Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1056: You Only Swing Once

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s day off and Ron Fowler’s comments about Jered Weaver, then answer listener emails about baseball’s arbitrary rules, David Ross’s unexpected cultural cachet, the definition of a “slugfest,” Manny Machado’s relationship with the Red Sox, the softening of the tone of sabermetric writing over the past two decades, […]

We climbed and we climbed, oh how we climbed, oh how we climbed. Hello and welcome to episode 1056 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. Tell me about your day off, or tell me about the night before your day off that you were recovering from on your day off. Oh man, well I try to make it a winter or at least snowy tradition to go climb mons and helens gonna kick off mountaineering and outdoorsy season uh and the weather didn't really cooperate this year then i took a mountaineering class long story short finally

got a chance to go do it during the week just took tuesday off because there was a good weather window so me my girlfriend and a friend decided to go do a midnight summit attempt getting what they call an alpine start to go climb mount saint helens which is 5700 vertical feet of elevation gain up to the summit of 8300 whatever feet climbing up through the snow under what was very nearly a full moon which is spectacular and it took for effing ever to complete it for a variety of reasons i didn't get into. But we got to the top a little after sunrise and it was spectacular. There's Mount Rainier, 40 miles away. Mount Adams, 30 miles away.

Mount Hood, more miles than that away. You can look over the lip of the summit crater. For anyone who doesn't know, Mount St. Helens did blow itself out in 1980. So it now is in the form of a horseshoe. The crater containing what i believe is still the only growing glacier in the 48 states why is it growing it's growing because the uh the shape of the mountain basically protects the glacier from direct sunlight almost all of the year so there's no matter how warm it is the sun still doesn't really hit the glacier directly so that's nice

i guess for the very localized climate and you get to look over the crater lip down onto the lava dome in the middle of the crater which is steaming with gas which is awesome nice little reminder that you were on an active and extremely active volcano cool so if we could just build a mountain around everything we could cure global warming pretty much but we probably might have some side effects i I would imagine. You get a lot more global shadowing. That sounds really fun. I was telling you that that sounds like an excursion that would suit my sleep schedule because I'm generally up at night.

So Mount St. Helens doesn't close, huh? They don't come along and shut down a fence or something at some point? They don't. Starting on May 15th, they do have a quota so that the mountain doesn't get overrun. There are only 100 people allowed up the mountain on any given day. We were trying to do this before May 15th because the permits sell out really fast because people love the idea of climbing Mount St. Helens, but most of them like to climb it when there is not snow on it and there was snow all over it for us. And so just in case you were thinking about making any sort of advance, I will let you know that we were basically walking for 15 consecutive hours because the sun warmed up to such a degree that the snow

got very soft and we had crampons instead of snowshoes. I don't need to go into detail about this. We made a bad decision. It's fine. We got home. Do you listen to anything while you're climbing or do you talk or do you just pant? Sometimes if I know I'm going to do something that's really monotonous, sometimes I'll'll bring headphones but usually i'm out there for the purpose of being out there i kind of want to pay attention to what's around me and also just for safety reasons you want to be able to communicate with whoever might be in your party so uh it was pretty good i didn't listen to anything except for my own gasping breath and uh and other party members complaining but it was fun because we got to the uh the summit and then a man came charging up much faster than we did. And he had his three like grown huskies with him. So we

got to spend the summit with a man and three husky dogs, which is great. Yeah, that sounds really nice. All right. Anything about baseball you want to talk about? Well, I've been spending the entire day getting caught up on baseball because it turns out when you miss one day, one day, just one day of nothing remarkable happening, it still feels like it takes all day to get caught up. So this is why we should never take trips. Yeah. So I don't know if you saw Padre's executive chairman Ron Fowler's comments about Jared Weaver. Literally just read, just read 10 minutes ago.

Okay. Well, I'll read them for the benefit of people who didn't. These are some mean comments. These are pretty disparaging. I mean, in fairness to Fowler, Jared Weaver is pretty terrible by Major League Baseball standards. He now has a 6.81 ERA with a 7.92 FIP, and I believe he was throwing fastballs in the 70s in his most recent start. Oh, no. Is that true?

I saw Darren Willman tweet that he, what do you say? You can't say maxed out. You say minned out. That sounds wrong. I guess it is scraping. It's a form of scraping. Well, evidently, he threw at least one fastball at 79. I don't know if there was any kind of classification problem there,

but he does not throw hard. So Ron Fowler said in this radio interview, we've had several performances from Jared that have not been very good and Jared owns them. I think it's a short leash and we've got to make decisions. We're hoping there's something left, but the last several performances don't give us much cause to be positive. We did take a chance on him. We were hoping we'd get some more, that there was more left in the tank. And at this point in time, it doesn't appear that we were right. We're not going to let it continue for a long period of time.

We like the way he's owning it, at least, and not trying to walk from it. The biggest compliment they can give Jared Weaver is that he's owning it terribly as the press. That's fantastic. Yeah. I don't know if, I mean, it's honest. It's true. But it's pretty harsh. I don't know if there's an upside to making comments like that.

I don't know how he would even dissemble and say something relatively nice about Jared Weaver. I guess he could have just said the part about how he was owning it and not about how he's terrible. But everyone can see what he is now, I guess. what he is now, I guess. It just seems like it's not the best sign when your owner essentially is doing radio interviews and criticizing players, unless you think there's some kind of motivation aspect to this. But it doesn't seem like Jared Weaver is going to see these comments and say, oh, I better throw harder, I guess. It doesn't sound like they're going to let me keep throwing 79 for long, so I'll just throw hard again. He's incapable of doing that. So when you have owners making public comments like this and disparaging players, which is something that the radio and criticizing you, even if it's justified criticism. And if it's a case like this, where the player can't actually do anything, it's not like a motivation thing where he's not working hard enough and they want

to try to inspire him to. So I don't know, but I guess it would be tough to come up with something positive to say. Well, okay. Right. So two things. One, it would be really easy to draft like a template for a usual boring executive on Jared Weaver explanation where you say, well, we brought Jared in because he's experienced. We liked the way that he was a leader with the angels. And we like that even when he is gotten hit around and you could say it that way to him to suggest, even though he has gotten hit around every single time, that maybe that isn't what's happened. But you could say, even though, even after he has gotten hit around every single time, that maybe that isn't what's happened. But you could say even though, even after he's gotten hit around, he's taken ownership for it, and we think he's a great role model, and he has fulfilled what we thought his role would be in the clubhouse,

and blah, blah, blah. Of course, his performance on the field could be better. Anybody could be bad. He has a better ERA right now than Bartolo Colon, by the way. And also Trevor Bauer, beloved Trevor Bauer. Jared Weaver, still a better ERA, or by this measure, ERA minus, than Trevor Bauer, comparable to Adam, still a better ERA or by this measure, ERA minus than Trevor Bauer, comparable to Adam Wainwright, Jordan Zimmerman, Jarrell Cotton, Matt Moore, Kevin Gosman,

lots of interesting pitchers who have been similarly terrible to Jared Weaver. The problem is that he's been terrible in a way where everything is flying over the fence. I said I had a second point. I do have a second point and this is it. So Jared Weaver, unsurprisingly, giving up a lot of home runs, not getting a lot of strikeouts, but as a little fun fact to show that ways that contact rate might be deceptive contact rate, some people get confused by contact rate, but what it is, is the, the rate of contact batters make overall swing attempts. So there's a difference between contact rate and swinging strike rate, which is overall pitches for anyone who likes to play around on the leaderboards. Anyway, this season in Jared

Weaver's however many starts he's made, he's thrown 35.2 innings. So I assume for him, that's like 20 starts. So Jared Weaver this season has allowed a contact rate of 81.5%. That is a little bit higher than the average. Here are some players who have allowed higher contact rates this season than Jared Weaver. Jose Quintana, Justin Verlander, Tanner Roark, maybe that's less surprising, Jordan Zimmerman, who I guess is terrible now, Matt Harvey, Alex Cobb, Adam Wainwright, who's been just absolutely terrible. Kyle Hendricks has allowed a lot more contact than Jared Weaver. The highest contact rate allowed by anyone who is a qualified pitcher so

far, Phil Hughes, rookie sensation, if you want to call him that, Antonio Sensatella has allowed a lot more contact than Jared Weaver. Yvonne Nova has allowed a lot more contact. Other Rockies rookie sensation, Kyle Freeland, has allowed a lot more contact than Jared Weaver. So batters are actually swinging and missing against Weaver, I wouldn wouldn't say often but more often than you might expect his contact rate in let's call it 2012 so what was going on in 2012 weaver was good sub 3 era in 2012 and weaver allowed a contact rate very similar to the contact rate he's allowed this season so obviously there's there's more to it than that but just compared to 2012 weaver's getting the same amount of swings in the zone basically same amount of swings out of the zone

contact isn't a lot better or worse it's just the actual contact is much much worse like almost a third of his fly balls have been home runs that's crazy which uh i guess you could say is is something that tends to regress back toward the league average, but I don't know if it does if you're throwing 80, so that's worrisome. His curveball has the highest velocity it's had since the late 2000s. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers here because this is a fan graphs, but whatever. Curveball velocity relative to last year is up. His changeup velocity is up. His slider, his fastball velocities,

they're up. Jared Weaver has actually dug in, found something in there, but still, he might be the best example in baseball today of a player's statistics matching exactly what you would expect of a player's statistics. Yeah. Maybe he should try throwing all the other pitches slower too. That's one solution. I don't know. I think he's made one mistake. He's throwing his fastball more now. He spent the last couple of years throwing it less than half the time because, you know, you know, he's like, I'm not going to do that.

Well, he's doing more of it this year. And guess what? It's not working. It's just awful. I love that he's in baseball. Yeah, me too. I hope it continues and it doesn't sound like it's going to for much longer. All right, so we're answering emails

today. Let's start with one from Ezra. As I watched Chris Davis strike out for the 1353rd time, I wondered how much of a player's ability is dependent on the arbitrary rules of baseball. If, for instance, strikeouts automatically ended the inning, would Chris Davis have adjusted his approach long ago and still made his way to the big leagues, or would he have washed out in single A? If fences were moved 50 feet back, would John Carlos Stanton be the greatest player of all time, or would all of the physical freaks have adjusted? What percent of each player's skill set is unique to the rules of baseball, and what percent would be applicable to any similar sport? Just to be clear, Ezra, have you watched all 1,353 strikeouts of Chris Davis's career?

I know. Wow. That's pretty dedicated. Very dedicated. Yeah. So all of the rules of baseball are arbitrary, right? I mean, just the fact that we value the ability to throw a ball hard or hit a ball that's thrown hard is totally arbitrary. Those skills might have some correlation to skills that are valuable in real life or were at one time valuable in real life, but not so much now. So we've just decided that these are impressive things that we will pay to see players do, and they are rich and famous as a result. So I guess it's not completely arbitrary in that these are things that we all enjoy or have convinced ourselves that we enjoy, but largely

arbitrary. And athletic competitions are all so different and have such completely different rules that that's just an illustration of that. It could be almost anything. And I guess we appreciate just speed and strength generally. And these are the many manifestations of that. So I am interested in this question because I always wonder about it when people talk about, say, with Jim Rice or someone like that during all the years of debates about his Hall of Fame candidacy and the more stat head type people would point out that he didn't walk that much and then other people would counter either that that didn't matter or that he might have walked more if that had been a prized aspect of performance at the time and that you can't penalize players from an earlier era by the standards of the current era because they were evaluated differently. They were told to do different things. They were instructed a different way. And so it's almost like moving the goalposts to after a player's career is over, say, now we value on base percentage and he wasn't good at that. So I'm always curious about that because I don't know how much of that is just inherent and how much of it really is based on coaching and the incentives that the player has. And I asked Ozzy Smith about that recently when he was on the Ringer MLB show because he just never struck out ever. And I was asking him basically, like, if you played today or if

your time had been more similar today and strikeouts hadn't had that stigma and no one really cared if you struck out that much, would you have struck out a lot more? Would you have tried to hit for more power? Would you have been able to? And he basically said no, that that was the type of player he was and he couldn't have been any other type of player. have been any other type of player. I wonder in retrospect, like how different would the Hall of Fame look if hitters always had sort of the brewing approach of try to hit everything hard in the air

instead of all the slap hitters that kind of defined entire decades of baseball. You wonder what the game would have looked like, but... Of course, there were decades of baseball when that made the most sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so... Yeah, absolutely.

I'm also reminded of all the times there's like a bang bang play at first base and someone thinks they're clever saying like look how genius baseball was designed such that not running 90 feet and throwing the ball to first base after ground ball 90 feet etc just takes the exact same amount of time and the game would be so different if the baseline was one foot longer or one foot shorter well okay the game would be different but we don't have access to those counterfactuals no matter what the game would have looked like we would just be used to what the game looks like and so there would still be bang bang plays and so let's stop worrying about that the baseball designers that were not genius

and i think one bit of evidence of that is well actually i don't actually have a joke so i'm just gonna let that one drop and move on to the next question. Okay. Question from Sanjay, a Patreon supporter. He says, has any player had his national profile rise as rapidly and as unexpectedly as David Ross? Going into the 2016 season, David Ross was a solid and unspectacular part-time catcher. Career line of.228,.314,.421, eight baseball reference war, reputation as a very good defender and teammate. Looks like a very nice career, a guy who eventually gets a nice saber biography, maybe carves out a role in coaching or front offices. That said, he was coming off a mediocre year, and it seemed like a lot of Cubs fans were ready to DFA him for Wilson

Contreras before the season started. After that point, he puts up almost two baseball reference war in only 205 plate appearances and gets attention as the de facto captain of the best team in baseball, hits a home run in game seven of the World Series, and is carried off the field as the Cubs break the curse, gets a book deal, appears on Dancing with the Stars, and is apparently a semifinalist. Has anyone gone from good but fairly nondescript career to on a reality show not hosted by Dr. Drew like Mr. Ross has? I don't have a good answer to this. Can you think of anybody? Maybe Mike Kekic and Fritz Peterson, the Yankees in the early 70s who swapped wives and children and became known for doing that, just showing up to spring training, swapping families and continuing on with life. They became famous for that. And Kekic was a pretty lousy player, I think, who only pitched a couple more years after that. Peterson was better, but I don't think either one

was particularly well-known. And of course they did that and they became celebrities and people still know them, even though they would have been long forgotten by most people otherwise. So something like that, that is really crazy off the field could get you notoriety, but it's true. Like David Ross really has had quite an ascent over the last year or so because people appreciated him as a backup catcher, as like a Greg Zahn type who was a good framer and like a good quote and a good clubhouse guy and all that. But for him to be on a reality show is kind of crazy

that many millions of people watch. I guess it's a testament to the Cubs and just the degree to which their story broke through in a way that most baseball stories don't. I'm a little shielded from the pop culture aspect, I guess, of this question because I didn't realize David Ross was on Dancing with the Stars. I don't know what's going on in that whole genre. My entertainment preferences are very much select. And it's more about baseball than what baseball players are

doing. I guess like you can point to someone like Dirk Hayhurst, but not really because he wrote some books and he came out of kind of nowhere because he was even less of a well-known player than David Ross was. But again, that took some time. And it's not like he's become whatever sort of household name David Ross is now. I think just in terms of things that have happened on the field, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who went more from anonymous

to well-known than Armando Galarraga for reasons that had only some stuff to do with Armando Galarraga. So even though he didn't end up on a reality show, there was plenty of coverage. And even now, whenever anything happens with Galarraga so even though he didn't end up on a reality show I'm there was plenty of coverage and even now whenever anything happens with Galarraga which I guess actually it's kind of depressing because I don't think anything is happening with Galarraga anymore that will be the first thing

that people bring up it's going to be with him for the rest of his life he is at least extremely well known among casual baseball fans that was kind of one of the bigger stories of the decade probably outside of that, I guess all there is, I don't need to go into all the racial biases of it, but David Ross kind of had checked every box for what you would need to have a very lovable personal player become like outlandishly famous given his skill set. So kudos, I guess, to David Ross. I also did not know about the book deal. I think maybe I need to read more about what's happening with baseball players.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, he had really great timing and the Cubs, I mean, like game seven was the most watched baseball game in I don't know how long and he hit a home run and he was also mic'd up during the game and they had some things about him talking to other players during the game so I guess that was really great exposure just excellent timing on his part and he had a beard and it was gray and a lot of the other Cubs were young and he just looked like he was from an earlier era of baseball or something so I guess it was a good story. And yeah, it seems to have paid off in his post baseball career. I don't know if like, like Chris Benson, maybe because Anna Benson became sort of a celebrity and she was on a reality show, but that's not really for reasons that you would want to be famous again. So I, uh, I don't know if anyone listening can think of a good one, please

write in. Yeah. I guess David Ross would have been everybody's dad's favorite cub So now with Dancing with the Stars He can be everybody's mom's favorite Former baseball player And then it just kind of captures those generations Alright Andrew says Last week a friend and I were having a discussion

That I thought could use your input How many runs need to be scored in a game In order for it to be considered a slugfest? Is it strictly a runs thing? Do a certain amount of home runs need to be hit? Do both teams need to be doing the slugging? Or does the 23-5 Nationals-Mets game that we saw recently qualify as a slugfest? Do you have any thoughts on slugfests?

Okay, so let's see. 23-5, that doesn't count as a slugfest. That counts as a drubbing or taking beyond the barn i don't know there's a there's a variety of adjectives you could use for that game for me personally that's not a slugfest and also for me personally i i do i do think a slugfest requires at least four maybe even five home runs in it i don't think a high scoring game on its own does enough for me because if you don't have home runs then those runs are coming from like singles and walks and no part of singles and walks makes me think slugfest so i

think you need a lot of home runs runs will come with that and my preference would probably be for at least one of the teams to reach the double digits so i think yeah and 10 to 7 with with at least five home runs for me that's a slug, I'm going to say not too lopsided a score, because if it's 23-5 or anything like that, that's just a blowout, I think. I don't think it's a slugfest. And I'm going to say both teams need to be in double digits, I think. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. If you have a 9-8 game, I guess that's pretty slugfesty, but I'm going to say both games. And I don't know how many games meet those criteria. Is that play-indexable? Can we see

what percentage of games have both teams in double digits? Yes, I believe so. You could by checking the number of teams matching criteria in a game. At least number of players. Maybe. Does that exist? That would be a silly thing to have

exist in a box, but whatever. Let's file it away as potentially play indexable. Okay. Well, it might be too exclusive. I don't know how many games that would actually turn up, but I think that will be my definition. And the more home runs, the better. But if you're going to have a game with both teams in double digits, you're almost certainly going to have some home runs in there that's not all going to be singles. So that's what I will say. Yeah, it's funny because you can have all these games increasingly, I guess, because the criteria to be a slugfest probably don't adapt with the times quite as well as they should. But baseball is now maybe increasingly or at least at the same level, a game of slugfests while it's Rob Manfred's priority to rid the game of snailfests.

All right, question from Scott. Recently, and on more than one occasion, Jeff has referenced baseball writing taking on a more positive tone in recent years, but always dismisses the thought as a topic for another episode. I'm hoping one day soon to hear that episode, or at least that portion of an episode. I become more and more intrigued with each mention. What are your perceptions about the shifting tone in baseball writing and what are your insights as to why the shift is occurring? Is either of you deliberate about this in your own writing? Well, I'm just going to not answer this and take it for Friday's

topic. So we'll just move right on. I guess in short, I don't know if you've thought about it at all and I don't have any hard evidence to go with it. But it feels to me, my sense is that in the earlier days of sabermetrics and baseball analysis, and by earlier days, I mean, like, you know, 1995 to 2005, like the early days for this generation, it felt more countercultury and more trying to get yourself known and and some of the first stuff that came out of all the analysis was like well here's here are on expectancy tables teams shouldn't bunt teams are stupid for bunting or or things like there's a lot of calling people calling players under or overrated calling managers and teams, trying to find analysis of really bad contracts. There was so much of trying to, I guess, legitimize the area of research by pointing out where the industry was wrong. And some of that has stuck and a good amount of it hasn't. And you graduate to the point now where it used to be stat heads were fighting for validation, for legitimacy,

for recognition. And that's not happening anymore. i know there are still dinosaurs out there but i mean there's exit velocity on national baseball games now there's there's pitch effects information people are talking about ucr on broadcast it's over but the fight's over baseball has very clearly embraced big data and i think that there's a shift where i don't know exactly why and maybe i'll think about this between now and friday if i do use this as a, where I think that people writing about the game are think when you try to call out authorities often enough, and then it turns out the authorities actually knew something all along, and you were wrong, then that can be kind of humiliating. So my thoughts might crystallize between now and when we actually do this podcast.

But I do think that the general tone of analytical writing is more positive now. And if you have one player who is exceeding expectations by 50% and one player who's undershooting expectations by 50%, I think you're likely to find more articles written about the good player than the bad one. Yeah, I think there's more humility now because the early generation of analysts have been proven wrong in some cases by better data. And often it will turn out that the old school people were right, at least to some degree in what they were saying. And there are fewer bad decisions being made and just teams are being run much more in line with the way that those writers were advocating and writers today of that same bent are advocating. Many of those writers now work for teams and are helping run those teams. So that's part of it. And if you used to work at Baseball Perspectives and you were working with James Click and Keith Wollner or whoever, and you were criticizing the way that baseball teams are run, and then James Click and Keith Wollner and Dan Fox and all those people are now helping run baseball teams, then you have less reason to criticize them because you know that your point of view is being heard and embraced and advocated for in those teams.

So, yeah, and it's just a lot less combative. There's less reason for it to be a sort of us versus them or trying to get attention because the attention has already been gotten. versus them or trying to get attention because the attention has already been gotten. And there's no need to snark as much in response to what people are saying because every comment the GM makes is very bland or just basically completely in line with everything that people at Baseball Perspectives or Fangraphs have been saying for a decade or more for the most part. So, yeah, I think it's just kind of an institutional cultural change that is very noticeable. If you go back and read Baseball Prospectus articles from 15 years ago or something,

it'll sound almost overly critical. And maybe that was what was needed at the time but it's not needed now i wonder if it's a reflection of sort of a greater evolution within the internet at large this gets into a very different conversation that i'm not authorized to lead but you i don't know if snark has yielded way to sort of the upworthiness uh upworthyification guess, of the internet where it's just trying to spread hashtag camp vibes or whatever are the hashtag trends of the day. Just trying to bring more positivity to the internet that used to be, I think, defined by its snark. In fact, I don't even know if snark was a word before the internet. I think it has a colorful history, but it at least

caught on on the internet. And I became aware of it through baseball analytical reading. And I wonder if this is something that's happened independent of any greater trends just because of the trend within baseball itself of teams embracing the numbers, or if there's just kind of more positivity on the at least American blogosphere internet. And I don't know, I don't have any points to make. I just had that one. Yeah, I don't know. There's still negativity on the internet from time to time. I don't know how to quantify whether it's less or more or whether in some areas, certainly today, it's probably even greater. I don't know whether there's a response in sports writing because people are miserable about other aspects of their lives to at least make baseball a happy place and not depress them when they're reading about baseball. I don't know. Maybe there's something to that. I would guess that it has even more to do with the things we were just talking about a minute ago, but it is very noticeable if you compare today to 15, 20 years ago. Agreed.

You have a stat segment. Stat segment. Let me sort this table so that I have a stat segment. All right. So not too long ago, a reader whose name I forgot to look up, maybe you'll remember it. You probably won't. There's enough emails already.

A reader emailed in to ask about the, I believe, the worst hitting streaks that players have had. I did respond to the email at the time but i decided to do a little more thorough research using the baseball reference play index listener's name is ked ked perfect thank you ted for the suggestion so i decided to use the baseball reference play index which remains not a sponsor of this podcast but is still informing many of these number of segments anyway could use the streak finder etc etc etc i decided to set a threshold of hitting streaks of at least 20 games 20 games i think is the kind of hitting streak that is at least notable and uh you know like a hitting

streak of seven you kind of roll your eyes at hitting streak of 14 that's nothing 20 that's pretty good you're hitting for three weeks in a row understanding that hitting streaks are sort of arbitrary because you can be great if you have three hits in one row. Understanding that hitting streaks are sort of arbitrary, because you can be great if you have three hits in one game and no hits in the next. Nevertheless, I looked at all of these streaks of at least 20 games. And for anybody out there who's curious, going back to 1913, at least for as much data as we have, there are 664 such hitting streaks. There are a whole bunch of those hitting streaks that don't have any home runs, which is not a surprise. The

lowest batting average for one of these streaks achieved by Tommy Agee in 1970. He had a 20 game hitting streak in which he had 23 hits, so he hit 288. That is one of three sub 300 batting averages for one of these

hitting streaks. Tommy Agee, George Case, probably not mispronouncing that one, and Eddie Foster. And I don't have a whole lot of length to go into in this segment because really there's just one hitting streak that I would like to discuss kind of briefly. There are two hitting streaks of at least 20 games that wound up with an OPS during the hitting streak of under 700, which seems incredible. Sandy Alomar in 1970 had a 22-game hitting streak in which he had 31 hits. He had zero triple zero home runs. He had an OPS of 677. And looking at Sandy Alomar's page, let's see.

Sandy Alomar that season, So during his hitting streak, he had a 677 OPS. And in the year of 1970, he had an overall 596 OPS. So he was still better than himself that season. So the one hitting streak that was worse than Sandy Alomar's, this is a 21 game hitting streak. This is achieved by Eddie Foster from From May 14, 1918 to June 2, 1918, Eddie Foster recorded at least one at-bat in 21 games. He had 26 hits. He had two doubles, zero triples, zero home runs, four strikeouts, five walks.

Eddie Foster batted 295, had a.333 OBP, and he slugged.318. It all yielded a combined OPS during Eddie Foster's 21-game hitting streak, a combined OPS of 652. That same year, Eddie Foster had a season OPS of 659, which means he was better

that season outside of his 21-game hitting streak, which I love. I don't know if he's the only player in this list to have been worse during his hitting streak. I'm going don't know if he's the only player in this list to have been worse during his hitting streak I'm going to guess the answer is yes because it one would be so inclined to assume the opposite but Eddie Foster 1918 probably not someone we can cold call on the podcast I think the odds of that one are slim I'm not going to scroll up to confirm but this is at least a reason to be aware of Eddie Foster 1918 better when he's not having a hitting streak than during his 21-game hitting streak.

All right, cool. All right, question from Bo. How high a percentage of all-played appearances would have to end in a three-true outcome walk-home-run or strikeout before you guys would see the game as broken? See the game as broken see the game as broken so let's have a reference we're at 33.4 percent this year which is an all-time high and last year was an all-time high and the year before that was an all-time high yeah so we've trended up from let's see what was a normal strikeout rate like 10 15 years ago would have been about 16 walk rate would have been around 8 that's 24 home run rate would have been probably two to three so okay three true outcomes a generation ago were probably somewhere around

what 26 to 28 percent somewhere around there so even the the upward trend is still one of those things that wouldn't wouldn't like slap you in the face if you just watch a game now but it's it's beyond evident in the numbers it's clear and we've written a million times about why this is so where is the dividing line i guess i still obviously can stomach watching baseball now i love writing about players who suddenly hit for power or develop some way to get strikeouts and that's not tired to me yet even though home runs and strikeouts kind of are tired league-wide. So I would say that my personal dividing line would be broken, broken.

Like, does broken mean unwatchable, or how do we define broken? Maybe enough that some people would stop watching, enough that it would hurt the game, enough that attendance would decline, revenues would decline. Obviously, not everyone's going to abandon baseball at the same time, but just, I guess, so that it heads downhill or some people consider it unwatchable. Well, I think that if there was a huge boost in walks, I think people would be really turned off by that. People don't like walks. I don't like watching walks for God's sake. Walks are boring. I know they help, but they're boring. They suck. Walks are great, but they suck. I think that strikeouts, because they're just another out, it doesn't slow things down. People like strikeouts with swings and

misses are sexy. People like home runs, even though there's probably been 17 home runs. We've been recording this podcast. I don't even know if there are any active games. So I think that the line would be quite high before there would be a real problem among fans in terms of tuning in so i would think uh i even 40 might be too low i guess i let's let's even keep walks constant let's keep walks around nine percent and where are home runs right now like three percent of plate appearances i think that's right yeah okay so let's see nine percent walks three percent home runs that's 12 so if there were strikeouts we're coming up on strikeouts in a quarter of all plate appearances and that would yield a three true outcomes percent

of nine thirty seven percent i think we could make it to 40 before there would be sort of talk about how baseball is broken and even then i don't think revenues would be sort of talk about how baseball is broken. And even then, I don't think revenues would be in too bad of a situation. I really think it's walks that would be the biggest turnoff. Yeah. In the last few days, I've been thinking about this a lot because I was writing about home run rates and everything. And I more and more think that we just make too big a deal out of all of these changes. And it's because it's a product of what we do. We have to do podcasts a bunch of times a week. We have to write articles a bunch of times a week. We got to write about something and we are examining the game on a level that most people

are not. Most people who even like baseball are just turning the TV on and they're watching their team and then they're turning it off. And that is about it. Maybe they're looking at box scores or something, but they don't have that awareness of the minutia. They don't know if some rate is slightly higher or lower than it was the previous year. And if they did know, they wouldn't care. And that's fine. And I think that's probably true for the vast majority of people.

So we're really interested in how the game is trending and if it's trending that way, why is it trending that way? And will it continue to trend that way? It's fascinating. We talk about it and write about it a lot, but really, I don't know that we're anywhere close to it mattering to most people. Like, you know, Dave wrote a post about a week into the season about this march toward three true outcome baseball. And I wrote about it in spring training even before the season started. So I just don't know if it matters that much because we're all like sounding the alarm about this increase. And yet we've gone from, you know, 28 percent, say, 10 years ago to 33 percent now.

It was like the mid 20s five years before that. I mean, maybe the climb is accelerating and so that's a little worrisome, but if we're saying that we could get to 40 and most people wouldn't even care, that even at the current rate of acceleration, I mean, we're up basically a percentage point from last season if that continues to hold. So we're talking about another seven years before we get to that point where we're saying that maybe some people would care. So I don't know if this is really an imminent threat in the way that we kind of describe it when we often talk about it. So I think in the same way that we talk about how baseball writers hate long games because they have to be at the games, maybe baseball writers focus too much, dwell too much on these little changes in the way the game is played just because they are paying so much attention to it that any change is magnified by that attention to detail. Yes, baseball writers have to blow everything somewhat out of proportion because otherwise they wouldn't be writing

about the thing that they're writing about. Maybe they just need things to write about, speaking for present company. I would think that if anything, we've seen anti-evidence of people being turned off by the blossom in three true outcomes baseball that we've seen. I know baseball isn't the national pastime.

It probably wasn't the national pastime 50, 60 years ago. I know that it's still like a, it's become a regional or tribal sport, but that's just inevitable with the way things are in the media landscape. And baseball is in zero ways suffering for attention or money. And I would, I would think that if there's a linked pattern that could become a major issue, it's not walks, strikeouts, or home runs, but it's, it's pitchers who are throwing harder and trying to throw as hard as they possibly can. Sam Miller retweeted on Wednesday morning an article that was written by ESPN's Eddie Matz, ESPN senior writer Eddie Matz, and it was an article written about Robbie Ray. It's an article written about Robbie Ray

grunting when he throws. Robbie Ray is not the only pitcher, certainly not the only athlete who grunts consistently, but Gray grunts with basically every pitch. He grunts to such a degree that you can hear him from hundreds of feet away. He grunts in a way that might explain his high strikeout rate, although that then does not in any way explain his frequency of hits allowed. Anyway, it's an article about Ray grunting. It's something that he started to grunt, tracing the background of his grunting preferences. He started to grunt somewhere, I think it was last season season maybe it was the year before that i don't remember exactly it

doesn't matter read the article it's great about him grunting and he was he decided after yeah it was last season because he had like a bad first month i think it was and then he had like a conference in the bullpen before game he had a terrible warm-up and he got some sage advice and he was like i'm just gonna throw the hell out of the ball and then he just goes and he grunts with every pitch and his velocity climbs and there's strikeouts and everything and he's striking a lot of hitters out now but this is coming with higher velocity Robbie Ray has not been significantly hurt yet to my knowledge and I don't want to talk about it like it's an inevitability but there is a reflection in him of the trend at large of

pitchers not only training better than ever but just basically throwing at 100% all of the trend at large of pitchers not only training better than ever, but just basically throwing at 100% all of the time. And it makes sense that they would not only so they could get to the major leagues in the first place, but because outings you've looked at outings are just more abbreviated than they've ever been. Relievers are maybe maybe starting to throw a little more in a game. But still, that's with a relief pitcher workload and starters are throwing less and less and less. So maybe they're just trying to pack in more and more of their energy but if pitchers are throwing at 100 effort 100 of the time then you just you get stories like it's it's a bummer it's a complete bummer for everybody that noah syndergard is hurt but we've

we've talked about it as an inevitability and it really did feel like an inevitability. And it might be an inevitability that he's going to get even more hurt because he has a lat strain, a torn lat instead of a torn UCL or a completely ruined shoulder. And if enough of the exciting young pitchers get hurt, that's where I think baseball's real crisis is. Because as a fan, you want those players. And it's beyond frustrating when players just get hurt because you want to be able to rely on the people on your favorite team. And if you can't do that, I don't know why you keep tuning in on a consistent basis. Obviously, position players don't have the same kind of problem that they're facing, but pitchers are 40% of the game, or I guess that's 40% of value. They're 50% of the game, and sometimes more than 50% of a roster. And if you can't rely on your most valuable pitchers to stay healthy, then I think that would be a major turnoff. And I think that's something that baseball is going to have to reckon with. And I recognize that they are already. Yeah. Although as Sam wrote in a recent article, if they weren't getting hurt all the time,

then the other things that we're talking about, the strikeouts, would be an even bigger problem because you'd have the best pitchers staying in the game more often. And right now, the fact that they are not, that they break pretty often, is one of the things keeping hitters from being more overwhelmed than they are. Give me a league with more strikeouts and Noah Syndergaard than a league with fewer strikeouts and Adam Wilk. Yeah. All right. Question from Henchman21, who is a Patreon supporter and a Venture Brothers fan. He says, the Red Sox have a glaring hole at third base and have seemingly chosen not to address it despite having a ton of young, cheap talent elsewhere on the roster. Perhaps they believe in a Sandoval bounce back, but the front office had to have had their eye on Manny Machado, right?

What are the odds that they shot themselves in the foot and already took themselves out of the running for him once he is a free agent? So people at the beginning of the season, maybe you, maybe other people were writing about how if the Orioles season went south, they could be interesting because maybe they'd think about trading Machado. Obviously, it has gone north, very, very north, which you just wrote about. So they will not be trading Manny Machado, but he will still be a free agent at some point, presumably. So question is, will he now cross them off of his potential free agent destination list because of all the fighting and the wars of words and the wars of throwing baseballs that those two teams have recently gone through okay so the easy answer is no but the fun answer is yes yes he has yes they have and so i really and genuinely do believe this is stuff that just ends up water under the bridge i didn't think to take the time to do a little uh background research before this

but i can speak as a fan who has enjoyed watching players signed or acquired from rivals. And as soon as somebody wears your own uniform, then you get to forget about that history. I think Red Sox fans would very quickly see past any issues with Manny Machado if he played for them. And I think Machado would see past issues he has with the fan base when he sees $400 million as an offer. Now, the odds that Machado goes to the Red Sox are slim. That's still at least, what, a year and a half away, if anything. And there are so many other teams who would love to have Manny Machado. And if Machado does go somewhere else, the Red Sox could always explain it. If they were

maybe thinking about signing him, they could always say, oh, we didn't want to bring him in past baggage. Same reason the Orioles didn't go after Jose Bautista. So there's the possibility of something there. But at least for this particular season, I would think that the Red Sox were probably thinking, let's give Sandoval a chance to show some signs of life. And failing that, maybe we could bring up Rafael Devers. Devers right now in a small sample in AA has been letting it up. He's got an obp of 366 he's slugging 560 with portland so deaver is probably not too far off he's one of the prospects left in the red socks thinned system and he's people have seen him coming for a while so it would not

be any amount of surprise to me to see him in boston within i don't know a month and a half two months so given how much the red socks everywhere else, it made sense they couldn't just address everything. I think Machado would be willing to just kind of let it slide. And so would the Red Sox. But I guess I don't have a whole long list of precedent for this kind of behavior. And based on a sample size of Dan Duquette, maybe it does matter. Yeah, there have been cases where a player had some beef with a team or a player, and

then he ended up being that player's teammate. And they just kind of make nice, and everyone moves on because you have to. And generally, that's what I think when someone asks, like, for instance, sometimes you get a player who's a pre-arbitration guy, and some teams will give their pre-arbitration guys a little more money than the absolute minimum

than they have to just as a show of goodwill. And then sometimes teams won't, right? And that was a story when the Angels didn't pay Trout more than they had to. Same thing with the Mets and Cinderguard, I think, this spring. It's a story periodically. And I always assume that that just has no effect. I think there was even a study, if I remember right, that showed it had no effect, that what you paid a guy, basically you're talking about a few thousand dollars. At that point, it just doesn't matter. Years go by, other things happen, and the player just forgets about that and teams, probably the same is true. A year and a half from now, who knows what the situation with the Red Sox will be. Some portion of the team will have turned over. Maybe the manager will have changed.

Who knows? Maybe some of the players who threw at Machado won't be on the Red Sox anymore. So I just think that players kind of put this behind them and that if the Red Sox end up being the high bidder on Manny Machado and there aren't other reasons why he wants to go somewhere else more, he'll probably just say it's over and that's that. I mean, there could be rare cases like he made critical comments about really the entire team's character that were maybe justified, but he believed that at the time. So, you know, like I doubt he would turn down a meeting with the team when he's a free agent and just say, you know, don't call me and not take their message. And if he goes to the team and

they give him a tour of the stadium and some of the team leaders call him and say, hey, come play in Boston. It's a great place to play. That stuff's going to take precedence over something that happened a year and a half earlier. So I would think it's the rare, rare, rare case where something like this dictates where a player ends up signing. Yeah, I would think that in the introductory press conference of Manny Machado signing with the Red Sox, this basically just gets distilled into one question that Machado has a laugh over. And I have one. I'd forgotten about this, but you might remember that when Josh Hamilton signed with the Angels, he made a remark that somewhat hilariously, Anaheim was more of a baseball town than Arlington, Texas, or wherever

he was specifically referring to in Texas. When Hamilton played his first game in Texas as a member of the Angels, he was heartily booed by Rangers fans. And then, of course, two years later, Hamilton returned to the Rangers. He returned through a trade. The Rangers made basically zero commitment to him. But anyway, he came back to the Rangers. And in his first at bat, he received a rousing standing ovation from the Rangers fans who were so-Josh Hamilton in 2013, and they were at least pro the Josh Hamilton comeback story in 2015. And granted, they probably turned on him again because baseball fans have a delicate relationship with players who have off-field issues. But in any case, Hamilton would be the best example I can come up with almost off the top of my head. All right. Question from Kevin. I was at the Rangers AAA Round Rock game on Friday night And it went into extra innings

The game was fun, but nine innings was enough for me So in the bottom of the tenth I started chanting the pitch clock countdown To try and mess with the pitcher As crowds do, the rest of the fans around home plate quickly joined in And it led to a rattled reliever walking the number nine hitter Then allowing a single followed by a walk-off double by Jerks and profar my question is this type of inevitable crowd behavior a fatal flaw with the pitch clock that the players union would never approve or is it a hidden benefit that would increase fan engagement and home field advantage while also helping the pace of play okay i think

it would be in theory it would be a hidden benefit i think it would be great to have actual chance just more crowd participation people always want the crowd to be more into it i think the problem in a case like this is that there are so many numbers to count down every single time if you have a 20 second clock people aren't going to want to chant 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 etc all the way down every single pitch so that's that's a non-starter just fans are not going to be that engaged at least not in the majority of them. You'll get the drunk ones and the isolated ones later in games, but it would be effective if it was almost random when it came up.

Like if you just greeted certain relievers, like choose one reliever a game where you're just going to chant or like one inning. I don't know. But yeah, there's just too many numbers. It's too engaged of a chant. Because this is an audience that sometimes will chant and repeat itself three or four times over saying, let's go Yankees or something. That's really simple, easy to do, and you're done within 15 seconds. The fans are not going to want to chant this much.

Yeah. I guess you could start the countdown when you get to 10 or something, and that would be a little bit easier. But yeah, I don't know if this is a common occurrence at minor league games. I haven't heard of this happening regularly. Maybe it's a little bit easier at minor league games with smaller parks and smaller crowds. It would be more noticeable, and maybe minor league players would be more susceptible to getting rattled by this sort of thing than major league players would. susceptible to getting rattled by this sort of thing than major league players would. But I agree, it would be nice to have more coordinated fan behavior during games, not necessarily the wave, which is sort of adjacent to the game, but something that is

focused on the game in the way that Japanese crowds do, which sounds like a lot of fun. And we don't really see that kind of cheering and chanting as much in United States crowds. So yeah, I mean, this would be kind of fun, but I doubt it would be such a big problem that the players union would get upset about it. Really, I don't know why there's not more chanting just like derisively of the other player's last name. It's the usual last name chant and you know exactly what it sounds like. And it's great when the entire building or a stadium participates it's outstanding i love when hockey fans do it to a goalie who's just allowed a goal they just chant his last name

over and over i don't know if it makes any difference but every single person can participate it's not on its face cruel so it's not like parents would not want their kids to do it couldn't be easier it can go as long as you want if like the pitcher walks somebody or gives up a home run it can get even louder and more intense and like as the player you're being singled out you know it's your name and you know it's not like a good chant they're all waiting for you to make a mistake and i i can't believe there's not more of that in baseball it's just it's so easy to me as opposed to like the scoreboard saying make some noise and people say let's go yankees that doesn't do what does that do for anybody the yankees don't need you to cheer them on but the yankees need you to make fun of the other team yeah all right uh let's see it's been

a few weeks since uh we did a mike trout hypothetical i think so let's do one from jamal it's opening day 2020 mike trout has just won his fifth mv MVP award after leading MLB in war for the eighth consecutive year. He's all but cemented his Hall of Fame resume. But in 2019, Trout rose to heights unseen, posting career highs in every category. And it turns out Trout was taking all the shine from all the other players, so Rob Manfred needed to even the playing field. He institutes a new rule to slow down Trout. He declares that Trout is hereby allotted one swing per plate appearance. He knows this. Opposing pitchers know this.

Fans at the game and watching TV know this. One swing per plate appearance. That's it. So with this new rule instilled, how do opposing pitchers and Trout go about playing under these circumstances? When would be the best time to utilize the swing if you're Trout? And how do you attack Trout at the plate knowing he only gets one chance To swing if you're an opposing pitcher

Does falling behind 3-0 to Trout become The optimal time for him to swing Knowing he's getting it down the pipe fastball Or do pitchers try to get him to chase out of the strike zone Early so that they're given the freedom To throw strikes knowing he has wasted His swing. How would his strikeout And walk rates look by season end

And finally, is this the limitation that finally lowers mike trout to below replacement level bad man there's a lot of bad players who i think should be limited to one swing per plate appearance so so this is a fun one obviously it's not because of the the reason because it would never happen but it's fun to think of just because it gets into like pure game theory intellectual gymnastics where so just for the record this season mike trout has averaged 1.8 swings per plate appearance so already he has plenty of plate appearances that do end with one swing but of course there's a difference uh trout is not limited to said one swing so if you are trout you would essentially go up there with the what there was there was a an Eric

Thames article written by Travis Satchick it was Travis Satchick on Wednesday who wrote about Eric Thames who had been watching videos of Barry Bonds so it's it's Travis Satchick writing about Eric Thames talking about Barry Bonds being talked about by somebody else saying that Bonds would go up there and look for a pitch within like a three inch sided box or something in the strike zone and Bonds would just look for that pitch and then he would attack it and so Trout would essentially hone in he would sit dead red he would have sort of like a his 3-1-3-0 approach in every single plate appearance because he couldn't do anything else he would only swing at pitches in his hot zones or around his hot zone. We know exactly where that is. It's the lower half the plate kind of over the middle, which is not a

surprise. So he would sit on that pitch. Pitchers would of course know that he's sitting on that pitch. If Trout used his swing and then it didn't work and he fouled the ball off or swung a miss, then it gets lappable because pitchers would just try to they would just throw batting practice fastballs and trout would do nothing so i would think that trout would wait a while he would very rarely swing early in the count of course we know the most valuable pitchers are the ones that come with i think two strikes right now anyway trout would have to mix in just enough so that he's not just being

pitched to too easily early in a bat but the one advantage he would have is that he could decide to swing or not to swing when the pitch is on its way. So he could stand in there and you would not see anything. You would not see a frequently a lob or anything before trout swing. But then things would get very funny after that. I wonder how much he could still produce given these conditions. He does do a lot of damage. And also, we've both looked up that it's not like pitchers are guaranteed strikes when wonder how much he could still produce given these conditions because he does do a lot of damage and

also we've both looked up that it's not like pitchers are guaranteed strikes when they need to throw a strike like we've both looked at the pitchers throwing what like 65 or 70 percent strikes when they have a 3-0 count against the opposing pitcher like yeah although in this case they would probably do better than that because they wouldn't even have to throw a competitive pitch they could lob it in they could just throw it 50 miles an hour like they're just playing catch. Presumably, that would be easier than even just the pitch that you would throw to a pitcher, which would still probably be 90 or something. You wouldn't even have to throw a real pitch unless your ego or something forced you to do it, even though you didn't have to. So I would guess that if pitchers just have to get it across the plate and they know that

even a bad swing couldn't be coming, then I would think that they would rarely walk him. They'd probably still walk him occasionally, but I would think very rarely. Yeah. And I can see that this would render Trout extremely mortal, if that's the thing you can be. It's fun to imagine ways in which it wouldn't, but let's see. Looking at Trout's career, he has hit, with his swings, 39% of his swings, he has hit a ball and hit the ball fair. So not a whiff, not a foul, and that's less than 50%. He might be able to get

it up to 50% if he's only swinging dead red or at least at pitches that he thinks are dead red. So Trout would still do a lot of damage, but would he be the worst regular hitter in baseball? I really, I can't, I don't know the answer to that because his eye is so good. Yeah, it's hard to have an answer to that off the top of your head, but my instinctive sense would be yes. I think if he could only swing once, but no one knew that, then I think he'd still be really good. But the fact that everyone knows that he's limited to one swing, I think that's just too much information and that he couldn't compensate for that let's see uh robert gesellman couldn't swing at all last oh okay so gesellman last year had one hit gesellman this year has one hit as someone who's fully capable of swinging nothing to be probably nothing to be learned there but yeah trap would be i guess

he'd be pretty bad but he'd be pretty bad in a really fun way to study game theorists would just have entire classes dedicated to this topic yeah all right so i guess he'd still be playable would he still be playable given his other skills maybe for now you'd still yeah the hell with it i'll say he's playable he's playable. He's playable. He's an average player. I don't know if I'll quite go to average, but I'll say he's... I'm going for average. Okay, I'll say he's playable.

All right, question from Evan. After the Eric Thames show a couple weeks ago, I started thinking about KBO pitchers throwing a lot more junk and forcing him to adjust. I'm sure there are plenty of players who can hit fastballs but are just awful on breaking balls. You even mentioned that it might be beneficial for some players to go to Korea for the sole purpose of pulling a Thamesian transformation. Most professional soccer teams will loan players for a season or two for various reasons, like getting

more experience, playing every day, freeing up space, etc. Would it be beneficial for an MLB team to take, for example, a quadruple A player who can't hit off speed stuff, loan them to a KBO team for a year to fix their junk problems, and then have them come back stateside once they become super good? How do signing rights work when a player goes abroad? Are KBO breaking balls better than triple A breaking balls? I probably don't have a great answer for that part, but I don't know that I totally buy the Thames breaking ball transformation story. It sounds like a fun story. I'm sure there's something to it.

At least I don't know that that would work for most players. I don't know the rates of breaking balls in the KBO. I don't know the quality of breaking balls in the KBO. If we assume that they are more common, then I suppose it would help to be exposed to them. There are probably some players who just will never hit breaking balls well, no matter how many they see, but I just don't know if this would be worth the loss in quality of competition in other ways. Maybe you'd get worse against fastballs because you're not seeing good fastballs. So I don't know if this would be a repeatable strategy.

I like the idea. And I'm sure that Thames did get better against breaking balls by seeing so many of them in Korea. But again, the thing that might be toughest about transitioning to the States is that you're seeing the best velocity in the world. And that's something that he never saw in Korea. So how did Thames adjust so well the fastballs that are 98 that he certainly never saw in Korea and that's just natural ability so I think I'm sure that there was some polishing around the edges that did happen for Thames in the KBO but it seems like his refined approach was more something that happened as a function of his just having time this is again people should just read the article that Travis Sajic wrote about Thames on Wednesday on Fangraphs. It's great. And it goes into

some background on how Thames decided to and was able to refine his play discipline. And the answer is probably not quite as simple as the article makes it look because the answers never are. But Thames did not get good because he saw a lot of junk in Korea. And I don't think that Pedro Alvarez could solve himself if he went to play in Korea. And Will and Rosario, as we discussed previously, has certainly not figured out how to hit junk in Korea. And so I doubt there's a benefit that you couldn't learn nearly as well just by facing a breaking ball pitching machine in any major league facility in the country.

Although Jeff Manship is still been incredible. He now has won all seven of his starts for Eric Thames' old team in Korea with a 149 ERA and a 0.92 whip. So that's nice at least. Last question from Johnny. I am a relatively new resident of St. Paul, Minnesota. I live within walking distance of the St. Paul Saints' beautiful new stadium and intend to engage as a fan of the team when they begin their 2017 season on May 18th. What is the best way to root for an independent league team? We could probably extend this to a minor league team too. Should I love the individual players and root for them to advance to organize ball? Should I focus on the team and root for victories in a championship? Should I attempt to care as little as possible and let the wonders of baseball wash over me? This seems like it's a

question that you are more equipped to answer because I've wondered similar things. I've always liked the major league franchises, but the only hockey team that exists in Portland is the Portland Winterhawks, which are a, they're not even affiliated they have a roster that has some drafted players but they play in the whl and it's a bunch of very young players like 16 through 21 sometimes but mostly players who are trying to be going places and so players seldom stick around for more than a few years which is is not too different from, I guess, hell, even just think about college sports. I don't know what you do then.

This is a little more extreme than that. But yeah, I'm mostly interested in your answer. I have nothing to say. I'm curious. Yeah, well, I guess in IndieBall, at least, and maybe low levels of the minors, the players are kind of a part of the community in a way that major leaguers aren't. They're living with host families. They're out and about in the town. Maybe the town is smaller in some cases,

so you see them around. That was certainly the case in Sonoma when I was there. So I think maybe you root for the guys and you root for their stories and you get to know them in a way that you don't get to know more famous and successful players. So that's probably part of it. I think if you do that and you get to know the players and like the players, then of

course you root for them to succeed. And even if it hurts your team, you probably root for them to get picked up and fulfill their dreams and that sort of thing. So that is also something to root for. dreams and that sort of thing. So that is also something to root for. And hopefully you just like the aesthetic experience of watching baseball and being at baseball games. And really, if you're talking about a high level indie ball game, it's not so different from watching a major league game. If no one told you what the level of competition was, it would probably take you a little while to figure out that it

wasn't what you were used to. It's not exactly the same, but it's not completely incomparable. So I would say that you can like the team for most of the same reasons that you would like any team. I think obviously you're a little less focused on a championship and on short-term success of the team probably, especially if you're talking about a minor league team where it's subject to the whims of the parent club and you're constantly losing players and the priority even for the team is not really winning in a larger sense. So I think probably there has to be a greater appreciation for the little stories and the emotional stuff and things that you might not

care as much about with a big league team because you have a playoff spot to root for and a championship spot to root for. But players want to win and you want them to win. And so I think largely it's the same reasons. Ben wrote a book, by the way. He co-wrote a book, everybody should know that. In your book book you wrote obviously mostly about finding the players and how the players were managed and whatnot but there was very little written for a good reason about the the fans of the sonoma stompers and while your focus was of course on what was taking place on the field what was your experience with the people who came out i mean were there are the is there such a thing as a sonoma stompers die, or is it more families

who come to the park and cheer for when players do a good thing, and then they just go home? Yeah, they're definitely diehards. They're Stompers fans who are at every game, who even travel to watch the team's away games. A lot of the time, it's because they are a host family, and so these players become almost their kids for the summer. And so they're rooting for them like a biological parent would almost. So that's a big part of it. There's always a hardcore cheering section just because of that. But there are some people who, you know, like there's not another higher level team to watch right in Sonoma.

So if you like baseball, you just get attached to what is close to you, the team that you can walk or drive to easily. So yeah, there definitely were some diehard Stompers fans, and I'm sure they're diehard fans of almost every professional team out there. So we will leave it there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already done so include Timothy Mennell, Ryan McLaughlin, Jim O'Brien, Mick Reinhart, and Will Cohane. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group, which is approaching 6,000 members at facebook.com

slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're looking for something else to listen to, we'll have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up today. Michael and I talked to Ken Zhu, who's an executive vice president and the chief financial officer of the Boston Red Sox.

And we talked to him about how sabermetrics and moneyball have made their way into the business of baseball, how teams are increasingly using analytics and ticketing and marketing and promotions and concessions and the effect that that's had. You can find that in the Ringer MLB show feed. You can contact me and Jeff with comments and questions via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

We'll talk to you again very soon. We have one chance, one chance to get everything right. We have one chance, one chance. And if we're lucky, we might.