Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1071: I Would’ve Felt Silly Saying Boo

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about position players pitching, another non-catcher catching, a Zack Cozart quote, and Ben’s latest home-runs research, then answer listener emails about Hunter Pence, better ways to make boundary calls, the number of plays at the plate, managerial aging curves, playing all nine positions in a game, the worst times […]

You have every right to blame Still it is hard to hear you say That it ever will That you're out of your element The hardest part is to know That you're out of your element I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs. Hello. Hello. How are you?

I'm well. How are you? I'm okay. Each of us actually wrote about something that is of interest to podcast people. Let's start with yours because we haven't talked about this on the podcast for a while, and I actually haven't read your post yet. But for a while there, position players pitching was something that we talked about all the time on this podcast because, and I don't know whether you just looked this up and are about to contradict me or not, but I think there was one season where there were just a ton of position players pitching or there were a lot early in the season and it looked like we were off to a record or we

were setting a record or maybe we have been setting records repeatedly and maybe that's what you wrote about. But what did you write about? What have you found? Yeah, record base. So I didn't want to talk about this too much yet because it sort of does tie into the stat segment that I've put together, but it's indirect. I can at least acknowledge we'll just kind of kick it off here. Yesterday, Carlos Ruiz came in, pitched for the Mariners against the Twins because the Mariners were losing a game 19-7 at that point. It's a baseball score, the day before the Twins had the tables reversed against the Mariners.

Twins lost 14-3. Chris Jimenez came in to pitch in that game. I will never be comfortable saying Jimenez. There's no way that that name is supposed to be Jimenez. But people have been saying his name a lot this season relative to his career because I don't know if you know this. Maybe you do. Maybe it's common knowledge. Chris Jimenez has pitched five times this season yeah I saw it in the Facebook group I think or someone tweeted it at me it's it's a very effectively wild factoid so yeah yeah extremely it is uh he's already over the past 50 years no position player has pitched more often in a season than Chris Jimenez already it is the middle of June over the last 50 years no position player has made more pitching appearances in his career than Chris Jimenez already. It is the middle of June. Over the last 50 years, no position player has made more pitching appearances in his career than Chris Jimenez,

who's up to eight. And baseball as a whole is on a record pace for position players pitching this season. The previous record was that two years ago. Last year was basically right there. This is a trend, even though the numbers are small. I observed in the post that i wrote that so far 0.23 these are very small numbers 0.23 of all relief appearances this season have gone to position players that would be the high with the previous high being 0.18 from two years ago so in a sense that's a very small difference in another sense it's not because that is a 31% increase now something I just realized as I was talking out loud is that I wish in my post I had considered that in September these probably just about never happen because the rosters expand so there are more pitchers available so I wish that I would

have noted that I did not that was dumb or at least an oversight but in any case there have been a lot of position players pitching the all-time record for appearances in a season is 27. So far, we're up to 14, more than a third of which have come from Chris Jimenez and the Twins. But in any case, that would seem to put this season still on pace for breaking that record, even if you assume none in September. It would be a narrow edge, but it would be an edge nevertheless. Point being, it's happening. It would be a narrow edge, but it would be an edge nevertheless. Point being, it's happening. This decade, position players have actually combined for an ERA a little under six over 120 plus innings, which is better than, for example, Eddie Butler's career ERA. Eddie Butler was a first round draft pick, and he's currently pitching for the defending world champions and a developing dynasty. So there's that. The position players have actually been quite bad overall, but still but still era under six is better than i was expecting by about four runs yeah didn't you write something a few years ago about position players pitching and their babbip and how it wasn't actually that

bad yeah that was that was several years ago that was back in the espionage days but the point of that back then was that as i think most people know batting average on balls in play hovers around 300 historically it's been around 290 then 280 then 270 it's gone up over time but if you look at a bigger historical perspective I don't know where it's been since in like modern baseball probably around like 280 to 290 somewhere in there overall and position players pitching have been right there their batting average allowed on balls in play has been something like I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head but right in the vicinity of normal so what that demonstrated was one of two things one sample size was still kind of limited or two batting average

on balls in play is really only very slightly dependent on the pitcher now one of the realities that comes with examining any non chris davis or darnell mcdonald pitching appearance is that they are coming in blowouts where the other team has very little incentive to care and so while i don't think players take at bats off you will have a difference in effort i did see in my research that no one in at least recent history has stolen a base against a position player pitching because i can't imagine how many unwritten rules that would violate yeah but then what's going to happen is the position player going to throw it the next guy i feel like that's not really so much of a threat in any case there is reduced incentive to do anything or to even try i think

all anybody wants to do when there is a position player on the mound is to just try desperately not to strike out because that's the only really embarrassing outcome as it happens. Carlos Ruiz yesterday got a strikeout. Way to go, Chooch. Yep, that is the abridged history of visiting players on the mound. You know, that game that you mentioned briefly there, the 20-7 Twins game, only took three hours and four minutes to complete, which seems pretty quick for a game where 27 runs were scored. Is there a way to play index that? I just, I play indexed games where one team scored 20 runs and found that it's not actually that extraordinary. If you look at games since 2000, it is only the 11th fastest game in which one team scored 20 runs but all of the games in front of it had fewer combined runs scored than this one but that is not the ideal search here is there a way

to look at uh combined runs scored and sort by game length or is that not a thing i don't know if there's a way to do that at the same time maybe i'll do that for next next Wednesday, depending on what turns out. I guess when you have these blowouts, you're going to have fewer pitching changes and you'll just have players eventually trying to get at bats over as quickly as possible. Maybe that's how it works. I don't know. Pitchers have to think less between pitches because they just kind of stop caring. I don't know why there aren't forfeits. It's weird to me. Yeah. By the way, you just mentioned that there are no steals against position players pitching, which seems like a pretty strong unwritten rule. But we got an email from Bo, who noted in response to our recent discussions about players playing out of position

and playing catcher out of position. And Bo says, my favorite pitching line in history came out of a game where Len Sakata put on the catcher's gear for the first and only time in his career. And it was because he had no experience behind the plate that Tippy Martinez got to set a record on the mound. And then Sakata hit a walk-off three-run homer. So this is from a 1983 Orioles-Blue Jays game. I'm sure many people already know what game I'm referencing, but many people don't. I'm sure many people already know what game I'm referencing, but many people don't. I'm just going to play a quick clip of a much younger Buck Martinez talking about this game that is on YouTube.

In the one game, we had three runners picked off of first base in the same inning. Barry Bunnell was the runner, and he just couldn't wait to get to second base because he knew he could steal with Lenny Sacato behind the plate. But the pitcher was Tippy Martinez, and he picked him off for the first out. The second runner that on, I believe it was Dave Collins. John Sullivan was the first base coach and he walked over and he says, listen, you got one out. Now don't get picked off. And he didn't get those words out of his mouth and Tippy had picked off Collins for the second out. And then Willie Upshaw got on, so we still had a rally going, and I'm the batter, and Sully walks over again and says, okay, now you've got two outs. You can't get picked off now.

And sure enough, he threw one over the first base and picked off Willie for three in a row, and that pretty much set the tone. So there were three pickoffs in that inning. So Len Ciccata, who was the second baseman in that game, moved to catcher because there had been a bunch of pinch hitters earlier in the game. And so they used up the bench and it was the 10th inning. And for whatever reason, they ran out of players and had to shift a bunch of guys around. And so Tippi Martinez, the pitcher, got three pickoffs in that inning because people were eager to run on Lent the 10th inning And it was tied

3-3 and it Was August and Both of those teams were in Pennant races the Blue Jays Were 70 and 56 I think at the Time and the Orioles were 70 and 52 So unwritten rules Trumped by

Game situation and season Situation but that is a fun one. Similar to that, I was not aware of that game because I am a baseball history idiot. However, I made a quick reference when I was talking to the game from 2012 in which both Chris Davis and Darnell McDonald pitched. And not only did they pitch,

but they didn't pitch because there was a blowout, but rather because the game went to 17 innings. And so both the Red Sox and Orioles needed people to pitch. Chris Davis wound up getting the win. He struck out both Jared Saltalamakia and Adrian Gonzalez, which is amazing. That was when Gonzalez was at his best. Very appropriately, I think the last batter that Chris Davis faced in the game was Darnell McDonald, the losing pitcher slash Orioles outfielder who had earlier allowed a home run to Adam Jones that proved to be the game winner Davis got McDonald to ground into a game ending

double play that's a fun little detail but the reason I brought this up was because in the top of the 17th Wilson Bedemit worked a walk work to walk do you work a walk off Darnell McDonald or do you just walk yeah I think you just stand there yeah so uh mcdonald walked wilson bedemit on a full count and bedemit went to first base at this point it is six to six it's in the 17th inning and uh bedemit took off on the first pitch he tried to steal against darn al mcdonald and he was caught stealing catcher to second and bedemit was erased in that inning anyway the orioles went on to win the game i had referred earlier how mcdon how McDonald was an Orioles outfielder. Actually, he was the Red Sox outfielder, of course.

Anyway, so Benamit's stolen-based failure did not prove costly. Benamit, not really much of a runner, as I remember him. He was on the pudgier end of things, but he did try to go first pitch off a position player. So that is, I think, the most recent and only recent attempt, but still unsuccessful and in a circumstance that is Of course very different from the usual Position player pitching appearance By the way from that 1983

New York Times game story About the Tippy Martinez game Last paragraph starts Tom Hurt of the Elias Sports Bureau which keeps Baseball statistics said that a pitcher picking Off three runners in one inning had Quote probably happened before but we have no way of checking without going into the scrapbooks end quote 1980s elias

is uh not really at the top of this game yeah we don't know pretty lackluster it's like you want us to go look at the books like you want us to go look this up? How are we supposed to do that? What are we, some kind of number nerds? I guess the moral of the story is that computers are helpful. A lot of stuff here. Mind your own business. How are we supposed to figure that out? I worked there briefly.

It was not that fun a job. All right. So we're going to do emails in a second. You wanted to ask briefly or talk briefly about my latest Home Run article. Yeah, I want to bring that up. Before we do that, why don't we just get a quick banter thing out of the way since yours is a little more substantial. This is something that I think a lot of people have probably already talked about.

I've seen it written about on MLB.com. It was tweeted at us, maybe emailed. I don't remember. But I'm just going to read a quote. This is Zach Kozart talking to MLB Network Radio. network radio quote i don't know why i like donkeys so much maybe because they look like they're real chill kozart told mlb network radio about a mile away from our spring training facility in arizona there's a donkey farm where you can feed the donkeys old jovo joey vato apparently this is the name the kids could call you hoju old jovo was like you make the all

star team i'm going to get you a donkey i'm like joey i don't need a donkey right now but if anybody knows joey i do and if that happens he's going to show up with a donkey somehow so okay on the one hand headlines that say joey vato is going to get zach koza to donkey if he makes the all-star team maybe kind of overstating things because this sounds like just a statement you might make in the spring. On the other hand, what if Joey Votto gets Zach Cozart a donkey? Because here are two things that have happened since spring training. One, Zach Cozart is currently third place among all position players in Major League

Baseball in wins above replacement, leading all shortstops. And oh, by the way, he is also currently leading all National League shortstops and oh by the way he is also currently leading all national league shortstops in all-star voting so zach kozart ahead of cory seager ahead of trey turner ahead of addison russell in national league shortstop voting zach kozart i'll repeat leading national league shortstop war and voting for the all-star game so it sounds like joey vato is going to get zach kozart a donkey in the middle of the season but that seems like it's a horrible gift he definitely deserves a donkey i guess if a donkey is something he wants which doesn't really sound like it is but yeah he's he's had a donkey level season so far it's been been a very impressive. I mean, wouldn't it be majorly income?

You have to, it's the middle of the, I guess it doesn't say when he's going to provide Cozart with the donkey. Maybe it's not like immediately after the all-star game, because maybe it makes more sense in the off season, but Cozart would have to build a barn. I don't know what you do with donkeys. Do you need a second donkey?

Would Cozart sort of ride the donkey to the spring training facility in February and March? Kind of like his version of Ioannis Cespedes and his Hot Wheels. I don't really know. But keep your eye on the Reds because there is something of interest taking place with Joey Votto, Zach Cozart, and donkeys. It's a developing story. Okay. So you had an article go live on Wednesday, which is today. It's an article that I don't know if you co-wrote with Mitchell Lichtman, but he at least co-produced with Mitchell Lichtman. He was doing an independent study

on the baseball. Listeners will remember that a Ben Lindbergh for the Ringer received the official report from at least some summary of the official report from major league baseball some weeks or months ago that performed extensive study on the baseballs because of the home run spike capturing everyone's attention and major league baseball released a report that said everything's the same and so as a response to that i think a lot of us in the community said well okay i don't see any reason to doubt them. And Alan Nathan weighed in and he said he didn't see any convincing evidence. And so it still felt like it was unsolved. But there was at least a report that seemed to be objective and truthful, backing up the idea that baseball hadn't changed. And so Mitchell Lichtman, MGL, co-author of the book, etc. UZR guy, I don't need

to explain who he is. he commissioned his own independent study that involved him i guess buying baseballs off of ebay and knowing when those baseballs were used and he sent them to a testing facility long story short you will now summarize what you found what he found what you both found yeah or what the lab found and he analyzed yeah it was it's complicated to explain who did what but he looked at balls from 2014 and the first half of 2015 and then compared them to some balls from 2016. And the core, the coefficient of restitution or bounciness of the balls had changed. The circumference had changed a little bit. They were a little bit smaller.

They were somewhat bouncier. The seams had decreased changed a little bit. They were a little bit smaller. They were somewhat bouncier. The seams had decreased in size and height, so the seams were lower. And that's something that, in theory, should cause the ball to travel farther, as is the smaller circumference. And the bounciness, of course, contributes to the exit velocity and the batted ball distance. And so we plugged all those numbers into Alan Nathan's trajectory calculator tool, and Mitchell did some other math based on some studies about what effect seam height has on the flight of the baseball and concluded that the differences, the cumulative differences, would just about explain the home run scoring or the initial surge that we saw in 2015, according to some prior calculations that Alan Nathan had done about what size effect in the ball juicing beat, I think. And our editor-in-chief at The Ringer, Sean Fennessy, said something earlier. He called me the Bob Woodward of ball juicing. And all I could think of to suggest that the ball played a role, could be sufficient to explain that initial surge in home runs. Although, as you wrote recently at Fangraphs, that surge has continued at a slightly lesser pace.

But there are more home runs being hit month after month, year after year. runs being hit month after month, year after year. And so my conclusion, essentially, the more I look into this, the more I despair of having any sort of smoking gun or simple, clear answer that we can point to one thing and say, this is why home runs are up. It's such a huge effect and such a drastic change. And in the past, whenever there's been a drastic change like this, there's always been a simple explanation or a satisfying explanation, not necessarily a proven one or a correct one, but something we could point to. And often it has to do with the ball. And it's hard to believe that there's no role for the ball to play in this, but I assume that it's just a part of things. And so my hypothesis in this article was that the ball

changed, there was some change in the ball, and hitters, whether subconsciously or not, may have noticed that, may have noticed that fly balls were flying farther, that they were being rewarded more richly for elevating the ball, and that maybe that has something to do with the fact that there is an air ball revolution of sorts, or hitters are paying more attention to that. Could also have to do with stat cast coming to the fore and people paying attention to launch angle. In 1919, I've talked about this before, but the dead ball era was not really a clean transition from dead ball to live ball in 1920, as it's often believed. But in 1919, the ball changed. They started using a different sort of wool that was springier and bouncier, getting it from a different source because of a shortage that had been caused by World War I. And so offense was up in 1919.

been caused by World War I. And so offense was up in 1919. And then in 1920, offense was up again because they were replacing the ball much more frequently within the games. And so the ball was in better condition and cleaner and brighter much of the time. And so offense was up again because of that in part. And then in 1921, it seems like was when all the hitters realized, oh, it's not the dead ball era anymore. We don't have to keep just trying to make contact. We should try to swing harder and elevate the ball and try to be like Babe Ruth. And so offense went up again. So I'm guessing that there's some kind of interplay here that there's something different about the ball and hitters have picked up on that and have adjusted their style in a intelligent way and

that that has caused further effects but it's really hard to untangle all this stuff i think it's just probably fair to say that there is some evidence that the ball changed and so we can't rule out that hypothesis the way that the earlier MLB report would have had us do. And it's all very murky, and I wouldn't consider this settled in any way. But if I had to guess, weighing all the evidence, I would think that there's been some change to the ball and that there have been many other changes taking place at the same time in a way that all those effects have stacked together. You mentioned that in the transition out of the dead ball era, they started getting, what

was it, Australian wool that they were making the baseballs out of? I believe it was merino wool because they needed the baseball that wicks. So one of the things that is somewhat, I guess, partially unsolved still is you could account for the additional distance that batted balls fly balls are getting now but still not necessarily the entirety of the exit velocity gain which would not have to do necessarily with the seams would be partially related to the coefficient of restitution the core but i guess that's where you can get into the hitters maybe responding to the balls extra life and you also have to wonder

about just how well calibrated. I mean, we're not getting those exit velocities directly from an irrefutable source. I'm not saying that TrackMan and SackAst are wrong, but of course there can be calibration errors or just little changes between years or between ballpark where those numbers cannot be taken to be concrete and true. So they are by and large great. But when you're doing a very granular specific analysis like this, it is enough to make you wonder whether or not you're seeing something real in the data. It's possible that the exit velocity gain was actually smaller than it seems, in which case, hey, you've just accounted for everything. Yeah. And I should mention that Rob Arthur is doing, and by the time many of you listen to

this, we'll probably already have published some accompanying analysis at FiveThirtyEight that shows that more balls left the park in 2016 at the same exit velocity and launch angle than had in the first half of 2015, farther because of something having to do with aerodynamics because he essentially built a model using the first half of 2015 before the home run craziness or before some of it at least. And that model then predicts how likely a ball is to become a home run at a given exit velocity and launch angle. And if you hold those exit velocities and launch angles constant, the 2016 home run rates are still much higher, which suggests that if you basically hit a ball at the same initial speed and trajectory in 2015, it was less likely to be a home run than it was in 2016, which suggests that the ball may have flown farther in 2016, may have flown farther in 2016, which is corroborating evidence of a sort to suggest that maybe the ball is different in some way. So these differences are small and hard to perceive. It's not like you could just look at it or even necessarily feel it and tell the difference,

although there have been some players and coaches who've said that the ball is different or behaving differently. So it's not solely stat nerds saying these things. But, yeah, it's all very complicated. It's like to write about this, you have to be like a writer and a reporter and a physicist and a statistician. And no one actually is all of those things. So we're trying to pull from all these different sources and disciplines. And it becomes a much more complicated question than you initially suspect when you just set out to find out why is everyone suddenly hitting tons and tons of home runs, which seems like something that would not be that hard to solve. But it is.

I like how whenever there's a vaguely science-y question about baseball, everyone has to go to the same guy. It's just always Alan Nathan for every single single query like his inbox must be absurd these aren't like one-off quick responses that he can issue uh you did raise real quick i guess now no one needs to go to the ringer to read your actually article because we're just going to talk about the whole thing don't give them the traffic you raise an important point uh within your article toward the end where you know this doesn't have to be something intentional or conniving or nefarious like i don't know a lot about coefficients of restitution but the change that you observed or the delictment observed or whatever was if i remember something on the order

of like five thousandths of a point it was very small well within the range of major league baseball's guidelines yeah which are huge yeah which are very imprecise but yeah yeah and they run a different test to get their numbers, which is rather different. Anyway, Rob Manfred doesn't necessarily have some sort of like back channel to the baseball factory where he said, we need runs and we need them now. It's not like this has to be some sort of dark plot. It could be a dark plot because as you also observe, there are some coincidences like the timing right when people were starting to fear that baseball was running out of runs and major league baseball had also alluded to the possibility of sort of juicing the ball previous to the ball seemingly becoming juiced so you know there's circumstantial evidence that could point

to there being well i don't want to say conspiracy but what the hell i'll say a conspiracy but this could very easily just be a random thing some some sort of very, very minor tweak in the manufacturing that has created a very slightly more juiced ball. And you really don't need that much of a change in order to get the ball to fly further. And so we move on to emails. Yeah, right. Especially if it's some circumference change, some core change, some seam height change. It's very easy to imagine that being missable when it's just these little differences in a few different areas adding up to something significant. So yeah, even if the ball is different, I would say it's still more likely than not that it was

an accident or random or some manufacturing variation or something. And again, whether it was true or not, or a conspiracy or not, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that the ball is juiced. I don't know that anyone actually minds that it is. I think people like home runs and runs, and maybe they don't like strikeouts, which you could argue are a result of batters swinging harder and trying to hit home runs. I don't know. But I think on the whole, baseball is probably better off today, gameplay-wise, on the field than it was in, say, 2014 when there were a lot fewer home runs and runs. So I think on the whole, it's not such a bad thing. And I kind of like that it's a mystery that none of us can seem to satisfyingly untangle

just because it is easy to answer so many baseball questions that wouldn't have been easy before. And that is nice that we can look up all sorts of data that we couldn't have even imagined having not long ago. But it's also sort of nice that this is something we can keep trying to wrap our heads around and not have an easy answer to and keep studying. So I look forward to someone else's next article about it, hopefully. One more thing real quick, just to satisfy those out there who would have the question. I assume the answer is yes, but when you or Lichtman were running the analysis, were the differences you found to be significant? Like, did you have the error bars? And did you perform the analysis in a scientifically rigorous way? Because I know there's at least a

Fangraphs commenter who raised the question that people always raise about, where are the error bars? There seem to be missing error bars. And they were unreported in the article that you published. Mitchell did some calculations and he found that these differences, given the samples that we used, were like almost three standard deviations beyond the mean of the variation that you would expect given those samples. So it's very unlikely that those differences would be the result of randomness. And he was using a cross section of baseballs and times too. So it wasn't like they all came from the same batch that could have been different for some reason. So bigger the sample, the better, obviously. But it still seemed meaningful based on the calculations that he did. All right.

So emails, now that we've talked for almost half an hour already. Guess we like hearing ourselves talk more than we like hearing your questions. All right. So Mike says, how much better do you think hunter pence would be if he had smooth mechanics so the question is if hunter pence were different how different would he be yeah okay so i i responded to that one by email i know the i get the spirit of the question my the default answer that i always give to questions like this is that he would be no better he might be worse here's what we know is that hunter pence has been

something like a 30 war player in the major leagues swinging like i don't remember exactly how grant brisby put it but something like a alarm clock in a washing machine something along those lines that he clearly has let's say distinct unique throwing and swinging mechanics but he's made them work nearly perfectly for himself. So while you could argue that he has things to clean up or that he could stand to look more like, I don't know, Chris Bryant or something, he has been a very, very good player. I have to think that these players, as we see them in the major leagues, are generally very nearly, if not exactly, the best versions of themselves. Of course, there are players who are able to make little tweaks and

make themselves better. But I mean, these people are like 10 standard deviations from the population mean in terms of how good they are at baseball. And I find it really hard to believe that Hunter Pence could be much better than the 30 war player that he's been because there have been, I don't know, maybe a few hundred of are really good in the majors already or who just have made the majors and held their own become far better because of some mechanical tweaks. So it's possible that if you could go back in time and take the young Hunter Pence, I don't know how he learned to hit and throw the way that he does. I don't know whether he was instructed to do this or he modeled it after someone or whether that was just his natural motion. But if this is something that he picked up from someone else, say, and maybe it's that he's so incredibly talented that he has managed to transcend weird and suboptimal mechanics. And if you could go back and give him more standard mechanics with

his skill, he would be even better. I guess that is possible. But if you tried to change him, say, now that he has been doing this his whole life and has had a lot of success with it, I would imagine that he would probably get worse. So I think it's too late to change Hunter Pence now, and it may have never been possible to have a different and better Hunter Pence, but it's not impossible that you could have had a even better Hunter Pence, I suppose, if you could have ingrained different habits early. We all have the same dream, right, of Hunter Pence retiring and becoming like a high school coach who just imparts these mechanics upon America's youth. You just have a whole generation of hunter-peds is coming. Yeah. All right.

Question from Colin. Edwin Encarnacion blasted a foul ball this weekend. He links to the video. It was ruled a foul ball on replay review, but it looked kind of like a homer. It was over the foul pole. You couldn't really tell just by looking at it whether it was gone or not.

Colin says, clearly this isn't the first time a large man Hit a ball higher than the fair pole My question is simply What's the current state of stat cast With respect to fair and foul balls This isn't a call an umpire can actually make And yet like a runner leaving a base early While tagging up there is a correct answer

To whether it's fair or foul The radiation blasting the field currently Can track everything including angles and velocity how long before we get boundary calls made by the computer optional related whimsy why aren't there cameras or seats atop the fair pole or a vertical camera looking up the pole from its base oh can you imagine a seat on top of the pole just like it's very precarious you don't get to go with anyone i guess you just have the one then you have to just balance you know like when they're repairing power lines you just have to

kind of climb up there kind of like strap the rope around the pole and eat yourself up so i meant to actually send this question to someone who might know better because i don't know the answer do you happen to know the answer about with the state of things because it feels like it's an inevitability and i would imagine that we would have something like this before we would even have like an automated strike zone. But I haven't heard anything about actual progress being made because it is a fairly uncommon event on the field in the first place. And I don't, I can't recall a time when an umpire staff has actually gotten the call wrong. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't ask anyone about this. My understanding of the StatCast tracking of batted balls is that it doesn't always track the complete trajectory of the batted ball.

And obviously, it occasionally will miss a batted ball entirely, but it gets the initial exit velocity and it gets the angle. And if it doesn't track the full trajectory, I don't know whether that would always be sufficient to tell you whether it was fair or foul, because maybe it's not perfectly precise. Maybe there's winds blowing it after it's hit that could affect the call. So my guess would be that this wouldn't be definitive. Maybe it would be just as good as an umpire eyeballing it, but I would think that it wouldn't be a perfect solution.

Although the question about why there isn't a camera, I guess if there were a camera at the base of the thing that had a wide enough lens that it could capture balls hit to either side and to some distance above it, that might be a useful angle. It doesn't really come up that often that it's difficult to tell with regular cameras though. Right. And I guess you could still conceivably, if you had a camera at the base of the pole, you could still have balls that are confusing if they go just kind of just over the pole. But I would assume the pole works like the strike zone does, where if you, the ball even like nicks any part of the vertical area of the pole, that it would count as a fair

ball. That is my assumption that that would be true. And I don't think that you could necessarily see that even if you had a camera planted at the base. So I don't know how much more clarity that would give. So this seems like one of those things that will eventually be coming down to the computers doing this properly, computers and the robots that will take over the game, but we are not there yet. And I would assume that this is still years and years off, but still probably inevitable because there's a boundary call and there'll be very little controversy about implementing something to get these calls right. All right. Question from Zachary. I have a simple question. It seems an easy hypothesis to assume

that every increase in strikeouts and home runs probably coincides with fewer plays at the plate. Is that true? Is that researchable? I ask because I think the most exciting play in baseball is the play at the plate. And surely other events have indirectly become less frequent due to fewer Yeah, so this is something that I don't know of a way to directly research these plays. I don't think there's anyone who tracks play at the plate or not. But at Baseball Reference, you can navigate through a series of pages until you eventually end up on the base running leaderboard for a given year for players and teams in the league. And then one of the categories that is on that page is outs at home so you uh you have counting stats for outs at home which i took to be a proxy i would assume that plays at the plate are no more or less successful i guess for either team than they've ever been so just

based on that i looked at four seasons 1986 1996 2006 and 2016 seems like a good slice of different eras. And so in 1986, the average team made 21 outs at home. In 1996, the average was down to 18. In 2006, the average was down to 17. And in 2016, the average was down to 16. Now, I don't know why the average would have gone down the most between 86 and 96. I guess aggressive running was more popular in the 80s, right? And then the home run started to take off somewhere in the 90s. So that would be one sort of era difference. And then more recently, there has been a gradual, very gradual decline in the number of outs at home, which I assume means a decline in the number of plays at home. Of course, the plays at home have also changed their appearance ever since Buster Posey was

run over by Scott Cousins. So things have changed there already. But the evidence does seem to suggest that there has been a reduction in plays at the plate, not to such an extent that there are no more plays at the plate or that baseball has suddenly lost one of the things that makes it so fun and energizing. But as with so many elements of the game, it's not so much about what has already happened as what the trend line says about what is happening and will continue to happen. And, you know, if baseball eventually becomes 100% walk strikeouts and home runs, then there will be no more plays at the plate. Yeah, I wonder whether catchers are any less effective because of the new rule protecting them from blocking the plate. new rule protecting them from blocking the plate. I wonder whether there just would be fewer plays at the plate because of that or fewer outs recorded because of that. I don't know whether that would make much of a difference, but we are talking about small differences here.

All right. Question from Steve. Is there a manager aging curve or perhaps a managerial difficulty spectrum akin to the defensive adjustments. On this list of coaches, and he links to a list of coaches, I count more than a dozen former managers among the coaches for the bench, first base, and third base. Some of them, Freddy Gonzalez and Larry Boa, for instance, had been managers where they are currently coaches. So manager aging curve. Manager aging curve. All right.

Well, I don't know. I can tell you that much. We're not even good at telling you what managers are good. So manager aging curve. That's probably not a coincidence because I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but teams are looking for, let's say, more open-minded and analytical managers. And there's sort of a pretty substantial gap there between a 40-year-old X player and a 65 or 70-year-old X player. So we have much younger managers now, but I don't think that would so much have to pertain to an aging curve as just pulling from a different pool of managerial candidates. And so we will see how these managers age. I don't think anyone would suggest that Joe Maddon has gotten worse. I don't know exactly how much people love Joe Maddon these days, but he's been a manager for what, more than a decade, something like a decade. I don't remember when he switched from being Mike Socha's right or left hand man, but he's been a manager for a while, just won a

World Series. People seem to think that he did good things so there's that i think dusty baker has actually only gotten better over time he seems to have been open-minded he's received certain ideas it took it took a while and i understand that i just saw i was watching a nationals game earlier today and i did see they listed a tenor row of course pitching and a little graphic showed the top five starting pitchers in the national league in pitches per graphic showed the top five starting pitchers in the National League in pitches per game. And the top four are all Nationals, which is funny. Now, granted, there are also reasons for that because the bullpen has been so bad. But Dusty Baker in general has aged well, I think, relative to what he used to be. So I would think that there is

no managerial aging curve until whenever dementia starts to set in, at which point then the curve would be steep and depressing. But that's a curve that exists beyond just the field of dugout managers. Yeah, I would think that at least in some cases, maybe the older you get, the harder time you have relating to players just because of the age gap or because the game has changed since you were playing it and most managers were playing it at some point obviously there are many exceptions to that and you just probably named a couple of them who are on the older side for managers but still beloved by their players so definitely not a hard and fast rule but I think there are many historical examples, at least, of guys who were kind of out of touch with the clubhouse, maybe in part because of an age difference and thinking that young players don't play the right way or all that sort of thing. Or, yeah, if it's a period where there's been a rapid change in the way the game is played and tactics and relating to the front office and all of that, then the older you are, the longer you've been in the game, the more things have changed since you came into the game.

Not everyone has the ability to adjust and do things differently when they started out doing things one way. So I would think the curve would be downward. It's always downward in every aspect of life, unfortunately, but probably a lot less steep than it is for players and people who rely on physical skills. And there are certainly some guys who have managed to be great managers into old age. Agreed. Should we do a stat segment?

Yeah, let's do it. So I was going to do a stat segment around what we already discussed toward the beginning. I was going to talk a little more about position players pitching. And already mentioned chris jimenez and his sort of modern day record of usage which reflects a good thing and a bad thing i guess good for him for finding a role bad for him that it's the role that it is but he has it and in the course of my research all of this was conducted at baseball reference which makes it easiest to look up data for

position players pitching enough people have asked them about this i guess that it is a box you can check in the play index to look up players pitching who are not typically pitchers so i went in and went into the history of that and i of course took out players like brooks kieschnick or rick and keel or even this year's christian bethencourt because those are not i think the kinds of players that you usually think of when you think of position players pitching. And so one thing that caught my attention was the last that it's been a while, but there have been cases of position players starting games. I don't know if this has ever come up on the podcast. You had a lot of set segments before I came on and I don't remember all of them. before I came on and I don't remember all of them but there are two cases since 1950 that I could find that are clearly cases of position players starting the game on the mound when they would

not ordinarily be doing that so one game I found it's from September 27th 1953 this is the final game of the season which would be one clue it's between the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Giants started Al Dark Alates. And the New York Giants started Al Dark. Al Dark threw one inning. He allowed a hit, two runs, had a walk. He allowed a home run. Home run was hit by, well, I don't know, who cares? Somebody hit a home run off Al Dark. Al Dark was also the leadoff hitter for the Giants in that game. He switched after the first inning from being pitcher to third baseman. As mentioned, this was 1953. The Giants were going nowhere, but Dark that year played in 155 games and he hit 300 and he hit 23 home runs. He had

one of the best seasons of his career, but he was given a chance to start that game. He threw the one inning. I found a little thing from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that a manager of the Giants, Leo DeRocher, said, quote, in order to have a little fun, as this is the last game of the year, he started infielder Al Dark on the mound. And he pitched one inning, giving up a two-run homer to, I guess, Frank Thomas, but not that Frank Thomas. This is a while ago, his 30th of the season. There was one male on base, and it raised Thomas' RBI total something something. One male on base. That's an interesting way of putting that. But I guess it's really no different than saying one man on base it's a

little more formal in any case there was another another case of a position player pitching and this takes us to 1968 this is a game that you might know i don't have a real good grasp on your understanding of baseball history i know that it is better than mine so we go to september 22nd again 1968 oakland athletics who were not very good they lost to the minnesota twins who were not very good by a score of two to one and the starting pitcher in this game for the minnesota twins was cesar tovard so cesar tovard that year for the twins and for several years for the twins was a very worthwhile quality utility player who I shouldn't say utility player because he played almost all the time he was just good and he played a bunch

of positions but he started this game for the Minnesota Twins and he went one inning this was not the last game of the year I should say but it was toward the end the Twins were not going anywhere anyway Tovar he came on to pitch he started the game and he threw one inning and he he faced Burt Campanaris, Reggie Jackson, Danny Cater, and Sal Bando. He actually threw a shutout inning. He struck out Reggie Jackson. He walked Danny Carter, Cater, I'm sorry. He then boxed Danny Cater to second base, which may be not so much of a surprise. He didn't really know what he was doing. Tovar, not a pitcher, but then he got out of the inning now you probably wouldn't be able to

guess why this happened but i can give you the answer tovar in that game became the second player in major league baseball history to play all nine positions in the game and it just so happens that he was given the chance to start on the mound the only previous player to play all nine positions in a game was bert campanaris who who did it in 1965. I will now remind you that the first batter that Tovar faced in this game was one Bert Campanaris, which is incredible. My favorite thing about this game is that Tovar, he pitched the inning, then he went to catcher for an inning, then he went to first base for an inning, then he went to second base for an inning, then he went to shortstop for an inning. he went to shortstop for an inning this is critical

he's moving around but he didn't go in the order of the numbered positions he went in order of proximity i guess so instead of going from second base four to third base five to shortstop six he went from second to shortstop interesting that's the fifth inning then he went to third base then he went to left then to center then to right tovar played all those nine positions through his shutout inning he also led off and he went one for three with a run scored and a walk so tovar at that point was the second player to play all nine positions in a game that has been done two more times since then you might be more likely to remember these because what's weird is that the other two instances happened within a month of one another in the year 2000 scott sheldon played all nine positions for the Rangers against the White Sox.

That's a game the Rangers lost 13 to 1. Scott Sheldon threw just one third of an inning. But in that one third of an inning, he struck out Jeff Leifer. So way to go, Scott Sheldon. The other case was Shane Halter in 2000 for the Tigers. A game the Tigers won 12 to 11. I guess that game was not very important to them. Halter played all nine positions and he faced just one batter and he walked Matt LeCroy. LeCroy? LeCroy. Whatever. Who cares? He walked the guy he faced. So Tovar had

the best inning of the four guys who played all nine positions. Halter, though, went four for five at the plate, had a double, drove in three runs three runs whatever so that is a history that tovar the most recent position player to start a game it's probably not a surprise that position players don't start games because hopefully teams have better depth than that but this did make me want to ask you a question as long as we're doing a question episode whenever this happens and again it hasn't happened for 17 years so it's not like this comes up often but is playing all nine positions in a game really something to be considered an achievement because it's always choreographed and scripted and it's done as an intentional novelty so what does it actually mean it doesn't even necessarily show that you can play all the positions you just do it by having tovar or by having Shane Halter pitch, if anything, that just diminishes the significance of his playing the other positions because it's showing that they're willing to play him at a position he doesn't know anything about.

Yeah, well, there's probably some correlation between playing all nine positions and having abilities to play multiple positions, right? If you're the guy who gets chosen to do that, then it's probably because you can hold your own at a bunch of positions. But yeah, it's a stunt. Like if it happened organically somehow, that would be cool. What would that require?

Just like guys getting hurt over and over and over and running out of bench and you just had to do it. There's no way that could happen really. And if it did, that would be fun. But yes, you're right. It is sort of a manufactured fun fact and artificial. So it's kind of cool. I guess it's nice that there's room for a whimsical feat like that in sports,

but it doesn't tell you all that much about the player. Yeah, I guess it's a fun way to just let the player have his day. And I should also mention that the play index didn't capture Will Ferrell in spring training. That was not one of the toggles that I could select. All right, question from John. I think we all think booing is dumb. I don't know if that's the case, but when is it the dumbest? I think my vote is for the specific situation where a home team closer has blown a save in the ninth and now his team is down a run.

There's that familiar restless booing in the stands and some people are leaving, but in most stadiums it gets sort of quiet at this point. He's still in a jam, however you want to measure your jam. Speaking of which, I guess we can talk about your results from that on Friday, because you did that post today, and could possibly let the game get out of hand. Instead, he roars back to get a big outer three, stranding runners and avoiding further damage. Then he walks off the mound and here come the loudest boos of the night. He just got a guy out. He wobbled, but stayed on his feet. Your team needs to rally in the bottom of the ninth. Booing doesn't make sense, but this booing makes even less sense. Maybe you have a better example of the worst booing. And it's true that when I was a fan, I never booed more just like a personality temperament

thing. And I would have felt silly saying boo in a crowd. But I also felt like it was just sort of piling on and that there wasn't really a reason to do it unless you thought it would motivate the player as opposed to making him feel worse. So I would say that maybe like the best booing is if a guy's just taking forever and there's a voluntary aspect to it. Like I kind of like the booing when a guy's throwing a lot of pickoffs. And I also like throwing a lot of pickoffs when the crowd is booing. I like both ends of that. But I don't like booing, I guess, when the player is struggling. Like if the player can't throw strikes or something, and you start booing your own guy, that seems kind of cruel and certainly counterproductive. Like if anything, it's just going to make him feel worse that everyone is aware that he can't throw strikes and that's not going to enhance his ability to throw strikes. So I would say that sort of situation where the player already seems to be struggling mentally or is not in a great frame of mind and booing is just exacerbating that condition. Yeah, I am not much of a booer i preferred if i were to boo i would just be

booing people i don't like as opposed to events because i'm just not that invested in games anymore and i just really don't like francisco rodriguez but i think that there must be some specific circumstance this person is thinking about because i i can't picture that booing in a game i get that people boo closers all the time but i feel like the booing would basically be complete by the time the inning is up i think that you boo when the lead is blown and then by the end it's just kind of weirdly silent so i think the dumbest booing is that like first or second pick off booing where it's like okay it doesn't it's this is no different than stepping off the mound or doing anything having a mound conference which is also some silly booing but the hell with mound

conferences they don't serve any purpose so the first or second pickoff move by the visiting pitcher that usually draws boos and i think that's absurd because i don't know what you're complaining about this is barely taking any time if he continues to do that then then that's when it gets fun it flips immediately i agree with you i like that the booing picks up and then i like when pitchers just kind of lean into it and what was it think he was years ago i even wrote about i think it was bruce chen who in one game i think he attempted what was it 10 like almost consecutive pickoffs of one guy in the same at bat i don't even recall i don't recall a punchline of the article if he even accomplished anything all i know is that he

threw a bunch of pickoffs at the same time as the visiting pitcher and everybody hated him for it and it was fantastic so i think that's great that's like the player having fun antagonizing the fans and showing some sort of bond and being receptive to the environment and that just that makes it fun but i think the the first second pickup point that's just that's dumb you're being stupid all right dylan says the best baseball anything to come out of the past week is a man called the freeze who challenges braves fans at sun trust park to a sprint giving the fan a head start before crushing their hopes and dreams a couple of reporters have identified who the freeze is it is nigel talton a former sprinter who ran the 60 meters in 6.77 seconds and the 100 in 10.47 seconds. So my question is, if the Braves offered Nigel Talton

a bench contract, what would he be capable of? This is assuming he would provide no value with the bat, very little value as a fielder, enough speed maybe to make him not the worst outfielder ever, and extreme value compared to his peers as a pinch runner or bunter. Another way to phrase this question, if the Braves knew what they knew now, would they rather hire the freeze or Emilio Bonifacio, who has negative half a win above replacement and a 132-150-211 slash line in 44 plate appearances before getting designated for assignment,

which would be better to have as your 25th man. So this is basically the Herb Washington question. Herb Washington in 1974 and 1975 made some appearances with the Oakland Athletics. He was a world-class sprinter signed for basically the same reason as brought up here by Dylan. Herb Washington played in 105 career games. Amazingly, he batted zero times. He was only out there to run, and he was a very fast runner, and he tried to steal 48 times and he failed 17 times and his actual base running value as measured by fan graphs and a baseball

reference was very slightly negative so herb washington actually bad for the oakland athletics it turns out there is a lot more to running the bases and do stealing bases than just being ridiculously fast we can assume that the freeze is ridiculously fast, just as we can assume that Herb Washington is ridiculously fast. But as we saw with some early career Billy Hamilton, there is technique to this. There are any number of players who are fast but not very good at stealing bases. There is a lot that you need to pick up.

I do not mean to suggest that the freeze could not pick up the technique, but it would not be instant and it would really not be very useful at all. You'd rather have Emilio Bonifacio. I think that's a pretty easy call. All right. Question from James. Shouldn't the more local pattern of baseball's interests and viewing habits imply that MLB should be larger than the NFL or NBA in terms of the number of teams? the NFL or NBA in terms of the number of teams. We hear quite often about how while interest in the national storylines and playoffs for basketball and football is greater than baseball, MLB is

sustained by the strong local passions and revenues for big league teams. More people might watch the Pro Bowl than the World Series, but enough people are interested in watching 100 plus games in their baseball team season that it evens out. The thought I am having is this, shouldn't this make expansion a much more attractive prospect to MLB compared to the other sports? Obviously, there aren't serious baseball fans everywhere, but surely even the weaker markets like Tampa Bay have to be bringing in so much more money for baseball than places like Indianapolis or Vancouver do. Local TV revenues drive baseball more than other sports, etc., etc. It seems that if the ratio of local money to national money is high, expanding a league should be more attractive. Right. Okay. So I am not very comfortable with the economics of baseball. I know only some of the more simplistic stuff. I know that so much of team revenue has come from, say, the local cable contracts they've been signing, but that's also understood pretty well to be a bubble because people are ditching cable because it's terrible and so people are moving to other packages mlb tv will eventually become like the major way that people are consuming baseball that is a national

enterprise so there is maybe more of a trend back toward national money i don't know exactly what it is like all the teams have stake in mlb am and so that is something that if you if you added two teams to the league then that would only decrease the share that other teams are able to get so that would be an incentive against expanding that being said baseball is doing so extraordinarily well and there are markets that could stand to have teams i do not think the baseball is there that far from expanding. It clearly has the capacity to expand and be successful. I think that Rob Manfred would tell you, and I think the evidence would support him, that this cannot really happen until they figure out what is happening in Tampa Bay and Oakland.

They need to know if they have to relocate teams before they can create new ones, which makes sense because if you have to relocate teams, they would get market priority. I am not well versed on exactly what is happening in Tampa Bay or Oakland. I know that there's seemingly constant chatter of a new stadium or a team getting out of a lease. Maybe you understand that stuff better than I do, but I would think that if and when those two situations are resolved, then it will not be long at all before baseball plants some new teams, two at a time, presumably in, I don't know, Mexico City, Montreal, Portland, Austin, somewhere else, maybe Las Vegas. Also, I don't know how much more popular, if at all, baseball is in many local markets compared to, say, football.

Because when people point out that baseball is kind of a local game, they're often defending it from people pointing out that the national ratings aren't so great. And people will say, yeah, but the local ratings are strong and that matters too. But they're not necessarily saying that local fans don't care about their local football teams or that local basketball fans don't care about their local basketball teams, right? I don't know whether baseball is stronger locally than those sports are or whether people are just pointing out that the national difference isn't as great as it seems to be because baseball still does well locally. I don't know. It's not like no one in the local markets cares about their football or basketball team. It's just that they also care about the other football and basketball teams, which seems like something that would be beneficial to a league also.

Agreed. All right. Quick terminology question for a post you can do next week, maybe. James says, so I have a buddy who loves to call home runs moonshots. I got to thinking and I was just wondering how far does a home run have to be hit for it to be properly deemed a moonshot? And okay, right. I would say a there's a park factor here, right? Because I think moonshot has a lot to do with how far over the fence it is. And so if it's a deep fence, I think that makes a difference, even if it's the same ball. Same ball could be a moonshot in one park and not a moonshot in another, because a lot

of it has to do with just the perception and the visual. And then I would also say that it has a lot to do with the trajectory, not just the distance, but it has to be high. It has to look like it's going to hit the moon, which means that it has to be high as opposed to just far or in addition to just far. So I think if it's a real just arcing home run, it still can't be like arcing into the front row of the stands, but I think there has to be that high arc to it also. Yeah. So it's an apex question really, and you have to figure out where the threshold is in the

apex measurement, because that would be a combination of exit velocity and launch angle, which gets you exactly where you want to go, then I don't know what a standard apex is maybe 75 feet, if you have a home run that's more than 100 feet off the ground at the time where it peaks in guess it's referred to as a frozen rope but lasers i think are more saved for home runs frozen ropes can just be like line drives i think that above a laser maybe you just have ordinary dingers homers long balls whatever you want to call them and then you have your moon shots it makes me wonder what does a moon shot have to be a home run like if pop-ups go straight up, they can be hit very hard. You know, if you hit a very high, why shouldn't that be a moonshot? That's true. I would say that there are other terms for that, right? There's a home run in a silo. Some people call pop-ups. Is there other terms for it? I don't know if I've heard that once. Yeah. Yeah. That's a thing. I think there are others that aren't coming to mind immediately, but yeah, I think a moonshot has to be a home run, I would say.

Maybe a high pop-up that just leaves the infield could be like a dirt dinger. Okay, we can popularize that one if you want. Well, if home run in a silo is a thing that exists, then the bar is low. All right, last one one Because this is draft related And it won't be as relevant for a year Brennan says Would evaluating where in the draft Teams tend to pick players versus

Where those players are projected to go Yield useful insights It seems that an organization with better than League average scouting ability would tend to Reach on players underrated by Others or avoid top-ranked prospects whom they've correctly deemed a bust? Or would the data, at least near the top of the draft, be hopelessly noisy based on the other non-talent-related reasons that teams take players

early, such as signability and high bonus demands? Yeah, it's a complicated question to try to answer on the fly. There are adjustments. I know earlier in the same email, I think there was a reference to capping the value that you would give if you were doing an evaluation of a draft pick, capping the value a pick could have. Because, you know, like if the Cardinals really loved Albert Pujols so much, which I think was the example provided in the email, that if they were really so big on Pujols, why would they have waited to draft him until the 13th round? It seems like the longer you wait, then the more difficult

that gets if you really think that Pujols is going to be great. So just based on that alone, you figured that you should restrict how much credit the team gets for that pick. I know along similar lines, I wrote about the Angels bullpen, which is shockingly good and surprising and weird this season. And one of the players has been really good in that bullpen which is shockingly good and surprising and weird this season and one of the players has been really good in that bullpen is Blake Parker and so I am inclined to want to give the Angels some credit for Blake Parker because they picked him up off waivers but he was claimed off waivers last December after being claimed off waivers by the Angels also in October it was complicated he came and went and then this January I think the Angels

designated him for assignment and then he got through waivers. He stayed in the system. Then he came to spring training. Then he went back on the team. And he's been really good. So on the one hand, kudos to the Angels for Blake Parker being good. But on the other hand, if they really thought this was going to happen, then they wouldn't have treated him in the way that they did. So yeah, I think I've drifted now a little off from the question. One of the difficulties is we don't have any sort of real public understanding of like when, where a guy is supposed to be drafted. You know, we hear it referred to with some guys that this is a reach or they thought this guy was going to be already taken. So it becomes a hypothetical

where we don't have a lot to actually handle. be interesting to look back retrospectively and, I don't know, look at mock drafts or pre-draft rankings or something like that and see whether certain teams had consistently low ones. But yeah, that might be skewed by money stuff and salary demands and who knows what else. So there's potential for that to be interesting. And I do think just evaluating how teams draft and how scouts evaluate players is a tough thing to do. You can't just look at which players the scout picked or signed. You should also look at all of the evaluations that the scout turned in and kind of the hypothetical. If you had picked this person where the scout said you should pick him, then what would have happened? So I'm sure that some teams already do that sort of thing,

but they don't really like to talk about it publicly. Well, yeah, good luck, researchers. It's so easy to get your hands completely around. There's not an overabundance of details or variables to consider at all. All right, so we will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners have already pledged their support include Eric Peters, Alex, Jessica Pritchett, Dustin Palmatier, and Craig Campagno. Thanks to all of you. You can

join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. By the way, there is a thread now where Dave Cameron posted. posted if you have tickets to our august eclipse event and you no longer need them join the facebook group post in that thread and dave will arrange a refund for you so that we can take back your tickets and offer them to someone else who will use them you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes you can contact us via email at podcast at vangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you later this week. On the bench and your dad will punch you With a head full of whiskey and all this money You go, you'll never make it