was afraid, he was afraid of aging ungraceful socially. Yeah,

he picked the date, yes, birthday, yeah, yeah, born 8, 15, 53,

died 8, 15, 13,

age 60.

What was that day like?

One thing we're quite sure of is that he did not go to sleep the night before.

He didn't sleep much anyways, but I can't imagine like setting an alarm for the next morning, knowing like what you're going to wake up and do.

He had a personal blog called Sports and Review that had a fair number of readers.

Yeah, he had people that read him and had a post there saying at seven o'clock tonight, I'll be posting my most important post of all time.

He went on, he had this investors' message board that he spent a lot, he was like a moderator on there.

He was that guy, right? Just like finding every little wrong post and deleting it and getting into fights with all the other people about deleting their posts, that sort of thing.

But posted on there and said, just so you know, on my blog, Sports and Review, I'll be posting something. It was a pleasure to know all y'all.

He changes his outgoing voicemail.

Hi, it's 4:30 a.m., August 15th. Thank you for being my friend.
This is the last time you'll hear from me. I wish you great happiness.
At the tone, please record your message.

Drives about 10 minutes from his duplex to the Overland Park police station, goes to the back, back parking lot, right in front of a basketball court, by the way, an outdoor basketball court, under a tree, calls 911, I would like to report a suicide, and

hung up. And that was about a little before 5 a.m.
Again, another thing he would break down. He broke down the best way to commit suicide.

And he finally arrived at the conclusion that like, I want professionals there immediately so I can donate organs and things.

And I don't want to hurt anyone else or affect anyone else that's not used to this kind of thing. So he did it at the police station.
Right.

Like there are drugs you can get, but I have to get them from Mexico. And you don't know

if they don't work until it's too late. I could run my car in the garage, but I live in a duplex.
What if it seeps into my neighbor's house and does something to them?

I could kill myself in my apartment, but then my landlord is going to have to clean it up. Someone's going to have to find me.

So he crossed off every box to figure out this is the neatest, most organized. And he'd liquidated his life to, I think he'd been sleeping on the floor the last couple of nights of his life.

Everything was gone. Even like one room.
Like

his lease on his apartment was about to expire. His registration on his car was about to expire.
Everything was like closing, right? His life insurance was about to expire.

It was just, he was gone and like any trace of him was gone. We talked to Barbie, his sister.
I don't think she has cried yet. I don't think she ever cried about it.

And his sister told us it was, it was damn easy. I opened up the email and I could read some of it to you.
If you want the intro, I could read it to you. Please.

Barbie and Phil, he addressed it to both of us. I hope this is the first you are hearing of it.
Today is my 60th birthday, the last day of my life.

Assuming everything went according to plan, and I'm 100% sure it did, I have been dead for a few hours. Please set aside your shock long enough to read this.

I'm sorry for any hurt this may cause, and I understand if you are angry. Perhaps by the time you are done reading, you will feel less so, but perhaps not.

Unfortunately, I couldn't make this decision based on anyone else's feelings. I'm the only one living in my shoes.

Nevertheless, I hope you can consider my actions with an open mind and forgive me either way.

And this is, gosh, I don't even know 10 pages. It's a lot, you know, but he goes into great detail about all the planning he did

and what it took and how organized he had to be. And I was so impressed.

I mean, he did make it easy. He did make it easy.
I don't think I ever stopped and cried because he was, you know, telling me how he felt and he was happy and don't feel bad.

I'm not like all the other people that commit suicide when they're depressed.

I'm thrilled. He said he's been thinking about it somewhere in there.
He's been thinking about it most of his life.

Yeah, I'm struggling to see the reasoning.

Although, on another level, he laid out the logic. Yes.
But the idea of like, do I want to blurb this website?

It is also occasionally brilliant. But the rest of it man i'm like

what the f

he made he made us say what the f

every other every day oh

At the end of the podcast, the way you guys conclude

your series,

you return to Bill James.

You do what I cannot.

You access. You want me to call him? I mean, I can ask him.
Just, Bill, if you're listening.

We're in the group chat. God.

Of course you are.

Bill James just left the group chat.

What did

the godfather of saber metrics and basketball analytics and everything else advanced in mathematical and sports tell you about the death of the man whose book he blurped?

A Bill James was like, surpassed any expectations we had. Daryl Maury, when he was, he visits, I guess, every year, he always refers to it as like climbing the mountain to meet the guru.

And it does feel that way in your

house, which is very nice. You should check it out.
Okay.

But he kind of

related a lot of good stories about Martin, but he also said,

you know, he had just gone whitewater rafting, or his wife did.

My wife and I were, we just took a

vacation in in New Mexico and

my wife went water rafting, which I did not. I ain't doing that.

And

her kayak or canoe turned over and she's in the water and hits a rock. And, you know, it's,

I think of what happened to Martin as being like

not that he went down the wrong river, but that his

kayak turned over and he had to sit on a rock and then there was the, it was an end but it wasn't an inevitable end it was just something that happened

he kind of equates martin's choice martin's life to like to that like we're all in the river together we're all in life together and it just so happens that martin's kayak capsized and he hit his head and

that's that's the way things go sometimes it is a thing that happened as opposed to again because the way martin would kind of say is that i was always kind of this was my choice this was i i put this into existence he was big on control, as you might guess.

Like, he'd like to feel like he was in control of

everything. And that's, I think that's part of efficiency, right? It's controlling the circumstances so that it's as easy as possible.

One of the favorite lines from the show, we were talking to Bill James, and he's telling us about the river, the river being life and all.

And like the life lesson I took, he sort of ends the anecdote just being like,

You're part of the river, and you know, occasionally the river kills you, but it moves on

whether you're

whether you're swimming in it or pissing in it you know

so what you might as well swim you know

mart might have a been more of a pisser at the end

well at the end here it's hard not to

to follow this uh

turbulent river towards yet another liquid Because the part of this website, of course, in the food and drink section

that we foreshadowed and now must, I believe, open.

Yes. Is sitting on our table because Martin Manley writes,

gosh,

it probably wasn't until I was in my mid-20s that I started drinking soda. Sometime shortly after that, it became the only thing I drank.

No milk, no juices, no tea, no coffee, no beer, no water, no nothing except pop.

For many years, I drank Pepsi exclusively. And so I can really think of no better way to end this episode than for you guys to crack open one of these things.

All right, I'm going to get run on the mic. Let's get that.

Oh, oh, that was

professional. That was call our sound editor.
That was good.

They're going to think they put that in posting

ASMR sound.

If you wouldn't mind topping me off as well. Oh, sure.

And so as we hold these glasses in our hands, I just want to ask you guys, how should we remember Martin Manley?

What do you want to say as we toast this man that I didn't know anything about, but certainly will not be able to forget?

A proud forefather of sports analytics, perhaps unfairly unrecognized, but I've hoped to

bring him back into the limelight. And a man who believed in himself, who took some chances.
For better or worse, wasn't comfortable with being average.

And so I just feel like it's appropriate appropriate to raise a glass to the life and occasional brilliance

of Martin Manley. Here, Martin.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.

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