Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1066: Too Many Mascots

Episode Date: June 3, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about teams and players of particular interest (including the Astros, Marwin Gonzalez, and Aaron Hicks), Scott Boras vs. Theo Epstein, the brawl battle between Eduardo Jimenez and Jesse Stallings, bat-boy uniforms, Corey Dickerson’s real name, pitcher hitting and Walter Johnson’s unsung skill, many a mascot, and more. Audio intro: Pete […]

I don't matter, you don't matter, neither does this mindless chatter. It don't matter where you're from, what matters is your uniform. Wear your braces, round your seat, Dr. Martens on your feet. Keep your bonnet very neat, for credibility on street. We are marching next to war. We won't be obscure no more. In uniform, in uniform Hello and welcome to episode 1066 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I am Geoff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. How are you? I'm all right. I just overheard you tell your plumber that you would be recording a podcast in the next room, but I couldn't hear his response. What did he say? He said he'll be listening to a podcast while he's doing the work. So very podcast-oriented second story of the Stanton House. He didn't tell you to learn a real profession and get your hands dirty and do something

worthwhile? No, this is a plumber, not my mom. What's he fixing? Leaky sink. Nothing too interesting. Probably something I could have tried to do myself, but I cannot overemphasize the fact that as a at-home baseball blogger, I am probably the least handy person in existence. I mentioned that I blew out a tire on a forest road coming back from Mount Shasta last weekend,

and I did have a spare, and the tire was changed by my girlfriend and another lovely climbing partner named Allison, who did all of the work as I stood there and called a tire center to ask if I could get help. Well, I can't even drive a car, at least not legally. So you're ahead of me there. So you just finished your Fangraphs chat, which I read, and one thing I don't think you sufficiently addressed was what you think of Marwin Gonzalez and Aaron Hicks. Isn't it amazing how the hive mind just picks certain players every week that

are just on everyone's mind? You answered, must have been four Aaron Hicks questions and maybe three Marwin Gonzalez questions, and I assume that for every one you did answer, there were 10 more you didn't answer. How does this happen? I guess it's a very selective sample here. If you ask the typical baseball fan about Marwin Gonzalez or Aaron Hicks, he or she would probably say, who? I've never heard of those people. But you get fantasy players and you get very attentive baseball fans and people who are interested in stats. And so they tend to land on the same players who are hitting well or surprising or unexpected in some way. how this consensus coalesces around certain people and teams every single week about which is the most interesting. And there's the week where everyone writes the Mike Trout article. This was the week where everyone wrote the Astros article.

I might have to write an Astros article next week. I don't know. I kind of shirked my responsibility this week. My editor was asking me to write an Astros article, and I didn't have anything to say about the Astros. And I don't know that most people who wrote about the Astros did either, but they wrote about the Astros because they're really good. Well, thanks, because I just did it yesterday. I know you did, Rob Arthur did, everyone did, because they were coming off a seven game winning streak or whatever

and they have a double digit division lead, but they haven't really done it in that interesting a way, I would say. I know. I noticed. That was the trouble with the research. It took like five hours to find a post that said they've been good. Right. Yeah, because they were expected to be good. Maybe not quite this good, but they're good, and they've kind of been good at everything, but not like historically great at something. They're just a really good baseball team in a division that's been weak, and so there's

a pressure to write about them because they had the best record in baseball, but there isn't always something to point out about the team with the best record in baseball beyond the fact that they have the best record in baseball, which anyone can see without reading your posts. So it can be a struggle at times. Right. And I think what's kind of challenging here is that people are most likely to read an article in this instance about the Astros if you have the title that this hey this is a post about how the astros are really good but what's actually interesting would be like an in-depth breakdown on what jake marisnick and what marwin gonzalez are doing can actually be good hitters but if you put marwin gonzalez and jake marisnick in the headline then people are less likely to read it although based on the chat

evidence maybe that's not true i would like to make clear that while there were probably a million questions submitted in there about marwin gonzalez and Aaron Hicks, that was not a disproportionate representation of the questions being asked of me. There were very few questions about other players and several more about Gonzalez and Hicks that showed up. And what I have to imagine is that this has to be driven in large part, probably two things, and they're kind of related. One, these are players who were not very good before, so there's the breakout thing, which people love. But also, figure even if questions aren't specifically about fantasy baseball in the chat, it's being driven probably by fantasy content, maybe elsewhere.

I'm sure there are posts that are about like, hey, Marwin Gonzalez and Aaron Hicks aren't owned in the majority of leagues. Maybe you should consider picking them up. And so then people will ask about them. And I am more inclined in this case to believe, well, now i'm answering a question about them again in a live podcast but i'm more inclined to believe in hicks's improvement because i think he's always had a really good eye and now he's basically just zoned in on pitches up and he's not swinging anything down which is neat although now pitchers will just throw himself down and life is sick and you die marwin gonzalez

has hit i believe i saw 10 home runs in houston and two home runs on the road he's hit like a bunch of i don't know like wall scrapers or crawford boxes shots or stuff off the foul pole it's just like he's hitting for power without really hitting for power you know so i don't buy that but he's also walking a bunch more and he's a switch header and maybe something just clicked. So he's obviously interesting to enough people that he probably deserves a post. But if you write a post that has Barwin Gonzalez in the headline of it, you're going to get maybe 2,000 clicks. Yeah, would be interesting if they had just acquired him and he were taking advantage of the stadium in that way. And you could say, well, maybe they looked at his spray chart and they saw that he was perfectly tailored to this ballpark and all of his fly balls would go out.

But he's been playing for the Astros since 2012. And that hasn't been the case. So, yeah, I don't know. Another question you got, which you didn't have an answer to, and I don't blame you, from a reader named Greg, was if the home team provides the bat boys and the road team. This is going to be one of my bad points. Okay, yeah. the bat boys and the road team. This is going to be one of my bad.

Okay. Yeah. So if the home team provides the bat boys and the road team gets one of those bat boys in their own uniforms, does that mean that every team keeps 29 different tiny road uniforms hanging somewhere under the stands for their visitors? Bat boy. And I love the mental image of 29 different tiny uniforms hanging under the stands.

I didn't have a good answer because it was something on the fly. I didn't have time to pull up some research, but my chat transcript has since received two comments underneath by a username Rosen380. Let's see. Rosen380 says, it seems like it would make more sense for the road teams to bring the uniforms with them, especially if they want to

match an alternate jersey the team might be trying out that day. Further, from Rosen380 from Wikipedia, visiting teams, on the other other hand usually do not know who will be serving as their bat boys on the road and thus will send uniforms of various sizes to accommodate bat boys of varying heights and weights a bat boy may be provided his own number but will usually wear double zeros or bb in its place if a bat boy uniform does not have a first name on it it will usually have the term bat boy or no name at all. By the way, I love that they go by first names.

It is just so infantile. It's like how much more could you just make clear these are not actually people associated with our big league club. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a more logical explanation, but a lot less fun than the 29 different tiny uniforms. Also, Batboys, what a thing to exist. It's 2017. I know.

All right. What else did you want to banter about? Okay. So just real quick, I'll point out something I just noted to you pre-podcast. Throwaway point, but I was writing about Corey Dickerson the other day because he's bizarre, and I love the players who are bizarre. He's bizarre for several statistical ways, but there's also one more way when I looked him up on Baseball Reference.

The advantage of Baseball Reference is the full biographical information, and Corey Dickerson goes by Corey even though Corey is his middle name his given first name is McKenzie which is a name that I think you ordinarily associate with somebody's six-year-old daughter but he is McKenzie Corey Dickerson and according to baseball reference he is the first McKenzie in the history of Major League Baseball first name or last name as a matter of fact yeah I wonder middle name how many unique names you get per year. Sam and I used to talk about unique pitching lines and how those happen much more often than you'd expect. But unique names, probably less common than unique pitching lines. But I wonder how many you get in a typical year. I'm looking up a history of McKenzie's even in minor league baseball, and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. And there's a very short list of

McKenzie's as first names, even in the minors. However, there is currently a McKenzie Mills, who is in somebody's system, looks like the Nationals. Mickey Moniak, prospect of the Phillies. His first name is McKenzie, McKenzie Matthew Moniak. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that incorrectly. There's a Tristan McKenzie, which is extremely this generation. Yeah, he plays in the Indian system. But McKenzie, unusual name, Corey Dickerson. He's got it. Just another way that Corey Dickerson is unlike almost any other player in the game. All right. Good to know. I have one more banter thing before. I mean, this is basically going to be a banter episode.

I'm not going to lie to you, but let's see. Scott Boris has been making the rounds this week. You have probably read some of this or maybe seen references to it. But Scott Boris has been making the rounds with ESPN and, you know, his good bud, John Heyman, talking about Jake Arrieta. Jake Arrieta has a high ERA. The season struggled kind of down the stretch last season, but he's in his contract year. And Boris is his agent.

Boris is not just talking about Jake Arrieta for no reason. He's talking about him for a very good reason. And I'm just going to read some Boris excerpts. This is from his talk with ESPN, but he said the same stuff to John Heyman and everyone else. So pointing out Arrieta's numbers and also his declining velocity, I will quote, the question becomes, what's Kershaw averaging? He's throwing 92.5 miles per hour. Granke is throwing 91.8. Scherzer, when he was a free agent, was throwing 92 miles per hour. We're going to sit here and evaluate a player on a 60-day moment a 10 start moment when he has three years of history don't do it that's not fair that's not an evaluation i wanted

to bring this up because when you guys talk about what an elite pitcher is i want you to know scherzer in 2014 gave up seven runs five runs four runs four runs and 10 runs all before june struck my point is he's an elite pitcher referring to arietta in this case he did all that in his platform year no i'm sorry that was referring to scherzer anyway he's an elite pitcher he did that all that in his platform year jake is throwing at better levels than what scherzer did so scott boris has not only come to jake arietta's defense but he has directly compared a very slumping jake arietta to a contract year max scherzer when he was one of the top five or 10 starting pitchers in all of baseball. I don't know what the benefit is of talking to Scott Boris about stuff like this. I understand Boris will want to talk about this stuff, of course,

and he'll look for an outlet and he will invariably find an outlet. But it feels a little bit like booking Kellyanne Conway, you know, and then complaining that you're not getting a straight answer. I'll say these are numbers I did not make up over the past calendar year. So not just two months of Jake Arrieta, but over the past calendar year, Jake Arrieta is tied in Fangraph's War with Kevin Gosman. He's tied in ERA Minus with Matt Garza. He's tied in FIP Minus with Colin McHugh, and he's tied in fip minus with colin mckew and he's tied in x fip minus with wade miley all of these guys fine not max scherzer fine pitchers certainly not

max scherzer i guess i will have to confirm that matt garza has been a fine pitcher at least one number says that he has been who's to say but jake arietta over the past year has been you know adequate boosted presumably by last year's really good Cubs defense problems this year are I don't think about to suddenly go away he's not getting grand balls his slider or cutter whatever you want to call it has been horrible by the results so he's throwing it less and less he's still getting strikeouts he's not giving up very many walks so you know there's numbers there and arietta isn't a bad pitcher at this point but there are clear i think mechanical concerns the velocity being down is a problem and i just don't know what you're supposed to think about it i don't know how a team could look at jake arietta over the past year and think i want

to give that guy 200 million dollars as a free agent i should also point out that arietta is going to be older as a free agent and scherzer was when he signed his deal with the Learners and by association, the Nationals organization. Yeah. I guess Boris is hoping that they won't look at Jake Arrieta over the last year. They'll just look at his quote and take his word for it. Yeah. I mean, anytime Boris comes to the defense of his client, you can assume that almost the opposite of what he is saying is actually the case. And he comes up with interesting arguments that could fool people who don't look into them too deeply or don't actually check the math, but the math is almost always wrong. And that's fine. That's what his job is. And he has done an excellent job of getting his clients lots of money. So whatever he's doing, he should probably keep doing. It's not like anything he's saying about Jake Arrieta to a reporter is going to sway a GM or someone in a baseball operations department. talking directly to ownership. And those people are maybe not examining the claims with as much

skepticism as they should be. And so maybe he does hoodwink people with quotes like this. But yeah, especially when he has concrete claims in there that you can evaluate, it's always completely way off. And I enjoy seeing how he twists the facts to sort of suit the message that he's trying to send. It's always very convoluted and often you can't completely call it out as a lie. There's like a way that it could kind of be true if you interpret it in a certain sense. But this time I don't even know how you could come up with any kind of interpretation that would make it true. Right. It's not entirely like, but similar to, I guess, arguing against climate science by saying that the science is unsettled. And, you know, we don't know what all the effects are going to be.

That's true. A lot of it is kind of theoretical or extrapolation, and we don't know exactly how the Earth is going to be destroyed by our occupation of it. However, we have a pretty good idea that it's going to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the objective independent studies on the matter all agree, I don't need to get into the actual climate science of what's happening to our planet. But it's not a very convincing argument to say, well, the science is unsettled, just like Boris can point to facts that are true about jake arietta he was an ace he was an ace for a year and a half two years what have you he's been a very very good pitcher but if you wanted to extend that you could say felix hernandez deserves to be considered in the same way and he certainly does not he's declined rather significantly in terms of i

don't know everything and so the boris raises interesting points that are in defense of, I don't know, everything. And so Boris raises interesting points that are in defense of his clients that hint at something that's true, where he's right that Arrieta should not be evaluated based on his ERA of five or whatever it is over the 10 starts he's made this year. That's absolutely correct. All evaluation windows should extend further than that.

The problem is that even second half Arrieta last year was not very good. And so Boris raises a valid point, But what's unsaid is actually this point isn't really very helpful. So in one sense, Boris has this business where he spends a lot of time trying to put out really effective, let's just call it propaganda about his clients. And from I think the perspective of someone like you or myself or an analyst, it's pretty easy to see through because we don't need Scott Boris's help to analyze a baseball player. But this is where it becomes quite handy that Scott Boris doesn't deal with analysts. He

goes out of his way to not have to talk to those people. He goes directly above them and the front offices can't really complain because ultimately everyone reports to the owner and then the owners just aren't really necessarily so well versed in this even though no owner gets to that position without being very smart about money they are generally not so smart about the baseball parts of money right so yeah there's that aspect this actually i guess i might as well submit we'll talk about this now as a question i received in last week's chat and that dave cameron also received in this week's chat that i will propose to you would you rather have scott boris's job or theo epstein's job hmm i think theo's right because theo makes plenty of money and could make more if he wanted to and it's enough that I don't know that I would even notice the difference between being Boris rich and Theo rich. And so Theo is beloved and respect in it admired. Boris

is admired and respected by some people, but loathed by many other people. And he's certainly not beloved by anyone except his clients, perhaps. So I think that Theo is far better, right? I mean, maybe I don't know whether Theo's job is harder because he has to go collect the players. And Boris, I don't know, Boris is having teams come to him and saying, we'll pay this for that guy. And Theo's having to figure out which players to pay. So maybe it's a more difficult job, but the rewards are far greater, I think, just in terms of national notoriety and maybe in baseball notoriety too, and just kind of your relationship with the fans. You have fans who are rooting for you and grateful for things that you did,

whereas Boris never does. The easy answer is that you would much rather be Epstein. He's already won the two most desired championships in baseball. So of course, you'd rather be Theo Epstein because he's just like achieved more than arguably any player in the last 10 or 20 years, except for Mike Trout probably. But if you say, maybe if you take this question to a year ago, before Epstein won with the Cubs, then I think it's a question, obviously, there's respect, admiration, whatever. But I think that it seems like there would be a huge difference in the pressure that you feel on a day to day, week to week basis. Because at the end of the day, Scott Boris's job is seems remarkably easy. He's got these all-star clients and they kind of make

their own arguments and of course boris works as hard as he can to confuse old white men into giving them more money than they maybe deserve but the players sell themselves and so boris would be required to do quite little work aside from you know checking in on the players all that day-to-day stuff just to maintain a relationship. Whereas you have such a public position as the general manager of a high profile organization and you need that team to win. Fans only will respond to winning and losing. And it seems like there would be a lot of stress, a lot of gray hairs, a lot of lost hairs. And so it's a question, I guess, of which do you value more? Assuming Boris and Epstein are both substantially rewarded for their work financially. Neither one of them is hurting for money, but comes down to do you want that respect and admiration more or do you want an easier job more? And I actually don't know the answer to that since, I mean, who hates Scott Boris? Like GMs and fans, but who cares what the fans think that you're not working for them,

you're working for players. And I think the players love Scott Boris. Yeah. Well, I'm sure Boris's job has been extremely difficult at times. Maybe he's made it into an easier job just by being so successful, but it doesn't seem like he's really resting on his laurels. He does a lot of interviews. He has a ton of clients. Of course, he also has a large organization with people who are handling the day-to-day stuff. And then Boris just gets called in as the closer. He works on the really big deals. So maybe his job is not that difficult on a day-to-day basis now, but he seems so driven to make the most money for his clients and or himself that doesn't seem like he's really lazing around and enjoying a lot of free time. I don't know. I don't know Scott Boris's schedule,

but it doesn't seem all that low stress to me. I mean, negotiating seems like a high stress thing. Maybe it's not so stressful when you have the track record that Boris has, but just negotiating is something that I find unpleasant in my own life when I have to do it on the rare occasions when I have to. So for that to be my job, I would dislike. Of course, that is part of Theo Epstein's job, but it's not the bulk of it. I think there's a difference between how Scott Boris's job actually is and how it could be possible to conduct Scott Boris's job. Because what we don't know and what would be really interesting is to know what's, I guess, the replacement level contract that Scott Boris could get. If he did absolutely nothing but, I guess, own the rights to representing Bryce Harper,

let's say Boris does nothing, zero outreach. He just sits there and thinks, Bryce Harper. Let's say Boris does nothing. Zero outreach. He just sits there and thinks, they have to go through me at the end of the day. Is he going to get a smaller contract for Bryce Harper? And I'm not sure that it's true. I'm not sure that he would. I don't know how much of that negotiating is like getting an extra five or $10 million or I don't know, maybe an extra year, maybe an opt out clause. But like Scott Boris is in control of Bryce Harper's future contract, assuming Harper doesn't change you know, change that. But Harper seems like he's unlikely to do that. It would be interesting, though, if we will enter an era where players decide to represent themselves more and more as so much of the data is just out there that the players like teams will know who they want just by looking at the numbers.

They don't need to go through agents anymore. I don't know. That gets complicated. Agents do stuff that's important. Players don't know how to do it. But to get back to the point, if Harper is looking at something like a $400 million contract, how much is Boris really going to be able to do? Like if the Yankees come to Boris and say, we're going to give Harper this much. And then I don't know, the Red Sox or the Dodgers or whoever says we want to give him this

much. All Boris needs to do is inform the other teams, hey, this team offered this much and just sit and wait, right? And then do the paperwork when someone throws money at him. So what is Boris really doing by being aggressive? And I just don't know. I would love to know what Boris could do by doing a lot less than he seems to actually do. Yeah. Well, here's one related question. Would you rather be a stat person for a baseball team or a stat person for the Boris Corporation, the person who is coming up with these arguments about Jake Arrieta and Max Scherzer or Matt Wieters' framing not being all that bad or not mattering or whatever, all the weird Boris arguments in support of his players? weird Boris arguments in support of his players. He's probably not coming up with those on his own. At least most of the time, he has a large research department, which he seems proud of. I'm sure there are very intelligent, qualified people in that department who are not really using the most of their skills because they're trying to come up with these bogus arguments using very basic stats. So it doesn't seem like it would

be that hard. Now, I'm sure they're also doing other things. They're probably putting together real reports to try to optimize players' performance and that sort of thing. But would you rather work for Boris, presumably making more money than you would for a team? Let's say you're making twice as much money, three times as much money, who knows how much more money, but you are doing it in service of Boris and players making money, which is not an ignoble goal or anything, but maybe it's not quite as personally exciting as winning a World Series, which is the typical quants goal for a baseball team. So which one of those do you choose? Can I introduce, this might change things, but could I introduce a third option? You have those two, or you could be sort of like a stat consultant or something for a

specific player or three. Yeah, that'd be fun. Three options. And I only introduced that one because I think that one would be the most desirable. You'd have the most direct effect. I guess that's probably part of the Boris person's job also, if there's... So that's probably... Yeah, that's true. Third challenge is there's less... Relative to being a general manager, there's certainly less adoration and adulation for just being some team's quant, one of several quants. So you're not really going to get that respect aside from the occasional article written about how your team is forward thinking, even though every team is forward thinking now. Yeah. You might not get singled out by name, but if you tell people I work for

baseball team, that's probably a more desirable job than I work for an agent, I guess. I don't know. They're both baseball stats, so maybe they're both cool, but probably working for a team is something that would excite the typical person more. Right. It would excite the typical person, although already if I have told enough people, I write about baseball and then they get kind of excited. But I don't know. It doesn't seem to add that much to my life to tell people, hey, I work about baseball. And then I guess the majority of people I run into don't care about baseball. So that's kind of a non-starter right there. So I don't know how much of a window you have into the life of being, I guess, like an agent's quant. I have none. I don't really know much of a window you have into the life of being, I guess, like an

agent's quant. I have none. I don't really know much about what that lifestyle is like, but I know enough people in baseball that I know that it's underpaid and very demanding. Your hours are crazy and you're away from home for at least most of spring training seems to be the way that it goes. And you can't really book anything for seven or eight months of the year in terms of pursuing stuff in your own life. I don't know what it's like to work with an agent. I would assume that it's less horrible than working for a team. And I think there's also, I guess maybe the reward is greater if you're for a team, not only because the team could be successful, but you might like find your guy and then your team goes and gets that guy. And if he's good, then, hey, that's great. And you've given this guy an opportunity. So that could be rewarding. But there's also the challenge of you're kind of having to monitor everyone in baseball, which gets overwhelming. And I really enjoy going in depth on individual guys. I would like to write an article about Marwin Gonzalez more than just the Astros. Like I wrote a post about Chris Tillman that went up on Friday. And I like getting really deep into what I think are mechanical flaws or things a

player could do better or worse. And I think if you are working with an agent, you have a smaller list of players that you're sort of responsible for. Yeah, I think it's less daunting to think about helping the cases of those players as opposed to trying to monitor everything happening in the majors and the upper levels of the minors. Yeah, I think I agree. One other unrelated thing I wanted to bring up. I don't know whether you saw the video of the brawl between the West Michigan White Caps and, I don't know, the Dragons. I don't even know where the Dragons play.

They're the Dragons. But minor league teams, they brawled. It was on Sunday, but the suspension was just handed down. A 30-game suspension for Whitecaps reliever Eduardo Jimenez. And the thing that Jimenez did is he came right into the middle of the brawl and he threw a baseball as hard as he possibly could at one of the opposing team's players so you can uh find the video pretty easily probably i can send you a link it's about 50 seconds into this and he really does just whip a baseball at almost point blank range

at an opposing player and points for originality points subtracted for assault but this is uh this is something i've never seen in a brawl it is something that i hope never to see again because this looks really dangerous i just want to recognize the person who was hit by the baseball for his stoic reaction to getting drilled by a baseball in the middle of a baseball brawl. He just totally no-sold it. He just almost gave no reaction. It's really impressive.

He is Dragons reliever Jesse Stallings, who is, I guess I can tell you who the Dragons are now. They are the Dayton Dragons, of course, the Midwest League A-ball affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. And Jesse Stallings, he's a second year relief pitcher for the Dragons. And he just didn't react at all to getting hit by this pitch. So he's a reliever. Jimenez, who threw the ball, is also a reliever. So he's a professional pitcher. And he wasn't doing the full windup, but he did sort of take a crow hop. He put a lot of force into this. He was not just throwing

it. I would wager that he has as much force behind this throw as he would an actual throw, despite there not being a mound. So I don't know how hard you would estimate he is throwing this pitch if you have seen the video by now, but obviously this is from a distance of, I don't know, five feet or something he's getting drilled by this baseball. And it looks like it hit him in the leg or maybe the thigh area, which probably has something to do with how little reaction he showed. But coupled with the surprise and whatever pain there was, I'm impressed by Jesse Stalling's reaction to this. It's possible that he does not feel pain. It feels a little like that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the two soldiers throw

their helmets at one another because they're out of bullets, right? Yeah, so points for, like you said, creativity here to bring out the ball, but what does it say about a player that he has so little faith in his hand-to-hand combat skills that the only way he knows to enforce his own will is by throwing a baseball like we talk about how baseball needs to come up with a better way of policing its own game than just pegging each other with baseballs but look how deep it runs this is all they know how to do and we've seen in brawls that like anyone this side of route in our door doesn't know how to throw a punch, which is fine. I don't know how to throw a punch. I hope that I never have to, but none of us are

good at it. But I don't know, is this like really smart or really embarrassing? I don't know the answer to that. Well, it's, I think, embarrassing in a larger life context, but in the context of baseball brawls, which is just totally silly and nonsensical and doesn't seem to have anything in common with real life, it's smart, I guess. It's like the typical baseball brawl, especially for a bullpen. They come out there. They stand around. They mill about for a bit, and then they go back to the bullpen. Often the brawl is over by the time they even get there.

So he's taking it seriously. The brawl is over by the time they even get there. So he's taking it seriously. He's exploiting an inefficiency here where everyone else is not throwing baseballs at each other. Right. And they're just standing around. I don't know what the force is of getting hit by a baseball versus the force of a punch. Certainly like a minor league baseball player punch.

I have no idea. They're probably kind of similar. The size is about the same. I don't know how fast a fist goes, but, you know, getting punch shorts, whatever. Where did he aim or hit the guy? Yeah, I don't know where he's aiming, but he seems to hit him like on the upper leg or thigh area, it looks like. Okay, and so from that distance, he probably wasn't trying to hit him in the head. So the advantage here is that if you're striking someone from a distance, you're basically applying a punch, except you're not going to be punched back because you're too far away. Now, granted, then you're striking someone from a distance, you're basically applying a punch, except you are not going to be punched back because you're too far away. Now, granted, then you're out your baseball and then, you know, unless you run away, you're in the mix of it and there's going to be a fight.

But at least, you know, you get the first blow. He did run away, basically. Well, then that's this is exactly how I might fight in a brawl. Yeah. You know, it's better than a bat. Yeah. I mean, maybe he doesn't know how to punch, but he does know how to throw a baseball. That's what he does as a job.

So if you're in a brawl situation, everyone uses the weapons available to them, right? And this is the best weapon available to him. So you said it was a 30-game suspension? Is that right? Yes. 50? 30. 30.

Okay. Bryce Harper got three three games four at first hunter stricken got six is that warranted why would a guy get a long if you have a brawl there's going to be suspensions because there's going to be fisticuffs people will be throwing punches i get someone should be like kicked out of the game if they bring a bat into the brawl but if you have a baseball and you're not headhunting, it's kind of the same as throwing a punch, right? If someone throws a punch and gets suspended five games and this guy throws a baseball and gets suspended 30 games, why? Why is that the case? Punches, you're trying to hit somebody's head.

A baseball, he hit his lower body. Unless he's a terrible pitcher from five feet away, he wasn't aiming for the upper body. So I get that he gets a longer suspension because he like broke the under rules and used a weapon, but it's like a worse weapon than what he already has on his arms it's safer for him it's probably safer for the player getting hit by the baseball because there's less risk of getting concussed this is no he deserves a shorter suspension as a matter of fact all baseball brawls just should just be solved by everyone bringing a baseball out and getting to huck one one baseball at anyone else's lower body that's how they want to enforce the things right that's how baseball wants to police its own game everyone gets a huck of baseball at somebody on

the other team and that's it he deserves either half the suspension of anyone else in the brawl or he deserves no suspension and a promotion and like a raise i i've come fully around on bringing the baseball at the way that it was used it's better than i don't know like if you had a like a billiard ball in your hand and you just club someone in the forehead you know then that would be terrible but if you did that with a baseball or like a cricket ball that would be worse or like a rock yeah never use rocks but no this is fine this is totally fine i approve of this behavior i would like to know what grant brisby would write about it if this happened in the major leagues. I's the way it's always been done. But yeah, I think a thrown baseball by a professional pitcher probably has more potential to injure if the intent is to injure than a punch thrown by a baseball player. But I would think that a punch to the face versus a thrown ball to the leg slash thigh area, assuming that was his intention. Those do seem fairly equivalent,

I would think, in terms of their likelihood of injuring the person. So I don't know, other than the fact that we don't want a slippery slope where you can start bringing any weapon to a baseball brawl and doing whatever you want, and suddenly people will have tridents and it will be like the anchorman fight. So I guess I see why you would want to stop the expansion of fighting techniques. You kind of want people to stick to the fighting that is weirdly allowed because it's just been grandfathered in. So maybe that's why you don't want people expanding the definition of baseball fights to include other weapons. the definition of baseball fights to include other weapons and so you really drop the hammer on Jimenez for the baseball stunt even though the actual injury potential doesn't seem all that different you're right yeah no I don't I think that if for such a long suspension I don't

think they thought this all the way through of course you want to deter weapons but there are there's a clear line of the weapon if somebody came out took their cleats off and started swinging their cleats around then that's too dangerous but just throwing a baseball that's literally what pitchers do and get suspended a few games for when they're trying to retaliate for something they just happen to do it from a mound yeah which to be fair is a lot farther away and the recipient of the hit by pitch is more prepared for it or at least you know it's a possibility, whereas Stallings here, I'm sure, was not expecting to have a baseball thrown at him. So this is maybe more dangerous than a batter getting plunked by a pitcher intentionally. But as we've seen, baseball doesn't punish that at all or very severely in most cases.

But there's, I mean, there's already an active fight. So if you're going to have a choice between somebody getting hit by a baseball or hit by a punch to the face because nobody tries to punch the midsection in baseball they all flail at the head right no he deserves to be in the major leagues tomorrow let's see if he actually does i wonder how good uh he's good is he good he's got uh 33 strikeouts and 24 innings as a reliever he's in the tiger system so i'll say this again reliever tigers yeah strikeouts he should be in the major leagues how many probably good enough to be their closer uh eight okay so decent control too all right i have one more thing to talk about i don't this is her episode yeah i guess it is i do you have any long things to talk about that it's realistically

it wasn't going to be long but there's one one. Go ahead. Do yours. All right. Well, so we got an email this morning from a listener named Duncan, and he says in his latest post on his excellent pages from baseball's past, Craig Wright, and Craig Wright is the famous historian and trailblazing sabermatrician. And I have plugged this newsletter before. I'm a subscriber. It's really great He combines history and stats in an interesting way I always learn a lot

So Duncan, evidently a subscriber too He says in the latest edition Craig examines how Bucky Harris The manager in the Curly Ogden maneuver That we talked about recently His secret managerial weapon Was getting his pitching staff to hit better Given the declining benches of teams recently, and thus fewer players available for pinch hitting, do you guys think a team would

ever consider focusing some effort on this? Would having pitchers hit even just a little less pitifully be worth the time? If yes, how much of a difference do you think it could make to a team's offense over a year? What are the downsides? And so I was just reading this edition of the newsletter, really interesting. So Bucky Harris had a long managerial career and seemed to demonstrate this ability to improve his pitching staffs wherever he went. And I'm quoting now from Craig, Harris took over eight different clubs during his long managerial career. And with each team, he worked successfully with his pitchers on becoming better hitters All eight times the power percentage

Isolated power of his pitchers Improved the very first year And 75% of the time there was also Improvement in their batting average and on base Percentage. Overall his pitchers came up With a huge 16.2% gain In their offense as hitters That's a 71

Point boost in OPS And there are cases Where the boost was even bigger His first year as a manager The Washington pitchers improved their Combined batting average by 51 points From 187 to 238 And that put them 22 points ahead

Of the next best hitting team So that might have propelled the Senators to the playoffs that year, the 1924 pennant they won by only two games. So he seemed to have an ability to do this just by making the pitchers practice when other people weren't paying attention to it. And this was the 20s, so pitchers were much better relative to the typical hitter than they are today, but still pretty bad. And Bucky Harris was able to make them a lot better. So do you think it's worth trying today? And would there be any costs?

I don't really know how much teams have their pitchers practice hitting, but I do know there was an article a few years ago where I think the Cardinals had taken some pride in how their pitching staff was hitting. And then I think they had a down year and there was a bunch of chatter in spring training before spring training about how they wanted to have a renewed emphasis on teaching their pitchers how to handle the bet. So I don't know what that entails. I don't know what is sacrificed in order to make time and effort for that. But just looking over the past 10 years of baseball, so the last decade, looking at National League pitching staffs at the plate, the Cardinals have led the National League in pitching staff war at 4.1. have led the National League in pitching staff war at 4.1.

They have a two-win advantage over the second-place Giants, which means just Madison Bumgarner, let's be honest. So the Cardinals are in first, easily the best offensive pitching staff of the past decade. And in last place, there are the Pirates at negative 6.8 war over the 10 years. So basically, there's a one-win difference between the Cardinals and the Pirates per year over this span of time just based on pitchers hitting which is one of those things no one ever really pays that much attention to at least on a team basis how much of that is because the cardinals have had talented hitters like adam wainwright i don't know versus what the pirates

have had but there's at least some circumstantial evidence to suggest that the cardinals have just worked harder at it and it's it's helped them i don't know what it looks like by win probability but i can tell you in 10 seconds the answer is that well okay by this analysis there's a seven win difference between the padres who would now move up to best in the national league and the braves who dropped to last just barely ahead of the pirates all these pictures of course have been bad at hitting i need to make sure you understand that the cardinals who have been the best hitting pitching staff over the past decade, have a WRC plus of negative one. So they've been bad, but they've been better than the Pirates. And I would assume those other numbers are more reliable than the win probability numbers.

Pitchers overall this year, by the way, have a negative 16 WRC plus. year, by the way, have a negative 16 WRC plus. That's a 127, 162, 162 slash line, which is not quite the worst ever, but maybe like the third worst ever. It's very close to the worst ever, which makes sense because they get worse almost every year. Here's what's interesting. This year, well, I guess I should start with last year, pitchers struck out 39% of the time. Well, this is just looking at the National League, but whatever, that's fine with last year pitchers struck out 39 percent of the time well this is just looking at the national league but whatever that's fine national league pitchers last year struck out 39 percent of the time this year 36 they've gotten a little bit better in making contact which seems like it shouldn't make sense since strikeouts go up and they've batted about 1700 times so the sample size is it's not super low, but this year pitchers,

they've improved their contact rate by about a point. It's small, but it's something, something is going on where pitchers have struck out less often. And that's interesting. Now, while I have you on the line, which I do,

because this is our podcast, I will also pull up American league pitchers by comparison, see how they're doing. They are striking out more. They're at 47% strikeouts. Their WRC plus is negative 28. However, they bottomed out a few years ago at negative 41. So that's better.

They've at least walked a little bit. But American League pitchers are striking out as if they're an average hitter facing, I don't know, Aroldis Chapman, I guess. Career Aroldis Chapman. if they're an average hitter facing, I don't know, Aroldis Chapman, I guess, career Aroldis Chapman. Yeah, so I don't know if you could do what Bucky Harris did consistently now. If you could go from worst to best, I mean, that would be worth something. So I don't know what the opportunity cost is because obviously pitchers work harder in a lot of ways than they did in Bucky Harris's day I mean just conditioning wise and running and lifting

And the recovery that's needed to heal their bodies after throwing as hard as they do I mean there's just a lot more exertion It's more strenuous to face hitters all else being equal And of course the workloads are lower, but there's a reason for that. So maybe having them hit more would impair their performance in some way on the mound. Maybe it wouldn't, I don't know. Players have a lot of downtime. So it's possible that this is something that teams could get better at. You'd need pitchers to buy into it, I guess. Maybe Bucky Harris was great at motivating his pitchers to buy into it, I guess. Maybe Bucky

Harris was great at motivating his pitchers to care about hitting, which is something that some pitchers really care about and others probably couldn't care less about. They're focused on pitching. They're not really getting paid based on their offensive performance unless they're a real outlier in one direction or another. So I don't know. I just don't know enough, I guess, about the typical player's schedule and what the cost would be and what they wouldn't be able to do if you were having them drill more and pay attention to hitting more. But it does seem like the sort of thing where if you've got one of those good-natured intra-team competitions going and you had the players motivated, it would be worth trying.

Yeah, I think it's kind of tough to sell just because I think all pitchers know that pitchers can't hit. And so I think it's human nature to look at that and think, okay, well, there's no point in working here. We're always going to be bad. And the team might have difficulty selling the fact that any little slight advantage is still an advantage. If you hit 100 instead of 0.090 or something, that is a better hitting pitching stat that makes a positive difference. But it seems like they're just so bad that maybe players just don't feel like they want to put in the work because the gains are, they're hard to feel, I guess, on a team level because you still turn around most of the time thinking, I just made it and out. Yeah. And any individual pitcher is probably getting fewer plate appearances now than in

the past, right? Because you're making fewer starts. You're not going as deep into games. You're getting pulled earlier. So there's less incentive for any one pitcher, I suppose, to devote himself to practicing hitting than when you were pitching on a four-man rotation or whatever and pitching a complete game every time, as you often were in the 20s or before. So less motive, I guess, less motivation, less incentive to get them to work on it. But I wanted to mention it. It's a cool story. And the best part of this is Walter Johnson, who was Bucky Harris's star pupil. Good hitter before he was managed by Bucky Harris, but then became a great hitter under Bucky Harris. And Walter Johnson, just an incredible hitter, which I either never knew or had forgotten. pitching x points he's maybe the best pitcher ever at least relative to his contemporaries but his hitting is pretty incredible too speaking of what makes leaderboards interesting we were saying that a big gap between number one and number two is inherently interesting well if you look at the

offensive war leaderboard via the play index at baseball reference for pitchers career value walter johnson contributed 13.3 wins above replacement with his hitting alone and the closest pitcher is early win at 9.6 so no one is anywhere close to walter johnson in career offensive value for pitchers of course he pitched for a really long time but he was also just excellent and he was used in the field at times. He was used as a pinch hitter. He hit for power by dead ball era standards. And he had one crazy season under Harris. It was 1925. In 1925, Johnson made 107 plate appearances. He hit 433 and with a 455 on base, 577 slugging. He hit a couple home runs. He was just like one of the best hitters in the league on a per plate appearance basis. And he had other really excellent seasons. So just on top of everything else, Walter Johnson was

amazing at. He was also one of the best hitting pitchers ever, which I think is underappreciated, or at least it was by me. Early win is a good pitcher name. Yeah, just great name, period. Looking over, there's one more good win, not a pitcher, but baseball player in the 80s for, it looks like, the Pirates, Padres, and the Cubs. Marvel win. Marvel win. So that's two very good names to have as a baseball player. By the way, Johnson was 37 when he had that insane season. His last season, he was 39, and he hit.348,.388,.522 with two home runs in only 50 plate appearances. So just a really amazing player all around.

Just a strikeout machine when there weren't strikeouts i know what this this is the picture equivalent of the barry bonds i was just about to say that yeah i think it is so much black ink on there well uh we've already been doing this for like 50 minutes which is good because i didn't know how much material there was going to be with this next topic i was going to have kind of a grab bag but one thing i wanted to briefly acknowledge mr met was in the news this week right mr Met allegedly flipped off a fan who we don't need to talk about the fan social media account, but it looks like there were two villains here. But Mr. Met will be dealt with internally by the Mets because he flipped off a fan, even though by definition, Mr. Met cannot flip off a fan

because he doesn't have a middle finger. He only has four fingers. He's like a Simpsons character, etc. I don't have much to say about that story, except for I'm sure the deserve it and mr med should be fine but whatever i'm sure he'll lose his job and he'll move on from there but it did get me thinking mascots are weird right there are there are mascots and that's strange and it made me curious more curious about the history of mascots i know mr med it turns out by the way is the original team mascot, at least in this sense. He was created in 1964. Teams had had mascots before that. I can tell you a lot of this is going to come from Wikipedia.

A lot of that, this is just going to be excerpts. But many sports teams in the United States have official mascots sometimes enacted by costumed humans or even live animals. One of the earliest was a taxidermy mount for the Chicago Cubs in 1908, which makes me think they just killed a bear and stuffed it, and that was their mascot. I can't imagine that would work now. And later, a live animal was used in 1916 by the same team. I didn't research that any further, but what it implies at least is that the Chicago Cubs had a live bear

as a mascot for their team, which seems like that might be a one-year plan or maybe a one-day plan. And then you think better of it because it's a bear. Also, I remember I did write an article for SB Nation back in, I think it was 2011, that talked about sort of before we had these live acting like costumed mascots, there was a whole like genre of disabled people who were sort of like human mascots and uh i think the most well known of those was uh charlie faust victory charlie faust yeah charlie victory faust but there was also eddie bennett there was lewis

van zelst there was a little ray Ray Kelly who was like Babe Ruth's little assistant and then of course most recently popular there was Nelson de la Rosa who was a one of the world's shortest men and he kind of hung around with Pedro Martinez for some reason and he was just there and then they had a falling out which was odd and then Nelson

de la Rosa passed away a few years later but here's a history of human mascots who proclaimed themselves to be good luck. There were in there a couple of people who had humpbacks, hunchbacks. And then for some reason, I guess, 100 years ago, that was considered to be good luck. I don't know how to explain what was happening in the world back then, but there was war. I'm sure people were confused and looking for anything they could get. But one thing led to another, and it took me

to the mascot Wikipedia page. Firstly, do you think you could name how many Major League Baseball teams do not currently have an official mascot? Huh, I don't have a great sense of this. Since I grew up watching the Yankees and never rooted for a team that had a mascot, it's always seemed like a strange institution to me. Although Yankees did have a very strange mascot for about three years, from 1979 to 1981, named Dandy. If anyone isn't familiar with Dandy, you should Google him. Disturbing-looking monstrosity. But I would say a third of teams don't have mascots. Three teams. Wow. That's what? One-tenth. One-tenth of teams don't have mascots.

Three teams. Wow. That's what? One-tenth. One-tenth of teams don't have official mascots. You named the Yankees, so they do not have an official mascot. The Dodgers don't have an official mascot, and technically, I guess the Angels don't,

even though they do have or at least have had the Rally Monkey. I guess that doesn't really count. At least it didn't count according to Wikipedia. But yeah, yankees and dodgers long-standing franchises as you mentioned though the yankees have kind of messed around i wanted to read something from the dandy page dandy was a short-lived mascot of the new york yankees he was a large pinstriped bird it's right at a yankee's hat nothing too weird so far he had a mustache that gave him an appearance similar to that the former yankee pitcher sparky lyle his name was a play on the classic American folk song Yankee Doodle Dandy. This paragraph takes a turn.

He appeared at the start of the 1980 season and was so unpopular that he was quickly canceled. The dandy was beaten up by fans who didn't want a mascot and quit leading to the elimination of the character as the Yankees chose not to replace him. So dandy, colorful history. There was the White Sox had some mascots that people were not too fond of. There was Ribby and Rhubarb who were, I'll just keep reading excerpts. For most of the 1980s, the patrons at Comiskey Park

were asked to endure the antics of baseball's least appealing mascots, Ribby and Rhubarb. One looked like the dim-witted son of Oscar the Grouchouch the other like a chartreuse anteater with a genetic flaw the white socks also in the early 1990s folded in for some reason waldo the white socks wolf and then they finally introduced their current weird mascot southpaw in 2003 so the white socks have gone through four i guess mascots over the years and it's interesting through four, I guess, mascots over the years. And it's interesting that we get to talk about mascots in the same episode that we talked about Batboys because they seem so antiquated as a thing, like something baseball has just done because it's done it for a long time. But what might be even weirder is that mascots are growing.

They're expanding. Like just a few years ago, Clark, right? Clark the Cub became a thing. mascots are they're growing they're expanding like the just a few years ago clark right clark the cub became a thing so at a time when you the whole idea of mascots as far as i can tell is to help market to kids right yeah kids love costumed characters anthropomorphic whatever's and i don't really know what purpose they serve i don't care to see like the mariner moose when i go to safe the field as an adult but they're around and i guess maybe they still help and some mascots are so recognizable you can't ever get rid of them but it's a strange thing to just have at a game but as much as you'd think that it would lose

forward momentum clark exists and he became the first kind of real mascot of a storied franchise that didn't need a mascot and i mean i i realized it didn't really open this up very much to like a conversation i don't have points to make about mascots it's just that mr met got me thinking about mascots more than i think i've thought about them in a long time of course mascots are not unique to baseball there's olympic mascots or there's like mascots for drug companies or like business that makes toothbrushes so there are just mascots everywhere for anyone that wants to market itself to kids but it's not only interesting how many mascots there are but it's an expanding field the reds have like four mascots i learned a lot about mascots last night and this morning when i was reading ace and diamond were the four mascots. I learned a lot about mascots last night and this morning when I was reading. Ace

and Diamond were the official mascots of the Blue Jays, but then Diamond, the female bird, was eliminated and then we were given Junior who I think is Ace's son or little brother or something, but what happened to Diamond? There's no good explanation. Just a female bird is gone

and dead. The Diamondbacks have a mascot that's a bobcat. His name is Baxter. What I didn't know is that that mascot was created by J. Bell's son. J. Bell was a player on the team, came up with a mascot. There you go. There's Billy the Marlin, who I think many of us are familiar with. He starred in a fun sports center, I think it was, ESPN commercial, 10 or 15 years ago.

But Billy the Marlin, he has parents, by the way pill senior and betty of the marlin i don't know why mascots have such odd they construct histories and families and relationships for these things it's just it gets out of mascot expanded universe cinematic universe yeah this is very strange i didn't know a lot of these things but if baseball is having trouble marketing itself to young people does that mean we need more mascots? Or does that mean that the mascots aren't doing their jobs? Is that an indictment of mascots? Gapper is the least popular amongst fans. He received 6% of the voting. Mr. Red received 23%. Rosie Red received 34%. And Mr. Redlegs received 47%. The Reds have four active mascots.

They've been folded in at different times. And so I guess the Reds haven't had the heart to eliminate a mascot. But wait, there's more. Because there was a general admission play on words right general admission a pun on the unreserved four dollar seating section of the astrodome he was a mascot for the houston astros in the mid to late 1990s he was played by a middle aged white mile surprise and wore a traditional u.s cavalry uniform complete with gold stars he would affix to his uniform for every astros home run hit in the dome whenever an astro hit a home run the general would fire off a cannon from his outfield platform that

would often scare those seated near him that's fine whatever general mission plan words he was killed off at the end of the 1999 season when the astro's main mascot orbit had him zapped by an alien ray gun on the penultimate game of the regular season so the reds don't have the heart to do anything with they're just amassing mascots at this point they just collect them and then cincinnati.com readers like some more than others but the astros had orbit he was a pre-existing mascot then he went away then they had general admission marketing the team to children and then orbit killed him with an alien ray gun during the second to last game of the season. And General Admission was no more.

He was just zapped. He was dead. So they didn't just like Diamond the bird was, I guess, quietly eliminated by the blue chase, which that's fine. He just kind of disappeared, went back to his home planet. I don't know. But General Admission was just straight up murdered in cold blood by Orbit the green alien. And that's just something that's fine. I don't know if you could do that. That's 19 years ago but

if mascots exist for the kids they're traumatized because the general was killed. And you know what? General, he's military, right? He has a cannon and then Orbit just zapped him with a... Unbelievable. Seems like there would be diminishing mascot returns

after the first mascot, probably. So I kind of don't blame them for killing one off. That's the only way you can get rid of him. All right. Oh, oh, no, no. I can keep going. See, because there are more mascots. You might be familiar with Wally.

Wally the Green Monster. So according to the Red Sox promotions department, Wally was a huge Red Sox fan who in 1947 decided to move inside the left field wall of fenway park since it quote eats up hits that would easily be home runs at other parks that doesn't seem like an explanation that just seems like a second half of the sentence that they put in to an unrelated first half of the sentence apparently he was very shy and lived the life of a hermit for 50 years in 1997 and the 50th anniversary of the green monster being painted green he came out of the manual scoreboard and has been interacting with players and fans ever since okay so i get they didn't want to like the red sox just like the yankees and the dodgers it would

and the cubs i guess would have difficulty unveiling a mascot because fans think they're too good for it it's a traditional organization and you feel like you wouldn't need a mascot when you're one of these like original baseball teams, basically. But they still unveiled Wally in 1997. And the explanation they came up with was that at that point, I guess Wally was a 50 year old hermit who suddenly became very gregarious. And he grew a beard with the team in 2013. But see, in January 2016, the Red Sox unveiled a new mascot named Tessie who is Wally the Green Monster's little

sister. Let's okay let's think about this though. At this point Wally the Green Monster he's 53, 59 1947 to 69 years old basically Wally the Green Monster 69 years old all of a sudden he's got a little sister. So is the little

sister also very old? What's the sister's got a little sister so is the little sister also very old what's the sister's story was the sister a hermit if the sister has been around for so long why did she allow wally to live like a hermit for so long within a fence i just it doesn't a lot of continuity errors here yeah the backstory is not very well thought out and it turns out also the red socks had these other mascots that were retired in 2014 they were named lefty and righty and oh by the way they were socks they were each a large red sock with arms they were just there the red socks retired them but you know it's kind of weird to have mascots that aren't necessarily the team nickname but sometimes you don't really have a

choice and you should just have a mascot that isn't the team's nickname because sometimes there are just multiple teams in major league baseball named after socks and then you have mascots who are socks and the red socks are like why not have two why not have two socks represent our team i don't know if socks are very effective marketing when you were dealing with children and the final mascot the final mascot that i will discuss because i feel like it's appropriate colin hanks directed a espn 30 for 30 short about the crazy crab are you familiar with the crazy crab no tell me about the crazy crab i will tell you one long paragraph about the crazy crab and then we can finally be done with this episode talking about the history of major league baseball mascots the crazy crab was a mascot of the san Francisco Giants for the 1984 season.

As opposed to other mascots, Crazy Crab was meant as an anti-mascot, satirizing on the mascot craze that was going on at the time. By the way, apparently that craze still exists. Fans were encouraged to boo the mascot, played by actor Wayne Doba, and manager Frank Robinson appeared in a commercial with the crustacean where Robinson was restrained from attacking him. This encouragement may have worked too well as Giants fans regularly threw various dangerous objects at Crazy Crab, including beer bottles and batteries, and Crazy Crab's suit had to be reinforced with a fiberglass shell for protection. The Crab was so hated, players on both the Giants and even the opposition

would throw rosin bags and other objects at the mascot. Doba sued the San Diego Padres after two of their players tackled him causing injuries created a mascot to be hated out of nothing and he became so hated that players

actually people just threw shit at him and hurt the person within unbelievable crazy crap greatest mascot in the history of professional sports well this has been a weird one truly a wild episode all right we're finished i think i got no more all right lucille by the way in 2008 lucille of the giants voted by forbes magazine as the best mascot in sports. Who knew? I didn't know Lucio was a mascot in sports. I didn't know Forbes Magazine cared.

All right. Talk to you next week. Bye. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Ryan McLaughlin, Kyle Sharmataro, Jimmy Choi, Nick Wilwert, and George Bremmer. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group.

Very close to 6,000 members now at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. The paperback edition of my book, The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team is out now. You can get it on Amazon, has a new afterward. And if you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Baman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. We talked about the Astros and whether the Astros and the Cubs have ruined rebuilding for the rest of the teams that have to try to rebuild after those clubs raised the rebuilding bar. 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 nice weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Do you remember Walter Playing cricket in the thunder and the rain? Do you remember Walter Smoking cigarettes behind your garden gate? Yes, Walter was my mate But Walter, my old friend, where are you now?