This week, the Athletic ran the results of a poll of Major League Baseball players – over a hundred of them, split almost evenly between the two leagues, asking them a bunch of questions about the state of the sport. Those inquiries included:

• Who is the best player in baseball?
•  Who is the most overrated player in baseball?
• Putting aside their stats and going solely on vibes, who do you most want on your team?
• Evaluate this statement: Anthony Rendon was right — the season is too long.
• Which team would you sign with if contracts, state taxes, and rosters were not a factor?
• What organizations have bad reputations among players?
• What is the most irritating criticism of the current game coming from former players?
• Should MLB shut down midseason so players can participate in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles?
• Have analytics helped your career, hurt your career, or made no difference to your career?
• Have you ever seen or heard of a player being put on the injured list when they weren’t injured enough to merit it?
• Was the Dodgers’ offseason spending good for the game?
• Are you in favor of or opposed to MLB adopting the salary cap and floor system used in other major sports leagues?

Now I’m sure that BASS and MLF have done some sort of anonymized rules-and-competition-based version of this, and there are plenty of YouTubish venues for the anglers to do some of it with names attached, but I’d think some sort of middle ground would be valuable – at least for fans like me. I’d love to know which anglers are most respected, and least respected, and what the competitors think about the state of the sport without them having any fear of repercussions. I hear some of that info in off-the-record conversations, but I’m limited to a select group who trust me. I’d like to hear it from a broader list, across multiple age, experience, and income classes.

Of course, the hardest part would be getting them to respond. I have a tough enough time getting some of these guys on the phone with the explicit promise of pimping out their sponsors in print and pixels. There are some who wouldn’t respond for any reason, regardless of how much you pleaded. Nevertheless, there’s an opportunity here, and the savvy ones would know that. Properly prepared, by a comparatively impartial venue like BassFan, it would give them a megaphone for change, or publicity. Maybe it would result in nothing except a few grins and a-ha moments, but I’d like to know what people really think when they don’t have any shackles on, in response to the questions that can’t really be asked or answered in a meaningful way in public. It’s a matter of coming up with the right questions, the right interrogator, and the right way to broadcast them.