Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1045: Go-Go Gadget Game Times

Episode Date: April 15, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Mike Trout topping the WAR leaderboard, Stephen Wright’s vulnerability to the elements, and baseball-player social media behavior, then talk about the increase in game times in 2017, the factors slowing pace of play, and the coming of the pitch clock. Audio intro: The New Pornographers, "Clockwise" Audio outro: Jefferson Airplane, […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1045 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs Baseball podcast brought Our little red singles bring this podcast. I guess it wouldn't exist without baseball, but we're not officially sponsored by baseball. We're a sponsor of baseball, if anything. Okay, that's true. We are basically doing advertising, which is why I never understood why they wanted me to stop posting GIFs on Twitter. It's probably because you say GIF, not GIF. But it's on Twitter, so I don't say anything. In fact, before this podcast, I barely spoke during the day at all. I had no reason to. In fact, before this podcast, I barely spoke during the day at all. I had no reason to. Yeah. But brought to you by implies sponsorship. But really, it's just it wouldn't be possible without.

Right. So I guess. Yes, that's true. We are brought to you indirectly by baseball and brought to you very directly by our Patreon supporters and by the existence of Mike Trout and by his statistics. That's right. Yeah. Speaking of which, we got an email this morning from Ryan who pointed out that Mike Trout is now atop the batting leaderboard at Fangraphs. He's actually tied. And I think there's a pitcher ahead of him, Cindergaard maybe, but I dug a little deeper. I found out that he is the leader in baseball reference war alone in first place. And in the past on this podcast, we've talked about Mike Trout leading in

war as the moment when you know that the season is real and stats have stabilized, but it's actually a pretty bad indicator because it can happen at all different times. And at this point last season, I think Mike Trout was batting about 229 or something like that. He was not leading the league in war. This year he is. And I tried to find out the date in each season that Trout was first leading in war, and then the date at which he took the lead for good. And no one could give me an answer to that question because none of the sites that have win value metrics actually track them on a day-by-day basis, which is kind of weird because on any given day, they have a leaderboard and you know who's been the war leader to that point.

But retroactively, it seems like none of them actually saves it. So you can't say who was the war leader on that day, or at least it's difficult to do that. So I don't know. But clearly, he becomes the war leader every year, but at a different time in each season. So not sure that whatever we've had two weeks, less than two weeks is a reliable indicator. But in that I thought would end the season in the top 10. So I'm just going to read you this list of names behind Mike Trout. I know that at least one of these guys you'll probably say yes about. But here they are.

Mike Leak, James Paxton. James Paxton! Yeah. Will Myers. And after that is Albert Suarez. Wait, is that Albert Suarez or wait? Albert Suarez? Is there an Albert Suarez? There is, but yeah, he hasn't played this year. He played last year. So I take it that it is

Eugenio Suarez of the Reds who has a 1130 OPS. Okay. We just talked about the Reds again. 1130 OPS. Okay. We just talked about the Reds again. And Odor, Vargas, Darnot, Keichel, Judge, and Gonzalez. I don't know if there's anyone in here, obviously, other than James Paxton, who will end the season as a top 10 player. I could see Keichel, but not... Well, this is baseball reference war?

Yes. Okay. So I could maybe squint and see Ke see keitel because if he's back to what he was a couple years ago that would make sense and and he's a soft contact guy so baseball ribbons would like him more etc for whatever it's worth i guess if you wanted to track when trout took over the war leader every year you just need to go crazy in a way back machine which would be terrible i guess you could do that because i think the reason that war isn't updated day to day is because defensive run saved and ultimate zone writing factors go into it are updated.

I think UZR is like bi-weekly maybe and DRS seems to actually be mostly daily, maybe weekly. I don't know. But yeah, I wish that they would keep track but then you might be the only person who would ever make use of such a database. Yeah. I love the idea of saying that as soon as tribe takes over the war lead that's when the samples are all relevant because that means if we if we took that to its logical extreme the reds are the best team in the national league central and i mean we know that james baxson is the best pitcher in baseball but i guess jason vargas is also one of them assuming that was the vargas right because the other vargas isn't in the i don't know what's up with kenny's vargas

yeah that must be the vargas yeah i believe believe Jason Vargas threw a shutout or something yesterday, which is insane. Jason Vargas. Somebody actually asked me a chat question today about Jason Vargas. Wow. I don't think it was a typo, but it would have been a very complicated, like, what is that? 11 letter typo? Yeah.

Well, I'm buying stock in Eugenio Suarez. I think this is the year that we've all been waiting for with him. Another quick thing sort of related to our email question earlier this week about the player who's always in rain. We were talking about what impact that would have on a player if there's just a cloud perpetually over one player. And someone sent me this link and the headline, it's from wei.com. The headline john farrell hints stephen wright may need to be scratched in games involving rain comma heat so it seems like there's a limited set of conditions under which stephen wright does not need to be scratched so i'm gonna read a quote

from john farrell this is about how his knuckleball basically doesn't work a lot of the time. Farrell says, to figure out a way to maintain some kind of grip, whether it's wearing sleeves, using rosin. He's done a very good job for us, no question about that. But in those elements, we have to find a way to adjust and make the most of them. And he evidently doesn't use the rosin bag because he doesn't like what it does to his grip and the knuckleball makes his fingers sticky and he doesn't like that. So he can't pitch if it's hot and he can't pitch if there is quote a little bit of moisture so i don't know if a little bit is like greater than zero percent humidity or where that line is exactly but it seems like an email question we would get if there is a pitcher who can't pitch when it's hot or he can't pitch when there's humidity is he still worth a roster spot? And then someone will email us painstaking research on how many starts he would be able to make under those circumstances.

But I guess Texas Rangers don't sign Stephen Wright or any team that is in a place where it's hot or it rains. Stephen Wright has sort of the pitching range of like brewer's yeast. It's like if it's within four degrees, he can do his job. Yeah. Anyway, fun pitcher. Hope it's like if it's within four degrees he can do his job yeah anyway fun pitcher hope it's not too hot when he has to pitch so uh i don't know if you have any more banter i have one thing you uh it probably caught your attention friday morning so you must know where this is going so dave cameron not yet wrote a who will let's see when you when you pick up on where this is going dave cameron wrote an article for fangrass for friday morning titled what's the point of the matt adams outfield experiment ah i know where this is you know where this is going mad adams outfield experiment so

matt adams what's the point of the matt adams outfield experiment article by dave cameron on fangrass matt adams has been playing outfield for the st louis cardinals which just on its face is already relevant for banter but the cardinals were i thought that was where we were going oh no it gets better so the cardinals were won over by uh this is embarrassing i forgot the player's name some some nobody player had a big spring training and so they rostered him he's a big dude i should probably look up the article but i haven't but i'm still tell you what tell you what i'm going to do a quick little search the cardinals were won over by the spring training of Jose Martinez, 28-year-old giant. He had a good spring training, so they rostered him, which meant that they couldn't have a- Can I pay you a compliment, by the way? You're really good at looking things up

very quickly. Just from reading your chats, you have the timestamps of every response. So someone will send you this really detailed, complex question, and you'll say, oh, let me look it up. And then the timestamp will be like the same minute somehow. And you'll have an answer to some complex baseball savant query that you just did and exported to Excel and sorted and filtered. And you have the answer. And it's still the same minute as when the questioner asked you that. So I don't know how you do that, but it's impressive. Well, here's a hot tip sometimes sometimes i don't send that first tweet or that first chat message until i've done the work i see okay sometimes i do sometimes i don't but uh so jose ramirez is that the name that

i just said let's pretend that it is anyway so the cardinals were won over by the spring training by that guy which meant that they couldn't or didn't open the season rostering a true fourth outfielder which meant that they were going to try matt adams Matt Adams being, you know, you know, Matt Adams, like the guy who you picture when you think of Matt Adams, that guy outfield. So they put him in left field, not every day, but for four of nine games, I think he's played some left field already. And you know, he's, he's been not, not great. And so they had to do that because they didn't have a true fourth outfielder. They actually demoted outfiel tommy fam to the minor leagues because he was the fourth outfielder hits the ball hard when he hits the ball which isn't often demoted him to the minors because they wanted to keep

jose ramirez and so they're playing matt adams anyway long story short dave cameron wrote this piece for fangraphs again titled what's the Point of the Matt Adams Outfield Experiment? Tweeted out by Fangraphs and By the way, it's Jose Martinez. Whoops. Jose Martinez. That feels vaguely racist, but you know, maybe I was just thinking, Jose Ramirez, the really good player for the Indians. Another

red uniform. Can't edit podcasts, so we must press on. On we go. So, What's the Point of the Matt Adams Outfield Experiment? Retweeted by some people, liked by some people. And one of the people who liked the tweet was verified account belonging to Tommy Pham of the St. Louis Cardinals. That's I like that. Yeah, that was made public.

I don't know how it was noticed. But this man, Alex at Alex Cards 79 tweeted out proof that it was liked by Tommy fam at present it's up to 229 retweets 482 likes I don't know if Tommy fam liked this but I feel like it's not like it's a horrible thing for him to like it's not like when Carlos Martinez had the wall full of pornography and even that whatever off the field stuff but yeah you know Tommy fam should like stuff like this that says that Tommy fam deserves a job field stuff but yeah you know tommy fam should like stuff like this that says that tommy fam deserves a job in the majors because you know self-interest and all that probably not supposed to do it publicly i feel like the cardinals will probably have a message

for tommy fam like don't do that we know why you did it but please don't which means that with every little blip where baseball player social media becomes more interesting it then as a consequence becomes less interesting but still at least we had this moment. Tommy Pham, not a big fan of the Matt Adams outfield experiment. Yeah, I'm not sure even in 2017 that everyone realizes that likes are public. And it's sort of strange that likes are public, but they are. So know that. Word to the wise. If you are a demoted fourth outfielder, be careful what you like. And people are always checking who retweets and likes their tweets. So be aware of it. I know a lot of very famous people have secret accounts. I know someone

basically unearthed James Comey's the other week. But I know, for example, I think the first one I heard of was Zach Granke has some sort of secret account on Twitter and he follows like everything and everybody. I think Jerry DePoto. I mean, all front office people have, if not public accounts where they don't tweet from, they do have secret accounts where they tweet and follow and like stuff. So they're out there. And maybe if you are an athlete, you should have a secret account so people don't tweet out that you're Tommy Pham and you liked something that's critical of the person in front of you. But still, it's fun when we have these moments. Yeah. All right.

Anything else? Nope. Okay. So let's move on to our designated topic, which you don't realize is our designated topic. In fact, I'm sure you've talked about it before because it's been talked about for a while, but it's relevant again. It's the Pitch Clocks episode. Okay. Welcome to the Pitch Clocks episode of Effectively Wild again. I am certain you and Sam have talked about this, but Jeff Passan just wrote an article about the inevitability of Pitch Clocks again on Thursday. I don't know if it like six or seven minutes. Rob Manfred had

instituted some changes to try to make the game faster and it worked like players couldn't step out of the box and games got faster by I think eight minutes. And then last year they got slower by four minutes. And then this year, let's find the median. The median game this year is roughly three hours and 12 minutes, which is's uh that's very long for comparison last year the median was three hours and five minutes so it's gotten slower by seven minutes roughly which is now meaning that uh baseball is at its slowest pace i guess ever yeah uh yeah ever by and by a number of minutes and there are of course a number of reasons for why this is and if you look up the pace statistic

on fangraphs which measures the average amount of time between pitches for some reason that i i don't know what it is i'm sure you don't know what it is we could speculate pace has actually gotten slower from last year by almost a second and a half wow which considering there's something like 290 or 300 pitches in the average game that's a lot that is several minutes lost to nothing so yeah the easiest thing to implement to address this is the pitch clock there are a lot of points to be made on the pitch clock so i guess why don't i just pass it over to you where do you stand on the idea of pitch clocks i'm pro pitch clock i i think there is the obvious argument against it is that baseball doesn't have clocks.

It's kind of a tautological argument that you can't have a clock in the one sport without clocks. And I like that baseball doesn't have a clock, or at least I used to like that a lot. And it feels like it's very open-ended. And I like not having a scoreboard that is counting down the minutes and seconds until the game is over. Of course, baseball has outs. Outs are kind of the currency of baseball in the way that seconds and minutes are in other sports. But outs can take forever to record. So I like that.

I like that it can go forever. go forever. But as a spectator experience, if you do not have forever and you want to watch a baseball game, it's not the worst thing to know when the game will end and that it will end relatively quickly. I mean, there aren't many things in this world nowadays that people are asked to do without knowing how long they will take, right? I mean, there aren't that many entertainment options that are completely open-ended like that. I wrote an article last year about video games because video games are kind of the rare exception to that also, where you have almost no idea how long a video game is unless you've read about it in a review or something. And even then it's an approximation.

And that is a problem at times if you just know that a game is long and you have to try to plan your life around playing it for some reason that can be difficult. And baseball is like that too. And other sports aren't really like that. Of course, they have slowdowns and they have ads and breaks and fouls and all of that stuff. But generally, if you're going to go to a concert, if you're going to watch a show, a movie, you can look up almost exactly how long it's going to be before you go. And baseball might last twice as long as it's supposed to last if it goes to extra innings. And obviously even regulation games are lasting a lot longer now than they used to. So yeah, I don't see a downside to it really. I think there was a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about it before it was introduced in the minors.

It has been introduced in the minors, and from all accounts, it has not been an issue at all. And people are adhering to it, and it's not bothering anyone. So given that, I just don't see a compelling reason not to do it. And maybe while you are talking, I can look up some minor league game-like times also. Well, I've already done that. Excellent. Yeah, I can look up some minor league game-like times also. Well, I've already done that. Excellent. Yeah, I have some evidence. So I reached out to AAA Tacoma Rainiers and answered Mike Curdo, who I like.

I asked him his opinion of pitch clocks. He's the broadcaster I know the best. And here is his response, word for word. I love pitch clocks. I would have unprotected sex with a pitch clock. I want to raise little pitch clock babies. So Mike Curdo on board with pitch clock. I want to raise little pitch clock babies. So Mike Curto on board with pitch clocks. I asked him if he had heard any players grumble and he has not. Well, at least

he hasn't responded with any of that. I found this article from minorleaguebaseball.com, M-I-L-B.com. That part doesn't matter. The headline is toolshed pitch clocks do their job in debut. Triple A, double A game durations dropped dramatically with new rules. That was not all the headline. That was also a sub headline. That would be a very long headline written by Sam Dykstra on October 9th, 2015. Let's see. Lucas Giolito is quoted in here as saying, I could quote him directly, but I'll just paraphrase. It's fine. No problem. Didn't even notice he could pitch his own pace and it was fine. And so between 2014 and 2015, pitch clocks were introduced in AAA and AA. So here are how the average game lengths dropped in the five leagues that were affected.

Texas League, six minute improvement. Southern League, 10 minutes. Eastern League, 12 minutes. Pacific Coast League, 13 minutes. International League, 16 minutes. AAA and AA, an average of 12 minute improvement in pace. Pitch clocks were not the only change that were made between seasons. There was also the same stuff about batters not stepping out of the

box and all that. I have not looked up whether games then got slower last season. Yeah, I'm looking that up now. So right, there was that big decrease in 2015 there with the pitch clocks for the first time. And so I'm looking at Baseball Prospectus, which has game times for each level on average for each year. And in 2015, they do it out to two decimal places. So they had 2.79 hours was the average length of a AAA game in 2015. And right, that was down from 2.95 in 2014. So significant drop. And then 2016, it was basically the same, 2.82.

So just up a tiny bit. But then this year thus far, and fairly small sample, but it's up to 2.91. and fairly small sample, but it's up to 2.91. So it is almost as high this year as it was the year before pitch clocks were introduced in AAA. I mean, that is the trend in baseball going back decades and decades is that games have gotten longer. And so there is that trend in each attempt to try to turn back the clock a little works initially, and then things start going to seed again, and we're all just heading for the heat death of the universe, and things are getting disordered, and baseball games are getting longer.

So that seems to be happening at AAA also. But at least the lengths are considerably shorter than they are in the majors this year, which is probably not solely pitch clock related, but at least partly. And I would think that pitch clocks are not implemented in order to reduce game time dramatically. It's basically to put a cap on how much inaction there can be between pitches, which is, I think, a noble goal. One of the things that was interesting that Jeff Passon came across when he was writing his article is that I guess MLB did a number of surveys, which, you know, they should big business and everything. And there is a marked difference between the opinions of people talking about at the ballpark experiences and the experience of watching at home.

Of course, when you're at home, baseball is sometimes horrifyingly slow. Maybe horrifyingly is too strong, but there is a lot of inaction. And I know all the arguments about how football has the same amount of inaction that I get it. That's fine. We can skip past that. But people say that when they're at the ballpark, they love a long game. They don't mind at all. They don't care how long a game is drawn out because really you go to a baseball game is sort of a social event. You're there with friends or family. You're chatting. You're doing stuff between pitches. You can look at your phone. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of visual stimulation and auditory stimulation. There's just a lot of action and you don't really care if a game is three hours or three and a half hours. In fact, you could say that if you paid, I don't

know, $50 for a ticket and then another $750 in alcohol that maybe you want it to be worth your money and a quick game maybe feels like a worse investment than a long game so baseball has to reconcile how it's going to try to please one of the parties in theory both groups of people but that seems like it's impossible i don't know the best way to go about it i guess baseball has a greater attendance so to speak on tv than it does in the ballpark. I would assume I would strongly. Yeah, of course. So you want to please those people. I don't know if it comes down to a game problem or a broadcast problem where, you know, the solution with football has been constant, constant, instant replays of everything. I don't know if you can do that in baseball, considering most of the action is just a pitch

thrown and then the ball going back to the pitcher. There's nothing to necessarily show a replay of. You can show constant replays, I guess, of balls in play. But, you know, the average football play contains a lot of violence and there are 22 people involved, whereas the average baseball play might involve like five people, right? Pitcher, batter, six, four, three, double play. That's five people. And then some of the other players move, I guess. So many of them don't. Yeah. That's interesting because I feel differently about the at-home versus ballpark experience. I guess I'm atypical in that when I'm going to a ball game, it's usually for work or

because I'm supposed to talk to someone or something and not as much as a social event. And so I agree about long games not being a problem if it's a high stakes game or a particularly exciting game. But if it's like a day game and it's the middle of the summer and it's hot and I'm like Stephen Wright when it comes to going outside in the heat. And so I much prefer to be at home, I guess, if it's a long game. And maybe it's also because I'm not a fan of any one team, whereas most baseball observers are. And so if I'm watching baseball, I'm probably just flipping between games and scanning MLB TV for whatever's interesting at that moment.

So if there's a long break or something's going slow, I can just switch or I'm on Twitter or I'm reading stuff or whatever. So there's a ton to distract me, but I am not representative. So it makes sense that most fans would feel that way. But yeah, I don't understand the objections really other than just an appeal to tradition and it's the sport without clocks or whatever. Cause there was a great article by our friend Grant Brisby earlier this year who found a game from what the 80s 87 or something or 84 and it was he found an equivalent game of more recent vintage that had exactly the same number of batters and everything he tried to match

them up as close as possible and he found that the modern game was still way longer, even though there were like the same number of played appearances or pitches. And it was mostly because of time between pitches. And everyone always says, oh, it's the ads, it's the longer commercial breaks. And Grant did the research and found that it was not. It was partly that, but it was mostly not that. It was just players taking a long time to do the same stuff that they used to do more quickly. And I don't think any of us benefits from that. It might not kill your enjoyment of baseball. You'll probably still like baseball if you liked baseball before, but you're not getting more baseball. You're getting the same amount of baseball delivered

more slowly, which I don't think enhances the experience. So some people will kind of go overboard in one way and say baseball is dying and it's so slow, no one's ever going to watch it and this is going to kill the sport. And then people will kind of have the backlash to that, which is that, well, we love baseball and the longer it is, the better, because I just love watching baseball and I want it to last forever. And I don't think either of those camps is the best one. I would be somewhere in the middle, which is that, yes, baseball is great and we're going to like it no matter what. But it'd be nice if it were a little more efficiently parceled out to us

and we're not losing anything except the dead time during which we're all just waiting for the next play anyway. Yeah, I think there are two points worth acknowledging here one a lot of the coverage about the pace of game is of course coming from writers who don't have a fan's perspective as a professional who's working in baseball certainly at a baseball game you don't want the game to go along because it's your job you're not there for pleasure your experience is very different from somebody who's just chatting in the stands and so of course there is some sort of bias toward the coverage wanting games to be quicker

because the coverage is mostly coming from people who would love the game to be quicker because they would like to go home and not do work anymore. And so I hear that from fans and commenters pretty often whenever we have an article at Fangraphs about a piece of game where, you know, fans as Passon found and as Major League Baseball found, they quite like the at the ballpark experience no matter how long it takes i think another thing worth acknowledging is that i don't even baseball right now is not in dire straits it's doing great it's popular people love it people could love it more i think that there are people who there are a lot of people who would say that rob manfred shouldn't try to fix what isn't broken but i

do think he deserves credit for being proactive about something that clearly would become a problem. I think Manfred is sort of trying to be ahead of the curve with a number of issues, this being sort of his baby. And clearly, you know, if the average baseball game were three hours and 45 minutes, many of us would find that quite disagreeable. So that's not anything that's going to happen anytime soon. But given that any sort of changes would be implemented gradually and you can't make the game faster immediately, players need to adapt. It makes sense to try to do things now. It's just people are going to be off-put by that if they don't perceive a problem yet. But clearly, the trends are legitimately worrisome. legitimately worries him. Yeah. Meg Rowley was making that point earlier this week on Hang Up and Listen that his job as commissioner is to ensure that the sport has a bright future and that it can last and not just that it maximizes its profit in this year alone. And if you look

at these trends and whether it's the lack of contact or the length of games or the pace of games, if you just extrapolate them out, and in this case, it seems like it's fair to do that because you can look backward and this has been going on for so long that there's no reason to think that it won't continue to go on, then yeah, you have to do something now to safeguard the future. Even if the present isn't really broken, it's possible to project and see that if things keep going the way they are, eventually you'll have three and a half hour games and you'll have 40% strikeout rates and probably no one wants that. So at some point, you have to stop this progression and it has proven difficult. And I don't know whether the things that worked a couple

of years ago, just, I mean, was it the attention to it? Was it the threat of the deterrent? Like we haven't heard anything lately. At least I haven't really seen anything lately about players being fined or punished or warned. Like in that first, we would read about so-and-so got a letter sent to him that said he had to speed up, and if he didn't speed up, he was going to get fined or something. I haven't heard really anything about that lately. I assume that is still happening because I don't know why it would have stopped, but maybe everyone just realized that a fine for a baseball player is insignificant because it's such a small amount of money in relation to what he is making in the majors that everyone just sort of stopped caring and they realized that they weren't really going to get into trouble. And then they started taking their sweet time and maybe it is an advantage to take your time.

an advantage to take your time. I think Rob Arthur did some research at FiveThirtyEight once that seemed to suggest that older players benefit from taking their time to collect themselves, maybe more so than younger players do, whether because they need more time to catch their breaths or they just do more thinking and analyzing of what the next pitch is going to be or whatever. And so it helps them in that way, but could be a competitive advantage to take longer. There's probably a reason why players keep doing it. So it's going to keep happening unless we prevent it somehow. And the pitch clock seems like a way that has already been tested and proven to work to a certain extent without really any significant downsides. Yeah. The pitch clock in the minor leagues is at 20 seconds, and it's not 20 seconds

from ball to catcher to ball to catcher. It's 20 seconds from pitcher gets the ball back to starts his delivery. So right there, that's basically, you could say, I don't know, 25 seconds between pitches, if you want to say. And so now I will quote from Giolito from this article just because I have it. So this is Lucas Giolito from that article in 2015 talking about pitch clocks, blah, blah, blah. Then I realized I could pitch my normal pace and it doesn't make any difference from later in the same article. There's a paragraph here, Giolito again, quote, it wasn't a problem for anyone by the time I was there, referring to that level in the minors. It wasn't a problem for anyone by the time I was there, referring to that level in the minors. I mean, I was only there for a little over a month, humble brag, but I only saw one guy get called in that month and he got called for not being in the box. Talking to the other guys who had been there a little longer, they said there had been only two or three guys called for pace of game stuff all year.

So a point I hadn't considered that Joe Sheehan raised at Fangraphs on Thursday? Wednesday? One of those days. Wednesday. Whatever. This week. He had linked the pace of play issue with pitchers throwing harder and harder. And I know it's, we all, well, at least some of us love the idea of pitchers working as quickly as Mark Burley because it looks fantastic. I vividly remember Brett Anderson tweeting something to the effect of, I could never sustain Mark Burley's pace. I would basically have a heart attack. And it's really hard. Pitching is exhausting.

I know it seems simple because the whole thing takes two seconds and then you're just standing there again. But it really does take a lot of time to restore your energy. It's probably one of the reasons veterans take a little longer and benefit from taking a little longer is because they don't get their energy back as quickly. Pitchers are throwing harder than ever. Maybe they're throwing max effort more than ever. So it is worth considering that maybe pitchers just do need to take longer than ever between pitches. And I did see some research that suggested that there could be an injury risk to doing this because of what you're saying.

I don't remember what the source was. There was some study that suggested that for that reason, because this is recuperative in some sense to take that time between pitches, you might see an increase in injuries. I don't know how solid that is, but the theory seemed to be semi-sound. how solid that is, but the theory seemed to be semi-sound. Yeah. I don't have numbers in front of me, but pace clearly slows down when there are runners on. Pedro Baez, I've looked up when he's the fastest, when he's the slowest. We all know when he's the slowest. He's the slowest when he is a base runner to worry about. And those opportunities are more stressful. So maybe your heart rate's beating a little faster. And so maybe you need a little more time to try to catch your breath.

But I think this is where it's important to remember that, you know, baseball is not trying to tell these pitchers throw the ball within 10 seconds. That's unreasonable. You have 20 seconds between when you get the ball and when you have to start your delivery. That should be plenty of time because every pitcher in baseball with the bases empty accomplishes that probably at least some high percentage of the time with the bases empty accomplishes that, probably. At least some high percentage of the time with the bases empty, every pitcher in baseball can and does do that. So, you know, maybe the players push back and you're like, okay, well, you get 22 second pitch clock or something. Just anything to set a ceiling.

It would not be welcome immediately because it would be a very conspicuous change. But like Giolito said, if the decision is made for you, and we know Manfred can unilaterally start implementing changes, I think, starting next year to a lot of these things. If it's forced upon pitchers and then they realize that unless they're Joel Peralta or Pedro Baez, they can just do what they've always done, then I think it becomes a very easy thing to basically ignore and just kind of have there. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely going to happen because this is now what the third year that pitch clocks have been at AA and AAA. They've been in the Arizona

Fall League. They've been at least at some college levels. So most players in the majors now, I think, have played with pitch clocks, just not in the majors. So it's not going to be that dramatic an adjustment if it happens or when it happens. And it's clearly been tested with an eye toward transferring it to the big leagues. And I guess the question is whether it's going to make enough difference when it happens that we can all stop dwelling on this. And I'm not sure that that's the case because of what you're saying. It's not really that enormous a change unless you are one of the really super slow outliers and it doesn't apply to every pitch, right? If they're runners on, there's no clock, right? And so it's only in certain situations and it's not that dramatic a reduction in time for most pitchers. And so if you're talking about saving 10 minutes

a game or something, I'm sure that would be looked on as a victory for one year. But if we're at three hours and 12 minutes right now, you're still talking about over three hour games. So I don't know that that necessarily resolves this unending debate other than that year, especially if the uptick in AAA game time this year suggests that players have found other ways to slow down somehow, despite the pitch clock being there. Right. If you establish a pitch clock then that that sets forever a ceiling so you do at least achieve some sort of consistency of tempo which i think is one of those things that you'd subconsciously pick up on obviously

it would not make baseball an exciting game to people who don't currently find it exciting you would need to sort of tag team it with enforcement reinforcement i guess of the batter's box rule which umpires basically just stopped paying attention to in 2016 i think and that's why the game got so much slower if you could blend the pitch clocks and matters box enforcement then i think you get that tempo that keeps at bats watchable without people rolling their eyes i don't know what you do i mean the reality is that with strikeouts on the increase that does still reduce the amount of action i know a lot of people like watching strikeouts but balls in play are still fun and especially with hitters now basically

willing to strike out because they're trying to hit the ball in the air and try to hit home runs it's just like everyone is trying for a three true outcomes sort of game anyway so that's something that could or would have to be stemmed i don't know if putting in a pitch clock means that pitchers are now throwing a little below 100%, which means maybe that automatically takes care of strikeouts to some extent. I don't know what that would do. I haven't looked at the numbers in AAA, but maybe it's a very obvious point. But I'm going to read a little bit from the Wikipedia entry for the shot clock in basketball the nba national basketball association i guess that didn't need to be in parentheses we know what the nba has had problems attracting fans parentheses and positive media coverage close parentheses before the shot clocks inception

this was due to teams running at the clock once they were leading in a game without the shot clock teams passed the ball nearly endlessly without penalty etc you can imagine what basketball would be like without the shot clock baseball is not in that kind of situation but in uh around 1954 give credit to syracuse nationals owner danny biassoni db and general manager leo ferris experimented using a 24 second version of a shot clock during a scrimmage game in 1954. Since then, everybody loved it. Average points at a game skyrocketed. Fans came. People embraced the shot clock almost without any sort of downside. Basketball was revolutionized. The people who created the shot clock have plaques and memorials

everywhere. Everybody loves it. So a game that didn't have a shot clock adopted a shot clock, and it was great, and it made an immediate difference. And that was that. The game adapted. Fans came. Baseball is not in the same situation. It's not like a pitch clock is the difference between nothing happening and everything happening. It's still going to be baseball very much. But there's enough evidence. In fact, I could read the first paragraph from this Wikipedia entry because there are some words in here I've never heard of.

I guess one. A shot clock is used in some sports to quicken the pace of the game. never heard of i guess one a shot clock is used in some sports to quicken the pace of the game it is normally associated with basketball but is also used in snooker pro lacrosse water polo corfball and a 10 pin bowling i have no idea what corfball is but clearly it's a step ahead of baseball at least in this regard so kudos to the shot clock i am now going to click through to see what corfball is. Do you have any guesses? It's a Dutch sport. I've already looked because I didn't know either.

A Dutch sport with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players. It's co-ed. The objective is to throw a ball through a bottomless basket that is mounted on an 11.5-foot high pole. The sport is also very popular in Belgium and Taiwan and is played in many other countries. How many things do you suppose link specifically and explicitly Belgium and Taiwan?

That's a good question too. I don't know. All right. Learning something about corfball on this podcast. Yeah. So one other point that Joe Sheehan made, I heard him say this on will leach's podcast recently is that i don't think anyone's talking about oh we're gonna get back to two hour games

or even two and a half hour games because just too many things have changed there are too many pitches thrown because hitters are so good and pitchers are throwing so fast and trying to get strikeouts and their pitching changes, which is of course another thing that Rob Manfred is always speculating about and thinking about. Anyway, the game has changed too much to go back that far. So no one's really talking about rolling things back a century or a half century. But if we could roll things back a couple decades at least without losing anything, as it seems like we could, if we had the pitch clock and enforced the batter's box rule, I don't think anyone really loses from that. equally. I'm sure none of them necessarily wants to have to speed up, but if they all have to speed

up, then it doesn't really impair any particular player more than the others to any great degree. So I think it's in the best interests of baseball and of all of us. So I hope it happens. I expect it will happen. And I look forward to not having to talk about this every year. I think one of the frustrating things is there's sort of a snowballing effect where the deeper a plate appearance gets, the more time is taken on average between pitches and really good pitchers or really good strikeout pitchers will tend to get into deeper counts and slow pitchers will tend to get into deeper counts. So you take someone like Pedro Baez who gets a lot of strikeouts, a lot of walks just means that he's he takes even longer than he should

because he gets into deep counts so he just it snowballs on him or like daisuke matsuzaka i remember when he came over he was very exciting statistically before i knew anything about him i knew he was a good pitcher in japan i wanted the mayors to get him they didn't it's fine felix hernandez threw one hitter in his home debut take that daisuke matsuzaka but he came over he was very exciting and then you know he was pretty good for spurts some people would call him a disappointment but he was still pretty good for a little while but I personally found him to be nearly unwatchable and it was so bad that even in like the the very realistic baseball video games of the era I couldn't stand him because his wind-up took like three seconds and like a baseball video game is already so slow that you just kind of want to press

a button and the ball comes out. But yeah, like friends and I would basically have a rule where it was you can't use Daisuke Matsuzaka. He makes this game suck. And baseball now effectively has too many people pitching like Daisuke Matsuzaka. I know that it's a problem of time between pitches and not time during the act of pitching, which was Matsuzaka's other issue. But nevertheless, pitch clock would not fix everything. There's nothing baseball could do to fix everything. It will forever and always remain very much baseball, the slow, dramatically building sport that it is. It will never be football, but there are things that can happen. Pitch clock, I think, as you mentioned, it feels like and it would be a revolutionary idea. But I think it's one of those things that we would talk about far more now than we would after its actual implementation.

Just like the intentional walk rule, which is passed and nobody cares. Exactly. All right. Well, speaking of things that keep getting longer and longer, this podcast was originally supposed to be 15 minutes a day when we started it. So that hasn't happened anymore. Well, I wasn't involved in that decision. No, that's not your fault. All right, but we will end this particular episode now. Ending the week on a multiple of five.

Although now that we do this thing three times a week, I don't know if that's something I'm supposed to celebrate. Maybe I should be celebrating ending weeks on episode numbers that are multiples of three. Oh, and one more thing. Since we talked about the wave recently, it seems like now we're going to get notifications every time there's a wave at a game. We got a bunch on Friday night because there was a wave in the Phillies Nationals game

in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game at an extremely high leverage moment, the highest leverage moment of the game, as someone named Ben who tweeted us the Fangraphs win expectancy chart for the game demonstrated. So although we have a wave and let wave attitude generally, I'm not sure that that extends to bottom of the ninth tie games. So I will express mild disapproval at the fans who started the wave and participated in the wave at National Spark on Friday. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. And five listeners who have pledged their support include Alex Stanford, James Curdy, Carl Despoto, Ryan Quans, and John Hines.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Helps us climb the charts and find new listeners. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're interested in something else to listen to, Michael Babin and I interviewed two dermatologists about baseball on the most recent episode of the Ringer MLB show.

We talked to John Ulrud's dad, who's a dermatologist, and we talked to the team dermatologist of the twins. We asked about rich hill's blister issues among other topics and on our next episode on monday we'll be talking to rick ankiel about his new book and chris davinsky astro's relief ace extraordinaire keep your questions coming for me and jeff at podcast at fandrafts.com or via the patreon messaging system we hope you have a fine rest of your weekend and beginning to your week, and we will talk to you soon. Sack of a train Won't you try

Won't you try