Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1057: Tie Goes to the Podcast

Episode Date: May 13, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on two topics from the previous episode, announce an upcoming live event, banter about seven winning teams that weren’t supposed to win and Oakland’s monthly ballpark pass, and then discuss whether they’re pro- or anti-ties in baseball.. Audio intro: Beastie Boys, "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" Audio outro: Elvis Presley, "I […]

🎵 No, no, swing, jump from me, I'm free. No, no, swing, jump from me, I'm free. Hello and welcome to episode 1057 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Dolvin of Fangraphs, talking to Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. People can't hear it, but you do a countdown before we start recording, as most people do. But you start on the one, I guess. So you go three, two, and then you start talking where someone would normally say one, which always gives me a little charge, a little extra spring going into the episode. I think I'm going to have to wait that extra one second. And no, here we go. We're off. Yeah, I know. It's a trick I learned in college. That's what the tuition is for. I also realized that I don't even think about the words I'm going to have to wait that extra one second. And no, here we go. We're off. No, it's a trick I learned in college. That's what the tuition is for.

I also realized that I don't even think about the words I'm saying anymore. I guess this is the benefit of having the same introduction in every podcast. They just come out. And I'm always afraid that I'm going to. Anyway, hi, how are you? How are you? Hi, I'm good. Do you have anything you'd like to banter about?

Well, we should follow up, I suppose, on a couple things we talked about yesterday. Meg Rowley did some serious play indexing after our conversation about slugfests and how to define slugfests. And I was musing about how many slugfests there had been by my definition, which is that both teams have to get into the double digits. And some people pointed out that maybe there should be a lead change component to it. So that might enhance the slugfestness. But Meg did some play indexing. She found that there have been 1,269 games since 2013 in which both teams have scored double digit runs. I don't know what percentage of overall games that is, but 84 of those games had no home runs. She's found that 424 of them had five or more home runs. 11 had 10 or more home runs, led by a Tigers-White Sox game on May 28, 1995. With 12 home runs, the Tigers hit

seven, the White Sox hit five. And you said that you remembered that game happening. Yeah, I remember seeing that game in a newspaper, and I believe that was the game that had the most home runs hit in a game ever. But for some reason in my head, I kept remembering it as 13. That part's not interesting. The number 1,269 games since 2013, if that's true, that would represent something like 10% of all baseball games, which seems high, I think. But I don't know. Run scoring was down for the first few years. I don't know. I haven't fact-checked. It sounds fine enough. But I wasn't sure how you felt about the lead change component that a few people suggested. I don't think that matters to me

so much. It makes it a more exciting game, certainly, but I think it's still a slugfest for me if one team wins 11-10 and had the lead the whole time. It does feel like there's maybe at least a component where it has to be somewhat close throughout. I don't think a lead change specifically is necessary if you're kind of hanging tight and you think that there could be a lead change, and that seems to work. Right. And the other follow-up was from Zachary Levine, who wrote in about another question that we were talking about, which was the David Ross question. Has there ever been sort of a marginal player who achieved the same level of post-career notoriety? achieved the same level of post-career notoriety. And Zachary pointed out Bob Uecker, which is an excellent example. And he was also a catcher. He was a much worse catcher than David Ross, but obviously became something of a celebrity, was in movies, was on The Tonight Show all the time, was a broadcaster, and has sort of achieved fame outside of sports. And that is the thing we were talking about with Ross. So I would say that that is the perfect precedent.

And if I'm not mistaken, this is going to date me in the opposite way of usual, but he had a fairly regular role on Mr. Belvedere, right? Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. So Bob, you're a great example that I don't know why we didn't think of it, but it's probably because there are way, way too many baseball players for us to keep track of all of them off the top of our heads. Do you have anything else? So one thing we should announce in addition to our August Eclipse Fest event in Salem, Kaiser in Oregon, which we will probably have some Some follow up for people who are coming to that

But that's been sold out for a while We'll talk about that soon but We also have an East Coast event That same month we're doing like a Home away series You're coming here to Brooklyn And we're doing a pitch talks Event at the Bell House on

Monday August 7th We're going to record a live episode. I have no idea what we will talk about or whom we will talk to, but we'll do something. You can buy tickets now. So tickets are $15. I think you have to be 21 or over or

able to convince people that you are 21 or over. Can you? No, probably not if I've shaved. So you can go to homestandsports.com and you can find our listing again, Monday, August 7th, and the tickets are on ticket fly. So I would assume that if you want to come, you should get tickets sometime soon, but that's the Bell House, Brooklyn. We look forward to seeing those of you who can make it. How are you at working the crowd?

Decent. I've had some practice at Saber seminars and that sort of thing. I've never done a pitch talks event, but I'm sure it's a similar crowd. And I would assume that it will be a friendly crowd. Probably not a lot of people coming to heckle us and tell us they hate the show. But if you want to do that, you are able to buy a ticket for that purpose too. All right. How long is your topic going to take? Probably not very long. Okay. Well, I wrote something about teams that are outperforming their projections.

I wrote a couple days ago at The Ringer, there were seven teams that have been winning teams thus far that were projected to be losing teams. And you have, by chance, also written about a couple of those teams in the last day or two. We are often looking at the same things and racing each other without acknowledging that that's happening. But which of those teams, I guess, are you buying to the greatest degree? And these teams that I was looking at were the Orioles, the Yankees, the Reds and Brewers, the Twins, the Rockies, and the Diamondbacks. All of these have been winning teams as we speak, different degrees of winning, obviously, but they've done it in a bunch of different ways. The Yankees have just been almost the best at everything. They've kind of outslugged everyone.

They've been much better run prevention wise than you would expect. They're the ones whose performance so far at least is the most earned or the most deserved. If you look at run differential or whatever sort of less context sensitive way of evaluating a baseball team, they have played the best thus far, which doesn't mean they will be the best or that they are the best. And then you have the Orioles who are Orioles-ing again. You wrote about that. They are totally defying the projections largely because of bullpen performance, although they did have a Brad Brock meltdown right after we both wrote about them. And then you have the Twins who have had a defensive turnaround.

You wrote about that too. You've got the Reds who've had a defensive turnaround. You wrote about that too. You've got the Reds who've had a defensive turnaround. You wrote about that too. You have the Brewers who have Eric Thames, I guess. And you have the Diamondbacks who, you know, I think a lot of people expected them to be decent. And they've been a little bit better than decent. Their rotation has been great. Lots of people thought their rotation would be great. Hurts losing Shelby Miller, et cetera, but there was the bones of a

pretty decent team there. And then you have the Rockies who were a lot of people's surprise pick heading into the season. So it's not so surprising that they are doing pretty well, but it's interesting the way they're doing it. And you and I both mentioned that they have built a ground ball staff. And we've heard forever, oh, get ground balls in Coors Field, keep the you'd think there's an element of intention to that. We've heard for a while about various pitch types being affected by the thin air there and that maybe if you could just kind of pump fastballs in, you'd be less hurt by being in cores. So it seems like there are things you can point to with almost all of these teams and say they have done something unusual or unexpected or impressive and maybe that can continue i don't think any of these teams has like been outscored or anything they've all played fairly well if not quite as well as their record

would suggest this is convenient because i was torn and this is nearly going to be the topic and i thought maybe it's a little too simple or mainstream or something but anyway it's good because now we get the actual baseball this is so basic we come here for somebody on Fangraph said that last week's Aaron Judge topic was too mainstream and it stuck in my head now I think

I guess everything has to be weird so yeah we get to cover all the bases and see you made a mistake you wrote about seven teams in one post. I've gotten five posts out of this, and there's two more to go. So outside of that, yeah, it's fun to have surprising teams. And every single one of these teams is doing something that is notable and kind of different from the others, I think. I mean, I would be inclined to say the orioles

are doing the weirdest thing but then it's the orioles and so you get biased by all the weird stuff they've been doing for the previous five years but like the fact of the matter is i don't think their pitching is very good their bullpen is still deep but it doesn't have the like one of the best relievers in baseball for the next two months and the lineup has not actually been that good even despite whatever Manny Machado has been trying to do lately so I buy the Orioles the least out of this group but then well no because see that sounds stupid because then I'm saying that I buy the Orioles less than the Twins and that's just ridiculous because the magnitude of the Orioles start, I buy the least because it's just been insane. But I also recognize that in recent years, we've just been abused by teams like the Orioles, Rangers and Royals getting off to weird starts like this and basically never slowing down.

So it's always a little challenging to stick your neck out or not stick your neck out for one of these teams. And based on the research you've done in the past, we know that we shouldn't put too much stock into this. You wrote a couple of years ago in mid-June comparing preseason projections to how the teams had performed up to that point in the year. And even at that point, the preseason projections were still more predictive of the rest of season performance than the season to date performance. Even when you looked at run differential, which should be a little less noisy than the actual results. So we're still a month away from mid-June. So we're really at a time when we should not be changing our prior beliefs about these teams too much.

changing our prior beliefs about these teams too much and yet they have all done things or most of them have done things that make you tempted to think that we actually missed something yeah hot tip you can probably expect a very similar post down the line at fangraphs because when it's been a few years why not why not repeat so the i don't know i we don't have time or i guess we we do have time to talk about all seven i'm interested in what the Rockies have been doing because they have been very good at scooping up ground balls. And as mentioned, they've gotten plenty of ground balls, more ground balls than any other team. But they've also done an excellent job of turning those grounders into outs, which is interesting for one reason, because the personnel hasn't really changed compared to last year when they were not so good. And secondly, at least if you go by the way that Baseball Info Solutions tracks things, they are not shifting.

Last year, they shifted fairly aggressively. And this year, they are barely shifting at all based on whatever the criteria are that classify a defensive alignment as a shift. And while that might seem kind of counterintuitive last year the cubs technically shifted the least of anyone in baseball people asked joe madden about that and i think he sort of hemmed and hawed and said oh we we have our alignments but they don't always count as shifts or something because the cubs are clearly creative with their defense last year but they they didn't shift in the normal ways and you know what maybe that's the way that you have to do it because shifting in the normal way doesn't seem to do very much although we could probably get another topic out of the cubs defense too which we'll we'll probably

talk about at some point in the future yeah i think everyone i was planning to write about that but i think everyone did this week anyway whatever yeah well we'll just give another week for the data to well it it is in the yes right now we can look at this again now that we've had a bigger sample i guess yeah you can't be deterred too much because someone's going to write about everything at some point right as far as i'm concerned no one's written about it at fangraphs no one's written about it at the ringer so it's an opportunity it's exactly all there or and sam hasn't written about it yet i don't think so that's all that matters uh so the the rockies are turning a bunch of grounders into outs but they're also the grounders they've allowed so far have been weekly hit by all measurements that we

have access to the hard hit rate on grounders which sounds stupid on the face of it but does exist is very low it's one of the best in baseball the exit velocity is very low. It's one of the best in baseball. The exit velocity is very low. There's something weird about this year's exit velocities on grounders compared to last year's. I don't know if you've looked at that and noticed it. It seems like they're kind of down almost across the board, but I'm not going to pretend like I know what's going on. Maybe they're just doing a better job of tracking more

grounders, but there is something going on with the Rockies and something I didn't expect to discover, but did. You pointed out in your post that their bullpen leads all bullpens in the majors in win probability added, which is a measure. It's fun to look at for bullpens. And I looked at the same thing. I noticed that they were in first place for a while. And I knew that last year they were pretty bad.

I had kind of forgotten that they were the worst. And so they could, in theory, go from the least valuable bullpen in baseball to the best. There is a long, long way to go before that's actually locked up, of course. But there is win probability added information going all the way back to 1974, which is a weird time for it to start, but that's what we have.

And only one team ever has had their bullpen go from worst to best overnight between two seasons. And that was the 2007 Devil Rays to the 2008 Rays. And they went to the World Series. Yeah, right. That's interesting. Yeah, Sam wrote an article about five years ago about the 2012 Orioles and how bullpens are less consistent from year to year than other things, than offense, than starting

pitching, than defense, whatever. And he called that the most fleeting way to win, the way that the Orioles were winning at that time. And of course, they have continued to win exactly the same way almost every year since. And so it seems less fleeting now. But yeah, i guess if you had to pick one thing one area of a team to be your weakness it's probably still bullpen because that seems like something you could patch up and slap together more quickly than hitting or defense or getting a good rotation and there seems to be enough of a divide between how good a bullpen is and how well it performs based on win probability added because you don't need that much to get a big swing it's just uh throw in a few games where you give up a home run to the wrong batter or in the wrong sequence and everything

gets ruined and like the the rangers for example have a lousy bullpen win probability added they did this last year they did the year before but then they got a lot better in the second half and and they took off so you can always rescue these things. But I do wonder, like if Sam wrote about the 2012 Orioles and said this is the most fleeting way to win, and I do believe him. But I also wonder in this era of having so much more information that maybe teams are just gradually figuring out ways to make bullpens a little more reliable. I have no idea if there's any evidence of this, but maybe they're just using bullpens differently. Obviously, teams are building deeper and better bullpens. All relievers are better than ever, etc.

And yeah, even if it is the most fleeting way to win, the Orioles have done it for like six years in a row now, which is patently absurd, but good for them. Let's see who else is in there. The Reds are fun because they have maybe the best defense in baseball, which is what you need when you have what I would describe charitably as a terrible pitching staff. But it's at least a fairly terrible starting location.

And the Twins are close behind on defense so far. The Twins pitching staff is even worse. Forget the Reds. The Reds have pitchers who are interesting. I don't want to be cruel to those of you who are Twins fans. The Twins have been cruel enough the past few years, but that pitching staff is not good, and it has not been good. Did you see that I think Jose Barrios is coming up to start Saturday after the report that sources close to the team or whatever it was say that Jose Barrios definitely will not be coming up this week unless things change which makes that a worthless report because I guess something changed Barrios is

coming up and I don't know I don't know do you think that with uh with Barrios coming up and he's very exciting very good minor league prospect and he had a terrible season last year in the majors when he did pitch in the majors do you think that enough time has passed that you can kind of overlook that? Like, I know you're not a Twins fan, you're not an anything fan, but how much should someone's Barrios enthusiasm be dampened, if at all, by what happened last year, given the calendar flip? Yeah, I mean, I would be quicker to disregard something that a young pitcher does probably than almost anyone else, just because it seems like pitchers can change things quickly.

And he did pitch well enough in AAA that it seems like you can't be that worried about it. I mean, his strikeout-to-walk ratio was really good in AAA last year. It's even better in AAA this year. It's almost five. good in AAA last year. It's even better in AAA this year. It's almost five. You'd have to believe that there was some kind of like low grade yips going on to think that he can't throw strikes in the majors, which wouldn't totally disregard it. But we've seen enough young guys come up and have a rough start to their first year and then be fine thereafter. So I would still place my faith in the larger body of work, even though it was minor league work. Agreed. And he's got a good

catcher and good defense behind him now. Yes, that will help. Over looking over this, looking at the picture at the top of the ringer article to remind me who the seven teams are we're talking about going by team strengths, Arizona, I would say, well, their, their most extreme strength so far has been their base running. It's not the most valuable thing they've done, but it is the most exceptional. So Arizona gets base running. Baltimore gets, I don't know, monkey's paw. The Yankees have Aaron Judge.

The Brewers have Eric Thames and Keon Broxton, who's been one of the best players in baseball since the middle of April, which gives him roughly a month now. He's great. The Reds have the league's best defense. The Twins have one of the league's best defense, and Miguel Sano. And the Rockies have a really good bullpen and a really good ground ball, I don't know, synergistic model, I guess. In terms of who I believe in the most in there, I do like the way that the Yankees are shaping up, given that I do believe in Judge to be quite good. And Severino and Pineda, I think, are better than the reputations they brought into the season. I am very interested in the Rockies, provided they keep their three big relievers healthy. I don't know how much of that is going to be under their control, but they're going to score runs.

The defense is fine. I don't know how much of that is going to be under their control, but they're going to score runs. The defense is fine. If they get full seasons out of Holland, out of, you know, and McGee,

then I think that they're going to be there at the end because I think that is a really outstanding top three of a bullpen. And also they have Mike Dunn, whatever. Really not buying the twins. I think the Reds can end up with like high seventies maybe, which isn't bad. And I think the Brewers can end up with high seventies too. It helps them that the Cubs have struggled a little bit and the Pirates certainly don't look very good. I think this could be a year where the Pirates

might actually finish in last place in that division, even though they aren't that bad of a team. They've just had enough go against them. And the Diamondbacks are interesting. Losing Miller hurts. I think that they will end up behind the Dodgers, but at this point, I don't really know how they would finish behind the Giants, who were supposed to be good, because the Giants have just been a nightmare, and then I can't even say anything about the Orioles.

It's just not worth my time anymore. It's just... You got anything on the Orioles? I don't know what you're supposed to say about a team like this. I don't know. I'm so tired of saying the same things about the Orioles. And regardless of whether I was proven right or proven wrong, it's just sort of a tired

trope at this point. So I don't disagree with any of your evaluations of any of those teams, really. It's fun. It's fun to have bad teams being good, I guess, or at least surprising teams. And I don't know. I guess next week we have a podcast about all the depressing teams and then we could just turn people off yeah do you have anything else to say about the those seven teams no i wanted to throw in i guess now this is weird intermediate banter but i did want to mention something that i i just

noticed it was announced i think yesterday headline a's unveil monthly ballpark pass under $20. Have you heard about this? No. So the A's unveiled a monthly ballpark pass for under $20. And apparently, I also didn't know this, but other teams, including the Brewers, Astros, Tigers, and Twins, have sold similar monthly passes at times, however, for much higher prices. So what this is, is from June through Septemberember at the a's ballpark you can get a

ballpark pass for under 20 i'll just keep repeating the headline and that gives you access to all home games in a month so you could in theory pay so what is it i think it's 1999 just just say 20 just 20 it's fine nobody cares about the penny so for 79.79.96, if you wanted to, over four months, you could have access to however many A's home games are played over those four months. Figure what's 81 times two thirds would be, well, I shouldn't have done this live. What is that? 54 roughly? I think it's exactly 54. Anyway, so something like 54 home games you could have access to for just short of $80. So you'd figure you're looking at, I don't know, between 10 and 15 home games you could have access to for just short of $80. So you'd figure you're looking at, I don't know, between 10 and 15 home games a month, which means that you're looking at an average ticket price of under $2.

And it gives you access to everything in the ballpark. Your seat is assigned when you go through the gates. It's just assigned digitally. You have to do this through, I think, the MLB app or some sort of... Yeah, the MLB ballpark app. Passes available only through the MLB ballpark app include access to Scheib Park Tavern and the food trucks. These are apparently features of the ballpark I did not know about. And the only condition is that the passes are not available in the unlikely event of a sellout, which I'm not sure if that's ever happened in recent years at the A's ballpark.

So I don't go to Oakland. I don't know many people who live around Oakland, so I don't directly know people this will affect, but it seems like a very cool, very good, incredibly cheap promotion, considering I don't think I could go to a Mariners game for less than like $25 for one game and have to get there, etc. But under $2 a ticket, that's it's crazy to me.

And maybe it kind of reinforces not only that the A's are clearly desperate to get people in the stands, but also that just so little of teams revenue is actually tied to the attendance that they bring in relative to all the other streams of revenue they can get. attendance that they bring in relative to all the other streams of revenue they can get and i don't know it seems like it's a it's a really good way to introduce people to the ballpark who might be deterred or wouldn't usually go there and of course that just kind of sets some roots uh sets a foundation for people to come in the future and i think that the a's are a worthwhile product this season but basically i just keep coming back to under two dollars a ticket that's just yes it's crazy to me if you were to go to every home game which of course nobody would but still like if even if you get go to two games in a month it's still a really good deal just go to the Andrew Triggs starts it's still a good deal for A's Andrew Triggs

perseverance pays this is a different feature article in the San Francisco Chronicle that I already read this morning. He's awesome. He used to be a political advisor. Who knew? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I had the Red Sox EVP slash CFO Tim Zhu on the Ringer podcast this week, and we talked about how teams are using data to analyze ticket sales and concessions and marketing and optimize all of those things.

Analyze ticket sales and concessions and marketing and optimize all of those things. But you're right that all of that is kind of just a drop in the bucket relative to just all the money they get from broadcast deals and from MLBAM and all the revenue that's shared in that way. So teams are really rich is the moral of the story. If anything, I was into the Red Sox might want to study ways to deter fans from coming to the ballpark because there's just too many and the demand is through the roof. But A's obviously fighting a very different problem from the Red Sox. But I don't know. I love it. I know that I can't. I didn't do enough research on this, but the A's have been working on their marketing and their PR for the last several months, I believe.

I have not looked up anything in this regard, but this would be just another piece of evidence that they are trying to improve their image. And I think that when you're offering people the opportunity to go to a bunch of baseball games for less than $2 each, that's very good for your image. It's going to introduce people to the ballpark and what I think is a pretty fun environment no matter how few people are actually there. And yeah, it's a good deal. All right. What was the original topic?

Well, the original topic was I actually decided about two minutes before the podcast started to not do the overachieving teams topic, which we did anyway. Yeah, so perfect. I wanted to ask you about ties and whether or not you have an appetite for ties in baseball. Now, for all I know, this might be something you've already podcasted about. It wouldn't be surprising to me. However, this has come up again after last Sunday's marathon game between the Cubs and the Yankees went 18 innings. The Yankees ultimately won. And I know Trevor Sochik on Fangraphs has written about how ties could be a good thing

for baseball. Buster Olney was talking this week about how something like ties, there's momentum building toward baseball, implementing a tie system for games that reach a certain length. For anyone curious, last season, there were a little over 2,400 baseball games, and 185 of them went to extra innings. That's actually a lower number than I was expecting. 112 went to 11 innings, 63 went to 12 innings, and only 32 went to 13 or more innings. So a very low number. I think the usual cutoff I've seen suggested is that Major League Baseball could implement a tie after the 12th inning.

Now, they've talked about doing other things. They've talked about the WBC rule where they put runners in scoring position to start an extra inning or something like that. And there's been resistance to that. But essentially, do you have an appetite for ties? How do you feel about the concept of ties coming into baseball? I don't mind the idea of a tie. I think a winner, a loss is more satisfying in certain ways, but other sports have done just fine with ties. I'm sure baseball could survive ties too, and we'd all get used to

it. I get the idea behind it and that it is kind of crazy that a baseball game can just last forever in theory and that you go to a game or you watch a game and you have no idea how long it will last. It will probably last something like three hours, but it's totally possible that it will last twice that long, which is what happened in that Cubs-Yankees game. And that's not something that we ask our audiences to do really in any other area. If you're going to a movie, you can look up the runtime before you go to the theater, before you buy a ticket. You know that a TV show is going to be 22 minutes or 42 minutes. You can plan your life accordingly. And it seems like there would be some benefit to baseball in giving people that certainty. hours and that would ruin my plans and you can always just leave if you want to if you are not

dedicated to keeping score at the game like connor our guest room earlier this week but i think it makes sense there's a lot of competition for people's eyeballs and attention there are so many tv shows there's so many entertainment options that capping baseball at a certain point, especially given the increasing length of the typical game, does make some sense. But I don't care personally about it. I don't think baseball needs to do this. I don't think it's imperative that it happen sometime soon. I like the very long game because it's rare. I think it's memorable for everyone. It's fun. You get weird baseball on Twitter. And if you need to go to sleep, you go to sleep. And it's not the end of the world. You don't get to see someone win or lose, but you wouldn't if there were a tie either. much i get it i'm not going to be out protesting if it happens but i'm not really advocating for it and much like we were talking in the last episode about how all these things that we dwell on and obsess over about minute changes in the game and how they're huge deals i think

is largely a product of the fact that we have to talk about this and we have to write about it all the time and we need something to write about and talk about and everything gets magnified in importance. So I don't think the way it works right now is a huge problem, but I'm not philosophically opposed to ties. Yeah, I guess. So that's coming at things largely from the fan perspective. And as you mentioned, the neat thing you can do as a baseball fan is just turn the game off or leave whenever you want. You're not obligated to watch a game all the way through. If you prefer the games end in 12 innings, you can just stop paying attention after 12 innings and you're fine. No one's going to judge you.

And then you can just check your phone later to see who ultimately won. It would be interesting to see if ties did become a part of the game, given that within the past 10 or 15 years, whatever it was, that hockey basically eliminated ties because people wanted conclusions. And now granted, I don't think that it's found a great way to decide games that go to overtime. I do think that the three on three model that they have now before the shootout is pretty good, but still, it's not quite the same game. And so hockey moved away from ties. And I think the response has been fine and baseball could be moving toward ties and the response probably would be fine there would be the usual complaining like when you eliminated

well not you when baseball eliminated the intention to walks you're not that powerful and people were sort of grumbling and then everyone was okay with it but I think that the idea is to come at this from the players perspective that this is this is something that players would lobby for because they don't like the long games they don't want to be there forever especially like with the the cubs and the yankees that was a sunday night game they had to travel and then i i don't remember exactly what the schedule was i think the cubs had a game the next day and maybe the yankees did too and that just seems terrible so there is an argument that this is bad for players it's

dangerous because games go long pictures get stretched out someone could get hurt etc and i am i'm sympathetic to that viewpoint because these are you know people and they should be treated like people and no one should be overworked overtaxed risk injury or anything like that but i think a fairly sensible counter argument would be this is what you sign up for and you get paid extremely well to play a baseball game until it is over most baseball games don't go very long there were fewer than 10 games last season that actually made it to the 15th inning and given that the actual extra innings tend to go pretty quickly uh just because if something happens then the game will end and if some if nothing happens then the innings tend to go pretty quickly just because if something happens then the game will

end and if some if nothing happens then the innings pass quickly and you just proceed i don't think that there would be much in the way of fan momentum toward baseball implementing ties because i don't think fans care and for players to lobby for it it seems like all, we're already getting a minimum of a half million dollars a year. And now we want to ask for a little more rest, which I get. But it seems like maybe barking up the wrong tree. Barking up the wrong tree. That's an expression, right? That's the expression.

Yes, it is. Yeah, I think maybe it kind of comes down to how unique we want baseball to be, how much we want it to stand out from other sports, because it does have these quirks about it that I think we're fond of. At least I'm fond of the fact that baseball has different dimensions and playing surfaces. I think that's a great quirk of baseball. There's no uniform court or rink or field. Everything can be a little bit different. And those dimensions have gotten more uniform over the years anyway, but I still like that. I think it's a feature of baseball. I'd be sorry if that got standardized. And I sort of like the

non-clock aspect of baseball to a certain extent in that I am still pro pitch clock and think that things have to be kept to a certain pace and length. But again, I like the idea that the game can just go on and on and on. And I don't know that it going on and on and on is less fan friendly than it ending in a tie, which is essentially the same thing. Like everyone gets to stop playing and go home, and that's good for the teams. But I don't know if it's better for the fan because you don't go home feeling like you saw something more satisfying than I think if a game is tied in the 10th inning and you say, I have to go to work tomorrow, and you leave.

Essentially, that was a tie for you for all intents and purposes, and you can read about what happened later. So I kind of like the fact that baseball is open-ended in that way. It doesn't really fit in with larger trends or with the media environment. And I don't know if it's attracting people to baseball either. I don't know if anyone's becoming a fan of baseball because you might see an 18 inning game, but I think it's probably not driving anyone away. And for those of us who are already converts, it's fun. It's a deviation from the norm and the routine.

It keeps things interesting. The longer a game goes, the more fun I'm having. I mean, if I have to stop watching for some reason or I have to get up the next day or something, that's unfortunate. But if not, I'm having a lot of fun. I want to see it go longer and longer. I want to see how late these people can play. So I think it adds something that I would miss. So it's not even so much about the ties as it is about placing that constraint on the sport that hasn't existed to this point. It feels like it's possible this is similar to the pitch clock argument,

which might just be driven by the people who are writing about baseball and they don't want to be there forever at the ballpark because that's a group of people who would be very motivated to lobby for baseball to have games end sooner, and that's the people who have to sit there and write on deadline. And those are also the people that you are most commonly reading online, even though that doesn't include us specifically. Nevertheless, you do feel sorry for the people that you are most commonly reading online even though that doesn't include us specifically nevertheless you do feel sorry for the beat writers who are on site

and have to deal with very long baseball i can't imagine what it would be like if like the i don't know padres and another bad team let's call them i don't know the braves played like a 19 inning game in the middle of august i can't imagine what that would be like but that's the game where you don't have to so much lobby for a tie as lobby for the game to just not exist in the first place. I think everyone would be fine with that, but I guess that one might be a little too extreme. I don't have a sense of how close anything here actually is. It seems like baseball is closer to implementing one of the weirder runners on to start an extra inning rule than actually having games end in ties. It does kind of fold in with, I think there's more recent emphasis on

rests and rehabilitation and players just not being so exhausted all of the time. I think we're moving away from guys who try to play every single game because there's just a lot of value to be found in giving guys regular rest. There's some talk, there's more talk, I should say, about travel being easier. You have pitchers commonly flying ahead of their teammates to the next stadium so that they don't have to deal with jet lag so much when they're on their game days. So this is clearly the area, or at least one of the main areas, where teams are focusing on trying to make things easier on their players.

But I think you can do that within the current constraints of the game without actually ending games early. I recognize that it is kind of like intentional walks where you miss some of the weird freak moments that were so infrequent that the game isn't missing anything so meaningful. But the memories that I have of intentional walks going wrong don't really compare to the memories i have of games going really late those are more cherished memories instead of like freakish that was a funny thing to see memories like i think uh mike cameron won a game i think of the 19th inning with a walk-off home run in seattle and that's just there's no good reason to remember that game except any game that goes that long is just instantly memorable because that's just the way that it goes just like any

hockey game that goes to four overtimes in the playoffs is instantly memorable no matter how it's won because it's just so much time has passed that the moment becomes dramatic and embedded in your brain if only because the game lasted twice as long as a usual game it can't for twice as much bandwidth but I don't think I have anything else to say about ties right now, except that I am more generally opposed to the concept than in favor of. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, you've got a chat to get to.

Ah, yeah. All right. Got to do it for the people. All right. Well, we will talk again next week. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so already include Sandra Maslodzik, scott rosen dale schneider andrew taylor and alex nazer thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and you can rate

and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes i will add a link to the pitch talks event that we announced earlier in the show on the blog post at fangraphs and also in the facebook group thanks to dylan higgins for editing. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at Fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you soon. I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be tired