Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1080: If Baseball Were Beep

Episode Date: July 6, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s altitude sickness, Matt Albers and Ryan Raburn, an odd-field update, the Rich Hill resurgence, the MLB Battlegrounds event in Hyde Park, Logan Morrison’s comments about Gary Sánchez, Jonathan Lucroy’s comments about framing, and more on the Reds’ pitching staff. Then they take a detour to talk to […]

I'm too high, I'm too high, I can't help the sky. I'm too high, I'm so high, I feel like I'm about to die. Hello and welcome to episode 1080 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg, I'm a writer for TheRinger.com, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for TheRinger.com, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. Do you want to talk about Mount Shasta? Would you rather never talk about or think about Mount Shasta again? The long and short of it, my girlfriend and I tried to make a second attempt for the 14,000 plus foot summit of Mount Shasta following not the very popular avalanche gulch route but

following a different route up to the top and the previous time we were turned around because a team member experienced a bit of a anxiety attack and so we had to turn around but we were my girlfriend and I were dissatisfied so we went back and tried to make it up on our own we knew the way we were fully prepared and all that and we were doing. I was feeling strong until about 13,000 feet or so. I started to feel some altitude symptoms, which I am fairly familiar with high altitude related symptoms, although these were a little bit less familiar to me. And so we plugged away a little bit more until I realized I couldn't go any further. And we had to make the difficult decision to turn around. And I was with it it's we did everything by the book we made the right decisions but it wasn't until we got back down and out of the trailhead and got to a hotel in town that we started looking

up these were I've had some altitude problems before but never quite of this variety and it seems that the symptoms I was feeling were in alignment with those of high altitude pulmonary edema which is commonly fatal. So it turns out that the right decision was made to turn around because 48 hours previous to recording right now, I was apparently experiencing symptoms of a condition that causes people to very frequently die on mountains. And now I have paired a stat segment that involves Nefi Perez. So life is good and life is bad.

And sometimes it bounces back and forth between them with great speed. Well, there's no shame in needing oxygen to breathe. I mean, we're oxygen breathing beings. We've evolved this way for a reason. So I can't really blame your body for wanting oxygen. I feel like as a taller individual, I should be somewhat more acclimatized to high altitude than the average. But my girlfriend was doing great. She had the energy. She would have had the energy to summit. So now I feel some guilt, but there's not much I can do if my body wants to die.

Well, we would have mourned you. It would have been a great inconvenience for me to have to find another replacement co-host. So thanks for sparing me that trouble you're welcome all right so we are kind of doing an email show here we have some banter first and then we have a quick guest so i'm not sure how many emails we'll actually get to there's the stat segment too but we'll see how much we have time for here. So a few quick things that I wanted to mention. First, there was a Nationals game on Monday. And as Kazuto Yamazaki pointed out on Twitter, this was a peak Effectively Wild game because it involved a Matt Albers blown save and a Ryan Rayburn walk-off hit. Same game.

Nationals are making all of Our dreams come true this year and Albers blew the save but he Did end up getting the win And Rayburn had The the walk-off blooper so All was well in the end So the Nationals won 3-2 And Ryan Rayburn now after

44 plate appearances has a 117 weighted runs created Plus so he is on track At least least, for having his scheduled bounce back season. Let's see. His WRC plus is up from last season by 47 points, which would be his smallest swing since 2010 to 2011 when his WRC plus dropped by 26 points. So Ryan Rayburn, overachieving slash underachieving? Who's to say? Another follow-up to our email about that crazy misshapen field on the outskirts of D.C.,

suburb of D.C. that we talked about on the last email show, I heard from Jake Mintz, formerly of Cespedes Family Barbecue, currently of MLB.com. And he, of course, was a college baseball player, although this was a high school field, but he is from that area. And he said he is listening to the email about the field with the hill in right field in DC. He says, I've played there a few times and the hill is incredibly steep.

Once I saw a ball get stuck on the top and the kid had to run to the top to get the ball. And I asked him to estimate the angle of the incline. And he says it's right around 45 degrees. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. So if you're climbing a mountain, like, uh, okay. so 38 degrees is like the golden angle for avalanche proneness. That is where a slope is so unstable that snow or ice will frequently give. So if you're climbing on a slope of 38 degrees, you have to be extremely careful that you don't trigger an avalanche. This is steeper than avalanche. This is so steep that if it were to snow, the snow might just fall off instead of consolidate which i understand

might not really put things in perspective for a lot of people who aren't familiar with high altitude or high angle slopes but 45 degrees is absurd that is absurdly steep no one could safely no that's well i love that it's this is one of those things where we we're glad that it exists and we would never design any stadium this way you would never want to put anyone in position to try to track a fly ball. I know we've all seen footage of catches made on Towsdale. This is the hill I want. This isn't even a hill.

This is part of the Matterhorn, and I want footage of catches. Another follow-up, Darius Austin, who is a writer for Batflips and Nerds, the UK baseball blog, and also Banished to the Pen. He's been a guest on this podcast. He and many other Effectively Wild listeners and Batflips and Nerds listeners went to that Hyde Park MLB Battlegrounds event on July 4th in London that we talked about and speculated about.

And he has a full write-up of the event, which I will link to in the usual places. But it sounds like it was fun and pretty strange. And there were floating inflated targets at 150 feet and 250 feet hitting in the home run derby. And I will read from what Darius said about these guys, England cricket stars, Joss Butler and Alex Hales. And his review of their performance goes, The cricket stars definitely did not look like baseball players. Hales seemed to be generating a lot of his power with his knees and struggled early before finding a rhythm to hit a few balls out, while Butler was constantly dropping his front shoulder and couldn't get a consistent swing going both still hit some impressive shots considering their lack of expertise but I think both were also struck by how difficult it was and how easy the baseball players made it look

and it sounded like Carlos Pena was hitting a lot of bombs but was not aiming for the targets whereas cliff floyd did have a target based strategy and he hit five or six line drives in the vicinity of the 150 foot target to the right of the stage he hit them twice and these inflatable targets were also moving in the wind which made it even more difficult so it was a showdown in the end between Pena and former Dodgers farmhand Federico Celli, who had a 92 batting average at single A last season, but apparently was very impressive in this home run derby and was hitting a lot of deep home runs. And Darius also mentions that there was an element of danger here because people were understandably eager to acquire a ball, but some of the attempts to do so were rather frantic

and people were smashing into barriers and knocking kids out of the way to get balls. So a famous British reserve was not in evidence here. Maybe they were visiting Americans who were going crazy. Maybe it was Zach Hample trying to add to his collection or something. Anyway, it sounds like it was fun and weird, and a lot of listeners were there. So I will link to the full write-up for those who want to read and watch and listen, because they're going to do a podcast also with Green and Floyd and some other people who were there. Outstanding. All right. Another thing I wanted to mention, Rich Hill.

Since we devoted part of an episode to Rich Hill, June 16th, we talked about him on the podcast. And since then, he has made three starts. He has thrown 19 innings with 26 strikeouts and only four walks and four runs allowed. That's a 1.89 ERA. Way more than a strikeout per inning. His walks are under control also now.

So it seems as if not only is the blister under control for the moment, but the curveball is back. So right after we talked about him being completely out of whack and the curveball being the worst curveball in baseball this year, and you got your fun fact Instagram post out of it. It seems as if Hill refound whatever had enabled him to succeed over the past couple of years. So Rich Hill's back. Yeah, looking at the run value. So Rich Hill had the most negatively valued. I don't know a good way to put that.

He had a bad curveball run value through June 15th. Since then, his curveball has been worth 3.1 runs better than average that quickly, which is, you know, these are some silly numbers in that they're not familiar at all. So people don't have a very good reference for them. But if you think about 3.1 runs better than average for one single pitch type over three games that's incredible uh ball back somehow this is one of those good little reminders that no matter how fun a baseball fun fact looks or how compelling material looks things can change almost immediately and there's no well i guess there's sometimes rhyme or reason to it but there's no rhyme or reason that we can tell

from the outside so rich hill back but a few weeks ago rich hill broken and yeah both true it's just one is more recent than the other i don't know what's what this is about but over those last three starts rich hill has gotten credit for throwing a cutter yeah something to pay attention to new new pitch new pitch for rich hill okay here's a thing to pursue. So, okay. Okay, so through June 15th, Rich Hill was throwing a fastball around 89 miles per hour. He had a slider, which was

basically just his curveball that was classified as a slider because he was throwing it from a different arm slot because, you know, he drops down. But over the last three games, Rich Hill has thrown a cutter that is coming in around 85 miles per hour. So, I don't know what that is. Maybe it's just a worse fastball or something.

He threw it a lot against the Mets on June 21st. Then his last two starts, he's thrown it a very small amount. He's basically still fastball curveball. But something new has shown up for Rich Hill just when it seemed like he was at his darkest. I guess if you're not counting when he was actually at his darkest, when he was not really in affiliated baseball. But something new for Rich Hill. So that's a cool little tweak. Yeah. All right. So we will keep tracking Rich Hill. Not that there was ever any doubt about that. And also wanted to mention Logan Morrison and his comments about Gary Sanchez and the home

run derby. I don't care all that much about who's in the home run derby. I'm happy that Judge and Stanton are there and maybe I'll watch just to see those guys, but it's not something I really look forward to all that eagerly. But anyway, Logan Morrison came out against Gary Sanchez participating in the home run derby because Logan Morrison is not participating in the home run derby. He says, Gary shouldn't be there. Gary's a great player, but he shouldn't be in the Home Run Derby. I remember when I had 14 home runs, that was a month and a half ago. I thought that was an excellent line. And I have no love for Logan Morrison. I think just about everything else I've ever seen Logan Morrison say or tweet has made me dislike Logan Morrison. But I did want to salute him for that line because I like when pro athletes are petty, and I think there's not enough pettiness, and I enjoy vindictive, petty comments from pro athletes. And I would also point out that Logan Morrison had 14 home runs

all of last season, although he missed some time. And he does have i think the second most home runs in the league this year so he deserves to participate according to that but that's not the only criterion it also takes into account popularity and your previous performance and other factors so i think they're good reasons for gary sanchez to be there and gary sanchez was hurt of course and hasn't had time to hit as many home runs but hits home runs a very long way so I think that will be fun and you get the Judge Sanchez rivalry so I think all told it's probably more fun for everyone if Gary Sanchez is in this if I were Logan Morrison I might be somewhat aggrieved that I wasn't invited to participate it's a good comment it's weird this. This like a strange blend. We of course, you need to have Stanton and judge in the home run derby for

anyone who actually cares about the home run derby. Those are guys that you need to have. And I don't actually remember the field off the top of my head. I know Miguel Sano was in there. It's good. But you also get this weird mix like Mike Moustaka. Sure, he has home runs, but I don't think anyone thinks of him as like a compelling. I don't know. I feel like now that we have stat guest information and all that, know what what a really impressive like enjoyable home run looks like and actually this is useful banter because i'm supposed to somehow whip up a freaking home run derby article for espn tomorrow and i i think it's it's probably going to be garbage espn i'm sorry you're listening to this but it's a it's an obnoxious topic because i don't actually even watch the home run derby but

for those who do watch the home run derby i don't know what is the most fulfilling part of it. Maybe it's just seeing someone get on a roll and put together, I guess we can say a rally, a home run rally, if you will hit a bunch of home runs in a row. But I think that you want to see home runs that are pushing limits, right? You want to see really fast, really long home run that feels like the thing that you would want. And so now that we we have stack s it seems like you would know who to invite besides charlie blackman who doesn't seem like a really outstanding home run derby candidate in terms of what people want to see you want to see home runs like aaron judge hits that so no hits that stanton hits harper you've got you know cody bellinger hits some very long home runs chris davis the a's chris davis or the other chris davis i guess but

he can't really swing right now he's still still hurt. The currently better Chris Davis, I guess, seems like he would be a great candidate. Joey Gallo, a very obvious candidate to go in and, you know, because otherwise you have people like Mike Moustakis, which whatever. OK, so he's going to pull some home runs and he he could win the thing. I don't know. He could have a really consistent swing, but I don't think anybody's going to jump out of their seat because Mike Moustakas hit a home run 393 feet that just doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the event so I get that Logan Morrison has the whole fly ball thing he has a new approach and he's had great success in a very pitcher friendly environment so he's having an incredible season certainly even by his own standards because he's not been a very good

player before I get his argument but you know if you want Logan Morrison in then you want Yonder Alonzo in and I personally don't want to watch a home run event that features people like Logan Morrison and Yonder Alonso. Even Justin Boer, Bauer, Boer, boy, do you know how little attention has been given to Justin, whatever his last name is? Let's call him Boer. I'm pretty sure it's Boer. I can look it up. I'm not going to. You confirm.

He has pretty good sack-ass information. I've almost written about him before because he hits the ball really hard except I've realized Who you know you know that expert Who cares who cares about Justin Boer If he were on a better team somebody would care but he's On the Marlins and he's a he's a mediocre first baseman But he hits the ball really hard so at least he could be an interesting Surprising candidate Mike Misogas

That's not interesting and neither is Logan Morrison But good comment yeah Okay we by the way just got Another email from Patreon supporter Aiden Jackson-Evans, who also attended the London 4th of July event and also blogged about it. So I will

link to his blog post too. Our listenership was very well represented there. Alright, so the last thing that I wanted to mention was about Jonathan Lucroy. News came out a few days ago that Lucroy is on the trade market. I don't know what kind of value he could command at this point. But anyway, it is a rapid fall from grace for Lucroy, who was, I think, perceived to be maybe the best player available at last year's trade deadline.

And now is so available that I'm not sure anyone would want him or want to give up much for him. And then Travis Sotchick did a post on Lucre too, and he covered some of the same ground that we did when we talked about Lucre in an episode earlier this year after I wrote about him. And the thing that differentiated Travis's post is that he talked to Lucroy and Lucroy, it seems, completely failed to learn the lesson of Miguel Montero, assuming that he talked to Travis after the Montero dust up. I don't know whether that's the case or not. But anyway, Lucroy essentially tried to blame his own poor framing performance on his pitching staff. He said, when you look at the best framers in the game, look at the pitchers they have. When you look at my best years, look at who I had on the staff, look at all that stuff. You're only as good as the pitches.

Being able to hold the baseball, to have strong hands, it is important. But if they, the pitchers, don't know where it's going, dot, dot, dot, I will guarantee you whoever catches Dallas Keuchel has the best framing numbers. And so Travis looked at all the things that Lucre told him to look at, and they didn't really support Lucre's point. And whoever catches Dallas Keuchel does not have the best framing numbers. And when you look at the pitching staffs that Lucre caught in Milwaukee, there were some good pitching staffs, but also some pretty terrible pitching staffs, and it doesn't seem as if that could be responsible for this. Anyway, we have talked about this before, and certainly poor command on the part of the pitcher might impact a catcher's framing performance to a certain extent, although

if that pitcher habitually has poor command, that is something that would, at least in theory, be adjusted for in the stats because every catcher who caught that pitcher would have a tough time framing. And so those debits would go to the pitcher, not to the catcher. But it's possible that maybe there's something that could not be captured by the stats. Maybe there's something that could not be captured by the stats. So there's some element of truth to this, just as there is some element of truth to Montero's claim about how pitchers are responsible for poor throwing performance by catchers, at least in terms of steals and caught stealings. But in the case of these two guys, that does not, I don't think, explain the bulk of what's going on here. It is on those catchers to a large extent. And even if it were, it's not a great thing to say, and it's not well received by your teammates. And it seems like that kind of thing is particularly egregious for catchers who are supposed to be team leaders

and are supposed to protect their pitchers in all ways. So this is not a great look for Lucroix in a year when a lot of his looks have not been great. Not well received was a clever choice of words. Yeah, didn't intend that, but yeah. All right. Did you have anything? Also, I basically don't because I missed nearly the entire four-day weekend, but I can say this much. When I was just browsing the leaderboards while you were talking, I was looking for where the Rangers were among pitching staffs this season. And I think we all understand the Rangers have not had a very good pitching staff this year, but nobody would consider those Brewers staffs that Luke Roy caught to be particularly outstanding.

Now, that was back when Giovanni Gallardo was not a terrible relief pitcher on not the Brewers, but in any case, not really a command-oriented pitching staff. But looking at this year's team pitching staffs, I've talked about the Cincinnati Reds pitching staff before. And the Cincinnati Reds were fascinated because last year they were the first pitching staff in baseball history to have a below-replacement level pitching staff by Fangraph's version of war. This season, they were negative through, when did we talk last? Through 78 games, I believe it was. The Reds were below replacement. And in fact, through 82 games this season, the Reds were below replacement.

And yet yesterday, the Reds behind the strong pitching from Homer Bailey, who seems to have allowed one run. I don't know why I didn't look at the box score. But Homer Bailey, Wynnie Peralta, Asher Wojcicki, and Michael Lorenzen all combined to pitch well for the Reds on Tuesday. Lorenzen all combined to pitch well for the Reds on Tuesday, and they combined for a 0.4 war figure in one game alone, pulling the 2017 Cincinnati Reds up to a season total Fangraphs war mark of 0.1. They are out of the red and into the black. They remain in last place among all pitching staffs with a war of 0.1. They are behind the Minnesota Twins at 1.9, and the Bra and mariners and orioles are all tied at 2.8 but the cincinnati reds officially no longer in the

red which i have not realized that's a fun little coincidence but we will see if this continues now that they have bailey back i don't know when they're going to get biscofani back so there is some actual talent rejoining the reds now some actual pitchers to give them some help but just something to watch because they remain right on the border. All right. Very qualified. Congrats to the Reds. Okay. So let us bring in a listener who posted something in our Facebook group over the weekend his name is max go to ricer that is hyphenated last name which is a black mark in scouts books against him but we're still having him on the podcast and he posted about beep baseball

which is something that has fascinated me for some time ever since ESPN and Jeremy Schaap did a story about it. We have never talked about it on this podcast, but Max volunteers for a team in New England. There's a big tournament coming up. So we wanted to have him on to explain what baseball is and what he does and how other people can get involved if they're interested. So Max, thanks for coming on. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here. if they're interested. So Max, thanks for coming on. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here. Yeah. So first of all, I guess we should say that baseball is not a full-time thing for you, but you have seemingly made it a close to full-time part-time thing because in addition to beat baseball, you also work as a stat stringer for MLB advanced media. So how do

you fit all of this this in in your schedule? So I don't sleep a ton. I've kind of sacrificed sleep for everything else. And I love, so I work full-time at Mass General also as a research tech and then part-time for MLB AM as a stats trainer. So how many games do you do for them? I'm working about 32 this year. It's between three of us. And this is my first year doing it. So the two veterans are letting me take a couple more games. Okay. And so for people who don't know what stat string is, it means you go to the game, right? You sit in the press box, you mark everything that happens in the game, you're scoring the game essentially. And then that's what everyone sees in game day, or that's what gets compiled in the official statistics or at least i mean that's all pitch fx based too but you're kind of marking yeah yeah so everything everything that you see

on game day is pretty much what i input so if there's ever a problem uh now you know who's faulted okay so tell us about beat baseball yeah so beat baseball is an adaptive form of baseball for the blind the way it's played basically the pitcher and catcher, they're both sided coaches, but everyone else is blind. So you have the batter and then six fielders. You have two bases. It's only first and third, and they're about four foot tall tackling dummies that buzz. So once the batter swings the bat and they make contact, the umpire randomly turns on one of the bases to buzz. So the batter has to figure out which base is buzzing, which also sometimes sounds just like the ball, which beeps. And so they beat baseball.'s that's caused problems before but uh once they figure out which base it is they try to sprint down to the base and if they touch

the base tackle it knock it over before the fielder holds up the ball it's a run otherwise it's an out and so you get three outs per inning six innings and the batters they get four strikes and one take uh-huh so the pitcher is essentially trying to hit the bat, the batter is sort of swinging the same way every time, or can they tell from the beeps with enough precision to actually swing in the right place? So we really try during practice to tell our batters, don't listen to the beeps of the ball when you're batting, because it should be consistency, like trying to keep your swing as level as possible every single time and let the pitcher adjust to you. So if your swing is dipping or something, let the pitcher try and figure that out. We preach consistency, trying

to keep the bat as level as possible so the pitcher can get it there. So when you're playing this, are we talking about regular baseballs and regular baseball bats, or are there also adaptive equipment to make hitting the ball maybe a little bit easier yeah so the ball is a six it's like a bigger softball basically it's 16 inches in diameter it weighs about 16 ounces and for reference in baseball is about five ounces i think and nine inches in diameter so uh we'll play catch afterwards and the baseball feels so so much smaller but so the ball yeah it's a much bigger ball and it beeps obviously uh but the bats are whatever's approved by like softball or NCAA. That's the bats we use.

So what can you tell us about the organization itself? How many teams, how many players to a team, how many games, that kind of thing? Yeah, so to my knowledge, it's unlimited players. We have, I think, 14 or 15 players on our team. We're the Association of Blind Citizens Boston Renegades, based out of Austin, obviously. So there's teams across the country. There's teams from the Dominican, Canada. It's the Toronto Blind Jays up in Toronto, which is an incredible name.

Maybe one of the best logos in the league. I really enjoy that. There's teams in Taiwan. I think it's the Taiwan Home Run is their team name. They're coming back to the World Series this year. But yeah, there's teams throughout the U.S. And I think a slightly different version of beat baseball is growing in Cuba and Italy. I read a piece on NPR, I think, about the beat baseball variant in Cuba, which seems really interesting. Yeah. Are there different play styles that you are aware of or different strategies? I

searched the Facebook group for previous posts about beat baseball. And I found a listener named Steven, who was at the World Series last year, and he noted that teams were shifting in beat baseball. Yeah, so we shift a ton. There's a ton of different strategies, really. The way I actually found out about this was at Saber Seminar 2015. One of the coaches gave a presentation about beat baseball and kind of the shifting strategies they've been using, which I thought was so cool that you could do this in beat baseball. So so yeah we do shift pretty heavily for certain players uh we keep spray charts um during the game and from footage game footage is tough when sometimes it's blind people filming it but we try to do our best so we keep spray charts and then shift accordingly to try and compensate for that but as in terms of playing style i think taiwan might be the most extreme example they

really really preach a fly ball heavy kind of batter strategy so a lot of uppercut swings which in beat baseball no one really catches the ball i think there's been a recorded five maybe catches in the entire history of the sport that goes back to the 1975 and if they catch the ball it retires aside at the ending but so if you hit the ball high in the air it gives you so much more time to get down the baseline and there's nothing the fielder can do obviously while they're waiting for the ball to come back down so that's definitely the best strategy rather than hitting ground balls as it is in nlb also but uh it's a more extreme example yes as someone said in the facebook group the airball revolution yes even more important baseball exactly yeah how loud are the beeps if you can give us some idea it is pretty loud it gets really annoying actually part way through as a practice

we play with live balls and in tournaments obviously always live balls and the beeping kind of wears on you after a little bit but uh kind of tune it out um it's pretty loud it can get lost in the wind i don't have like a decibel level or anything like that but um if you like held the ball with pins in it like a grenade so if you unpin it'll start beeping and if you held it like next you're having a conversation with someone you have to talk a little bit louder than normal probably hear over it but if it's like a really windy day it can be tough to hear the ball while it's in play if the buzzer faces down into the grass can be really tough to find the ball so it's definitely loud

enough for players to hear but not not like overwhelming everyone wants to compete everyone wants to have fun ball Ball. Ready. Pitch. Drag one. Get ready, guys. When the ball is hit, either the first base or third base will start to emit that beeping sound you heard. So for anybody who hasn't already decided to look it up, the Toronto Blind Jays do have a Twitter account,

and their logo is the Blue Jays logo, except with a blindfold over the eyes. There's no question there. It's great. They also, and the Twitter account and their logo is the Blue Jays logo, except with a blindfold over the eyes. There's no question there. It's great. And the word blind on the logo is in, they have Braille next to it, which I thought was really cool. Oh, that is a fantastic touch. So obviously a very worthwhile organization and terrific volunteer work. But I think that it's probably very easy for people to start to wonder about the actual uh the gameplay itself and so to try to put this in some

perspective what would be like an average inning or an average score for one of these games it does it keep pretty well parallel with familiar baseball or is it completely off that scale i'd say more or less you have i think there's an opportunity for more high scoring games in this you don't really have like one-off shutouts or anything like that more or less yeah but it is pretty similar to mlb we our tournament the first leg of the beast of the east which we played back in back in june the beginning of june i think we won games like nine to five eleven to six uh and then like seven to zero so it kind of parallels baseball but a traditional inning usually it depends also on the team we have some newer teams in the league and for them a lot of the struggles they have is the consistency

um and trying to find the rhythm with the pitcher because that relationship between the pitcher and batter is so crucial to any kind of success we played a team where i think the pitcher struck out all but three batters which would be incredible if it was baseball but uh in deep baseball you want as high of an er as possible so that's definitely the hardest part but normally get some balls in play but there are i think it does skew towards more strikeouts than outs for balls in play and how seriously do the players take this like how how much of their time do they devote to this how much practice do they do it's a huge commitment um i mean we fly to different tournaments we just flew back from bowling brook indiana a couple weekends ago we'll fly to west

palm beach in florida for the world series in august so it's a big time for it we practice two this week uh one day during the week one during the weekend during april june july and august before the world series and then we i don't know about other teams but we have winter practices in a batting cage where we just work on hitting and trying to get our timing down and we do that once a week usually every other week for about three hours or so but players practice time on their own they do do a lot of weightlifting. I just had lunch with one of the players on Sunday, and he was telling me he'd shut back from a workout where he was practicing swinging for about an hour, trying to get down the mechanics.

So it's definitely a big commitment, and it's very intense. Is there a Yankees of beep baseball? No, there's the Long Island Bombers. Based out of Long Island, they wear pinstripes. There's a number 13 on their team, who's probably the biggest guy I've ever seen in my life. So I don't know if the rivalry is as intense as Red Sox-Inkies, but it's definitely there.

How is it that you came to be involved with this organization in the first place? So me and two friends were presenting at Sabre Seminar back in 2015. And one of the coaches at the time, Justin Mandrudis, he was presenting on shifting and just in general what the baseball is all about. So after that, I got his contact information. The season had already ended at that point. It was late August. And then at the end of my junior year of college, I called the head coach and I was going to be around Boston for the summer. So I decided to see if I could help out in any way. So I went to one of the batting cage practices and just fell in love with it. And what's the aging curve like in beat baseball?

Is it any more forgiving? Do you get older players in the league? Definitely. I think we're skewed towards definitely late 30s would be our average. We have two. I think our youngest player is a year older. He's 23. Another guy is 24.

But most of the players are throughout their 30s, 40s. I think our oldest player is in his 50s or late 40s. So it's definitely not as demanding as baseball. And I would imagine that these players tend to stick year to year. You don't get so much in the way of like comers and goers. You have a lot of consistency in the league makeup. Yeah, there's not a ton of turnover. I think one thing that we're proud about is our homegrown talent. So everyone on our team, they found out about beat baseball through us. They started playing beat baseball with us. They've learned it our way.

It's not like, I know some other teams have gotten recruits from other teams and they, they fly in different pitchers for different tournaments. If their pitcher might be struggling and they need someone really good, but we're proud of the fact that everyone on our team is from the Boston area and has played with us their entire career. So even in beat baseball teams, they have capital W ways, the Renegades way. Exactly, yeah.

Built from within. I like it. So is there anything about the game that we haven't covered? Any tactics that wouldn't occur to us or anything about the way the game looks different or is played differently that we might not even suspect? So I think a lot of the danger in the game that not necessarily is brought up, but is, so like I said earlier, if a player thinks the ball is the base and runs out into the middle of the field, that can cause a lot of issues. One of the big things as coaches we have to watch for is players running into each other. Last year during the World Series, we had one of our star players, he collided with another player and he was crawling on the ground for the ball. The other

player didn't quite realize he was that close and came in and kneed him right in the face and fractured a couple bones i think it was the semi-final so we missed him for the world series but so that's definitely a big hazard they have to be really careful if we yell stop to stop immediately because collisions in this sport when you're running full speed and can't see adds a lot more danger uh-huh do players insult the umpires? So do they call them blind or do they have some other insult? So I think on our website, which is blindcitizens.org slash renegades,

just to plug that, under the rules section, we have like a lead in is blind baseball, or beat baseball, where the players are blind and the umpires aren't. So I don't think there's that kind of animosity between players and umps. There was one call. So the umpires aren't um so i don't i don't think there's that kind of animosity between players and umps uh there was one call so the umpires have to keep their eye on when the player hits the base and when the player holds up the ball so that can cause some issues where we

might disagree with the call um we try not to get too heated about it but uh there's definitely some some argument some room for argument so ben already asked if there is such thing as a league yankees but do you have such thing as a league mike trout is there a clear star player i would like to say our own player christian baxter so christian he's the youngest player on the team he's 23 now i think you're just about to turn 24 he came to us actually from redlands community college in oklahoma where he played he was playing truco baseball he was incredible he played baseball throughout his entire life and then i think his freshman or sophomore year of college he started noticing he couldn't see like the inside fastball and he was

having blind spots develop and then as the season went on he was having more and more blind spots develop so he actually has labor serendipity optic neuropathy which is a super rare disease but it's basically a degenerative blindness disease so he has a couple other guys on the team have it but so he is probably our most natural player. Because he was he played sighted baseball for 1918 years of his life. So he I would say he's the mic track. It's for power, it's all fields fast down the line, and is really, really coming along on defense. And I guess we should mention that because they're varying degrees of blindness or sightedness, players play blindfolded, right? So that everyone's sort of on the on the

same level yeah so we have guys like christian he has partial vision but we have other guys with prosthetics who obviously can't see at all so everyone to equalize the field wears blindfolds and then if if the opposing team uh kind of accuses you of cheating your things you can actually see out of the blindfold when you probably can't uh there's special ways to tape it down uh and then you tape another blindfold over that like like a heavy-duty blindfold that covers most of your face. So that's an extreme example. I don't know how many times that happens per game. That's one way to get around that, yeah.

So tell us about this upcoming tournament this weekend, how people can get involved with that if they happen to be in the New England area, or more generally, how they can get involved wherever they are. Yeah, absolutely. So we're hosting the second leg of the Beast of the East tournament. The teams featured are us, the Long Island Bombers, the New Jersey Lightning, the New Jersey Titans, the Philly Fire, the Rochester Pioneers. So they'll be coming this Saturday, July 8th, to Woburn at Joyce Middle School.

Games start around 9. We'll have games at 9, 11.30, and roughly 2.30 for the final game. So it'll be this Saturday. We'd love for anyone to come out if they're interested in watching, interested in volunteering. We always need to spare umpires or base switch operators. So if anyone's interested, you can find us at blindcitizens.org slash renegades. You can find us on Facebook at Boston Renegades.

Beat Baseball, contact one of us, and we'd love to have you. It's a really cool sport. We'd love to show it off. The World Series actually in Ames, Iowa last year. I have a ton of cousins out in that area, and they went to watch a couple of games my recommendation and now they're big fans of beat baseball so uh it's it can get you hooked and how should people get in touch with you if they want to of course you're in the facebook group and could answer questions there

but if people want to reach out to you some other way yes you can find me uh either facebook twitter at max goder r-g-o-d-e-r-R. My email is justthatatgmail.com. You can get me through the Facebook page, through our website. If you want to learn more about the sport, I believe the website is nbba.org, the National Beat Baseball Association. Find out about the sport, the history of the sport, the recent standings, pretty much anything you want to know about beat baseball, you can find on there. And then just to plug this, we actually had a documentary made about us, The Renegades, a couple of years ago. So if you want, you can find that.

We sell it on our website. You check the trailer out online. And then again, you can watch the ESPN, the special they had on beat baseball from a couple of years ago. Well, thank you for coming on and telling us about this. We're way overdue in talking about it. I think we've talked about lots of baseball hypotheticals. And if baseball were different, how different would it be? And this is the ultimate be? Exactly, yeah.

That's the ultimate example. Yeah, right. All right, well, this was a lot of fun. Thank you, Max, and good luck with the tournament. Thank you so much for having me. Have a good one, guys. Thank you very much. I won't tell you to get some sleep because people always tell me to get some sleep,

and I wouldn't be able to do all these podcasts if I were sleeping, so that's not good advice. Well, could I tell both of you to get more sleep? You could, I guess. Maybe, maybe. All right.

Well, thanks a lot. I guess we will let you get back to work. Thank you guys so much. All right. So we will be right back on this email episode with those promised emails. If I was scared, I would. And if I was pure, you know I would. And if I was yours, then I'm not. Now I'm ready to start.

All right, so we are back. Let's see how many emails we can squeeze into this episode, which has already run for as long as some episodes. So let's start with a question from Colin from Virginia. He says, I have a question that might be incredibly easy to answer. I noticed that John Smoltz's walk rate during his time as a closer is noticeably lower than the rest of his career. His career walks per nine is 2.6, while his walks per nine during those four seasons is 1.68.

His strikeout rate during those years is also higher than the rest of his career. The strikeout increase is potentially easy to answer. Since Smoltz knew he would pitch in a limited and concentrated capacity, perhaps he attempted to strike out more hitters with little regard for stamina and arm fatigue. However, I cannot understand why his walk rate would decrease. Perhaps it's a matter of command, but I wanted to know what you think. I know it's not uncommon for a starting pitcher to transition to the bullpen and find success, but Smoltz's situation was different for many reasons. So what I would say is that there's a little rule of thumb that Tom Tango came up with called the rule of 17. And this is based on observing what has happened when starters become relievers historically. looked at it, the strikeout rate of a pitcher going from the rotation to the bullpen rises 17%. The batting average on balls in play tends to drop 17 points when he goes to the bullpen,

and his home run rate relative to contact also drops by 17%, which is just a coincidence. And he also found that walk rate does not change. Walk rate remains flat, but in Smoltz's case, it did not. So I don't know specifically why in Smoltz's mindset or approach when he came out of the bullpen that was a little bit different from when he was pitching from the start of the game. Well, when Smoltz was a reliever, and this is looking at what, 2001 through 2004, I haven't run all the numbers, but he had a walk rate that was somewhere between four and five percent. In 1999, when he last started, before he became a reliever, he had a walk rate of just over 5%. And when he went back to starting in 2005, he had a walk rate of just over 5%. So it seems like he actually just learned a better command as he got older. And then he happened to become a reliever

before he went back to starting. But we can also say I don't have any or none of none of us have any good baseball info solutions smolts info for before he transitioned to relieving but when he was a reliever we have some information from 2002 on he was a reliever and his fastball was between uh 94 and 95 miles per hour and he was mostly a fastball slider uh splitter pitcher when he was a reliever then he went back to starting still through the fastball and the slider and the splitter but he also folded in a change up and he used his curveball more often presumably just worse pitches of his that he had to throw because he needed a bigger repertoire and he also like many pitchers just lost some velocity he lost

looks like three miles per hour nearly off of his stuff when he went back to starting which is not uncommon so while there are all these general rules, they will affect different people in different ways. Some people will be more immune to them, some people will be less. And in Smoltz's case, when you are throwing harder, and you can eliminate some of your worst pitches, it just means that batters are going to have less of a chance, they're going to have less time to figure out what you're doing, they're going to have less reaction time. And so they're just going to be probably more likely to swing at pitches out of the zone, etc. And it's easy to see how maybe it was less about Smoltz having better command and more about Smoltz just causing pitchers or batters in a sense to have worse command of the strike zone because his stuff was just better. Yeah. All right. Did we talk about David Ortiz fixing a flat tire on this podcast? Yes.

Yeah. Sometimes I can't keep my podcast straight. So we got another email from a listener named Jameson who said, oddly, I actually also know a story of David Ortiz helping a coworker of my mom's whose car broke down on the side of the road. The mass bike in this instance, Ortiz picked her up in his car and called a tow truck. This was around 2006 as well.

So apparently Big Papi went on a flat tire streak that year. Anyway, that's weird, but I wanted to mention it. All right, question from Michael. Historically, how correlated is a team's number of wins with its players' collective war, weighted for off days on the roster? If they are very highly correlated, would the degree to which a team's performance differs from the sum of the players' war be a measure of a team's chemistry or are we not there yet in fully understanding individual players contributions to teams wins so i could have done the math here i

did not but i am fairly certain that a team's number of wins is highly correlated with its collective individual player war totals right yeah yeah that remains because it's one of the best validators of the fact that war is actually out of something is that it clearly has a very strong relationship to uh actual team success yeah so to the degree that it differs where you'd get a team record that's way out of line with the player's collective war. I suppose there could be a chemistry element to that in theory it put up all that value in blowouts or whatever and came up shorter in important moments. That could be part of it or maybe like had a terrible bullpen or something and just had a big win probability hit from that. It could also maybe be schedule related, right? Like if you were in a very tough division, in theory, that wouldn't affect your war, but it would affect your actual record. So those are two factors I can think of off the top of my

head that would probably have a significant impact. And so if you could also account for those things, and maybe you could find something left over that was some kind of chemistry thing. But if the chemistry thing doesn't affect a player's stats, I don't know how it manifests itself, right? Because if the chemistry is having an effect, then it should, in theory, be making your players play better, which would show up in the team's collective war unless the chemistry manifests itself in the timing and the clutchness more so than the actual surface stats. Right. So when you add up team war, I'd say there's going to be a very strong correlation between that and a team's Pythagorean record, which for anyone who doesn't know, that's basically just an estimated win loss record based on run differential. So if you are looking at the differences between the team's actual record and the sum of their individual player war, what you are capturing is, like you said, the timing.

So sort of clutch performance or unclutch performance and any sort of separation between the team's record and Pythagorean record. Very frequently, when you have a team that is overperforming its Pythagorean record or overperforming its base runs numbers, if you will, those teams will be said to have some sort of special chemistry. This is sort of the go to explanation for any such team. Now what's interesting is last year, the Texas Rangers were one of those teams, they were one of the most clutch teams in baseball history, they had a Pythagorean winning percentage of 505. So just over 500. They had an actual winning percentage of 586. They were a very clutch team. And it was said there's just something about Jeff Bannister's clubhouse environment. This season, the Texas Rangers actually have an even better Pythagorean record last season. However, they are 40 and 44.

There are 17 games behind the Houston Astros. Basically, at the midway point, the Texas Rangers have a very similar clubhouse, very similar coaching staff. I don't know of any reason why the clubhouse would be any different, except now Jonathan Lucroy is throwing his pitchers under the bus. So maybe there's something there. But I don't know. You know, we've talked about just last week about how chemistry can be fleeting. And maybe the Rangers did have something special going on in 2016, but that's gone. I think maybe if you were looking for anything, you would want to look at team that ends up with a much higher actual war

than projected war. Like you said, you'd think that any sort of good chemistry would show up at least indirectly. It would benefit the team's numbers. You know, a team that is performing better is going to be performing better in some measurable way that would go beyond just wins and losses players are gonna pitch better they're gonna hit better they're gonna defend better you have last year's cubs that did everything perfectly

so you would want to look at the difference between a team's performance versus their projected performance this is i suspect uh if we had big enough samples probably the best way to evaluate managers this is sort of my the crux of my whole argument that dusty baker is actually has been a good manager despite all of the despite all the criticism he's gotten, which is rightfully so. He's made some pretty major gaffes in the past and he does not do everything perfectly. But he his teams have over the whole of his career overperformed what they were projected to do. And while I know that every individual team is a unique organism, if you will, projections don't capture everything over a big enough sample, you would always

expect the projections to be right on. And if a team if a manager has a history of overachieving, then that seems to be something you can give them credit for. And the same could be said for chemistry, if a team is projected for x, and then they actually end up at x plus 10. That seems to reflect well on the team, although we still certainly don't know enough after a one season sample. All right. Question from Jake. As of this moment, Fangraphs has the Rays and Jays projected to tie for the final AL

wildcard slots with 82 and 80 records. This is dangerously close to what we might think of as an embarrassing situation for MLB, where the two wildcard system creates a playoff team out of a team without a winning record. Would this be embarrassing? I love the new system, but the idea that it devalues the term playoff team is already out there and would definitely catch more support if someone made the playoffs at 81-81 or, gods forbid, 80-82. or, God's forbid, 80-82. Also, how likely is this, both in the 2017 AL and in broader probabilistic terms, given the presence of five playoff teams in 15 team leagues with interleague play? So the worst playoff teams to date, I think, were 82-win teams. There's the 2005 Padres were an 82-win team. The 73 Mets were an 82-win team.

And then, of course, the 2006 Cardinals, who won the World Series, were an 83- win team. The 73 Mets were an 82 win team. And then of course the 2006 Cardinals who won the world series were an 83 win team. So I don't think we've ever had a 500 or worse playoff team. So if this were to happen, would you consider it a source of embarrassment or a bad thing or a reason to scrap this system? Nope. Don't care. I think that if there is a playoff system where five teams make the playoffs in a league, then that's what you have. You're going to have the fifth best team in any given year make the playoffs.

And so be it. That's what teams are contending for. And, you know, you could justify it. Let's say the Blue Jays end up with the last wildcard and they finish at 82 and 80. But given the way the Blue Jays started, given the injuries that they experienced, you could say that the Blue Jaysays actual roster talent is better than that.

You know, they were without Josh Donaldson for a while. They've been without Aaron Sanchez and et cetera. They've had a litany of problems. But just like those 2006 Cardinals, their true talent team was much better than their 83 win regular season win total. So I think that there would be enough ways to justify it. And of course, it would be weird to have like the Astros make the playoffs with 136 wins and then the Blue Jays make the playoffs with 82. But that's the system we've always had.

And I don't care. I don't care. It's the playoffs. We're not looking for the best. I don't think we're looking for the best teams to win the championship every year. It's certainly not something we'd expect. So so be it. Yeah, I mean, other sports with different playoff systems have had losing teams or non

winning teams in the playoffs, and they've survived. And those playoffs in those sports have historically been a little less exclusive than baseball's. So it is a mental adjustment to get used to the idea that you don't have to be a great team to make the playoffs. But yeah, I mean, as we know, it's not as if the best team always or even usually wins the World Series once it makes the playoffs. So you just kind of have to separate those things in your mind. And maybe it goes too far for some people who got used to a different earlier system and others don't really care. But if it happens, I don't know exactly what the probability is, but we've had 82 win teams under much more exclusive systems. So I'm guessing that it will happen someday and baseball will not be destroyed. Yeah, let me just for anyone who doesn't remember this, the New Orleans Saints won the 2009 Super Bowl. Super Bowl. And then in 2010, they lost in the first round to the seven and nine Seattle Seahawks, who won their division at seven and nine, and therefore won a home game to open the playoffs against the defending champion New Orleans Saints and the Seahawks beat them. And you know,

that was silly. It's a funny memory for a lot of people. It's a less funny memory for others. But it had some incredible moments, very famous run by Marshawn Lynch. And I don't think anybody looks at that as an embarrassment for the NFL. Certainly not anywhere close to the top of the list of NFL related embarrassments. But I think it's just kind of a funny memory, just like the Cardinals are a funny memory for winning the World Series after winning 83 games. I think that's just one of those things that you embrace. Yep. All right. This is a quick one. things that you embrace. Yep. All right. This is a quick one. Anthony says, watching Saturday's Yankees-Asters game, Matt Vesgersian and John Smoltz mentioned the potential negative impact

of pitching the half inning after your team has a long inning. The Yankees scored five runs in the sixth. Jordan Montgomery then promptly gave up a home run to Carlos Correa and got pulled. Is there any statistical support for the idea that a pitcher can somehow get knocked out of his rhythm by long delays while his team is hitting? Or is this more of an apocryphal baseball statement than anything else? And it does sound like it could be one of those apocryphal statements, but I did find or remember some statistical support for this. And this was an article that Max Markey,

formerly of Baseball Prospectus, currently of the Cleveland Indians front office, wrote in summer 2012 at BP. And he looked at the difference in the pitcher's performance based on his time on the bench between innings. So he bucketed it three different ways, 10 minutes or less, 10 to 20 minutes and more than 20 minutes. And he found a pretty significant effect between the effectiveness of the pitcher and the length's talent and the ballpark and all of that in the way that Max always did with his analysis. So these are pretty significant.

He mentioned that there is some margin of error here. So there's a little leeway in how significant the numbers are. But the differences are pretty big. There's no real way for me to say what the differences are in a podcast-friendly form because it's three decimal places and it's linear weights, but I will link to the research. I think this was based on just 2010 to 11 data. So if someone wants to update that with the many more years of data that we have at our disposal now, that would be cool. And I will mention it on the podcast. But yeah, at least based on that quick look, there is something

to this idea. Yeah. And you see this a lot. Teams clearly act conservatively as they should with any pitcher because we all know that pitching is very dangerous. But you see this similarly whenever there's rain coming in, that a rain delay does not have to be very long for a pitcher's outing to be threatened. You will have teams sometimes start relievers if they sense that rain is coming and they don't want to have to pull the pitcher because if it rains for say 45 minutes or if the delay is 45 minutes teams are extremely reluctant to have the pitcher who was pitching then resume pitching because if you cool all the way down i am not a physical therapist or sports medicine major i guess but i i it seems intuitive to me that if you allow yourself to cool all the way down then it's

going to be difficult to build back up and maintain the same performance it could be bad for you meanwhile if you try not to cool all the way down by throwing on the side then you're just going to weigh yourself out so it seems to me that there could or would very clearly be something that happens if you let yourself cool down too much. And I will not criticize any team if they act conservatively in the interest of maintaining a pitcher's health and performance. So I have a little stat segment of my own to work on, but I need a few minutes. So I'm going to tee you up for your stat segment. What do you got? Okay, this is very hastily prepared and in thoroughly research.

Is that a word in thoroughly? I didn't have any good reason to look this up, but I was curious about teams reaching on errors and players reaching on errors. I know last week we were dealing with teams who have allowed the most stolen bases in games. I was just curious about historical records for times reaching on errors now there's a difference between reaching on error and an error being committed reaching on error is something i searched because it's the searchable one so i liked it more besides those are the more

meaningful errors i think so just running a search through the play index there have been two teams at least according to their historical records in the play-by-play, two teams who have ever reached on error seven times within a single game. We're going to 1933 in the first game of a doubleheader, Boston versus Philadelphia, and Boston appears to have reached seven times on error, but also in 1972 in the second game of a doubleheader. I don't know why both of these happened in a doubleheader. I could guess, but sample is only two.

Cincinnati versus the Dodgers, and Cincinnati reached seven times on errors in that game both of the teams that reached seven times on errors one they combined for 22 runs in seven games in 2010 the dodgers were playing a game against the diamondbacks and the dodgers reached six times on error there have been 17 instances in which a team reached six times on an error now i am less interested in the teams and more interested in the individual players themselves just a few days ago jorge polanco in a game between the twins and the royals polanco reached twice on errors in the same game which is fairly uncommon although not

so uncommon that it hasn't happened a bunch of times this year tyler flowers reached twice on errors in the oh look at this the most recent three instances also in double headers i don't know what's going on it seems like teams are just more sloppy possibly in double headers something to research there actually something to research there i don't want to do the work but somebody could tyler flowers as rubel cabrera both of them reached twice on uh errors in the same game well that's a fun fact i didn't know that june 10th 2017 as rubel cabrera reached twice on errors for the mets against the braves tyler flowers also reached twice on errors for the Braves against the Mets. Anyway, there have been 43 instances going back to 1930, it looks like,

in which a player has reached three times on error in the same game. The most recent incidents happened in 2012. Luke Carlin, bad catcher for the Cleveland Indians, reached three times on error against the Royals. Previous to that, Brian McCann. Previous to that Brian McCann, previous to that Kenji Jojima. So as much as people talk about how reaching on errors can be a speed related skill, and it can be very loosely the three most recent times that a player has reached three times on an error. They've all been by catchers, very slow catchers, we can assume. Now granted, four times before that, all short stops, three times before that,

all center fielders. So you know, still something there joe gerardi has reached three times on errors in the same game going over this i got curious about players who have reached on error three times while only having three opportunities to reach on errors and we've got three of those games and i should probably look these names up to make sure that i don't mispronounce them because that's something that i've done before i'm sorry jerry grody so we're looking at don hoke i feel pretty confident about don hoke that i am pronouncing that correctly we've got jack oh no i'm just gonna guess this is lork jack lorky i'm gonna okay so his nickname there is no pronunciation guide for jack l on baseball reference however his nickname is luckyy i'm gonna okay so his nickname there is no pronunciation guide for jack l on baseball reference however his nickname is lucky so i'm gonna therefore assume his last last name is

pronounced lorky so i'm gonna say jack lorky also interesting nickname lucky given that he reached three times on an error in this game game jack lorky and emile verben verben verban it's probably verben it's got to be verben this this one looks pretty easy his nicknames were dutch or antelope Verban. Verban? Verban? It's probably Verban. It's got to be Verban. This one looks pretty easy. His nicknames were Dutch or Antelope. I don't know why Antelope, but maybe also related to the fact that he reached three times on an error in the same game.

Anyway, we've got Emil Verban reaching three times in the first game of a doubleheader in 1944. We've got Jack Lorke reaching three times on an error in 1947 in the first game of a doubleheader. Interesting. And then Don Hoke, who reached three times on error in not the first game or second game of a double header so I guess we can just kind of go through them in the first game in 1944 let's see what do we have we have Verbin Emil Verbin who was a second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals this

is a game that the Cardinals lost to the Brooklyn Dodgers 10 to 4 but Verbin he was batting eighth in front of Al Jurich the pitcher and Verbin, he was batting eighth in front of Al Jurich, the pitcher. And Verbin wound up in the game 0 for 3. However, he had a walk. He also scored a run. Verbin, interestingly, also committed an error. So lots going on for Emil Verbin and errors in this game. Verbin in the second inning reached on an error by the shortstop. Verbin then advanced to second base when the shortstop committed another error in the same inning and then verben wound up scoring driven in by somebody named johnny hop which is a very 1944 name i can tell you uh at a restaurant in uh in mount shasta city where uh where we had breakfast

on tuesday before coming back to portland there's it's a black bear diner it's the original black bear diner in manchester city i think it was only open in the 90s. It's not that old. But there is some sort of history of baseball in the Mount Shasta, Northern California area. And there was a picture of Babe Ruth with a area women's team from 1940, whatever. But there were a bunch of local sponsored like area baseball teams that were just I don't know, they were unaffiliated, but communities who are sponsored by local businesses. And it was great to see a bunch of just like the old names, names that you just don't see represented in the world anymore. And there was somebody named his last name was lost a lot. Like his last name was Oh, like Johnny, Johnny gets lost a lot. His last name was lost a lot, which is a name I've never heard before.

But the one that sticks out to me the most was Bones Coon. Bones Coon was the manager of some team put together in 1951 in the Northern California area, but he was just an ordinary looking man. But Coon, not a last name you come across ever. And Bones, I'm going to guess his first name wasn't Bones, but his nickname must have been Bones. It was a nickname that stuck. It was just given to him as his official name on the picture. But who would nickname somebody Bones? What are the characteristics that you have in order to be named bones are you just bony is it that simple or are you skinny maybe he had medical training he's a doctor saw bones yeah i you know what i don't know i tried to look him up didn't try very hard anyway johnny hopp drove in uh emil verbin in the third inning

emil verbin reached on an error by the third baseman and then in the third inning emil verben reached on an error by the third baseman and then in the seventh inning emil verben reached on another error by the shortstop in this game this is a game in which emil verben reached three times on air it's also a game in which bobby bragan committed three errors for the dodgers so not a great day for bobby bragan moving on to 1947 we've got jack lorke he's got it's got to be It's got to be Lorkey. Also batting eighth. I think it's Bobby Bragan, if you want to be sure. Look, I can't be blamed for not being alive in 1944. That's not my fault.

That's not even my parents' fault. They weren't alive. Okay. This is like needing oxygen. It's no more at blame for that than this. Turns out there is a strong genetic component to being prone to altitude sickness so thanks mom and dad dad maybe shouldn't have been a pilot but here we are jack lorke 1947 this is a game where he was going up against fritz ostermuller another very

1947 name there's just the box scores are just so i know the box scores look the same between eras but if you just look at the players there's no comparison anyway okay so jack lorke reached on an error by the shortstop he reached on an error by the third baseman and he reached on an error by the shortstop i guess that's what you would expect shortstops get the most grand balls they're the most prone to make errors lorke reached three times out of three opportunities to reach on errors in that game whitey wheedleman committed three errors he was the uh the shortstop for the pittsburgh pirates batting leadoff terrible hitter i quizzed ben before this podcast began i asked him if he could guess what position whitey wheedleman played i thought it was a pretty

clear shortstop sounding name but i was biased by the fact that i see whitey wheedleman at shortstop in the box score so that's my own fault probably should not have been batting leadoff his on base percentage was higher than his slugging percentage, which is good, but his on-base percentage was also bad. Yeah, I just think it's funny that any pre-integration player is nicknamed Whitey. Or Bones.

Seems unnecessary, yeah. He must have been extremely, extremely white. So Don Hoke, finally in 1960, Don Hoke reached three times on errors in a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies. Don Hoke was the leadoff hitter for the Pirates in this game. Third baseman batting in front of Dick Grote, Bob Skinner, Dick Stewart. Two dicks in this lineup.

Two dicks, a Don, a Smokey, two Bills, a Rocky. Just going, oh man. Okay. The Phillies also had al dark uh in their lineup al dark we talked about recently on this podcast for reasons that i've already forgotten about but i'm sure that he did something worthwhile i think he played a bunch of positions in the same game that sounds right anyway so we're looking at don hoke and in this game there was nobody on the philadelphia phillies who committed three errors in the game so good for the phillies i guess for keeping it

together they did commit four errors in the game and they still won the game four to three. But Don Hoke batting leadoff in the third inning, he reached on an error by the second baseman on a ground ball. And then in the fifth inning, he reached on an error by the second baseman on a pop fly. So that's a little more embarrassing. And finally, in the seventh inning, he reached on an error by the third baseman. There's really nothing that interesting in this that I've looked at, whatever those are the players the three times in recorded baseball history that a player has reached on errors in a game three times where they have had only three opportunities to reach on an error it's been since 1960 so i don't know

who the next player to do this might be errors are at or around an all-time low now i don't know if that's because of official score decisions or if defenders have gotten better or what but errors are down so it makes it all the more unlikely for somebody to reach on an error three times in the same game but we have seen it eight times since the turn of the millennium we've got the three catchers we've got nefi perez rafael for call of russ adams jack wilson and jose macias have all done it carlos beltran in 1999 also reached three times on an error in the second game of a doubleheader. I will say again, this seems like something that somebody could research,

see if errors have been more prevalent in doubleheaders. If you adjust for error, there could be something there. I'm not nearly interested enough to do the research. However, I am interested enough to talk about it for 30 seconds during our next banter segment. So somebody out there, do the hard work and we'll talk about it a little bit. All right. Well, your stat segment gave me time to do my own. This is in response to a question from Dan, who wants to know if Justin Turner is off

to the greatest non-qualified season pace. He says, it's no question how absurd it is that Justin Turner isn't an all-star. Someone suggested to me it was potentially because he is quote-unquote non-qualified or unqualified to this point in the season that is for the batting title which puts his under the radar 3.7 fangraphs war in perspective i couldn't care less about all-star appearances but it got me wondering how rare it was to accumulate this much value during the first half of the season

without being on pace to qualify as a league leader. My question, who has accumulated the most war in a non-qualified season? So I just looked this up. I exported some giant spreadsheets from Fangraphs. Apologies to David Appelman for your server costs. And I looked for the best seasons ever by non-pitchers in non-qualified seasons. And I have an answer. The best season ever, best non-qualified, unqualified season ever, is Gary Reneke for the 1982 Orioles, who played in 137 games but only made 477 plate appearances. I assume he was a defensive replacement sometimes he was worth 5.9 fangraphs war that year he hit 270 392

499 which was very good at that time that's a 148 wrc plus and he also had like plus 17 defensive runs which would support his being used as a defensive replacement if that was the case. So 5.9 war, that is the most ever. 1970, Bernie Carbo for the Reds was worth 5.6 war. So that's the closest anyone is. 1987, Randy Reddy was worth 5.4. Carlos Ruiz in 2012 for the Phillies was worth 5.2 war. He played in 114 games, 421 played appearances. And then rounding out the top five, maybe the most impressive, 2014 Steve Pierce. Everyone remembers that weird out of nowhere season for the Orioles. He was worth 4.9 War and he played in only 102 games, 383 plate appearances, but he had a 161 WRC plus with positive base running value and defensive value.

And he managed to put together a basically five win season in just a little more than half a season's worth of plate appearances, which is pretty impressive. And then I'll just read the names, the rest of the top 10. 1923 Reds, Bubbles Hargrave was worth also 4.9 war I guess he was close to tied with Steve Pierce and then 1950 Phillies Andy Semenik 2014 Devin Masarocco Reds in only 114 games 1912 Giants Chief Myers and 1997 Astros Bill Spires was also worth 4.4 and actually number 11 Carlos Ruiz again so Carlos Ruiz in 2010 and 2012 for the Phillies he had two of the top 12 non-qualified seasons ever just because he didn't play full seasons in those years but he was really good when he did so obviously if you're a catcher and uh Sandy Alomar is a couple names here down so if you're a catcher and uh sandy alomar is a couple names here down so

if you're a catcher you kind of have a leg up maybe because you get the positional adjustment and you're not playing that much just because you're a catcher and you're getting some time off so anyway that's the answer to the question so there you go uh bubbles are grave the only bubbles in major league history there has been Bubbles Lance in the minor leagues and three Negro League players. We had Bubbles Anderson, John Reese, whose nickname was either Pepper or Bubbles. And there was also Roy Johnson, 1920, whose nickname was Bubbles. I should also say that you mentioned Gary Reneke, 1982, 5.9 fangrafts were in a non-qualified season. He played 137 games.

5.9 fangrass war in a non-qualified season he played 137 games like you said ron reneke played over his career 527 games career war of 3.6 and josh reneke 190 career games up through 2013 fangrass war of 0.1 so gary reneke's non-qualified season still better than the other two renekes combined over a very large sample so way to go gary reneke pretty good career yeah all right this has already been a long show couple quick ones if we can squeeze them in Bill says Babbitt is an indicator of how well a hitter is hitting the ball and the relative luck he is experiencing on the batted balls put in play Aaron Judge both walks and strikes out frequently and has hit a high number of home runs he has a low number of doubles relative to home runs he has few if any blue pits of any kind I interpret this to mean that he hits almost if any bloop hits of any kind i interpret this to mean

that he hits almost everything hard if the launch angle is sufficient the ball goes out if it's not a single or a hard hit out please help me understand the usefulness of babbitt for aaron judge does it have more less or the same usefulness as a stat as it does for other players is it only useful for him once he has enough at bats and seasons under his belt am i overthinking this and aaron judge as we speak has a 423 babbitt yeah judges babbitt is insane now it's also worth considering that john carlos stanton was sort of the the precursor to aaron judge in terms of you know this is the comp that we thought was absurd to give to judge before the year because stanton was too high a bar now that people think maybe Stanton is too low a bar, which is funny because people are right and they're

wrong. So Stanton has hit the ball as hard as Judge has. He's done it before. He was sort of the batter version of Aroldis Chapman, if you want to look at him in terms of exit velocity. And Stanton has never really run a crazy Babbitt. He's hit the ball really hard, very similar profile to Judge. And his Babbitt has never been particularly crazy, either way too high or way too low. It's been a little above average, which makes sense because he hits the ball harder than average. So Santhan is there as probably the best comparison to make for Judge. I think it's pretty easy to think, oh, Judge will run a really, really high BABIP in the same way that you think, I don't know, Billy Hamilton would run a really, really

high BABIP because he can just outrun any grand ball. But Hamilton does not have a really, really high BABIP because these things aren't quite as simple as you think they should be. Judge, just this season alone, if I am correct. Well, I'm not. I'm not correct. I thought his BABIP was going down. It is not. It's actually been going up by the month. He had a BABIP of 310 in April, and then he had a BABIP3 in may in any case still when you are talking about judges balls in play you have to subtract out all of his walks from his plate appearances all of his strikeouts all of his home runs so he runs a pretty small sample of balls in play in the first place so it's going to take a little longer for his numbers to stabilize in the way that we're used

to talking about and yeah he does hit the ball really hard but that doesn't mean that he's not defendable it doesn't mean that everything is extra difficult for the defense to play. And it also doesn't mean that he's going to continue to hit the ball so hard because one of the things that we know about the older stat of line drive rate is that it's not very stable. That doesn't mean that it's a bad statistic. It just means that players go through cycles and line drives or hitting the ball on a line and not making soft contact. Is that sustainable? Because players go through strikeout cycles where they miss the ball more or less often and they go through other cycles where they hit the ball hard more or less often so judge will not keep doing this he will not have a career babb up over 400 i can tell you that right now unless something

horrible happens to him tomorrow that ends his career i guess but it will normalize and their aaron judge will eventually be less of an outlier, even though he will forever remain a true outlier in the general sense of the word. Yeah, I wonder what his true talent Babbitt has been over the first half of the season, which is obviously a different question than what it will be in the second half of the season or thereafter. But I wouldn't be shocked if he did have a true talent 400 babbitt over the first half of the season and maybe he got a little lucky but he is also just creaming the ball and not putting it in play very often but yeah i don't know if i had to guess it what it would be from

today to october i don't know what i would say, like 365 or something like that. Does that sound about right? So I can tell you that Judge right now is the BAPIP of 423 according to Fangraphs. And Miguel Sano, similar kind of hitter. Miguel Sano has now batted more than 1,100 times in the major leagues. So he's hit a bunch of balls to play. And his career BAPIP is 363 as somebody who is not fast, but hits the ball really hard, does not hit a lot of pop ups.

So Suno also a worthwhile point of comparison. So between him and Stanton, yeah, I could see Judge being a true talent like 340 to 350 guy. I can judge so far this year has 28 home runs and only two pop ups, which is a unbelievable ratio. Even in the small sample last year, he didn't hit a single pop up, but he did hit four home runs so he's at 32 and a two for his brief major league career and that's really good that's better than joey vana that's probably better than anyone in history if you wanted to pretend like judge's career is over so he's done a phenomenal job of not popping up and that's tightly linked to running a good babbit but still not a not a 423 okay question from jeff imagine that cody bellinger ends this season with 69 big league home runs. That's obviously not the record, but when you factor in the five homers he hit in AAA before being called up the minors and then hit a crapload of homers in the majors.

And it's obviously not likely to come up this year. Bellinger still at 24 home runs. But I wonder what would happen if it did. What if he hits 57 homers so the minor league homers would give him 62, passing Roger Maris' mark that some people still consider the legitimate record? Thoughts? Yeah, no, nobody cares. Yes, I agree. No one would pay any credence to this it

might be a fun fact people might mention it from time to time but i don't think anyone would give him credit for any sort of single season record it would just be additionally weird that the guy who had that many home runs had started the season in triple a as je is mentioning, but I think that's as far as it goes. All right, and last question from Jack. Hypothetical closer scenario. In this scenario, baseball god bestows a magical power upon a dominant closer of your choice. For example, Jansen, Kimbrel, etc. This closer will have an ERA of zero for the rest of their career, but a whip of three. Given enough appearances, this closer would break the scoreless inning streak and be recognized as dominant, but would they make it that far?

If your closer never gave up a run, but loaded the bases in every appearance, would they be able to stick as a closer, or would managers panic and stop using them in the ninth after the fifth straight time loading the bases? How long would it take for this power to be recognized? Okay, so this is the Fernando Rodney question, right? This is basically just a question about Fernando Rodney and when he's going well versus when he's not and the only difference is that fourth base runner really for fernando rodney so i i think it would take a very long time for like a team to analytically start to believe that a closer is

actually good however if this guy was already at the designated closer which we're given to believe in the premise he is he's the guy and managers are very loathe to remove a closer from the role sometimes it takes a great deal of convincing and i don't recall a manager ever making sort of a preemptive closer demotion right you always wait for something that wait for something to break and so if the closer never actually blew a save then you would still every single time the closer came in you would still kind of have that freak out here we go again kind of moment but you still wouldn't associate the closer with failure the way that you do if a closer even blows like one freaking save over three months you still think oh he's you can never trust this guy he's always blowing saves eight percent of the time. Yeah. But if he never blows a save, you won't even associate the closer with failure so much.

You wouldn't have that history of people booing him. The closer wouldn't lose his teammates support because his teammates would just think this guy really buckles down under pressure. He doesn't feel any pressure until he loads the bases for some reason in every single inning that he works. So I it would take a very long time before people would be convinced that the closer is actually good at preventing runs his splits would be bizarre but if he never actually blew a save or allowed a run then he would i don't think he'd ever lose his job yeah i totally agree i don't know how long it would take for people to buy into this because it's almost like a mystical ability it's like a ghani jones johnny gomes type of scenario

where his team always wins and And I don't know, I mean, people would maybe start to think that he was just a head case who buckled down when the bases were loaded and he just couldn't pitch up to his full capabilities at any other time. So maybe that would be his reputation. But I agree. If you don't blow the save, if you don't lose the game, you don't lose the game you will never lose your closer role even though if you didn't know that this was actually an inherent quality of this closer

you probably should lose your job if you have a three whip in enough appearances alright I lied I have one more on my list this is from Eric he says after Taylor Motter hit his second Grand Slam this year I saw a tweet that pointed out that Pete Rose and Derek Jeter each had one Grand Slam in their entire career,

spanning over 25,000 combined at-bats. Ricky Henderson had three for his career. Now, former Mariners fringe prospect Chris Taylor has three Grand Slams this year and four for his career. Is it more unusual that these Hall of Fame caliber players hit so few Grand Slams or that the guy who was once behind Quetel Marte and Sean O'Malley on the M's depth chart is now seemingly hitting Grand Slams at will? Appreciate you helping me get me through workouts. So he

wants to know if it's weirder that those guys, Rose and Jeter, almost never hit Grand Slams or that Chris Taylor is hitting lots of grand slams. And I will say that for Pete Rose, it's actually not that weird that he only hit one grand slam because he was just not a big home run hitter period. And in his career, he had over 14,000 at bats and only 160 homers. So I just did the math. He averaged 88 at-bats per home run, and he only batted with the bases loaded 196 times. So it's semi-weird that he only hit that one homer in 196 bases loaded at-bats, but not that weird when you consider that he usually went 88 at-bats between homers anyway. With Jeter, it is a lot weirder. He didn't have

as many at-bats, and he hit a lot more homers. So that was unusual in his case. And just from remembering his career, it seemed like he just wasn't really trying to hit home runs in those spots, or at least that's what he said when people would ask him about it. And he was just kind of trying to poke the ball the other way, the way that he always did. And so that's probably an element of this, that with certain players, they're just not trying to hit a home run or they're trying less hard than they usually are to hit a home run in bases loaded spots. Maybe for whatever reason, they're just trying to put the ball in play or get a runner in or something like that. So I would say that for Rose, it's not that weird. For Jeter, it's kind of weird, but potentially just a product of his approach. And Chris Taylor, I guess I will leave to you how weird it is that Chris Taylor is good now.

Yeah, kind of weird. Although Meredith struggled to get a choice up for a while, and they went through Brad Miller, Nick Franklin, Chris Taylor, Cattell Marte. And you know, Miller's a useful player now, and Chris Taylor looks like a good player now, and Cattell marty and you know miller's a useful player now and chris taylor looks like a good player now and cattell marty he doesn't seem very good and nick franklin now has a new job with the angels but still there's there were careers left to be discovered i don't have anything interesting to say about chris taylor except for the fact that he seems to have a really good eye i haven't looked at him in the last few weeks but last i looked he had a better in zone swing rate minus i don't this is stupid i shouldn't even try to talk about this on a podcast because I don't have a quick way of doing it but he had a really good

eye and he compared well with Joey Votto is the point his play discipline resembled that of Joey Votto which is a really good thing it's a great foundation for any hitter because if you know what a strike is and know what a ball is then you don't have to be so good this is nothing to explain the grand slams I don't think that there's anything to be made of a sample of three I'm just going through the all-time list of most grand slams and of don't think that there's anything to be made of a sample of three. I'm just going through the all time list of most grand slams. And of course, Alex Rodriguez is a top it with 25 career grand slams. He's got four more than Mayor Ramirez at 21. That's all pretty good. Dave Kingman is at 16, even though he batted not very often relative to the other guys, just eyeballing things. John Milner hit 10 grand slams out of just 79 career opportunities,

which seems insane. I don't have anything else to say about that or John Milner. I keep scrolling down this list. I don't see anything else truly remarkable. Chris Hoyle's eight grand slams and 77 opportunities, which is pretty good. And as I scroll, still nothing, still nothing, still nothing, still nothing, still nothing. Yeah, nothing else really standing out as I scroll down this list. I'm sure more research could be done. Marcus Thames, I guess, six Grand Slams and 46 opportunities. That's a small number of opportunities and a big number of Grand Slams. Don't think it reflects anything about Marcus Thames except for, hey, he batted with runners

on base and then he got lucky over a very tiny sample. Kind of like Taylor Motter in the month of April. Yep. There's an element of randomness here. All right. Well, we are not going to answer the Jason Vargas question out of respect for your wishes. What did Jason Vargas do over the weekend? Oh, good.

He allowed one run while walking as many people as he struck out. Just allow home runs, Jason Vargas. Jesus. He's going to make you write about him. No, I'm not going to do it. Home run suppression is the least interesting article you could write about because it means nothing. I'm looking at, so, you know, on Fangraph's's pages It lists all the recent articles that have Been tagged with a player so Jason Vargas

Last five tagged articles Are all sleeper in the bus podcast Episodes by Paul Sporer nobody has Written about Jason Vargas at all but Paul Sporer keeps Talking about him interesting Alright well at least Someone is still carrying the torch for Jason Vargas alright

So you can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Andrew Thurmond, Daniel Steinberg, Noel Purcell. I like that name, Noel Purcell. Chris Travell and Kanan Crist. Thanks to all of you. By the way, Mike Trout returned to professional baseball on Wednesday night. Played for the high A Inland Empire 66ers. The starter on the Stockton Ports whom he faced, Kyle Friedrichs, less than six months older than Mike Trout.

Trout went 0 for 3 with a strikeout before he was pulled for a pinch hitter. Still, nice to see that name in a box score. 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. Thanks to Dylan higgins for editing assistance if you're looking for something else to listen to michael bowman and i will have a new episode of the ringer mlb show up later today we bantered a bit about all-star selections played an excerpt from a conversation i had with braves catcher and framer extraordinaire

tyler flowers and michael and i talked about that discussion had our own discussion about framing and robot umps and computerized strike zones. You can find that on the Ringer MLB Show feed. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you later this week. Or argue about which route to take I forgot how to cross the road But the driver still know how to brake And he told you a little story

The one I've heard before As I looked at our reflection window Shopping the department store I think it's eleven o'clock in the morning Of a long, long, a long, long, long, long walk.