Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1023: Mike Trout, But Backward

Episode Date: February 23, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a Steven Matz tweet, the Reds and Ryan Raburn, and the automatic intentional walk, then answer listener emails about misleading headshots, pitchers who rely on one pitch, the decline of player nicknames, the Yankees’ refusal to lose, Josh Reddick’s lack of clutchness, making Mike Trout run backward, and […]

How I'm supposed to know how home feels, I ain't even on my home field And again I feel lost What's not a cruise that brought us here? Again I feel lost And I refuse to be stuck right here I don't want to look like Rose and all Can somebody just give me, can somebody just give me, can somebody just give me direction? Doing an email show, but I anticipate a bit of banter before we get to the questions. So first one for you, we've been talking about some strange injuries lately and weird risk factors for MLB players.

We've talked about trampolines. We've talked about falling through the roofs of barns. And there's a new entrant in this injury genre. Did you happen to see Steven Matz's tweet yesterday? I did not. You don't follow Steven Matz. You're really missing out. I'm going to send you a link so that you can click on it now and just give me your initial

gut reaction to the activity Steven Matz is performing here. Oh my God. Oh my God, that's a shark. That's basically what I would say if I were Sandy Alderson, I suppose. So this is a picture of Stephen Metz accompanied by fellow Metz pitcher Sean Kilmartin, and he's tweeting about a fishing trip

that they just went on in Florida while they're down there for spring training, and he is holding the tail of what looks like a really large shark. And I have caught sharks before while fishing for other fish, but they were just little kind of cute fish, not the sorts of sharks that they make movies about. This is like, this thing is a serious shark. I don't know what type of shark it is, but it has all the markings of a terrifying shark and he is holding onto it with his bare hands, which isn't shark skin abrasive to begin with, isn't that bad? But there's also the risk of the ultimate dangerous thing happening with a shark encounter. So I'm sure that in the grand scheme of things, this is not as dangerous as it looks. He was on a fishing trip with trained professionals. I'm sure this is a photo op that they do with a lot of their guests before they release the shark back into the water. I'm guessing they would have suspended that practice at some point if guests were regularly losing arms during

the photo op. But the optics, as they they say are not the best for a major league pitcher who needs his arms yeah i guess this one probably flew under the radar though because of zach wheeler's tweet about how he was alligator wrestling so i guess steven matt's kind of got away yeah that's definitely that is definitely a shark acknowledged as a shark at the end of the tweet um yep and if you look at fishing with at black tip h was no joke black tip h their bio is we love to catch big fish so already implied their header looks like they're catching a well yeah their their header picture is someone holding a shark so clearly the idea is that you're going out to catch sharks it is spring training i think we can agree

that spring training is too long if players have the time to go deep sea fishing for sharks. Yeah, this is like a catch a tiger shark by its tail sort of outing, I guess. And maybe this is a good way to just forget about bone chips. Next time he feels some twinge in his

elbow, he'll say, at least I have an arm. It was not bitten off by that shark I was holding recently. That's right yeah I mean probably a lot safer than it looks there's like I don't know if there's any upside to tweeting this photo if you are Steven Metz most of the comments seem to be from terrified Mets fans who are asking him why he's handling a large shark so and that's the problem whenever you're an athlete like fans expect you to be completely serious, like either working on your craft at all times or just resting quietly somewhere. They don't want to see a picture of you partying before a game. They don't want to see a picture of you engaging in some risk-taking activity. They'd prefer to think that you are devoted to baseball 100% of the time. They don't want you making statements about immigration policy. They don't want you tweeting, especially if you are in any way a not Mike Trout player. If you tweet, if you tweet anything that somebody disagrees with, you will get the response. Shouldn't you be focused less on what you tweeted about and more on your,

I don't know, four and a half ERA or something like that. As if every, I can't, what is the expectation of a baseball player? Are you genuinely supposed to only occupy yourself with baseball? Should you dream of baseball? Should you sleep at all? Or should you be, what is the optimal amount of sleep? Yeah, right. You should only sleep as much as you need to to perfect your athletic ability. I mean, he says right in his Twitter profile, he loves family. Okay, that's his top priority. Fine. He loves baseball. That's his second priority. And third, he loves being outdoors. And sometimes when you're outdoors, you find yourself holding a large shark. So that just comes with the territory, basically. Sean Gilmartin, looking at his Twitter.

First of all, Gil right there implies something fishy in his avatar picture. He's holding up a fish that he or someone close to him has caught. His bio reads, my job is to give my team a chance to win. That's fine. Colon, Nolan Ryan. Is that a quote or is Sean Gilmartin saying that he's Nolan Ryan? I guess that's an old Ryan quote he doesn't know what the punctuation convention for quotes are let's say let's say

okay let's say it's a quote I'm not going to look it up quote my job is to give my team a chance to win Nolan Ryan is that not quote every pitcher who's ever been interviewed at a locker room. It's like, quote, Mitch Hedberg. Good morning, Ben. Yeah, good point. Not a quote that stands out. No, that's definitely, remove the dash. My job is to give my team a chance to win. Quote, pitcher. All right. The Reds, in a successful bid to get us to continue talking about them, signed Ryan Rayburn Subject of recent Effectively Wild banter To a minor league deal

Which means that his odds of having another 200 plate appearance season are looking up Couldn't have picked a better team Probably I haven't really studied The Reds depth chart to see How Ryan Rayburn slots in But just generally if a player goes to the Reds It's probably a good Ind good indicator for their playing time.

So we will hopefully get to see if he continues to be as volatile as he has been for the last several seasons. This will be fun. This will be fun. Uh, I have, we're going to, we're going to play a little game.

It's going to be called stop me when I named the player who's currently the red starting right fielder. Okay. Okay. Okay. These are all, these are all going to be red. So I'm not going starting right fielder. Okay? Okay. Okay. These are all going to be Reds, so I'm not going to cheat you. Okay.

Alejandro Chassin. Jackson Stevens. Kiri Mella. I'm going to go right by the name if you don't say anything, okay? Stuart Turner. Richie Schaefer. Scott Schaefer. Yeah, Richie Schaefer. Let's do Richie Schaefer.

Richie Schaefer. It is Scott Schaefer. Scott Schaefer is currently, the next name, currently lined up to be the Reds starting right fielder. However, looking at Ryan Rayburn's page, there's a quip here that says, Redawire News, Rayburn and fellow NRI teammate Desmond Jennings have reasonably good odds to make the Reds opening day roster out of spring training. So not only Rayburn isn't competing against Desmond Jennings necessarily, these two fallen on hard times outfielders signed a minor league contract they're both likely to make the Reds because the Reds have so little faith in Scott Schebler, Jesse Winker, Richie Schaefer, Adam Duvall who's fine I guess, Erezmendi Alcantara, Gabby Guerrero it goes on

it's not it's not great man but at least they have Rayburn, and hopefully he bats 200 times, so he hits that minimum that I have set up for him to be so volatile. As a reminder to everybody, the following are Ryan Rayburn's WRC Plus marks over the last five years, 28, 149, 50, 154, 73. The projections for rayburn put him at a 92 wrc plus but the projections in this case are nonsense because we all know he's going to take last year's wrc plus and to fix a one in front of it all right do you have any intentional walk thoughts so the point that is probably not unique to me but i don't follow football to any extent but i do know that football modified the extra point because the entire thought was that the extra point used to be

essentially automatic and it would go wrong or something interesting would happen basically i don't know one out of every 200 300 extra point attempts so what did they do they moved it back so that there's a little more challenge. And so this year there were more missed extra points. Maybe it's still mostly automatic. I don't know, but it's, it's been changed and it's because there was effectively no point. It's true that every so often you could have a block or like a missed upright. And when that happened, it would be bad of course, for one of the teams, but it basically never happened. And so in baseball, I think the reason that you talk about wanting to preserve the intentional walk is aside from any sort of

time spent that it gives a team to think about strategy. You think, okay, there's the Miguel Cabrera single, or there's Gary Sanchez hitting the ball 400 feet when he's trying to be intentionally walked, or I guess when a team's trying to intentionally walk him. And those things are interesting, but they're so extraordinarily rare that what is the game really going to miss? I guess the counter argument would be twofold. One, baseball, maybe more than football, is beloved because of those weird random events

that give us material, for example. And two, maybe, although I haven't seen this researched, maybe there's something to the argument that telling a pitcher to issue an intentional walk makes him worse for the next batter because he's doing something that is not his job. I don't know how to look that up. Yeah, Russell Carlton, of course, did an article on that.

Oh, perfect. I should have expected. Because he started an article on everything. Yeah, he did one a couple of years ago. Results? He looked to see whether there was any effect for increased wildness after you ask a pitcher to be intentionally wild.

And he found that there really wasn't, after you, correct for the fact that a pitcher who is in a spot where he is having to issue an intentional walk is probably more likely to be having a bad day or whatever, or facing a tough lineup, or probably most of the perception that an intentional walk can screw up a pitcher has to do with the fact that that pitcher is in some sort of predicament already and probably had things going against him to begin with. So from what he could tell, there wasn't any sort of significant finding for a lingering like hangover effect of an intentional walk. Okay. So that kind of deals with that reason. So we're left with just the one, I guess. Yeah. I know that this is, I think,

nominally tied to the pace of play argument and the argument against doing this, of course, that it'll make a negligible difference. But if we're going to be missing so little, there's no reason not to save a minute per walk, I guess. Of course, it doesn't make baseball a fast game, but it's something, I guess. Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to the pace of play arguments.

Like when people say, oh, whatever, it's five minutes. That's not going to bring anyone back to the game or make anyone a fan of the game. Sure, but if we can get rid of five boring minutes that no one cares about, then we should do that. We're costing everyone time when we could be doing something else. So it depends on the cost, of course, if we're giving up something significant, maybe it's not worth it. But just in theory, the idea of making games shorter by eliminating the dead times is perfectly fine

with me and I support it in its many forms, depending on the cost. And in this case, I think it's a little silly to get too worked up about the intentional walk going away either way, just because as you already outlined, it's not a lot of time saving. Teams are throwing intentional walks less often than they ever had before. So you don't save that much per intentional walk. There aren't that many intentional walks anymore. It just, it doesn't add up to a whole lot. And so you're not gaining a huge victory. I don't think you're losing a whole lot either, except sort of in principle, like in real terms. Yes, we all love watching the Miguel Cabrera hit on the intentional

walk. We liked when Gary Sanchez almost hit that home run on the intentional pitch on the intentional ball, but that happens so rarely that we all have like two examples of it right exactly like there's i think it's meaningful that we're still talking about something that happened in 2006 yes like exactly it's literally been once a decade bill dean at saber has tracked instances of batters taking swings at intentional balls and he only has 16 on record going back to 1892 and like you know watching a guy throw away intentional ball, that's fun too. Like the risk that he might do that is fun. But again, that almost never happens.

Like you've done posts on the speed at which pitchers throw intentional balls. Yes, I was just going to bring up Octavio Dottel, who I don't know if people remember this. But the thing that I most remember about Octavio Dottel for some reason, because I'm sure he doesn't even remember this about himself, is that when he was told to issue an intentional walk, which couldn't have been that often, but he faced lefties sometimes, when he was told to face an intentional walk, he acted with such, like, it's not disregard, the word isn't coming to mind, but I think he was essentially was flipping off his own manager every single time that he had to do it, because he would just stand up on the man and throw the ball like 30 miles per hour just with this look of scorn on

his face that he was beneath him but he would still have to do it of course he wouldn't be disobedient but he would just go up there and lob the ball at essentially the minimum speed necessary for the ball to get the home plate without a bounce yeah and he would do this i don't know however many times i had video i'm sure the video is no longer accessible but i was uh i was thinking maybe i would look up to see if anyone's lobbing the ball the problem with trying to get the stuff is that pitch effects would usually just skip the really slow intentional balls it wouldn't record them but i haven't checked for 2016 and this will be our last opportunity because i guess this is going to be effective immediately, right? Yeah, sounds like it. And that's another argument in favor of keeping the

actual intentional balls, that the shame and the booing is an incentive for the pitcher to face the batter instead of intentionally walking him, knowing that he's going to be ridiculed for cowardice. Actually, I was just looking to see whether the home and away rates of intentionally walking batters are dramatically different because I was thinking maybe by getting rid of the actual intentional balls, you will inadvertently increase the number of intentional walks because pitchers won't have to deal with having to be booed when they issue them. So I was looking to see if maybe when they're at home, pitchers actually issue more intentional walks because they know they don't have to worry about being booed. And last year, pitchers issued intentional walks 10% more often when they were on the road and when

they knew that they were going to get booed. Although that doesn't really help us all that much because, of course, there's home field advantage to consider and pitchers do worse on the road. And so they'd need to issue more intentional walks. So it would take some work to disentangle those things. And I'd be sort of sympathetic to an argument that we should get rid of the intentional walk altogether. I know that people have come out against it. Joe Pistanski has often written about how he hates the intentional walk. And it's this weird cop-out that a lot of other sports don't have. And it's just no one likes to see a team be able to bypass a good batter in an exciting situation. So this change, just making it automatic instead of actually having to throw the four things, I game that make it appealing to us. Maybe it makes the game less

appealing to casual fans or non-fans. I don't know. But like there was a really good article on the Hardball Times, I think it was last week, about the homogenization of ballparks over the years and how one of the things that makes baseball stand out and that is special about baseball and gives us thing to write about is that all the ballparks are different. The playing surfaces are different, sort of unique among the American major sports. And I like that, but there's less variation now than there was. The ballparks look a lot more similar to each other, at least in terms of fence depth now than they once did. And, you know, like things like the fake to third, throw to first pickoff attempt move, which was eliminated a few years ago. And I wrote like a fond farewell to that move when it was banned.

But honestly, who misses that move? It never worked. It never worked. It didn't work once. Yeah, it almost never worked. And we all said that and we all love the fact that it never worked, but people still tried it. And like occasionally someone would throw a ball away there was the rare instance when it worked but for the most part who cares it's gone we don't actively miss it and that was another thing where

people said oh this is one of those weird little quirks of baseball and now it's going away and i don't know i think the whole history of baseball and probably most industries is like pruning away these little weird artifacts of the forming of the foundation of the sport or the industry or whatever it is and becoming more streamlined and efficient and hopefully fun in the case of a sport. So I think there's a risk of going too far with that and getting rid of some of the character and the flavor. But I don't know if this is where that happens. Going too far with that. And getting rid of some of the character. And the flavor. But I don't know if this is where that happens. I'm probably not going to miss it all that much. There's a whole podcast for us to have here. We haven't even gotten emails yet.

Because we're doing team previews. We don't get to have our own topic for quite a while. But there's a whole. I know you've already had the pace of game. And pace of play podcast before. But Rob Manfred is basically threatening to do things unilaterally now so there is a conversation to be had there but in terms of like changing the game there's the resistance to for example lifting the strike zone which i guess i don't understand the pushback to that because the strike zone was higher than it is now just a few years ago and

it's gone down sort of by accident and like if you reflect i i like to use 1969 as a statistical cutoff point because before that the mound was higher and then baseball was like pitching is too good we're going to lower the mound that's a huge change that baseball made it didn't ruin anything it just sort of tried to even the balance which is totally reasonable which would be no different from change i I mean, I guess they could keep the strike zone the same and lower the mound some more if they wanted to right now. I don't know what sort of effects that would have, although I think it was you or Sam who's written about that. This could go on for another two hours. We should just do emails.

Okay. All right. Question from Colin. Listening to the White Sox preview podcast led me down a Wikipedia spiral in which I came across Lucas Giolito's page, which currently has this photo of him wearing a virtual reality headset as the lead image. You can't see it because you're listening to a podcast, but you can Google it. It's an unidentified man, basically, with a virtual reality headset on and some iPod earbuds and some kind of Under Armour type shirt. And evidently it's Lucas Giglio. You can't really tell from the photo. And Colin says, my question, is there a worst possible photo to use for a baseball player? You can't see his face. He's not doing anything related to baseball,

nor is he wearing any team gear that indicates he is on a baseball team. What other image of a non-baseball activity could so poorly identify what this person does for a living? And we each had a response to this. So I think the worst baseball player headshot is Delano DeShields Jr., who, like, if you just Google Texas Rangers roster, Google will show you the headshots of all the all the Texas Rangers at the top of the page and you can scroll and they're all like baseball players wearing baseball uniforms and baseball caps mostly just faces and then you scroll over once and you get to Delano Shields Jr. who is completely misshapen and lopsided as you may recall Delano DeShields Jr. was beamed in the face a couple years ago

2014 I think it was and his face was broken in some very unpleasant ways and he I think tweeted out this photo of himself with one side of his face just grotesquely swollen basically and that is the image that Google has decided

to use as his stock headshot, at least until he does something more memorable than get beamed in the face and tweet the photo, I guess. So yeah, you can't tell that he's a baseball player. Clearly, he's just a head lying on a pillow. And it's a misshapen head at that moment. So very unfortunate for him. I hadn't Googled it when you emailed that. But now that I have, I was looking just real quick here for some other examples. I was trying some other rosters to see if other players had weird headshots. And a sad one, I looked up the Royals roster just off the top of my head.

And the picture of Kyle Zimmer appears to be him putting on the Royals jersey when he was signed. Because maybe there isn't a pitching picture of him ever since which is disappointing the one that i responded with i can't find that anymore because i think it's about 12 or 15 years old but i used to go through the espn player pages a lot and at one point you remember bo hart i believe it was bo hart who had like a late season adventure with the cardinals one year and espn for some reason didn't have like a player photo of Bo Hart. But what Bo Hart did do, I'm just going to have to look up the year that this was. So Bo Hart was with the Cardinals in 2003 and 2004. His first name apparently is Bodie.

But I can't confirm that because baseball references changed everything in the last day. So I no longer see where his full name would be. This is, oh no is oh no oh no i'm having a crisis here okay i'll deal with this later so bohart in 2003 came up with the cardinals and he hit 277 whatever he scored some runs and he scored what i believe would have been a walk-off run at some point and so espn didn't have a picture of bohart before but they did have a picture of bohart after and it was a picture of Bohart having crossed the plate. However, it was just a headshot.

So they cropped the entire body. They cropped all of the context. It was just a picture of Bohart's face. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was almost in profile, but more looking, I don't know, like a 45 degree angle. And his hat or helmet had come off. So there was no identifying feature of a baseball off so there was no identifying feature of a baseball team there was no identifying feature of a baseball game it was just an action shot of a man

with dirty blonde hair sort of looking both exhausted and enthusiastic about something his hair was a little bit windblown so it have been anyone, but it's still a lot more flattering than Delano DeShields Jr. having his face swollen and coming off, I guess. And also non-identifying picture would be if the Steve and Matt's picture were him catching a shark. Because if you notice in the picture, he's actually wearing a hat of the company

he went fishing with, which is probably the reason that the picture was taken. In the first place, this is probably the reason that the picture was taken in the first place. This is some sort of sponsor opportunity, or I don't know, a little bit of money or happy PR. But then you think Stephen Matz, world-renowned shark fisherman, but still at least you could identify Stephen Matz as Stephen Matz as opposed to Lucas Giolito covering up his face. Here's a weird one. Google Jose Reyes.

I will do that. What? So Jose Reyes looks like the non-baseball playing brother of someone who, I guess the non-baseball playing brother of two brothers, one of whom plays for the Yankees and one of whom plays for the Mets. And then you see a picture of those brothers' families in the stands. And the non-baseball playing brother, Jose Reyes, has split allegiances, I guess. He has a two-face thing going on here where half of him is a Yankee and half of him is a Met for some reason.

This must have just been a doctored image someone made that google picked up on somehow but he's split right down the middle as a yankee met met yankee hold on before you advance we have to do something on the air we have to deal with something i want you to also go to let's say jose reyes's baseball reference page where is his full name where can i find this i don't think it's there anymore and i don't think i don't think nicknames are there anymore either oh my god i think nicknames are gone from baseball reference i don't know it's there anymore. And I don't think nicknames are there anymore either. Oh my God. I think nicknames are gone from baseball reference.

I don't know what to do about this. Maybe this is just a temporary hiccup in the wake of the redesign. But that actually is a good segue into this next question, which is about nicknames and their disappearance, which may be their actual disappearance from baseball references symbolic of. But this question comes from Joe, who says, I was recently discussing Cardinals reliever Seunghwan Oh with a friend of mine who told me that his nickname when pitching in Korea was the final boss. I'm sure I've been living under a rock to not know this, but I was amazed by how inventive and original the nickname was in an era of A-Rods, E-Jaxes, and the like. It is a really excellent nickname. The golden age of nicknames like Dizzy Dean or Big Train Johnson is clearly over, but do you think there could be a resurgence of clever, interesting nicknames for major leaguers?

And what are a few other great nicknames for active players that people might be missing out on? that people might be missing out on. First, is it possible that we are being eraist about nicknames, that old school nicknames sound fun and quaint to us because they are old and archaic, and today's nicknames don't sound special because they're just today's nicknames? Is there any possibility that we are not adjusting for historical context here

that maybe in a hundred years, A-Rod will sound as quaint as one of the weird 19th century nicknames you used to read about on Baseball Reference? Okay. So first of all, you're wrong because first, one of his two examples was Edwin Jackson, which I think is funny it's like alex rodriguez and edwin anyway uh but i do think that there is an element of era ism here where i think that if you tried to give somebody the nickname the splendid splinter today people would be like no that's stupid that's a stupid nickname it's not a splinter it's a bat come up with a better nickname so there is a part of this where it's just that stuff that's old and established sounds better i think a rod is iconic everyone will know a rod it's a perfectly fine nickname the problem of course is then when people tried to affix that

to everybody else i'm not convinced that those actually were nicknames as much as they were just shorthand things typed by commenters on the internet yeah where like a rod is his official nickname but i don't think there's many players who are similar to that uh so i did i responded to this email but i guess that was only to two people you and and joe was his name so two things one i think there are only a few reasonable nicknames i don't have like a are only a few reasonable nicknames. I don't have a good mental list of player nicknames today. I Googled and I came up with a Chris Wick Big League Stew blog post from last year that was based around O's nickname of the final boss.

And he was just signaling out some other current ones. He mentioned Big Poppy. He mentioned Joey Batts. He mentioned Country Breakfast for Billy Butler. Not a good player, but excellent nickname. Kung Fu Panda, El Oso Blanco for Evan Gattis. He mentioned King Felix. He mentioned the Millville Meteor for Mike Trout, which is not something anyone really calls him, but technically a nickname. And then he mentioned Franklin Gutierrez's Death to Flying Things, which is really just a

reused nickname from 19th century players. So if that's the best that he could come up with, that's not a great array. Yeah, none of them are great. I am partial to Kung Fu Panda. I like that as a nickname, again, for a not very good player. Country Breakfast is probably the best nickname in existence, although maybe that's no longer in existence if he doesn't get a job. It does make me laugh that Seung Won Oh's nickname is and was the final boss. But of course, for half the season last year, there was a boss after him, although he was not very boss-like. He was more easily defeated. The other point that I think is worth consideration is that I don't know how nicknames get established, but my guess is that a lot of it used to be by

the news media or, I don't know, maybe teammates who would then offer those nicknames to the news media. But the coverage of teams is far less centralized than ever. Everybody is written about in a million different places by a million different people and so it would be more difficult i suspect now to reach agreement over a player's nickname where maybe this blog over here has x nickname for i don't know michael walka and then this other site has a different nickname for michael walka maybe one of them is flattering one of them is not yeah maybe neither one of them is flattering. One of them is not. Maybe neither one of them has player approval.

So yeah, although you'd think it might be easier for nicknames to become pervasive if one does catch on, like someone with a blog could have a nickname for someone and people might actually see it and read it. Whereas in the past, if someone just in the stands had a nickname for a guy there would be no way for that nickname to penetrate the larger consciousness so maybe that's true maybe there'd be an easier way to spread them although more competing nicknames and less consensus just because there isn't like a a beat writer who is in that market and he's like the sole person writing about that team for decades which is the sort of thing you you used to have i was thinking maybe that there's more

player movement now i suppose than there was in the pre-free agency era i'm not sure how much more because there was still quite a bit of movement in the reserve clause era but i think there are more teams now. There are more players for one thing. So we're probably less familiar with each player on average. And baseball has become this regional game, which is maybe part of it. But even if it hadn't, there are just 750 players at any one time. And you count all the relievers and bench guys rotating in and out.

There are like a thousand guys you need to know and no one knows all of them. I'm constantly coming across relievers I've never heard of myself. So you're probably not going to have a nickname for a guy when you have 30 teams and 40 players on the 40-man roster, whereas in the past, if you had like eight teams and a lot of those guys were staying with the team for a long time and fans were developing a real rapport with that player maybe there was more personal interaction at the ballpark than there is now although i guess there's twitter now that kind of conveys that too but that's what i'm thinking like maybe fans in the past were just more aware

of each player than they tend to be now. I could also be completely wrong because we have MLB TV now and we have interleague play now. And so we get to see these guys whenever we want. Whereas in the past you had to wait for a road trip or depending on where you lived, you were totally out of luck. I guess there's a question of what is the origin story of a lot of nicknames? Is it coming from the players or the teammates themselves? Or is it coming from writers? I haven't ever really thought about this. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be a bit of both. And that's probably worth pointing out, too, that writers probably used to be chummier with players,

they used to travel with the team, they used to maybe socialize with the players away from the park, that doesn't happen anymore. So if you only really get to talk to guys when you're interviewing them in the clubhouse and they're half naked, maybe that isn't conducive to nicknaming. But maybe it's, I mean, there was like a more lyrical style of baseball writing. If you go back to like the early 20th century, it sounds very hokey now, but there was this style of writing about baseball and all sports really as if it were just this high drama and very romantic and writers would consciously come up with these kind of high-minded nicknames that today we would probably just be cynical about and sneer at. So I think maybe that style of writing, which

I do not want to bring back because it's hard to read with today's sensibilities, but maybe that lent itself more to these memorable nicknames than today's style of writing does. I noticed, I was looking up, so of course, Harmon Killebrew's nickname was Killer, which is, first of all, a terrifying nickname. But I decided to do a search. You can still search for nicknames on Baseball Reference. So I searched for Killer. Here are some results.

Harmon Killebrew, nickname Killer. Jack Feaster, maybe Feister. Jack the Giant Killer. Okay, I don't know what that's about. That's fine. But then at the same time that jack feaster was playing there was a harry kowaleski whose nickname was the giant killer so i guess the giants were being killed by two players uh simultaneously there's olmedo science i never knew this but olmedo science

played in the 90s and the 2000s his nickname was killer tomato which is i don't i would love to know the story behind that one There's nothing remotely tomato-y About him Perhaps he's vaguely acidic Okay Maybe And also then there is Frank Larry All-star given Frank Strong Larry

Nickname Mule Taters I like that as a nickname Although I don't know why Taters But also the Yankee Killer So let's investigate this on air Yeah I like that as a nickname, although I don't know why taters, but also the Yankee killer. So let's investigate this on air. Yeah. Because I don't know anything about it.

So Frank Larry had a career ERA of 3.49, mostly pitched for the Tigers. 3.49 career ERA against the Yankees. 3.32. Okay. Okay. Doesn't seem something there.32 okay okay and seeing something there oh okay but he went 28 and 13 against the Yankees uh-huh which is I guess something he had a 3-3-2 era against the Yankees he had a 3-2-6 era against the White Sox however against them he went 14 and 14 of course he had a better era a dynasty the whole time he was pitching basically with

great offenses so yeah to be a little bit better than he was against the rest of the league against the best team in the league that qualifies as yankee killing so okay so let's say he was he was 28 and 13 against the yankees with a 3-3-2 era there were one two three four five six seven teams against whom he had a better era and against those teams he had 64 wins and 65 losses so he was a 500 pitcher against teams against whom he pitched better than the yankees so this feels like it's probably a run support thing more than anything else however yeah it stands up to reason. He won two thirds of his games against the Yankees. So good for Frank Larry, who deserved that nickname. I don't know how many other players, could you give a player such a nickname now?

Well, that's the thing. I don't think you could because there are too many teams, right? I mean, at the time he was killing the Yankees, you know, like in the 50s, there were only eight teams in the American League. So I think it was probably easier to get a reputation for beating up on any one team than it is now when you're facing 14 other teams in your league and 15 teams in the other league. And other than your interleague rivals, you're probably not playing any of them all that many times so seems like that genre of nickname of killing a particular team would be harder to attain today point killer searcher killer returns five players however search for murderer it returns zero players clearly there's some sort of line that nicknamers don't want to cross. I think murderer might be a little too vivid.

All right. Question from David. I'm wondering what, if any, is the non-anecdotal evidence that a pitcher needs to throw more than one really good pitch? For example, if Rich Hill threw only curveballs, do we know that he'd be worse? If Grant Dayton threw only fastballs, would he be worse or better? Really what I want to know is whether pitch mix might be nothing more than a widely accepted but false piece of common sense. Well, it's a legitimate question, but I think that maybe there's a difference between a guy who has a really good fastball and a really good something else because hitters go up there and they're trying to hit off of the fastball under almost all circumstances so everyone's kind of already

prepared for the fastball so if you have a fastball similar to a aroldis chapman or grant dayton i guess to put the two next to one another if you already have evidence that your fastball is dominating then you probably don't need to change very much or throw very much else because hitters are already kind of looking for the fastball and they're not able to hit it. So I think that we see a number of cases. There's Sean Doolittle at his best, Jake McGee at his best, even Bartolo Colon, who has a few different fastballs, but basically one mediocre fastball. If you have an effective fast fastball i think we have enough evidence to show that you can throw that pitch 80 90 percent of the time and you can be a good if not a good pitcher if

not a fantastic reliever yeah i think you run into problems when you have other stuff uh especially if you have say a really good slider who has a really good slider luke gregerson basically throws sliders right he throws like two-thirds of his pitches for sliders but gregerson even though i know he has a few different sliders his slider mostly goes out of the zone and if you were to throw that slider in the zone well it's slower than a fastball and if you exclusively threw that pitch hitters wouldn't think about the fastball at all they'd be looking for a slower pitch that has fairly predictable break, and they would better be able to identify when it's going to be in the zone or when it's going to be out of it. So I think you really do need the hitter thinking about the fastball to get those other pitches to work. Obviously, there's a difference with

knuckleballers, but fastballs mostly stay in the zone. Other pitches mostly go out of the zone, And I think that if you get hit in this case is evidence in itself. And that can be a dangerous argument at times. If your only justification is that no one's ever tried it, then that's not the greatest argument because maybe someone should have tried it. But I think in this case, it's not that no one's ever tried it. It's that no one has ever succeeded in doing it, right? Like lots of people have probably tried it. We all maybe have one

pitch we could throw, but that stops working at a certain point. So I think it's not so much that no one has ever tried it as they tried it until it stopped working. And then they either had to develop more pitches or not. I think if this were something that worked, we would have seen it by now because we've seen many, many years of baseball and lots of guys have had unhittable single pitches. And even those guys have never tried this to our knowledge. So I think just we can argue from the way baseball looks to say that, yeah, this wouldn't work. It'd be nice if we had an experiment, if we could convince some major league pitcher and, you know, like Bartolo Colon's pretty close, I guess, although his different types of fastballs really are different types of fastballs that move in

different ways. But if we could convince some great pitcher with some great pitch to just throw that pitch as an experiment, that would be fascinating i'd love to to see what would happen but we will never succeed in doing that because i i think we we probably know what would happen either if it were a pitch outside the zone hitters would just take it constantly and if it were in the zone hitters could time it and anticipate it and it wouldn't work so well i mean it's it's just intuitive that it wouldn't work that well, but I think we can conclude based on the fact that no one has ever made it to the majors throwing one pitch exclusively that it wouldn't work. I think there's clearly a worthwhile conversation to be had that maybe fastballs have been thrown too often. And there are clearly pitches who are moving away from

their fastballs, not not entirely i just as a quick little reference i don't know how much this is worth but let's go back 10 years so 2006 there were 329 pitchers who threw at least 50 innings this past season there were 326 basically the same so i don't know where to draw a cutoff but in 2006 there were six such pitchers who threw less than 40% fastballs. This past year, there were 23 such pitchers. There were, back then, 33 pitchers who threw less than 50% fastballs. 33. This past year, there were 79.

So that seems interesting. This could be a problem with pitch classification. I don't know. The data was different back then, but there is at least some evidence that pitchers are getting a little more adventurous, I guess, would be one way to say it. And at the same time, back in 2006, there were zero pitchers who threw 90% fastballs. And this past year, well, there were two. That doesn't really count. Kenley Jansen doesn't even really throw a fastball. It's more of a cutter. So I guess if you wanted to be a real stickler about this, you could say, well, Kenley Jansen and Mariano Rivera threw non-fastballs almost 100% of the time, but really they were throwing fastballs.

But yeah. Yeah. I tried to look into this last year with the Brooks baseball pitch classification data, and I couldn't find great evidence for it, but I've been meaning to look into it again during spring training sometime just to see whether I could find league-wide any evidence that pitchers were relying on their primary pitch more or less than they used to. Anyway, I've been planning to revisit that, but it's tough because of the pitch classification complications. All right right do you want to do a stat segment yeah let's do this i was going to do something using baseball reference but we love you baseball reference but something isn't working today so yesterday i wrote a thing about eric cosmer and how he's bad but he could

be good and one of the interesting things about eric cosmer is even though he's only 27 he's played six full seasons he's been a clutch hitter statistically i'm not just to be clear as always i'm not saying eric cosmer is a clutch hitter i'm saying he has been a clutch hitter he has been better in important situations than in less important situations and whenever i look at stuff like that it gets me thinking about a broader context. So on Fangraphs, we have win probability information going back to 1974. So that gives us what 43 years of information, which 1974 being a weird date to cut things off, but whatever, it's going to work just fine. So I looked up a bunch of hitters, and a bunch of pitchers. And I calculated we have a clutch score, which is, I don't want to

go into detail, but it is a win probability metric that shows the difference between how valuable a player was and how valuable you would have expected him to be given the same performance across all leverage states. I really need a better way to explain that, but I don't have one. So here we are. Cl are clutch just trust that it's clutch okay so i calculated clutch for hitters and pitchers per 600 plate appearances seems like a a fine cut off i don't know how interesting this is but the uh the most clutch pitcher over that span is aurelio lopez who i've never heard of before but there he is and he's nearly tied with don stanhouse who i thought looking at his name was doug stanhope who is not a pitcher but so a bunch of the most clutch pitchers not interesting

aragonier does show up at number eight antonio alfonseca mark waller's right there rounding it out the least clutch pitcher of all time by a considerable margin uh burke badenhop with a uh negative 1.81 clutch per 600 plate appearances i know that means nothing uh but it essentially means that uh every 600 plate appearances his timing was basically worth almost negative two wins which is terrible so burke badenhop fellow grantland alum burke badenhop. Fellow Grantland alum, Berk Badenhop. Sorry about that. And also now team pitching advisor. Diamondbacks analyst, yeah.

Yeah, so maybe keep him out of the dugout from the later innings. Just to, I mean, because I'm curious now, so let's look up some Berk Badenhop splits because he pitched, oh good, he pitched all recently, 2008 through 2015. So, Berk Badenhop, in his career, in low leverage situations, he allowed a 292 Woba. In high leverage situations, 342.

He was considerably worse with men on base and with men in scoring position. I don't know why this is, but hey, he was bad. Anyway, pitchers, we're done with. We're moving on to hitters. This is where I was looking for Eric Hosmer to show up. Indeed, out of all the players who have batted at least, I don't know where I set my minimum, 2,500 times, Eric Hosmer shows up as the eighth most clutch hitter

in this whole span of time. Number three, Jose Lind. I don't remember much about Jose Lind. Number two, delightfully, Willie Bloomquist shows up as a particularly clutch hitter. Could you name which Yankees player, former Yankee, shows up at number one as the most clutch hitter of, I guess, the last 43 years by this measure? Wow. It's not Luis Soho, is it? It's not Luis Soho.

I'll give you a hint. He was presumably a bad defensive catcher. Posada? Jim Leyritz. Yeah, he did have a reputation for being clutch. The most clutch hitter of this whole span of time, and of course, maybe even more fun than looking up clutch hitters, is looking up the unclutch.

I actually wrote a post about this player before. I think I wrote it last season josh reddick is the least clutch player uh by a decent margin rounding out the the bottom 10 we've got michael barrett john carlos stanton unclutch mike napoli unclutch lance parish gene tennis michael saunders is coming off one of the least clutch seasons in recent history. David Ross, Ron Kittle, Richard Hidalgo. And finally, by a relative statistical mile, I guess, then we have Josh Reddick. And so I don't want to pick on Josh Reddick, but I'm going to. I don't know when I wrote that post, but let's just look at some career splits for Josh Reddick. When the pressure is not on, this is a low leverage situation josh reddick has batted a bunch

he's got a 118 wrc plus pretty good well above average hitter low leverage situations medium leverage so this is i don't know your average game situation wrc plus to 97 so okay league average hitter so there's still something there high leverage situations is what's of greatest interest here he is batted in nearly 300 of these opportunities according to fan graphs it has a stricter definition of high leverage situations and his wrc plus is a woeful 63 which is terrible his power goes away his singles go away i don't know why this would be but this is a i guess it's somewhat established as like a career trait looking over his record he has been clutch in not a single season in his entire career negative

clutch last year horrible horrible clutch maybe the least clutch season of all time in 2012 i don't know what to make of that but this is like a thing with josh reddick uh baseball reference has a looser definition of uh of leverage states so just to put this in different terms ops plus basically for josh reddick low leverage 114 medium leverage 101 and high leverage 64 and a baseball reference has a a high leverage sample twice as big as fans so i wonder because josh reddick is also considered by a lot of people to be sort of a platoon guy so i wonder if he just ends up facing a bunch of good like lefty relievers who are sort of spotted against him because he's been bad and what's designated late and close situations and he has been bad against well he's been bad against

a bunch of guys power pitchers he's been bad against and let's see do i have relievers in here anywhere i must well okay confusingly he's been better against relievers than starters so i don't know how to explain this except that josh reddick has been the least clutch hitter in recent baseball history he has signed a four-year contract with the Houston Astros to be a regular, maybe a platoon semi-regular. But I never know how much to... That tells you, I guess, how much teams care about clutchness, right? At least retrospective clutchness.

Because, I mean, he was signed for basically exactly what you would say he should be signed for based on his war or whatever, right? Like, I mean, his contract was pretty much right in line with the projections, which do not take clutchness and timing into account, and neither did at least the Houston Astros. So I guess that just goes to show that teams don't put a ton of stock into that sort of thing. He has.

So his timing is another way to put this his timing has basically to this point in his career cost him seven and a half wins of actual value and that's basically half of his his war he has like a 16 wins above replacement and his timing has cost him half of that so yeah i guess like you said the the fact that he got the contract implies that the astros don't care the fact that he got the contract implies that the astros don't care the fact that he went to the astros maybe implies that other teams do care i don't know it's a sample size of one michael saunders was down there he's i think of saunders even though he makes less contact as a kind of similar overall sort of

player to reddick and he also shows up kind of a long lefty swing guy who for whatever reason doesn't work out in these situations. Saunders, of course, had to sign for a relatively small contract. I don't know. That's probably not linked. But in any case, Josh Reddick, horribly unclutched in 2012, has continued to be horribly unclutched ever since. And so I guess we'll see what he is going forward. But also, Josh Reddick will never be more than N equals one.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting i mean maybe someday in the future when we have like sensors measuring whatever your heart rate or your skin response or something in clutch situations and you can find out whether certain players actually handle themselves better in those moments maybe we'll look back and we'll say team overvalued Josh Reddick because he was one of these guys we know exist now and they weren't putting any stock into it when they should have.

Or for now, we can just say they probably shouldn't or maybe they shouldn't or they don't anyway. It's something we might find out about in the future. We probably won't, but teams will. I think there's some medical

Ethical considerations there Like heart rates Alright question from Eric In Plainview the Yankees have been An above 500 team since 1993 And I'm not sure what to do With this information is this impressive Is this the precedent for teams

With this payroll should this payroll Mean you shouldn't actually rebuild? What is the lesson here? And this is actually not the longest such streak. The longest such streak, as you might imagine, And the Yankees from 1926 to 1964 were not under 500. That's 39 seasons. Can you imagine? So much changed in the world over that span of time. And the Yankees were not a losing team from the Jazz Age to the British the british invasion basically so that's kind of crazy and i don't know what this goes to show other than that as i think you were saying in one of your recent chats over a long span of time money and market size and all of those factors that a

team might be able to underperform or overperform for a year or two here and there. Over many years and decades, those things do actually matter quite a bit. Yeah, I think there's more parity than ever, I think, in baseball. We've both written about this. With the luxury tax in place, there's less room for a team to really stand out in terms of its payroll just looking at i don't know 2001 i guess the yankees had the biggest well this is a bad example because they didn't stand out anyway the we know the yankees have they're the most valuable franchise in sports and they can and have spent more than everybody else but there's a problem i

guess with linking the current yankees to the yankees of the 90s because back then i think there was a greater advantage for them to to reap and certainly in the 20s and 30s and 40s oh yeah it wasn't even wasn't even comparable but if you the streak of theirs is in some danger because i think as I've mentioned before in this podcast, in three of the last four years, the Yankees have actually had a negative run differential. So even though they have finished above 500 in all of those seasons, they have not played, I guess, like an above 500 team. They've been very mediocre in terms of their actual performance the last four years.

They've clearly sunk now the fact that they can spend so much does seem to imply that they really should never have a full rebuild i don't think that there's any sort of appetite for the yankees to go through a full rebuild i think it would be unforgivable if they stripped their payroll all the way down to like the astros levels or the polydor's current levels because that would be a crime i guess the crime against the millions of people who follow the Yankees. It's a very impressive streak that will end, I don't know how soon, but it will end.

And then there, I would assume. If they can get through like one more year, it really might not end. It has to end at some point. They're at great danger right now, but if they can get through the next year or two somehow, I don't know know it will be tough for them to do it i think but if they could if they can get into the next yankees teams built

on their currently close to top rated farm system and whatever free agents they signed to supplement those guys after the last gasp of the you know sabathias and a rods and all those people are off the books then they really might just start another long run of being decent at least so i agree it's got to end at some point but what if what if they ran into like a red sox 2015 situation the red sox were below 500 in 2014 and 2015 and 2012 yeah so you know there's there's room for things to go wrong. On the one hand, teams are smarter than ever before. The Yankees have as much mental power in their front office as I think any other team. They're very smart, forward thinking, etc. They spend a lot. They have the money to spend a lot. They're willing to go over the luxury tax. But at the same time, the luxury tax is there. Teams

are reluctant to go too far over it. But the teams at the bottom of the payroll scale are being lifted gradually as they sign better deals there's less of a financial advantage for the yankees there which means things will get tighter uh they're always going to be at least for the foreseeable future an above average team in terms of what they have available and how smart they are But with everybody getting smarter and getting more money, maybe the Yankee streak ends in another 10 years. And I wouldn't anticipate seeing a streak like this repeated because we will presumably never have a situation like we did between 1995 and, I don't know, 2005. Those days have come to a close. Yeah. All right. Let's close quickly with a wacky Mike Trout question. This is from Ben Thoen, and it's about backwards Mike Trout, which Ben specified in a follow-up email.

He would like to have said backwards Mike Trout, as in were the baseball stat. He says, I want to say this was mentioned on the podcast before, at least in passing. I don't think it was, but is Mike Trout still an above-replacement-level player if he always has to run backwards or backpedal? He could still swing and catch normally, but running the base paths as well as his routes to catch fly balls and cutoff line drives must be done with his back facing the destination he's running to, although he can crane his neck to track the base the ball his coaches etc and i don't know about his neck mobility because it's it's among the largest necks anyone has ever seen but he can crane it to some extent so that's all he's allowed to do we did answer a question once on this podcast about what would happen if mike trout had to hurdle if there were hurdles on the base pass when mike trout was running Would that hurt him?

And we concluded that it wouldn't actually make him all that much less valuable. But this is a more significant handicap. Wherever he runs, he's got to run backwards. We know that's difficult. What do you think? Okay, I can tell you. There's this quip on his Fangrest page, Roto-Wire News. Trout said that he would like to get back to 40 steals this season,

the Orange County Register reports. Well, bad news, Mike Trapp. You've got to run backwards. So he's either not going to be able to do it or it's going to be the most incredible 40 stolen bases in the history of baseball. So, okay. We know this wouldn't do anything about his home runs. He would still have some doubles, but few. He'd have no triples.

Very few doubles, I assume. The infield singles more or less go away. His outfield defense resembles Matt Kemp at best. Never had much of a throwing arm. I'm not able to run through all the math off the top of my head right now. But what do you think the speed is worth to Trout's game? Not just speed, but not being someone who's running backwards. What is that worth to my Trout's game?

Is it worth nine and a half wins? Because he still hits all the home runs that he hits now. So that doesn't hurt him. I mean, he still hits the ball really hard. There are some stats I saw Tom Tango said, or I think it was on the StatCast podcast where he was talking about players backpedal more slowly. They can see with StatCast now.

I mean, it's intuitive. We know this, but they quantified how much slower players are going back on the ball compared to coming in on the ball. And it was a significant difference. And so those are harder plays over your head than shallow. And so that is Mike Trout's life now. He always has to be backpedaling um so how do you backpedal on a ball that's hit in front of you that's a good i guess you'd have to yeah you'd have to face the plate to see the ball being hit and then turn around okay cradens you'd basically

never worse what's the worst defensive season we've seen? I'm just going to guess this is Brad Hopp. I think he had a really bad one that one time. Or Adam Dunn, maybe. Or Adam Dunn, yeah. Brad Hopp in 2008, oh my god. He rated as a negative 36 run right fielder. And DRS said negative 27.

So let's say like negative 30. But he still played. So is Mike Trout backpedaling at least as good as right fielder Brad Hopp? I think given the difficulty you just expressed there that you can't really even see the ball if it's shallow,

I think he's probably the worst outfielder ever. Yeah, he'd be how how upset would you be if you are let's see let's pull a who's the name okay you're ben revere you're the angels fourth outfielder and you're looking out there you're like mike trout is backpedaling after every ball why won't he run towards the ball i know he's capable i've seen him do it before he was the best player of baseball why won't mike trout turn around or why aren't you playing me in the outfield more why is he still in center field here's the problem the angels can't dh him because they've got albert pools so they have to play trout somewhere but unless you're going to put pools at first and

move cj cron well actually i guess cj cron becomes a better outfielder than mike trout at that point even though you'd think maybe leadership would step in and be like dude turn around we know you can why are you doing this yeah I guess I have how good

would Trout be all the doubles and triples almost all the doubles and triples become singles most of the triples or most of the singles remain singles because they're well hit to the outfield but you know you'll get the occasional right fielder trying to throw them out at first base but i'd really i don't know how much slower you are backpedaling i guess i would need a lot like i mean just from personal experience a lot of like like half is at least half okay okay we can we can do okay so let's let's see mike trout for his career he has what's his infield hit rate 13.2 percent of i

don't know how this is measured but okay anyway mike trout for this whatever statistic this is he's got okay mike trout 117 infield hits so-called according to fan graphs billy butler has 88 infield hits which surprised me to see however maybe a better rate would be that mike trout has this mysterious rate infield hit percentage i don't know what it is on fan graphs 13 billy butler four percent that's probably makes more sense like infield grounders that turn into hits so trout maybe wouldn't have zero infield hits but it would require some sort of defensive calamity for him to arrive at first base like that famous astros gif from a few years ago where all the players were sort of jumping on a grenade i guess uh So you figure he'd run into a bungling infield

at least once or twice, but he would lose 20 infield hits a season because he's averaged 20 infield hits a season, which is absurd. The bunt hits go away or they become a lot more laughable. Mike Trout, incidentally, has not bunted for a hit since 2012.

That probably doesn't mean anything, but there he went. I could run through the math, but it would be complicated. I would say that he would be, if you have to play him in the outfield, he'd be so bad. I don't think he's replacement level. If he has to be an everyday outfielder, I think he's not playable. Yeah, worst base runner in the game, worst defensive outfielder in the game.

Still has power, but I mean, we've seen below replacement power hitters a bunch you don't get contracts right okay hold on yeah reverse question if mike trout in his contract year was mike trout but he ran backwards but he ran backwards all year long but he still has mike trout's talent and you're another team what do you pay mike trout under the assumption that you can get him to turn around I mean I guess he's been very adamant about the not turning around throughout that entire season so I you just give him like a pillow contract right and yeah hope he turns around like a one year how much uh i guess i mean if he's been totally committed to it and i like i'm sure the team has like had its psychologists and its mental skills program working on him and people have been hounding him all year the questions he's

gotten from the press and yet he still hasn't budged from running backwards after all that i'd probably give him five million just just on the hope that uh six months of off season is enough to change his mind i wonder how much faster he'd be backpedaling after six months of doing it every day yeah i'm sure he'd get better at this i just don't know if he could get good enough i wonder if he'd try to become well you know we could do this for an hour, so I'll stop now. But he'd probably try to hit for more home runs. Yeah, I would think so. Unless he's so committed to the back pad backwards.

Yeah. Well, in our universe of hypothetical Mike Trouts, I definitely prefer lefty hitting Mike Trout to backwards running Mike Trout. It was worth pointing out in the Effectively Wild group that there was footage of Mike Trout sprinting with, what, 120-pound weight on his back? I think that was. So if Mike Trout were 355 pounds, still super fast baseball player. He's not close to that unethical 600-pound gain that we think would get his contract avoided, but he's a fifth of the way there. All right. We will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Walt Kaufman, Eric Oliver, Michael Workman, Mike LeMaire, and Richard Anderson. Thank you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes.

You can keep the questions coming to me and Jeff at podcast at fangraphs.com or by messaging us through Patreon. If you need something else to listen to, Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up this week with Dodgers reliever Grant Dayton, a favorite find of Jeff Sullivan's, as well as hitting coach Doug Latta. We talked about a lot of intriguing topics, about pitchers aiming higher in the zone and about hitters embracing the uppercut swing. You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. Jeff and I will be back with the next team preview podcast on Friday, and we're going to talk about the Nationals and the Twins. Be back then. I'm the backwards traveler, ancient warline traveler, sailing songs, wailing on the moon. Wailing on the moon.