Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1064: Harper Throws Hands, Trout Hurts His

Episode Date: May 30, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and a Jeff Sullivan substitute banter about Clayton Kershaw, then discuss all of the fallout from Mike Trout’s surgery and Bryce Harper’s brawl. Audio intro: The Muppets Take Manhattan soundtrack, "Together Again" Audio outro: Paul McCartney, "Seems Like Old Times" Link to paperback edition of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work  iTunes Feed (Please […]

Together again. Gee, it's good to be together again. I just can't imagine that you've ever been gone. It's not starting over, it's just going on. Together again. Now we're here and there's no need remembering when. Cause no feeling feels like that feeling. Together again. Good morning and welcome to episode 1064 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Fangraphs.com.

I'm your guest co-host, Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hi, Ben. Hi. How you doing? Still saying daily for tradition's sake. How often do you guys do it? Three times a week, same as when you were still doing it. Why did we switch to three times a week?

Was it because of The Ringer? Mostly because I, yeah, I went to The Ringer. I was doing other podcasts, doing a lot of podcasts. So three times a week is about the most I can do. Okay. Whatever. This isn't interesting. So you asked me to fill in for Jeff today and I've agreed, but you'll need to tell me what we're going to talk about. I figured we could just talk about Harper and Trout since we spent

many hours talking about Harper and Trout. So it should be easy. And they're both in the news and I wrote about Trout and you wrote about Harper. So very little preparation required. And yeah, Jeff will be back for the next episode. He is off hiking in the wilderness somewhere. So this is fun. So you have any banter. If I'd had a little more of a heads up, I would have collected some. But in the meantime, I do just want to note that you've written about Clayton Kershaw's, I guess what you considered the greatest Clayton Kershaw fun fact, right? That he has managed to lower his career ERA every year of his career, which is, I guess, eight straight years that he's lowered it. And that puts him in an extremely small group of pitchers, most of whom have interesting circumstances around them and are not quite like Kershaw, where they just kept getting awesomer and better. Yeah, they just had 10 innings or something in

their rookie year and they had a nine ERA. So it was easy for them to lower it. So at the moment, so basically to keep doing this, Kershaw needs to have a lower ERA this year than his career ERA. His career ERA is 2.37. At the moment, his ERA this season is 2.37. Yeah. Yeah. He had a rough last start, right? Before that, he seemed like he was on track to do it, but seems like it would be tough to keep lowering that bar, but he has not had an ERA above 2.37 since 2012. Right. So yeah. So he might have found his level though. I think when I wrote that article, his projection was exactly 2.37. Oh, wow. According to, I forget which of the sites, maybe it was Baseball Prospectus, but yeah, that was what made it so interesting to me. Okay. So what do you think happens now?'ll say under i think yeah lower than 2.37 just because

he really has pitched like i don't like a thousand innings or something under that like it's not a small simple thing and of course there's regression with with anyone but yeah he's pitched he had pitched more than a thousand innings with an eraRA under two. Yeah. At some point last year, we noted when he crossed the thousand inning line with an ERA under two. But on the other hand, his FIP this year is 3.13. His DRA is 2.82. His CFIP is 87, which equates to an ERA higher than 2.37. So he has not pitched like a 2.37 pitcher this year. Yeah. And we've talked on the show about his slider, which seemed to have lost him. And then

he seemed to get it back. And I haven't looked that closely, but from what I heard from a listener, it was not so good in his most recent start. So he hasn't quite seemed like the same guy. So maybe over is the safer bet. But I'm going to say that he straightens out whatever has ailed him and goes back to being great again. All right. So I guess we can start with Trout. Maybe there's less to say about Trout, although we always have a lot to say about Trout. So Trout slid headfirst into second base on a steel attempt.

He was safe. This was on Sunday. He got an MRI on Monday, and it revealed that he has a torn thumb ligament. So he's having surgery on Wednesday. It's going to keep him out something like six to eight weeks. And this is, in a lot of ways, inconsequential because the Angels were long shots to make the playoffs, even with Trout. They are slightly longer shots now, but doesn't have huge pennant race implications. Probably doesn't have huge

Mike Trout career implications in that this is not going to change what we think of him as a player long-term. This is probably not career threatening in any way. Lots of players have come back from this. I don't know if it's routine, but it's not super, super serious. And so in the long run, a month or two missed in what will hopefully be a 20-year career. Not that huge a deal. But right now, it really bummed me out. I was very sad to see this because I was having so much fun following Mike Trout's season this year. And I'm not really someone who looks at box scores for every team

every day, although that can be a very helpful thing to do. But I need a reason to go looking at someone's box scores every day. And I was looking at Trout's performance every single day, even if I wasn't watching him, I was looking to see what he did. And usually it was something great because he was the best hitter in baseball, the best player in baseball, better than he had ever been before. I wrote about it. Everyone wrote about it, how Mike Trout somehow found a way to become even better. And so it looked like he was on track for a career year, which for Mike Trout means basically the best year since Barry Bonds. He was on track for an 11-war season, according to Fangraphs, which would have

been the best since Bonds. And then since Joe Morgan in 1975, it's only been done 25 times by 12 players, and it was probably easier to do back when a lot of those players did it. So this is sad. I wanted to see how great Mike Trout could be. He somehow found a way to be even better just when we thought maybe he had already maxed out his skills. And he was just amazing in every area of the game, I guess, except maybe defensively. And so this is sad. We don't get to see him push the records. We don't get to see him most likely extend his streak of having the highest war in his league every full season of his career. It would be very...

I bet he will. You think so? It would be tough for him to do. If he misses two months, that's a lot of ground he'd have to make up. If he misses six weeks, though, that's, you know, six weeks is a quarter of a season. So he would basically need to... I mean, you usually expect somebody to put up seven ish maybe eight maybe eight and and the al he's never not he has never not led the al in all three wars yeah he has not

led the majors in one of the three wars at some point he's not led the fan graphs war once and not led baseball prospectus warp three times but he has always led the AL in all three. And I don't know if that's an accident, a coincidence, or if it's that there really isn't a huge superstar in the American League, but you don't see anybody in the American League right now who's likely to top eight, especially with Josh Donaldson being the closest thing to that superstar. And he has a full win lead already. Yeah, exactly. A third of the season. Yeah. You know, if someone puts up a seven, then he needs to play at a 10 war pace for the amount of time that he'll play. And I'm saying yes, I'm saying he's got it. All right. I'm saying probably not. But that's a fun thing to watch after he gets back. I got a lot of questions about whether Mike Trout with one thumb could outplay Ben Revere or Eric Young or whoever fills in for him. What did we do with the Cespedes hypothetical?

Or was I on, I might've been on their podcast to talk about how many fingers, I think it was how many fingers he could lose. Yeah, that's right. And I don't remember what the answer was, but I think we decided it was either one, five, or like nine. Like there were only like three plausible answers yeah a thumb counts more than most fingers it does it does which thumb is it right or left left thumb uh i guess that's the better thumb to lose do you think do you think that the fact that he gets six weeks off will

make him stronger in august and september than he might normally have been and even in a certain way help his rate stats and therefore help him play at even maybe even slightly higher than a 10 or 11 war pace has he had a second half fall off I guess last year he kind of was bad everybody's playing everybody's playing their second half though and so if he were more tired so is everybody else if he were less tired and everybody else is then he would get a second half boost theoretically. He actually, I believe, has generally had aside from, well, he's had one bad July and one bad August. But I think he's actually been better in the second half in his career. Yeah, I don't know.

Anyway, it's disappointing because. Oh, no, he's been much better in the first half than the second half in his career. It's about a 70 point OPS because... Oh, no, he's been much better in the first half than the second half in his career. It's about a 70-point OPS drop. Oh, okay. Well, maybe then. I don't know. Maybe the rustiness will counteract the rest benefit. Well, look at the stolen bases.

First half, 91 stolen bases and 13 caught. Second half, 62 stolen bases and 16 caught. So he runs a lot less and gets caught a lot more. Uh-huh. That's interesting. I do wonder whether he'll just run less as a result of this injury, just aside from the fatigue factor. But having lost him now for maybe two months and all but knocked the Angels out of the

race because of that, because he was trying to steal a base, which ultimately is pretty inconsequential, I wonder whether either he will become more conservative with running or the Angels will not want him to run as much. Because it probably doesn't make sense, especially with a guy who slides headfirst, and that seems to be an ingrained habit with him, as it is with a lot of players. Maybe it's just not worth it. as it is with a lot of players, maybe it's just not worth it. He's so valuable as a hitter and as a guy who's always in the lineup and plays a premium defensive position that maybe having him steal 30 instead of just a handful is not worth the potential risk. So that would be sad because I like the fact that he is the best power hitter in the league right now and also a good base stealer,

and the power and speed combination is always what's made him so special so it'd be unfortunate if he stopped stealing which he kind of did one year and then started again but i wonder whether we'll see a different trout when he comes back jeff used to write about trout's headfirst slides as well because i think i'm not quite remembering it but i think trout is a more i don't know high effort headfirst slider than most people like i think he takes off from further back i think that was jeff's point and so like he begins the slide a little further back and i don't know if he's got a particularly risky form of head first slide or not. I'm just mentioning that without having any conclusion or real observation. Yeah, there are some advantages to it. I don't know whether

there's a speed advantage. If it is, it's probably very slight, but you do get greater control, I guess. You can reach for a base instead of just having to position your foot somehow, and maybe it's just instinctive. So everyone always says, why do players keep sliding headfirst after one of these injuries? And then they keep sliding headfirst. So I don't know if you can have them change that mid-career

or not, not sure what the precedent there is. I wrote about Starling Marte's headfirst slides once. And I started by noting that in like 20 years, there's either going to be no headfirst slides once and I started by noting that in like 20 years there's either going to be no headfirst slides because the damage done will be so ingrained in the way that players get trained because you know now that we're all analytical and stat heady and everything

like that and everything has to be boiled down to whether it is useful it will be determined that they're not worth the risk or it'll be the opposite and the headfirst slides will just keep getting more and more dangerous and more is useful, it will be determined that they're not worth the risk, or it'll be the opposite, and the headfirst slides will just keep getting more and more dangerous and more and more aggressive because the game is played at such a higher speed and with so much more kind of physical intensity now than it used to be that we're going one way or the other. And right now, I'm not sure which way we're going.

Marte's, so I wrote that piece because Marte showed how much value you can get out of headfirst slides. There's a, there, there are ways of avoiding tags that make you, it's almost impossible, sometimes it's almost impossible to tag the guy. It seems like if he's doing a very good controlled headfirst slide, but of course the flip side is obviously this. Yeah. Well, I kind of realized maybe this is something I subconsciously knew, but I made it explicit for myself when I was writing the reaction to this injury is that the reason I think we love Trout so much. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to love Trout and ways in which to love Trout. But the reason he's so fun for me and maybe people like us is that he's the one guy that we get to be the most sensational about because often our role is to downplay excitement and to say this

hot start isn't sustainable and look at the team's run differential and here's a link to the projections and it simulates the season thousands of times. And so it's not going to project anything crazy to happen. And so often we're kind of being a wet blanket. It can go the other way too, where we can point out some player who's actually performing better than his stats would suggest or a team whose underlying indicators are pretty strong. But with Trout, we get to be the ones who are kind of shouting from the rooftops, this guy is the best player ever. Like the kind of stuff that you hear on the shouty TV shows or the columnists just kind of making these attention getting arguments without much evidence. And we're the ones going, no, look at the numbers. This is wrong, citing the stats. And with Trout, we're the ones who get to

be more effusive in our praise than anyone else. Not that you can't just scout Trout and see how great he is or just look at the basic stats and see how great he is. But ever since 2012 and the Trout versus Cabrera war, war has been the stat that was kind of in his corner more than anyone else. It was the one number that captured his all around contributions and filtered out the park effects and the league and era effects and put him on the same scale as everyone else. And this was the stat that said Trout is off to the best start of anyone ever. And forget about stats that might say Mantle is better, DiMaggio is better, whoever.

No, Trout is better. We're the ones who get to say that about Trout. And it's so much fun to, for for once not have to be cautious and conservative and caveat everything and just say no we're watching the best player ever and this was going to be the best season ever by perhaps the best player ever and so I'm sad that we don't get that I don't know whether this would have been the signature regular season of Trout's career for all I know he might just get even better next year. But it saddens me that we don't get to just shout it from the rooftops that Trout is the best because

it seemed like everyone was waking up to that. I mean, you still hear people saying Trout is underappreciated and he's underrated and everything. But the number of articles I've read in the last few weeks pointing out that Trout is underappreciated, he's starting to get into that territory where you can't really call him that anymore because just everyone is constantly writing about how great he is. And it seemed like this was the year, you know, he had a documentary about him. There are writers like Ted Berg is writing a weekly What Happened With Mike Trout This Week, that kind of like live looking sort of feeling about Trout and you wrote about him, whether he should get the bonds treatment. And it seemed like that was maybe on the table. So it seemed like this was the year when everyone fully acknowledged how amazing Mike Trout is. And then just after that happened, he goes away for a while. So

this is bad. I don't like this. Yeah. And partly that's because I think there are probably four things that were working in his favor. One is I think there is a general media wide push to identify the face of baseball and to promote the face of baseball. There's a feeling, I think, among baseball media that it is a problem that there is not a face of baseball anymore and that there are qualified players, that there are players who are as good as any players have ever been, including Mike Trout. And that it is perhaps to some degree, you know, a failure of all of us to help people appreciate them and to make people aware of how great they are and why

they are. So I think that is it's somewhat intentional. But there's also the fact that he is not simply a war champion this year. He has occasionally been leading the league in home runs. He has been leading the league in batting average at various points. He was something like a triple crown threat. But certainly, he was a threat to win two even of the sort of prestigious three traditional stats. There's also the fact that he is having such a great year. This is not just like, oh, well, he's going to have an 11 war year and before he's only had a 10.8 war year. Like he has, and I wrote about this in the should Mike Trout get

the bonds treatment piece. He is basically hitting like Bonds hit from 2001 to 2004. And I need to back that up, but he is not as valuable offensively as Bonds was for those four years because he is not getting the Bonds treatment. Bonds value was in large part because he was also getting walked 270 or whatever times a year. That plus everything he hit was amazing. And Trout, everything he hits is amazing. So Bonds, 2001 to 2004 stats, if you take out the walks, his neutralized stats on baseball reference would be a 342 batting average and a 793 slugging percentage. Trout's numbers this year are 352 batting average and 762 slugging percentage. So it's just slightly

lower slugging, but otherwise he is as good when he hits the ball or when he is pitched to as Bonds ever was. He has the fourth best OPS plus since World War II. And the other three are all Bonds and they're all from that four year run. So this is not like, this isn't even just like, oh, well he's like, like the year Matt Kemp was awesome or the year Bryce Harper was awesome or anything like that. This is better than anybody has been besides Barry Bonds at the plate. And I forget what the fourth thing was. Okay. Well, you can come back to it in 10 minutes and interrupt me at that time. The fourth thing might've just been that he's now, he's now no longer young. He's no longer new. He is now a reliable part of baseball that this is, this has

now been going on for six years where every year he is the best. Uh, and the, even the old timers who want to say, well, you know, Mickey Mantle or, you know, Willie Mays did it for 24 years. Let's see Trout do that or whatever. There's an appreciation for the fact that, well, Trout is now an institution in the game. He is, you know, he's an institution and he does it all the time every year. And now you have to find new ways of talking about him. He's no longer the ingenue.

He is the most bankable star in Hollywood. And so you have different conversations about him when that happens. And I think we're seeing that sort of, I think what you identified is that different sort of conversation about him now that he is a cornerstone of the sport. All right. So Harper. Wait, wait, wait.

Before we, what was I going to say? Because I never gave, you opened with your thoughts on your feelings, your emotions about the industry. And I also took it harder than I expected. And like you, I don't think. Or if it happens again in four years, it won't be that big a deal. What is key here is that he is having the perfect career. Everything has been perfect. Other than being on bad teams and not making the playoffs. Oh yeah, right. But just his greatness has been perfect. He showed up early, so he's not going to be a guy, you know, he's going to have as many plate appearances as almost anybody when it's all done. He does everything. So he's been great in different ways. He's been consistently great. He's, it's just been perfect. And he's also been very healthy. And the, the, just to have a perfect baseball reference page, now it's going to be imperfect.

You're going to see this one year where he played 110 games or where he doesn't have any black ink or where he's not, you know, where he's got a 6.1 war or something like that. And that's good. That's great. You'll still be able to see it and go, oh yeah, that's Mike Trout at the top of his game. That was the year he hurt his thumb, but it's not perfect anymore and there's something that sucks about losing a perfect game and a no-hitter you know can't replace it yeah because he was as good at health and durability and avoiding injury as he was at everything else he was playing almost 160 games every season and so that was one of the other things that made him so awesome is that you could project that he'd age really well because he just never got hurt and seemed to be in good shape. And it was like, that's the one component that a lot of players don't have. They might not be as skilled and perform as well as Mike Trout, but they might be really, really good when they're on the field, but they can't stay healthy. They miss a season or half a season there, and that detracts from their greatness and their ability to compile stats. And Trout always had that too. So now this is, I don't know, it's one thing that he is not perfect in anymore. So

yeah, I did feel a greater loss than you would expect from just a fairly short in the grand scheme of things DL stint. All right. So the other news on Monday was Bryce Harper, who has been maybe the best non-trout player this year or close to it, and briefly at least reignited the Harper-Trout debate before, as usual, immediately after that debate, Trout just put even more ground between them. But he's been great. He got into a brawl on Monday, which was silly for a lot of reasons. And you wrote about the helmet throw, but just to set it up as if someone listening to this is unaware of what happened, Bryce Harper got hit. No, you better tell him who Bryce Harper is. happened. Bryce Harper got hit. You better tell him who Bryce Harper is. He's on a Sports Illustrated cover when he was 16. And ever since then, he's he got hit in the hip by a 98 mile per

hour fastball from Hunter Strickland, who had some history from Harper, some ancient history with Harper. Three years ago in the playoffs, Harper hit a couple bombs off him and Strickland gave up a lot of home runs. And ultimately, it didn't matter that much because the Giants won the series and the World Series. But evidently, he has been scarred from this. He's been holding a grudge. couple of years, but he never faced Strickland. And evidently Strickland was just biding his time and waiting for his moment all these years. And he plunked Harper, Harper charged the mound, some punches were thrown, and one helmet was thrown. And that was what you focused on in your piece. I wouldn't say I focused. I also focused on how he hit Hunter Strickland and fell backwards. I also focused on the way that he almost uppercutted himself in the nose. Yeah, it was, I mean, aside from the silliness of just how long it had been since the history, not that the history was anything worth plunking a guy over really,

but maybe Harper admired the home runs a little bit, which anyone would have. They were really aesthetically pleasing home runs. So silly that a guy was waiting this long and it seemed like even the Giants were not into it. Like Bochy was saying after the game that it was intentional. And Buster Posey, of course, barely moved, which was not what you usually see a catcher do and has caused a lot of reactions about whether he should have protected his pitcher or whether he would have said the pitcher's an idiot and I will just let him get punched but he opted for the latter and there was a silly collision between Samarja and Mike Morse who were both huge and on the same team and headbutted each other accidentally

so there's all kinds of craziness going on who are both huge and on the same team and headbutted each other accidentally. So there's all kinds of craziness going on. But the helmet throw was, I guess, the signature image of this confrontation just because it was so wild and Harper ran out and the whole thing was kind of undercooked and maybe he decided at the last minute to throw the helmet and then he threw the helmet nowhere near strickland and you assume that the helmet throw being wild was unintentional you think he was trying to hit him no i do assume it was unintentional there are a lot of motives in these situations where you have to decide what you think about the player's motives and it changes everything depending on whether you're

right or wrong and so in in a sense it's really unfair to have any of these conversations publicly because we could just be you know slightly off and then it changes everything but it looked to me like he had full intent in his heart furthermore they always throw the helmet that's just a that's a normal thing that i watched a bunch of these yesterday, old ones, and these guys love throwing the helmet. That's what they do if trying to throw a helmet for the first time in a rage while running and also, you know, holding it by the by the bill. I went down. I was at the park yesterday when this happened, not that park. I was at a different park and I was curious. So I went down to the Braves dugout and and held the helmet just to see. And that bill is really short. It's much shorter than it was. I think it's much shorter than they are when we're kids. I think

when you're kids, you get like a long bill for safety. But for them, it's really like, it's almost like a Shriners hat. This very short bill. I don't even know what a Shriner's hat is. I do know what a Shriner's hat is, but I don't know that the lack of a bill on that is comparable to the shortness of the bill on a helmet. So regardless, that's a bad analogy. It's not like you get a whole handful of the helmet when you grip it by the bill. And I think that the fact that he was holding it with batting gloves hurts even more because you don't get that real good feeling where like your skin is touching it and you can adjust as needed. So to me, the Occam's razor is that he threw exactly as one could probably be expected

to throw in exactly that situation. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Has there been accuracy in previous instances that you looked at? No. They're horrible at it. I remember one, well, this is not the same situation, but when Brett Laurie got ejected in 2012, I think it was, and he was mad because he got framed by Jose Molina a couple of times within one plate appearance. And he was like running down the first baseline because he thought he had walked, but he was struck out.

And he turned around and he threw the helmet at the umpire and hit him on the bounce, like hit him on the knee with the helmet. It was very accurate. Of course, he was standing pretty still at the time. He was not running out to the mound. So maybe that makes all the difference. Well, he wasn't trying to hit the umpire though. Maybe not. I don't know. He definitely wasn't. That was a total accident.

He was trying to slam the helmet into the ground. There was no intention of hitting that umpire, I don't believe. Now we did an episode at the time and you could probably go back and hear me going, of course he was trying to hit the umpire. But think that your example i don't think proves anything because i don't think that was that was actually intentional i don't think he did throw it where he wanted to throw it but also where did i wonder where laurie held it because what you want to do and i don't think that most guys do this because the way you take it off you take it off probably with either one hand so then it's got to be by the bill, or two hands. And in that case, if you don't hold it by the bill, you might hold it by like the big round, you know, the melon size part of it. And those are both very hard. If you were thinking about it, you'd hold it by an ear flap. And that still wouldn't, that still wouldn't be great. And by

the ear flap, I just mean the side, not the flap itself, just, you know, the you just you just hold it like you'd hold it if it was a you know shopping bag or something and you just hold it by the side looks like that was what laurie did it's hard to tell because he whipped it so fast but yeah i think he was holding it by a flap and so that's the way you want to do it but even with that you still got a tough throw because this thing is not evenly weighted. It's got weird air resistance angles. You're throwing it. I mean, you're a person who has been throwing a ball for his whole life. And now you've got a hollowed out watermelon half and you're trying to throw it straight, again, while sprinting in a rage at a man. And it's just not going to do you any favors. It's the worst thing you could pick up to throw.

And that's all you've got. Bats aren't allowed. And you're probably not going to take off a shoe. But honestly, your shoe would be much easier to throw. You probably should take off your shoe and try throwing that because a shoe is going to have a nice end over end rotation. We've all thrown shoes. I mean, isn't that what the guy who threw the shoe? Didn't a guy throw a shoe at President Bush? Isn't that like a cultural custom in much of the world? Throwing

a shoe, man, that's what you should do. And i know you think you're gonna look dumb i know you think it's gonna be undignified to stop and untie your shoe yeah it looks dumb you're already looking dumb like this is not a dignified series of events like you are going to end up in a lot of very bad freeze frames regardless uh so i figure uh in the uh tradition of i don't have to outrun you I only have to outrun the bear the other way around I don't have to outrun the bear I only have to outrun you I think take your time untie your shoe throw your shoe and now you've got a helmet on if he tries to punch you in the head you're wearing a helmet yeah you'd have to be careful because there'd be a pretty high tripping risk if you tried to undo your shoe on the way to the mountain.

That is true. You could throw a glove. Isn't that how people used to start duels? They would throw a glove on the ground. Like a batting glove? Yeah. Oh, but you're not, so you're not trying to hurt him with the glove. No. So you read the helmet as the glove.

That's the glove slap. Yeah. The helmet is like, it is on. Yes. It is not intended to hurt the guy. So in that case, accuracy doesn't even matter yeah all you have to do is all you have to do is throw it yeah if you throw it forward you have conveyed your point yeah which i guess he did barely

you want to hear a story man sure one day a long time ago my dad was hucking rocks and just throwing rocks as one does where I lived. There were plenty of rocks and plenty of space to huck them. So he's sitting there, standing there, hucking rocks. And for some reason, one of the rocks, it just, he doesn't release it. And his arm continues traveling and he manages to throw the rock directly behind him and hit my mom. It's like a Raul Abanez throw. It is similar to that. And so when I was a kid, I loved to huck rocks, walnuts. I like to throw green walnuts from the tree. And my mom would always be like, don't, you know, don't do that. I don't want to get hit by a rock. I'd be like, you're literally behind me. But that happened. All right. That sounds like if you had turned out to be better at baseball, that would be your

origin story that you like to huck rocks. That's why you have such a great arm. And in fact, it's actually the origin story for why I have a bad shoulder. Because throwing rocks is terrible for your arm. It's the worst. They're all different weights. A lot of them are super heavy. And they just, and you're not warm. It's a terrible, and you overthrow them.

So it's a horrible, horrible, horrible. Yeah. Don't throw rocks. Go from throwing a baseball to throwing a tennis ball or something. And it hurts. Anything else from this confrontation that you want to note? I would just note, I'm glad you brought up Laurie because I think it was in the context of Laurie that we long ago talked about the question of whether a player who is disliked, broadly disliked, or seen as a villain at 21 or 22 ever overcomes that. And I

don't mean overcomes it like has a good career there are lots of villains who have great careers but if you're a heel at 21 can you ever be the other thing the other word wrestling word what is that face face can you ever become the face and somebody i think at the time brought up joe dimaggio and i don't know his heel status and I don't really know his face status at the end of it. I don't really know that much about Joe DiMaggio except for, you know, all the things that we are supposed to know. But Harper is the classic of this. And I think we might've talked about this with A-Rod too. Harper is a guy who, when he was 16, KG wrote that piece in BP where he was quoting scouts saying he's just a bad guy.

Like he actually quoted a scout who said he's just a bad guy. Like he's Barry Bonds bad. He's, you know, that, right? And then Harper comes up and in a lot of ways is extremely successful, a joy to watch. One of my favorite players. I would probably rather watch him play than Trout. And in a lot of ways, a totally normal median baseball player personality-wise in a lot of ways. And yet, also, he keeps finding these controversies.

And sometimes they don't seem to be his fault at all. Like when Cole Hamels threw at him and when Jonathan Papelbon punched him. And strangely, people said, yeah, Jonathan Papelbon, that's right. And so with this specific case, like Harper, I'm guessing if this had been, you know, Carlos Correa or Jason Wirth or other baseball player who had hit two home runs off of Hunter Strickland three years ago, I don't think it's likely that he gets thrown at. And if he does get thrown at and there's a brawl,

I think that probably the amount of media coverage of it is probably considerably less, even if it's comparably famous. Well, let's imagine if this had happened with Mike Trout. Let's say that this exact situation had happened with Mike Trout, that Danny Duffy's mad that Mike Trout homered twice against him in the 2014 LDS, which he didn't because Pedro Mora is always hearing. Mike Trout went like one for 12 or whatever in the LDS. But imagine that and Duffy comes back and hits him in the hip and Trout runs out, throws a helmet poorly, hits him in the face, and so on. Is it a smaller story today? Or is my premise undone because Trout would get exactly the same

coverage that Harper did? I think he might get as much coverage. Maybe it would be different coverage. Or maybe it wouldn't be as much because he wouldn't have the visuals like Trout wouldn't take off his helmet and reveal a lion's mane of flowing hair because that's not something that Mike Trout has that was something that led to a lot of gifts like Harper is just flashier in that way he is just more visually arresting in almost everything he does which is probably why you just said that you'd rather watch Harper even though maybe you'd rather have Trout play. Harper is just more eye-catching in that way. So Trout wouldn't have done it in his eye-catching way. I mean, I think if Trout charged the mound, that would get a lot of attention because that would just seem so out of character

for Trout, right? He's always such a even-tempered, mild-mannered gentleman type that I think to get him mad and see him lose his temper in that way would probably get a lot of attention. It wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be, here goes Trout again at the center of a controversy. It would be, hey, here's Trout for once at the center of a controversy, but still interesting. But yeah, I don't know. If you had someone else who was the same level of superstar as Harper and Trout, if there were such a person, and he were involved in something like this and didn't either have Trout's pacifist past or Harper's always being in the middle past, then probably less attention. Although, like, Manny Machado was in the middle of things, obviously, earlier this year, and that got a lot of attention although that was long lasting and many incidents so right i mean machado is i don't know maybe maybe that's the point is that these things keep finding machado yeah as well so there are obvious differences between mike trout and bryce harper that like

you know mike trout as has been noted by many people, including you and I, is uncommonly guileless, that he, the thing that brings him more joy in the world than anything else, for instance, is following the weather and getting on an airplane, whereas Bryce Harper is a created media thing. And those differences are obvious and different and maybe significant. But there might also be things that are not necessarily relevant that become relevant because it's Trout and Harper. So Trout signs a below market extension to stay with the Angels. And I wrote a piece about whether there was design behind that, whether he signs that contract, partly because he doesn't want to have drama. He doesn't want to have drama with his club

in the negotiations. And he doesn't want the drama that comes with being the highest paid player in baseball. And there's just something, there's something less likely to lead to conflict about signing the extension. Whereas Harper, of course, goes year by year, seems to be like almost, you know, dying to get to free agency so that he can set a record. And he seems like almost like the kind of guy who loves the risk of going year by year. Now, did I just import lots of significance to those two decisions because I'm furthering the narrative of Mike Trout and the narrative of Bryce Harper and the narrative that puts them in conflict with each other or in contrast with each other? And the one that makes the one guy the all-American hero and the other one the prima donna. And I don't

care that Bryce Harper is a prima donna. I don't consider that a flaw, but, you know, certainly it maybe furthers a narrative that lots of people do find irksome and that ballplayers might find irksome and that might seem attention grabbing. And so I guess the question that I'm stumbling around is, are all of these moments in Bryce Harper's career that further the heel aspect of him because he was, do we read them this way because he was already the heel or do we read them this way

because he is actually the heel? And I think that's the question. And it's a question because I mean, I think it's a relevant question, partly as a curiosity. I enjoy watching other people watching baseball and the meta narratives that surround the sport are very interesting to me. But also, in a sense, I feel like this happened to A-Rod around the time he signed with the

Rangers. And even before that, there were a lot of these indications that the world was ready to hate A-Rod from the time he was 16 on. And that in a sense, I think it ruined the later part of his career and turned his career disappointing and tragic in a way. That is sad that I think that I would have rather he not gone through the villainy, the pure villain stage that he went through for about eight years. Especially now that we see A-Rod in public doing TV broadcasts and being much different than he was presented as and very likable and very smart.

And that didn't get conveyed. So I don't think that the A-Rod story was a true story. And so I there's some part of me that does worry that we're continually setting some guys up to fail and that we have a ton of power to actually make sure that they do and worrying that that might happen to Bryce Harper. Yeah, I don't know how much of it is media driven and how much of it is just player driven. You mentioned the Cole Hamels example when he hit Harper in 2012 for literally no reason. I mean, he gave no reason. He didn't really seem to have a reason other than just sending a message that, I don't know, you're young and I'm a veteran and don't get too big for your britches or whatever. Harper hadn't done anything to him. So that seems like the sort of thing where maybe Hamels had just been hearing about Harper for a long time and just wanted to put him in his place. I don't know that you can blame Harper in any way for that unless it was like word circulated among the players that Harper was a certain way. And so

Hamels felt he had to do something, or I don't know if that was media driven that Hamels was just reading coverage, reactionary coverage of Harper and felt like he was the one to step up and do something. But it is weird. Like a lot of these incidents, he doesn't seem to bring it on himself.

Maybe he partly brought it on himself through past actions, but it's the sort of thing where he's getting punished for things he did, in this case, three years ago that no one else remembered. So it is a strange thing that he doesn't seem to entirely have earned. And that maybe nobody else would have even noticed at the time had it not been Harper. That was already part of the story. And I don't mean to indicate that this was a like a media thing i think that a player's reputation is you know partly due to the media coverage and partly due to how his peers treat him and that both of those things inform each other and that they're not done with necessarily with intentionality that this is just the natural

way we react to people right so there is a natural way that we react to people, right? So there is a natural way that we react to Bryce Harper that is often not very forgiving or generous toward him. And it felt to me like there was a period a couple years ago where he was emerging from that. The make baseball fun again era, for instance, and when he pronounced it Maymay, he seemed to be emerging as a very popular face of the game. And maybe this doesn't hurt that. I'm not sure yet. But I think I was probably too optimistic too quickly. I still do think that whatever Bryce Harper does, he is more exposed to a negative reaction than, you know, he is more exposed to a negative reaction than Trout is or than a lot of other players would be.

All right. Anything else you want to say while you're here? No. Okay. I guess since you happen to be here on this day, we might mention the paperback edition of our book. The only rule is it has to work is out today. I don't know if either of us has all that much to say about it, but it is cheaper.

It's nine something dollars at Amazon. It is lighter. It weighs half as much. We fixed some typos and stuff. There's a new afterword, about 5,000 new afterwords about what happened after the season that we wrote about. So if you haven't read it, that's a good reason to get this version. If you have read it, maybe it's a reason to revisit it. I don't know. They asked us to write one, so we did. And you can get that in all the usual places.

I would obviously like people to read it because we wrote it so that people would read it and could read it. I'm bringing, I'm going to say this not as a way of bragging, but because it might encourage people to read it. And I want people to read it if they're going to enjoy it. It really has been the case that it seems like almost everybody who has read it has liked it. This has been a great year because very few people have told me that they're unhappy that they read this book or that they spent money on it or that they spent time on it. I wouldn't want them to spend money or time on it if they're not going to enjoy it. And I do want them to have a chance to enjoy it if they would enjoy it. So I'm just bringing it up so that hopefully more people who enjoy it will read it.

It is a book that people seem to like. Yeah. Right? It's pretty non-controversial. I think that's true. Aren't you though, like, haven't you been kind of humbled by how consistently people have seemed to like it? It's a crowd pleaser.

That's what I'm saying. It's a crowd pleaser, Ben. Yeah, it's, I mean. We're like the Ford commercial where the doors keep opening and more positive Amazon reviews are Chevy? Chevy? I think it's a Chevy. The Chevy Focus Group commercial?

Who cares? Anyway, the doors keep opening and it's more positive Amazon reviews. So I hope people will like it. And I hope that people who will like it will get a chance to read it. Yeah, it's, I'm sure, a self-selecting audience that has decided to read it. There's a baseball player on the cover, so some people are going to look at that and say, nope, not for me. Some people who might say that have read it and have told us that they liked it anyway, but everyone listening to this podcast is probably not in the group that would say, nope, not for me, about a baseball player.

So, yeah, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy it based on the feedback we've gotten. All right. Well, this was fun. We will do it again sometime. All right. Pretty fun one. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Sam still gets a cut of that Patreon revenue. So when you support the podcast, you're supporting him too.

Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Nishant Menon, Peter Lopilato, Adam VanderYacht, John Marsh, and Corey Rubin. 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 Effectively Wild on iTunes. Again, our book is called The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. I'll link to the paperback listing in the podcast post and in the facebook

group you can also go to the website at the only rule is it has to work.com to find out more about the book thanks to dylan higgins for editing assistance if you're looking for something else to listen to there's a new episode of the ringer mlb show up michael bauman and i talked to rob arthur and travis sawchuk about the flyball revolution and whether it actually is one. Keep your questions coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you all very soon.

Because it seems like old times So like long ago That I hardly even know Who's who anymore what's new anymore so like long ago that it seems like All right, what number? 1064. Okey-doke. All right. Three, two, one. Three, two, one. Three, two, one.

Three, two, one.