Jonah Keri joins the show to talk about life, baseball, and everything in between.

I was on Twitter last week and I saw a post by Keri that said he was in an accident and nearly died, but lived. I clicked the link he supplied and immediately sent him a cursory ‘hope you’re okay’ before I read the story, figuring it was hyperbole. He retells the story to us about falling asleep and hitting a guard rail at more than 70 mph, jumping a ramp and flipping over into trees.

And walking away.

It’s an amazing story, and even more amazing (to me) is the fact that Keri was able to so eloquently retell the story of the crash that nearly killed him. Yet he walked away virtually unscathed. If you haven’t yet read the story, do so, please.

In that story you’ll learn that Keri’s wife is pregnant with twins and was rushed to the hospital because the contractions were coming too early. Keri was driving back from the hospital when this accident happened, so we discuss the idea of life flashing before his eyes -- does the crash make him re-evaluate his importance in the world, not so much as a writer but as a soon-to-be-father of twins, and as a husband? Does something like that crash change you?

Keri explains that he’s not suffering from any overt PTSD but has caught himself wondering about times in his life he could have done things differently -- even so much, he explains, as emailing readers back more frequently. Talk about Jewish guilt. The guy gets in a hellacious car crash and Yom Kippur flashes before his eyes.

For those who don’t know, Keri is a writer who has worked for a litany of media outlets, not the least of which were his stints at Baseball Prospectus and ESPN.com. But now he’s a freelancer who still writes stock reports (we discuss if he’s a sportswriter who covers the market or actually a stock writer who dabbles in sports) and does a lot of his writing at jonahkeri.com. We talk about the penchant for writers who have taken similar career paths to Keri -- Dan Shanoff, Jeff Pearlman, Bomani Jones -- to promote themselves as a living, breathing, media entity. Does Keri see the readership changing from a site-based audience (people who go to ESPN.com or SI.com) to a personality-based audience? In other words, are people following him because he’s him, not because he writes for a certain site? And how does one capitalize on that following?

Which obviously leads to Twitter. We discuss Keri’s involvement and

how it’s helped him grow his brand. Shoot, it’s helped all of us in a way, none more than Peter Robert Casey, it seems. Casey has more than 50k followers and has leveraged that following into press credentials for St. John’s basketball this year. Keri and I discuss if this is really a big, significant step in social media or if it’s just a guy who had a plan to follow thousands of people expecting them to follow back out of nothing more than polite reciprocation. Once he got enough people following him back, he could dupe people into thinking he has an actual readership that’s close to that number.

And that’s the thing. I follow more than 1000 people. One of them is Casey. But I’m not reading his tweets. I can’t tell you the last time something he wrote even caught my attention in the stream. Yet he can use me, and presumably 50k others like me, to his advantage to gain access. Is this really a step ahead for social media, or just one guy who found a school -- and a few media outlets who featured him -- that doesn’t really understand the medium? People boast that Shaq has more followers than all but two newspapers in the country have distribution, but if I buy the paper, I read it. I follow Shaq, and because we’re not on Twitter at the same time of day, I never see what he writes. Never. So how do you determine what value a follower has? In the case of Peter Robert Casey, St. John’s probably didn’t think that far ahead.

Okay, on to baseball already.

Keri is writing a book on the Rays, and it’s not so much about last season’s run to the World Series as it is about the business side of building a team from nothing. Keri was hesitant to call it Moneyball East, especially because he makes no assertion to be changing the game. It’s just a chronicle of the way that team was built, juxtaposed with the other teams in its division and a past of doing things the wrong way.

And by the way, how did a Canadian who grew up an Expos fan, who is living in New Hampshire, end up writing a book about the Rays? It’s a pretty interesting story, actually.

The rest of the interview gets very inside baseball. We talk about Moneyball in context of his book and I wonder -- with the movie in the works right now -- if people look back on those As teams differently now than when the book came out. If you think about it, they were competitive, but they didn’t really win anything. Not even a pennant. And if you take out the fact that they hit the jackpot with three young pitchers, was the rest of the system really all that successful?

We talk about the AL and NL MVP races. Keri wrote a column that talks about Tim Lincecum being the MVP of the NL, over Albert Pujols. I bring up my assertion that Ryan Howard, while not worthy of the MVP at all, is having a better season than last year where he finished second in the race. How much of the MVP has to do with where your team finishes, and how much of it has to do with actual VALUE when compared to the rest of your team, and the rest of the league?

And that’s the semantic argument. If it’s true value on the field, why not just give the MVP to the guy with the highest VORP? There has to be more to it, including the effect a player has on the rest of his team. I bring up the Phils addition of Cliff Lee, which not only impacts every fifth game, but also impact the other starts from pitchers like Cole Hamels who clearly has less pressure on him now. Keri brings up the fact that a guy like Lincecum is even more valuable than his numbers show because he’s able to take pressure not just off of Matt Cain and other starters, but

the bullpen as well. And the manager for knowing that on a day he pitches, there are certain guys he’ll be able to rest in the pen.

Should the award be Most Outstanding Player, or is there a true way to determine value? Keri brings up Chase Utley which gets me in trouble as I try to explain why Jimmy Rollins is actually more valuable to the Phillies. I’m probably (definitely) wrong, but I try.

We discuss Bud Selig’s legacy. With a month left in the season and all but 1-2 division races locked up, isn’t it great we have the Wild Card to keep teams, and cities, involved in the race to the playoffs. But have steroids overshadowed the good things that Selig has done for the game?

Last, we briefly discuss the growing idea that many news outlets will start charging for online content. I ask Keri if he had to pick one site that was currently free (or mostly free) that he had to start paying for, what site would it be? I think mine, oddly enough, would be ESPN.com. Keri and I discuss why that’s not so odd, actually. Let us know what your pick would be (sports or not).

Keri brings up the fact that charging for online content isn’t the worst thing in the world because in most cases, they are bringing in top-level talent to give people content worth reading. The fear is if those big media outlets topple....then what?

Well, then Peter Robert Casey wins.

Thanks for listening.

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