Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1068: The Error-Prone Podcast

Episode Date: June 8, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Scooter Gennett and Cubs infield positioning, follow up on a Nelson Cruz question, and answer listener emails about defining “homegrown,” home-run league leaders, Liam Hendriks’ charity pledge, an official-scoring decision, the 40/40 club, the Cubs’ reputation, tracking warm-up pitches, the error-prone A’s, how to allocate extra runs, resting […]

I was one, two, three, four times gone. I was one, two, three, I was four times gone. I was one, I was two, I was three, I was three, but I was four times, four times Hello and welcome to episode 1068 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg, I'm a writer for The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi. What are you thinking about? Okay, well let's see. We talked about John Lester on Monday, right?

We did. We don't have to talk about the pickoff anymore, right? Okay, as sort of a follow-up, hell, before we get into that, hey, Scooter Jeanette, all right, four home runs. That's a lot of home runs, probably as many home runs as he has in his career. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. The article that ran on The Ringer by Zach Cram was Scooter Jeanette hit four homers because the ball is juiced. It's almost hard not to reach that conclusion because his name is literally Scooter and he hit four home runs.

But yeah, pretty crazy. Joe Sheehan wrote about how improbable it was or how improbable it was compared to previous four home run hitters. And there were other guys that it came just as much out of nowhere with. So it can happen, but it is very strange when it happens. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's going to be the equivalent of like the Tuffy Roads game, right? These things don't always have to be meaningful beyond what they are. I will say that while, of course, it's easy and probably appropriate to connect Scooter

Jeanette going deep four times with home runs being up all the time and the ball being juiced or not juiced whatever you want to say about it at the end of the day like the home run rate per plate appearance isn't like it hasn't skyrocketed like let's give him his four home runs it's great and one of them was like all weird hit to the opposite field I haven't looked at the splits I'm gonna guess he hasn't hit an opposite field home run before it's really not one that looks like, anyway. That wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, whatever. He hasn't hit that many home runs, period.

And I think Max Scherzer struck out all the Dodgers yesterday, but more burden to this week's episode and also last week's episode. Last week, I think it was last week, maybe the week before, pretty sure last week, we talked about what a team full of nelson cruises would look like right that was a a hypothetical that was emailed into us and uh i'm going to assume that well okay reader justin i'm not going to try to pronounce his last name because i could get that woefully wrong reader justin use what was it out of the park a simulating engine to make a season of all nelson cruise i will just read his methodology it's brief i used the existing mariners and demoted or released all the players other than the pitchers i cloned nelson cruz 15 times and assigned them to positions i renamed all the cruises based on the roles so you

can see what i had them all doing you can infer how healthy they all were by the playing time i had the backups only starting in case of injury and fatigue i made extras for injuries etc etc etc the team kind of surprisingly didn't hit that well it led the league in home runs this all nelson cruz team so i don't know if this if these rankings are by league so this is probably american league it was 11th in the american league and runs scored which doesn't make a whole lot of sense ninth and batting average 10th in obp last in stolen bases that's where it does make sense but really we can expect the team would probably hit better than this i don't know maybe the sim engine somehow factors in that all the players would get fatigued from being nelson cruz and that would have an

effect on their hitting in any case the team ranked last in runs allowed last in starter era last in bullpen era and last in defensive efficiency you are all probably familiar with defensive efficiency or the inverse of that or opposite of that which is just babbip and you all know that batting average on balls in play is usually around 300 which means defensive efficiency works out to 1 minus 300 which is about 700 the all nelson cru crews team had a season defensive efficiency of 584 which means it allowed a babb up of 416 that's how bad the team was let's see what the did he actually email in the team's record yes he did i think so yeah that mariners team finished according to the sim engine in last place at 54 and 107 it was 20 games behind the fourth place oakland athletics 36 games behind the first place

texas rangers 35 games behind the second place astros the mariners are probably 35 games behind the astros in real life today in any case the mariners were 11 games worse than any other team in the american league in this sim yeah i was higher on the all n Cruz team than you were when we talked about it, and I'm still higher than this simulation, I think. I don't know why the Nelson Cruzes on this sim team don't hit better, given that Nelson Cruz is right now having a season about as good as any he's ever had, which doesn't make any sense. He's 36, almost 37, and he's Nelson Cruz, and it looked like he was declining a few years ago. So I can understand why SM would say that he would decline. But knowing what we know about the real Nelson Cruz, I would expect a lot of these Nelson Cruzes to hit better than they were, unless, as you say, it is somehow docking them for having to play positions. But I'm still taking the over on this nelson

cruz record yeah and i would take the over as well however even though i have no frame of like real reference for how the team would do defensively this sounds about right so it would be a disaster out there i'll say that uh this mariners team did clear its pythagorean record by six games pretty good and the best team hands down by far in the American League in the sim was the Tampa Bay Rays with 105 wins. So I think the sim is essentially Pakoda. Yeah. All right. Any other banter? So as another kind of follow up, we had a pitch talks event in Seattle on Monday and their listener, Jim, and a twitter follower jim and uh everything else wonderful individual jim approached me with a question that he was surprised we hadn't discussed on the monday

effectively wild and even though i know that the protocol is for questions to be submitted through the email and exclusively through the email it's not often that we get a chance to have questions personally submitted face to face and uh jim wanted us to talk a little bit about uh did you see michael waka bouncing into a double play on sunday night baseball i did that right i mean it's just a pitcher bouncing into a double play right what's interesting one thing is interesting that was one of those cases where the uh the cubs i think it was kyle hendricks was pitching and they brought in Anthony Rizzo to basically stand next to the pitcher yeah pitcher's helper yep and they had Ben Zobrist over there playing first base I believe and you know there was a non-running threat I think it was a Led

Miss Diaz on first base and so Rizzo comes in and he has a tiny little infielder glove and the whole idea of course is to try to prevent Waka from dropping down a bunt because it was the world's most obvious bunting situation and waka i had him confused with many of the other cardinals pitchers who sort of can hit michael waka cannot hit when i think of good and bad hitting pitchers my line is usually one home run although maybe based on bartolo cologne it should be two but uh waka i thought had hit a home run. He has not. He has hit zero home runs. He has, though, hit one double over parts of five years.

Michael Waka, for his career in nearly 200 plate appearances, has hit.090, but he's slugged.096. He's been terrible. He's been an American League pitcher playing in the National League. Cannot handle the bet. So the Cubs bring in Anthony Rizzo. This is not, of course course the first time they've done this this is in fact has become so familiar that you right off the top of your head had the nickname for what anthony rizzo was doing in conversation just a minute ago anyway idea was to

prevent waka from bunting because said bunt would result in seemingly an automatic out at second base which would defeat the purpose and so waka was kind of forced to swing away waka is terrible he swung away didn't strike out but did bounce out into an easy double play back to the mound so uh hendrix turned around through the second through the first and the double play was complete and the defensive alignment worked jim's direct question was basically what are the implications of this is this the end of the bunt it is Is this the end of the bunt? It is not probably the end of the bunt, but if teams get more comfortable doing this, and we know that many pitchers, most pitchers can't hit at all. What does this do? Because you worry having the first baseman

playing so close in, but I don't think that you're worried about Michael Walker turning a pitch around and hitting a line drive at Anthony Rizzo's face. So will we see a lot more of this or is it still going to be just the Cubs doing this? Yeah, that's interesting. It reminds me of a early discussion from this podcast about the so-called silly position, which is a cricket alignment where all the fielders just come in and crowd around the batsman like right in front of him. And it's called silly because it's endangering yourself to do that. It's like a wall in soccer sort of except in cricket. And so you could do something similar in baseball, I guess, if you were very sure that it was a sacrifice

situation. But yeah, then you'd be risking life and limb, which you aren't really doing in this case, or Rizzo would at least have some time to get out of the way if Waka did somehow send a liner his way. So yeah, I guess you'd maybe work with pitchers to try to get them to bunt away from that person, bunt down the line instead of bunting forward. But that's a greater degree of difficulty, obviously, to have to aim your bunt rather than just having to basically get it fair. So I would assume that that would be another nail in the sacrifice bunt's grave, or maybe it would encourage pitchers to swing away more or work on their hitting more, or who knows, maybe it would hasten the arrival of the nldh just because it would

make pitchers even more pathetic at the plate i can tell you now having done a little bit of additional research michael walkie's batted 179 times in his career struck out a bunch but he has hit what is this uh 72 balls in play 71 of those have been ground balls. Waka also has yet to pull a single fly ball or line drive, of which he's hit only like 21, I think, in his career. So not a huge sample. But in any case, Waka, zero chance basically to pull a ball in the air, liable to hit a ball on the ground. Maybe what the Cubs could have done is not even bring in Rizzo so much as, or I guess, I don't know, keep Rizzo there. I didn't look at their defensive alignment beyond just Rizzo wins over. So maybe they did do this, but they don't even need a third outfielder. This is a clear candidate for the five man infield and you can still bring Rizzo in,

but you don't even need to abandon a position behind him. You can just have another guy somewhere else to just further ruin the chances of a bunt or anything, and you would compel Walker to swing away, and the odds of you getting burned for that seem extremely slim. Yeah. All right. Emails? Emails. I guess these basically are emails. Yeah.

Email from Spencer. On Tuesday, Dylan Gee made his first start for the Texas Rangers, and the Rangers sent out a tweet sometime in the afternoon describing him as homegrown. Gee was drafted by the Mets and brought up through their system, and the closest connection he had to the Rangers before this season was that he grew up around an hour away from Gold Life Park and went to UT Arlington. I have always considered a homegrown player to be someone who has developed in your own farm system and now plays for your big league club, so the Rangers claiming Gee in this way seems like a misnomer to me. Where do you guys stand on this pointless issue? I think I stand with Spencer.

You can't be homegrown just because you're from the area. You could be from the area, you could be local, you could be Texas native Dylan G or something like that. But homegrown has a different connotation in baseball. But I will say that I sometimes struggle with whether to describe a player as homegrown or not if he was acquired before his big league debut but was not drafted by that organization, if he was traded or released even, probably traded if he was traded after starting his professional career with one organization but then came up through the second organization system and was promoted by that team is he homegrown or is there a certain percentage of your minor league career that has to be played

with one team for you to qualify right i don't know what the cutoff is the rangers usage here is objectively stupid. They're wrong. This is not a homegrown player. This is a hometown player. There's a difference. Those players are all over the place and you can bring in someone who's from the area. People lose their minds over those guys for some reason. And that's legitimate. You can get a hometown player who's now on the roster and that's fine. Homegrown, I agree with you. I don't know where the cutoff is. I don't know if I'm comfortable with it having to be like the origin was with the organization. But like if you're growing tomatoes at home, you like have a tomato plant. Can you only consider them homegrown tomatoes if you raise them from seeds? Or like, can you go buy a tomato plant and then cultivate and develop the tomato plant and then it gets bigger and then you get tomatoes?

Are those still homegrown or did like the nursery do the work and i don't actually know the answer to that i don't know same question yeah i'd probably count that i guess because you're distinguishing it from buying it from a grocery store or something there's definitely a meaningful distinction there yeah so would you set a threshold or would you, I think just for ease of the whole exercise, I would say that a homegrown player has to have begun with the organization. But I know that if you pick a guy up when he's spent a year or two in another organization, then he spends like four more years in your system and then he comes up. That seems like it should count as a homegrown player, but I don't know. Maybe I'll have to be strict about this one.

Yeah. You know it when you see it, I guess, or you just go by feel. All right. Andy Young, Patreon supporter, says the A's broadcast just said Liam Hendricks pledged $200 to an end hunger charity for every walk he issues. And this is true. It seems to be the case. Oakland A's pitcher Liam Hendricks announced his pledge, I'm reading now from a site, to end hunger in the U.S. and abroad by partnering with Big League Impact and striking out poverty. Hendricks is personally donating $100 for every strikeout and $200 for every walk through the remainder of the season. Fans can join him by making a pledge of their own by going to pledgeit.org slash Liam hyphen Hendrix. So Andy wants to know, why would the A's let him do this? Why not say, tell you what, why don't we just give you a few thousand dollars for your charity and you don't issue any walks? Okay. Yeah, right. The economic incentives here are all messed up and i mean it's it's cute and you understand like liam hendricks does not issue a lot of walks and he wants to incentivize himself

to not issue any more walks and if he turns them into strikeouts then he's still donating money it reads silly and also you could say that if he issued a bunch of walks and then he had to donate a bunch of money, which would be good, his cash flow would come to a rather abrupt end because he would stop making money because he'd be walking too many people. Yeah. Just from the incentive foundation alone, it's ridiculous, I guess. But I was curious to hear what you had to say about this. Well, yeah. So he's, I guess, is the idea that he is going to try to i mean maybe he just thinks that this is not going to have any impact on what he does in the mound and maybe it

won't because how much is liam hendricks making right now i'm sure not that much by the standards of big league baseball players but 1.1 million.1 million. Okay. So $100 here, $200 there, probably not making a huge impact on Hendricks. Now, I don't know. We all suffer from loss aversion and we mind losing money that we already have, even if it's not that much money. And we care about that more than we care about gaining an equivalent amount. But I would think that this shouldn't affect his quality of life all that much. So maybe it's irrelevant. And he has the $100 incentive to get strikeouts, which is good. And then he has the $200 incentive to not, well, to not get walks, I guess, right? Or he is motivated not to get walks if he doesn't want to pay the money.

Now, I don't know whether helping the charity is the stronger incentive for him than not walking people, but he kind of has competing incentives here. But yeah, if I were the ace, I might say, can we just help you out with this and make it a lump sum or something? But the A's are strapped for cash, right? And I guess you can't tell a player that he can't do this. So maybe he just wanted to do this. Who knows? Maybe they did offer. Yeah, maybe that's his angle.

Maybe he wants the A's to be like, okay, why don't we just put up the money and then you just pitch and then he's out nothing and then there's still a donation made in his name, but then he to keep some of his money yeah yeah i don't know i guess uh i guess i'm falling back on it's very little money in the grand scheme of things to liam hendricks and uh he has far greater financial incentive not to walk people or just to pitch well because then he'll get a big contract that will dwarf any of the amounts he is giving up here. So that's my answer. Just to put this in a little perspective, Liam Hendricks making $1.1 million, $200

donated per walk. That would be the approximate equivalent if you made, I don't know, $75,000 a year. Maybe that's the median for our audience. Maybe that's high i don't know i'm out of touch i'm in a bubble but that would be like donating 13 and 64 cents per event that happens relatively uncommonly so not something you'd want to just like throw away all willy-nilly but i guess there's also a difference once you start making 75 000 a year then probably the one point whatever it is million dollars north of that starts to feel a little more expendable. So it's not a direct relationship, but nevertheless. All right. Question from Ben and friends in Portland. Ben says, myself and five others were in Seattle for the Rockies at Mariners game Wednesday night and

Thursday day games. And as an official scorer of my daughter's Little League softball team, I tasked myself with scoring the first game. In the top of the third, Rockies catcher Tony Walters hit a ground ball to third baseman Kyle Seeger, who made a great diving play to glove the ball. Unbalanced and on his knees, his throw missed the mark, and first baseman Danny Valencia had to take several steps off the bag in an attempt to field the ball, which he didn't do. Wolters made it to second on the error, and the debate began. Two of us had the play as a single, with the runner advancing to second on account of the throwing error on Seager,

but three in the group thought the error should have been attributed to Valencia for his failure to at least stop the ball from getting by him, consequently allowing the runner to second. One chose to abstain. The play was officially scored single, runner advancing on E5, but that didn't stop us from debating the call into the wee hours. The box score was even checked the following day to see if the ruling had been changed after the fact. Was the call right? When does it become a fielding error on Valencia, who maybe could have at least stopped the ball, thereby holding the runner instead of a throwing error on Seager? How much latitude does the official scorekeeper have with decisions such as this? And we do have an official scorer from the majors who listens to this podcast. So I sent him this email from Ben and Friends in Portland,

and he just reviewed it and weighed in. so I'm going to read his response. He says, That play is scored as a single E5 in every ballpark, all season long, every time. His scoring on this play is correct. However, I see the point of the first baseman failing to stop the thrown ball when he certainly should have been able to. Section 10.12 defines errors. should have been able to. Section 10.12 defines errors. There are lots of situations outlined there, but in the application of this play, Seager's throw is definitely wild, even though Valencia appears not to give great effort to stop the ball. Had the throw been catchable,

say in the air, and Valencia just missed it, he would have been charged with the error. Once the ball hits the ground on a throw, it is difficult by rule to ever charge the receiving fielder with an error. Often, this lack of effort falls under mental mistakes, and those by definition are not errors. As a coach, I want Valencia to stop that ball. As a scorer, the proper accounting is to give the error to Seager. Scorers do have room to give errors in these situations. The ordinary effort rule applies for errorror application but when throws get in The dirt given bounces you will rarely

See errors charged on the catch I've seen it on a throw to first that bounced Naturally and the first baseman missed it But was charged with the error So that is a much more thorough And informed response than I could Have gotten yeah so perfect I wonder if there was room to kind

Of just compromise and have a throwing error on seager to let the runner reach get the first and then a fielding error on valencia to let the runner get the second and then everybody wins for everyone yeah all right eric hartman says why aren't league leaders hitting more home runs with the rate per game up around 40 percent wouldn't one assume that someone should be hitting significantly more home runs than the league leader in 2014 and this is a good question we've got scooter jeanette hitting four home runs in a game why isn't someone hitting 50 or 60 or 70 we've got all of these different classes of players improving their home runs but you wrote about this a couple times last year.

And so you sort of have an answer, I think. Sort of. Let's see if I remember the answer. That was several articles ago. But this is something that when I moved across country, when I helped Dave Cameron, I'm sorry, move across country, we talked about this a little bit in the car because we couldn't agree on comedians.

So we had to talk about baseball. And he brought it up as a point. We got to to thinking about it and i guess it kind of depends on your explanation for the home run spike in the first place but if you if you blame the home run spike on the ball going a little bit further by some i don't know fixed percentage then than it used to then the theory would be and i don't know if this has actually been examined yet but the theory would be that the guys who uh who used to hit a lot of fly balls to the warning track they are now getting just enough extra distance to get the ball over the fence and then the big home run hitters usually people like nelson cruz chris davis john carlos tan they're not hitting a lot of balls to the

track they hit balls well beyond the fence and then that's it their home runs are their home runs and i don't know how evenly fly balls are distributed by distance. This would be a little more granular research than I've ever gotten into. And I guess it would go hand in hand with the theory that players tend to hit sort of fly balls nearer to their maximum distance. And then there's not a whole lot of like slightly suboptimal fly balls. I don't know if I'm explaining this very well. But the idea would be that in theory, a guy like Chris Davis hits a lot of balls way over the fence and then not very many just short of the fence for whatever reason it wouldn't be an even distribution whereas you have a guy like freddie galvis who hits a bunch his equivalent of those chris davis fly balls

10 rows deep would be a bunch of fly balls 10 feet short of the wall and then all of a sudden if the balls go a little further then those turn into home runs and galvis hits 20 or we can just point a scooter to none if we want to yeah and you divided i think you did like three different groups of hitters like i forget whether it was high distance medium distance or low distance or maybe it was just high homer medium homer low homer and I think you found that whatever the high group was had not improved by as much as the other groups or the low group had improved by the most. Right. And I'm pretty sure that was true. If I think it's probably true and you that's what you recall, let's just say it's true and hope nobody finds the article to confirm. So that's if you subscribe to the theory that the ball is going a little further than it used to, which who knows?

Maybe it really is. Maybe the balls are juiced. You need some more for experiments. The other theory, which is pretty popular, that it's just that players are now trying to hit home runs more, which again, as Sam Miller pointed out on Twitter, it's weird that it took so long to get here, but here we are. More players are thinking about hitting the ball hard and in the air than if you have the guys who are home run hitters. Well, they're already home run hitters, so they don't really need to change very much. Whereas now you have guys like Scooter Jeanette who are thinking, well, what if I did just try to hit the ball hard? And Scooter Jeanette last year hit double digit home runs for the first time in his career. Again, there's the Freddie Galvis example. I don't know how we aren't just

always talking about the Freddie Galvez example, but if you have a group of players who suddenly want to hit more home runs and previously they just didn't really think about doing that, then it would make sense for them to sort of approach their nearer to their maximum home run output. Whereas a guy like Nelson Cruz is already doing what he needs to do to hit a bunch of home runs. So there would be little room for him to grow. Yeah, those are the best explanations I have. It's still one of the many strange things

about this home run surge. I think that you wouldn't get at least one guy who was, you know, if not going for the record, at least surpassing the leaders from a few years ago when home runs were way lower. So it's weird, but I think the two explanations you just had would be the best that I could offer. So that's our answer. It may not be satisfactory, but that's the best we got. All right. Zach says, Sadly, I'm having trouble formulating a question to go with this factoid, but I was hoping it might inspire a little discussion. Is this just a small sample size issue that Mike Trout and others will soon correct?

Or could it be that this is not a coincidence and that having the body type to both hit 40 and steal 40 is an anomaly created by the steroid era? It's an interesting question. I didn't do, I saw this question, of course, I see you have a question, but I didn't run any of the numbers on it. I just kind of filed it away in the back of my mind. I usually don't pay a whole lot of attention to who's doing 40-40 in the first place, but Mike Trout, he has exceeded 40 home runs. He's done that once and he has exceeded 40 stolen bases only once. The very, I think, pretty obvious problem here is that stolen bases have been going down gradually in the league, so it's just harder and harder to do that.

You would assume, right, that these players would be the most likely to make the Hall of Fame? Yeah, well, Bant and A-Rod would be if not for their other issues. And I guess you could say that they wouldn't have joined this club if not for their other issues. So, and I guess you could say that they wouldn't have joined this club if not for their other issues, but I think they both would have, right? I mean, Bonds joined the 40-40 club well before he probably started doing whatever he probably started doing. And A-Rod was just kind of a prodigy, I think.

So I would say that those guys would both be in the hall. Bonds did it. Let's see, when did Bonds do it? 1996. He had 42 homers and 40 steals exactly. I don't know. Is that the only time he did it? I think that's the only time he did it.

So that was before he's suspected of having started his regime. So I think, you know, if his rest of his career had played out differently, we wouldn't be talking about having 40-40 and not making the Hall of Fame. I think that part is weird. It is sort of a special club just because it has happened so rarely. i think that part of the reason for that is as zach is saying it is hard to find players with the combination of those two skills uh it doesn't it's not always the case that power coincides with speed to that extent which is why it's so special when that happens when you have someone like bondsonds or someone like Trout who is theoretically capable of it, who can steal 40 and hit 40, that's a very rare skill. And I think also maybe once you start hitting 40, maybe it's not even worth stealing 40 because relatively speaking, the 40 steals are a lot less valuable than the 40 homers.

homers so if you start to think that maybe the steals are jeopardizing your talent or your ability to stay on the field as we just saw with mike trout maybe you stop running so much and so power i think is a a skill that tends to increase with age at least up to a certain point whereas speed is a skill that tends to decrease with age almost immediately and so it's hard for those things to meet in the middle and coincide in the same season and then yeah you have the the era effects and the league effects and like now it's a high home run era and a low steal era so you need sort of a high steal and high home run era and often those things don't coincide because if it's a high home run era it's probably a high run scoring era or often it is and then steals become less valuable because you run the

risk of erasing base runners who might score anyway so it's a bunch of things that are kind of working in opposition to each other and so that's why it hasn't happened more often i suppose and if you lower the thresholds of just 30-30, because that's been a little more common. Surprisingly, Ryan Braun and Ian Kinsler have both done that twice. So they're tied for fifth place in terms of players with the most seasons matching the criteria. Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonds. What were the odds of that? By the way, they're tied for first place five such seasons.

Bonds family, pretty good. Vladimir Guerrero had two of those seasons. He's going to make the Hall of Fame. Guerrero had two of those seasons he's going to make the hall of fame Jeff Bagwell had two of those seasons he's going to make the hall of fame Willie Mays had two of those seasons I think he owns the hall of fame Mike Trout is there of course and and it's interesting you just go on down the list lots of more modern day players Jacoby Ellsbury, Grady Sizemore, Hanley Ramirez, David Wright, Jimmy Rollins, etc just uh Barry Larkin made the hall of fame he had one of these seasons. The oldest player to have such a season seems to have been 32. So no 30-30

seasons from 33 on. Probably the least surprising thing we've said on this podcast, but still there. But yeah, interesting question. But still, these are all very, very good players. And maybe this just underscores the difficulty of making the Hall of Fame in the first place. Yeah. All right. You've got a stat segment. Stat segment. So we talked about errors a little bit by coincidence when we folded in the official score listener talking about Kyle Seeger and Danny Valencia and Kyle Seeger's bad throw.

You know who makes a lot of errors? Who said? The Oakland Athletics. The Oakland Athletics make a whole lot of errors. As a matter of fact, I can tell you that this season, as of this recording, the Oakland Athletics have committed 59 defensive errors and the team in second place has committed 42. That is a 17 error difference.

And the team with the fewest errors this year is the Royals, who have committed 19 errors. So the A's nearly a whole royals defense separated from the second worst defense by errors one of the reasons we don't talk about errors almost ever i think i don't even remember the last time i included errors in an article well we did just talk about them about 20 minutes ago but other than that yeah and that felt unusual to me because we never talk about errors because we keep thinking well we have these defensive metrics that are better than that and why only focus on errors instead of overall range totally legitimate i don't think there's anything wrong with the way

that we approach writing about defense but by the way the a's terrible with errors so let's talk about that just a little bit the a's have have had a terrible defense. They had a bad defense last year. I don't remember. So I'll just say unfoundedly that they had a terrible defense probably also in 2015. Who knows or cares if that's true? We talked to Susan Slusser in the preseason previewing this A's season, and she basically said, yeah, defense is going to suck. Everybody knows that.

And they have. They've been very bad. And this is a team that hasn't had Marcus Simeon playing very much because of injury. So fold that into your understanding. So the rate stat that goes along with errors is fielding percentage, a stat that still refuses to die, but is on broadcasts all the time. The A's this season have had a 972 fielding percentage of course that is also the worst in baseball next worst is 980 the margins here are such that it seems like all the numbers are really close to one another because errors are so uncommon relative to plays being made but the

league average fielding percentage this year is 984 I will say the A's again at 972. So the A's have a 12 point difference between their fielding percentage and this year's league average fielding percentage. So I was curious how that compares to other marks throughout history. So I went back to 1950 because that's just a fine year to go back to. And there have been six teams that have had a fielding percentage at least 10 points worse than the league average no team has been 12 points worse than the league average A's currently worst by that mark 2017 athletics off

the mark by 12 points as a fun fact the next three teams in the list, all Mets. 1981 Mets, 1963 Mets, and 1962 Mets. All, well, I guess 11 or 10 points worse than the league average fielding percentage. The league fielding percentage has gone up over time. Errors used to be a little more common. I don't know if that's a scorekeeping thing or a defensive players are better than everything. I didn't end there, but I don't need to get this arranged. So the A is also this year unsurprisingly to go along with the errors they lead the league in unearned runs allowed they have

allowed 41 unearned runs so if you just sort in the league by earned runs allowed the a's are a bad but acceptable 23rd in earned runs allowed however when you sort by overall runs allowed they drop to 28th so they have allowed a whole bunch of earned runs the royals have allowed just nine again royals defense pretty good ace defense not the royals so to put that on a rate basis one more time the a's have an era of 4.57 so you know you know, not very good. And they have a, I never know how to put this, RA9? I don't know. ERA, but without the E. RA, whatever.

Runs allowed per nine of 5.30. So that gives the A's a difference between those two marks of 0.73. Let's say 73 points. So the league average difference between ERA and and ra9 or i guess you could just call it unearned runs per nine would be a better way to put it the league average unearned runs per nine this season is 0.37 so finally the difference between the a's unearned runs per nine mark and the league average unearned runs per nine mark is 0.36. How does that stack up historically?

I'll tell you. It's second worst since 1950. The team with the worst such mark at 0.39 is the 1962 Mets, who came up just a minute ago. The 1962 Mets, that was their first season, correct? 62, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mets first season, they won 40 games. They lost three times as many games. They were a terrible baseball team. And one of the reasons

for that was the defense, which allowed nearly an unearned run every nine innings, which is too many unearned runs to allow. So the Mets in 1962 allowed 0.93 unearned runs per nine. The league average was 0.53 unearned runs per nine. That works out rounding to a difference of 0.39 runs per nine difference between the Mets and the league average. The Athletics currently are at 0.36. And then the next closest team at 0.30 is actually a tie between the 2008 Rangers and the 1987 Indians. Now, not to let them off the hook the

2017 braves are also high up on this list they're in fifth worst at 0.28 of a difference and that's bad and just to flip it around because again hey the royals have not committed errors they are currently seventh best by this metric with an advantage of 0.21 fewer unearned runs per nine than the league average the best team by that same measure the 1999 mets so the mets kind of dominating both sides of this table but long story short a's defense very bad very bad in a classic way yeah you know it's they're not just not getting to balls they're getting to balls and then messing them up so very very a's from 15 years ago yeah all right that's interesting i pity the a's official scorer that person must be very busy a lot of judgment calls to make this year mostly error related all right question from

brandon a patreon supporter in case you missed it the cubs won the world series last season in case you also missed it, before last season, the Cubs hadn't won in 108 years and had the moniker of lovable losers. How many years would the Cubs have to go without winning a World Series to reclaim the lovable losers nickname?

Five years is definitely too few. 10 years is still probably not long enough. How about 30? Over 50? So how long would it take? How many years would the Cubs have to not win the World Series? And I guess being bad is also part of it. They'd have to have some stretches of being just a bad baseball team as opposed to winning the pennant every year and just not winning the World Series.

So when would this come back? Because there would be a point, I think, at which people would start bringing it back out and kind of joking about it at first, like, hey, the Cubs are the lovable losers again, or they've been like the lovable losers for a while. But it would take a long time before that reputation really settled in again, especially given just how high profile their victory last year was. Right. So they, according to Wikipedia, at least the Cubs became known as the lovable losers somewhere in the mid to late seventies because they were, they were very bad. I am not certain just in this current and future climate of sports fandom. I'm not certain if any team will ever be considered lovable for being losers. I think people are turned off by that. So the Cubs made the world series in 1945. Of course, there were fewer rounds in the playoffs. In fact, I believe there were none back then. 1945, they made the playoffs and then they didn't make the

playoffs again until 1984, which is nearly four decades of baseball. Yeah, that is going to be very difficult for a team to repeat because so many teams make the playoffs now. And so if you have a team that's like you know any good as you discussed then they will deter that nickname i'm not sure the cut i don't i don't know if any team could ever be considered lovable losers anymore however if we wanted to talk about this team just never wins the world series there are more teams than ever of course so it's harder to make the world series than ever of course like i don't. The Mariners have never made the World Series. The Nationals franchise hasn't made the World Series. I don't think anyone is particularly close to thinking of either one as like lovable losers. In fact, people focus on the Nationals as

hateable losers, I think seems to come up fairly often. I don't know if the Nationals are sympathetic at all. I don't know. That might have just been a product of the era. I don't know if any team would fulfill the role that the Cubs did. I don't know if it's possible to do that anymore. Yeah, I think probably if the Cubs were bad, I think it would take less time for the Cubs to regain the reputation as kind of a sad sack baseball team than it would for a team that had never had that reputation to gain it for the first time. I think Cubs fans and just fans on the whole would fall back into thinking of the Cubs as that bad baseball team again more quickly because we just have that muscle memory. It's just ingrained in us.

And last year, obviously, wiped that slate clean, but maybe not quite completely clean. There's still a lot of baggage that goes with that. So yeah, if they were to become terrible, and if this current Cubs team, especially, weren't good, because that was part of the big story last year was that not only were they finally winning the World Series, but they were set up to be a dynasty and they were going to be good for who knows how long. And, you know, they've gotten off to a lackluster by Cubs standards start this year, which I don't think is all that concerning. But if it somehow turned out that that was it, that this team was just never that good again, then I think maybe that would hasten the return of the nickname. But I'm still saying, yeah, it would take at least like 20 years of being really, really bad, like being the pirates or the royals who just were terrible for 20 years. If the Cubs started doing that now, I'd say the nickname would come back, but it would take that as opposed to just not winning the World Series. Okay, related question. So as we all know, the Cubs have won more games than they've lost this season, but they're still kind of like middling, I guess, by Cubs standards. How much

longer would something like this have to go on before the players on the Cubs start talking to the media and giving those quotes about how everyone counted us out and we're playing the underdog role and we don't care what the numbers say. We believe in ourselves and that's all that matters. How long until the Cubs are able to play or at least claim to play the underdog role? I have seen teams claim the underdog role with zero basis, in fact. So I would say probably already i don't know like yeah i often see teams trying to motivate themselves that way when like no one was really counting them out so i would say that that could happen basically already you know i'm sure there were some

articles written in the last month or whatever about how the Cubs aren't what we thought they were or, you know, the Cubs are disappointments or something. So maybe someone posted that in the clubhouse and everyone got mad about it. And so, yeah, I think Joe Madden would probably be a good motivator in that way. So I'm's enough uh enough material for them to work with already first place cubs by the way they're in first place yeah all right you answered this one via email from garrett if the worst offense in the league was given 162 extra runs that they could allocate freely throughout the year how many additional wins would they earn would they spread them out one per game and approach league average and hope for 40 more

wins or two per game for 81 games to try and win, I don't know, 65 more games? Would they save some runs for the playoffs knowing they're sacrificing some regular season success? Right. So I had to make some assumptions. One, I ignored the playoff aspect because that gets complicated. And I assumed that you would have to come up with a strategy beforehand. And you can't just say, I want to run now if you're in the bottom of the ninth and you're

in a tie situation. So just making this the easiest hypothetical, it's like a handicap. And I confirmed what I was doing with a little with a win expectancy spreadsheet. But long story short, there are diminishing returns. If you start the game at 0-0, then you have a 50% chance of winning. If you start the game up 1-0, you have something have a 50% chance of winning. If you start the game up 1-0, you have something like a 60% chance of winning. If you start the game up 2-0, then it's like a 68% or 69% chance of winning. The point there being that the difference between the first run benefit and

the second run benefit gets smaller, and it of course continues from there. So there are diminishing returns to piling on additional runs. so i don't think that it would make very good sense for the team to get a two run handicap 81 times it seems to make the absolute most sense to take the one run handicap 162 times and then if you do that the average team would win 60 of its games instead of 50 this is a not very good team so i don't know maybe it wins 50 or 55 percent of its games instead of whatever the alternative is. But it seems pretty much concrete in that instance. I don't know, maybe the structure of the roster makes things different. Maybe you have a really, really, really good starting pitcher, or maybe you want to pile up runs so, could you drive any predictive data from a pitcher warming up? I would assume velocity would be somewhat telling. You could see how well the pitcher is finding the glove. and Pirates watching Matt Harvey warm up. I noticed that he was missing the glove of the catcher significantly before the first inning. Harvey then proceeded to walk two of the first three pitchers he faced. This got me wondering if the tracking data during warmups would give any predictive info. I would assume that spin rate stays constant, but maybe you could find

something out about the other aspects of pitching. And I assume that it is turned on and just not recording when I operated the pitch FX system for the Sonoma stoppers that we had installed in our little park there. It was turned on while the pitcher was warming up and it was tracking the pitches and it was telling you how hard they were and it just wasn't recording it. I think it could have recorded if we had wanted it to, but we just didn't start it recording till the first hitter came up. So in theory, a team could use this information, I think. I don't know how they would. I mean, once the guy's out there warming up for his start, it's probably too late to do anything, right? I mean, if you see that he is hurt in some way, like if his velocity is dangerously down or his arm angle has dropped to a frightening degree, then you could pull him or talk to him or he's not off today. I don't think you would make a decision about replacing him or something based on warm-up pitches.

Once he's gotten to that point, you're going to let him start because you don't have anyone else ready to start. So I have wondered, though, about bullpen track man, if a team could set up a system in the bullpen and find out something about the pitcher if they have like two or three relievers warming up at a time and you could assess how each one was doing and and then choose the one who had the best stuff on that day at least in theory there's something you could do with that but otherwise i don't know like maybe you can tell if a guy has good stuff on a certain day or not fairly early in the game and maybe that would impact your decision about whether to let him hit for himself whether to let him go as deep into the game but i don't know whether the warm-up pitches would add that much unless like you would i don't know see that he's not commanding his curveball well that day or something and then you could tell the catcher

his curveball's off right now and you could just call a bunch of fastballs in the first inning something like that maybe yeah i saw a video just this morning on twitter that i think it said aaron judge hit a ball 128 miles per hour in batting practice and like uh 510 feet so that would imply that something is on the the usual numbers are on and working and somebody's looking at them i'm sure that with judge people are more likely to be looking at them than otherwise by the way on that alone if aaron judge can actually hit a ball 128 miles per hour that's insane this would be a really fun application of pre-game track man you could basically try to figure out every player's absolute power maximum yeah which would be delightful because then there's basically no more guesswork if you get i don't know 50 games

worth of batting practice and you tell your players, swing from the heels, let's see what you can do. Then you can really figure out, therefore, that Aaron Judge hits the ball hotter than Ronald Torres, which I guess we don't need that confirmation. In any case, I don't think with pregame trackman there would be any real advantages to be gained. I don't know how many times, I don't know how many millions of times

we've heard articles about pitchers who had good games who said their stuff in the bullpen was bad, or pitchers who had good games who said their stuff in the bullpen was bad or pitchers who had bad games who said their stuff in the bullpen was good. I'm pretty sure before Felix Hernandez's perfect game that he said he had one of the worst bullpens of his career. So there are just so many differences, psychological and physical, between bullpen mounds and then the game mound. And then even if you're warming up on the game mound between pregame action and in-game action when adrenaline kicks in, I doubt pitchers are even throwing 100% velocity when they're taking their last warm-up pitch from the mound because there just isn't that same adrenaline. You're not pitching anyone. You're not going to risk injury.

So I don't think that there would be anything to be gained aside from just seeing that power maximum, which would be a lot of fun. Yeah. All right. Question from Aaron. One day a baseball prophet comes to you and offers to grant you perfect knowledge of one of the following three things for each item on the first day of spring training, he will accurately prophecy the following for the upcoming season. Number one, all players, true talent levels for the season. You'll get their true talent stat line for whatever stats you request across

the full season, not broken down over time. And with any DL time removed without your knowledge. Two, all players luck for the season. You'll get a luck adjustment, positive or negative as the case may be, for whatever stats you request, though you will not receive the true talent baseline to which that adjustment is applied. Or three, all players disabled list dates for the season, so you'll get the dates on which they will be on the disabled list, though no additional. So you'll get the dates on which they will be on the disabled list, though no additional information about the nature of their injuries. So number one, true talent, number two, luck, number three, disabled list. How would you rank these three

areas of knowledge in terms of what would be most valuable to you? Okay, so I haven't run any of the numbers, but my hunch is that you want the luck first then dl then true talent i think we have the best measures of what a player's true talent is coming into the year of course we make mistakes and whatnot and not all the estimates are correct but we have just about zero ways of predicting luck at all because by definition it's luck you just can't figure out anything and dl days we have barely any real understanding of how to forecast player injury so i think that you want those two far more than you would want the true talent because chances are overall your team is going to play to its true talent with just a few

exceptions but you can generally take it to the bank not that many players suddenly become really good or really bad overnight so that is where i am right now. Yeah, I guess it depends if this is a major league team, presumably. And so, yeah, you're right. You have lots of data on these guys going back a long way. So you have decent estimates of their true talent. If you knew nothing about the team, if you somehow inherited a team of strangers or you just knew nothing about baseball, then you would want the true talent. But assuming this is a real world situation except for the profit, then yes, I would think that is true.

Of course, there would be some guys who added a new pitch or changed their swing or whatever, and it would be very helpful to know how their true talent had changed or maybe they just got old all of a sudden or slowed down or they are in the best shape of their lives or whatever. So it would still be really helpful to have true talent because we only have estimates of that. But yeah, I think you're right. Luck matters a lot and disabled list matters a lot. I don't know. Can you do more with one piece of information? Like if you had the disabled list data, I mean, to a certain extent, you're just screwed. Like if you, you know, if you know that your ace is going to be on the DL for most of the season or something, I don't know. What can you do about that? Really? I guess, unless you think you can change the future by not using him or something, but assuming you can't change the future this is set in stone i don't know how helpful it is to know any of this i guess like if you you know because like

you're still gonna play the players that you have i guess if you know that some players just gonna have terrible terrible luck all season long you still don't know what his true talent is, but you can estimate that. So if you know that the luck is so terrible that he's not going to be a useful player, I guess you could play someone else who presumably will not have that terrible luck. Or if you know that someone's going to be on the DL, you can at least start preparing to acquire a replacement. You can start talking about trades with some team for a player at that position so that you're not caught unawares when it happens. You have already laid the groundwork for a trade. So I guess it would be useful in that way. So I guess I agree

with your ranking. I'm starting to have a change of heart, though, because if you knew all the true talents before the year and then you knew generally the forecast of heart though, because if you knew all the true talents before the year, and then you knew generally the forecast of true talents, then you could kind of leverage that, look for the biggest differences and just acquire them or trade them away from your team. That's true. If you're focusing, especially on more than just the one season ahead, then you're just accumulating really good trade assets, if nothing else. So now I've reversed myself and now I'm going one, two, three in order. Yeah, when I read the question the first time,

that was my inclination. But I was thinking of this as sort of a not knowing anything about anyone situation, which is not really what it is. So if you knew that a player's true talent was different from what his stats would suggest, though. Could you leverage that? Because the other teams aren't going to know. They're not going to believe the baseball prophet. So they're going to think what you would have thought without getting this prophecy. So you're not going to be able to trade someone for his true worth. You could trade someone who is overrated. So that would be helpful. But I don't know how many players that would apply to that would have such a huge difference between their true talent and your projections based

estimate of their true talent that you could get a huge haul for them i guess there'd be a few guys like that yeah figure though you could if you had a player who's on the decline and then the baseball profit reveals that his decline is about to accelerate, then you could have traded that player before the year for, I don't know, like Chris Taylor. Andrew McCutcheon's type of situation. Yeah, exactly. Not only could you have traded Andrew McCutcheon to the Dodgers for Chris Taylor, which would have been a stupid trade time, although it would not look stupid now,

but you could have traded for Chris Taylor and really good prospects or some other major league piece. So it feels like there's enough there from this perspective that it would make the most sense to start there. All right. Almost done here. Derek says, let's say a team has an aging star catcher named Molina and the GM sets a target for him to sit 20% of games during the upcoming year. They stick to the plan and he sits about one game per week.

Why not apply the leverage concept here? Set a rule with the manager that Molina comes out of the game any time the team is up or down by at least five runs. Comebacks that large are infrequent enough that downgrading one player may not result in the team losing or failing to come back a single one of those games. As a result of this extra rest, he can start 95% of the games rather than 80%, yet still catches the same number of innings in total. The benefit is that the innings he is catching now are more meaningful. Or a more

generic statement is this, no star player, especially pitchers and catchers, should be in the game if the score is 8-1 in the seventh. Why don't teams do this? Am I mistakenly assuming that nine innings of rest during a week has roughly the same benefit, whether it is taken in a single game or not. Well, I guess you can think about it this way. Would you be a happier person if you got two days off for the weekend or if you were told, well, maybe you're going to have to work every single day and you're not going to find out when you have a day off until the morning of or even later in the day? Players very, very highly enjoy knowing that they're going to have a day off in advance. Coaches will usually tell them, hey, you're not going to play tomorrow. Of course, when the Mets did this, the Met Harvey

had to go start against the Braves, which whoops, shouldn't have done that. It was bad, hasn't been good sense. But players value those days off like almost nothing else. Sam, you might remember when he was writing about the new CBA, talked about how much players value seemingly their own comfort more than anything else under almost all circumstances. So you want those days off. I think there should probably be more substitutions when the games get out of hand, but when you

have these roster constraints, you can only bench so many players and then when someone gets hurt, it turns into a nightmare. But yeah, this hypothetical old catcher named Molina would probably very much hate this system. To say nothing of all the work that goes into pregame and getting ready for a game in the first place. That's not rest at all.

Right. Yeah, I think the rest is not equal in this situation because there is a whole lot of preparation that the player could skip if he knows he's not starting. And so I think there are benefits to that predictability. And yeah, the general point that maybe teams could be more aggressive about pulling guys when the leverage is low, maybe that's the case. I don't know how much pulling a guy for an inning or two helps in the long run. It would be hard to quantify that kind of thing versus having him have a full day off but but yeah maybe maybe teams are too conservative there and they're too worried that there will be a huge comeback and they'll look stupid for pulling their starters or something like that so

i wouldn't be surprised if there's some slight benefit to be gained there didn't the 2001 indians in that huge comeback against the mariners pull a bunch of starters and then come back anyway so that's one of those like under let me pull this up real quick because i think it's one of those kind of like lost aspects in the miracle of the game but i'm just going to do this on the fly without actually fact checking first so that's going to be good uh the indians let's see when did the substitution start coming in so top of the sixth the mariners were ahead 14 to 2 holbert cabrera replaced roberto alomar russell brannan moved over will cordero replaced travis fryman ed tobbinsy pinch

it for juan gonzalez so i don't remember what 2001 was like, but that was probably an offensive downgrade at Taubensee for Juan Gonzalez. So yeah, Gonzalez was out of the game. Alomar was out of the game. Just for the record, Alomar was hitting third. Gonzalez was hitting fourth that day. Ellis Burks came out of the game and Travis Fryman came out of the game. So four Indian starters, to say nothing of the pitchers, were all removed. And then the comeback began. Starters to say nothing of the pitchers were all Removed and then the comeback began Alright last question From Sterling in Fort Worth

As a Rangers fan I've come To terms with the fact that my existence Is that of soul crushing disappointment and Shattered dreams and it seems that this Year closer term dumpster fire Sam Dyson is an encapsulation of the Rangers struggle this season He is no longer Sterling's problem Because Dyson was traded from the Rangers to the Giants,

but Sterling continues. Although his velocity this season is pretty close to his velocity from last year and doesn't set off any red flags, the runs allowed above average of his fastball and changeup are almost the polar opposites of his numbers from 2016 when he assumed the closer role. And to my eyes, it looks as though his sinker Just doesn't have the same drop it once did So my question is this What exactly is to blame for Dyson's struggles

Is it just a case of the yips Or is there a more tangible explanation For his ineffectiveness You just wrote about Sam Dyson So I figured you could try to answer this Good news, bad news I've looked at this like several times Since Dyson started really poorly I've gone over video, answer this good news bad news good news i've looked at this like several times since dyson started really poorly i've gone over video gone over numbers bad news can't figure

it out dyson is missing some of his peak velocity something is just off he's not throwing the ball as hard as he did not in a dramatic way not in a jared weaver way but he's down a few ticks and his peak velocity is down a mile or two so there's something that's either holding him back physically or maybe it's a mechanical flaw probably it's a mechanical flaw his sinker has been higher on average than it was last season which is bad because sinkers are supposed to sink and they're supposed to be low and i think when you have a high sinker it just visibly looks like it's dropping less than a sinker that's low for a couple of reasons. And the movement of the pitch hasn't meaningfully changed as far as I can tell.

But then there's also been cases where pitchers insist that pitches are moving differently, even if the pitch effects or I guess now Trackman says that they're not. So it is possible that his sinker is a little flatter. And I think he's also kind of dropped his arm a little bit. It seems to me that it's mostly been a mechanical inefficiency. He's had a lot of ground balls turn into hits, which is pretty bad luck. But I also would strongly suspect that at some point pretty early on, Dyson just went out there and started to feel like he couldn't do anything right because he was getting hit around all the time. And this seems like a case where the psychology of it is something we can't quantify, but Dyson would just kind of go out and feel defeated because he's been defeated so often. And then at that point, as soon as you are no longer throwing your pitches with conviction, enough pitchers have said in the past that that's when you know you're through.

This seems like a case where I think my conclusion was basically there's no one. No one knows what Sam Dyson is going to do from here on out his stuff is still basically the same he still throws hard still has a good sinker he should and easily could still be a good reliever last year Daniel Hudson allowed like 31 runs in the span of less than 10 innings in the middle of the year and then from that point forward his ERA was under two he was with the same team i don't know what happened but this is a case where the rangers have seen enough dyson to say we don't want to deal with this anymore other teams however are coming from the perspective where they haven't watched sam dyson a bunch and so they are either less informed or less biased by the small sample depending on how

you want to spin it and more than almost any other player throughout league, this seems like it would most call for just a simple change of scenery to get a psychological fresh slate. All right. Well, we will see whether that's the case. All right. So I have answered all the questions on my sheet. We can wrap up this episode. Excellent. By the way, Wednesday's games are now over and Ryan Rayburn in his first two starts for the Nationals, one for eight with a Excellent. Effectively Wild. Five listeners who have pledged their support recently include Brett Slonaker, Will Cook, Jim Rojan, Alex Roche, and Genevieve Luthi. Thanks to all of you. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. In the last episode, I mentioned in just a very brief end of episode aside that we hadn't had a review for a

while. And yesterday, 18 of had a review for a while. And yesterday, 18 of you left reviews for the podcast. I'm touched. I'm touched that enough of you listened to the end of the episode to leave those reviews. I'm wondering if this will work for Patreon. If I say no one signed up for Patreon for a while, will 18 of you sign up? No, that's not true. Someone just signed up yesterday, although your support is always welcome. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. You know the drill. We'll be back later this week. Homegrown is a good thing. Plant that bell and let it ring. Homegrown's all right with me. Homegrown is the way it should be. Homegrown is a good thing. Plant that bell and let it ring.