Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1089: A Very Odd Way of Walking

Episode Date: July 27, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Otani, another strange stance, and Eduardo Nunez, then answer listener emails about players owning particular teams, a potential tagging-up loophole, the all-time record for grounding into double plays, the negative interpretation of the White Sox rebuild, trading for players who would have played one’s opponents, switch-hitters with […]

Two, three hours have passed us by Altitude dropped to 505 Fuel consumption way too fast Let's get on home before we run out of gas Now you can't catch me No, baby, you can't catch me Cause if you get too close You're gone like a coot Hello and welcome to episode 1089 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. You know, we did a whole, almost a whole episode yesterday about Japanese baseball and didn't mention Shohei Otani, which is strange. I figured that our guest Shingo probably wouldn't have been able to say anything interesting about Otani because he's an opposing team's player. So I didn't bother bringing him up. But after we recorded that episode, Shohei Otani did something and I just sent you the video. Would you care that episode, Shohei Otani did something and I just sent you the video. Would you care to watch what Shohei Otani did? Okay. Firstly, is he pitching or is he hitting? He's hitting in this clip. So he has actually missed most of this season. He had an ankle injury that kept him out at the start of the year. And then I think he had a thigh thing.

So he has only recently returned. He hasn't had much playing time. But this is a recent at-bat of his. And as you may already have seen, I believe. I have not watched. Okay. You can watch now. You're allowed. Yeah.

Oh. Yeah, I believe he hit this ball out of the stadium. It is difficult to tell in this clip. And the walls of the stadium are not high. So it's more achievable than it would be in most ballparks. But it's a bomb, and it's fun to watch. He's so big. I mean, he looks huge at the plate. He's not as built as, like, Aaron Judge, but he's very tall and willowy. He has put on some muscle too, but he is so tall and has that sweet swing

that I think it's fun to watch him. I know people are down on home run highlights. Sam is writing anti-home run highlights takes, but I like this one. This one is fun. Wow. And yeah, he hasn't played much. And between that and our boy Takuya Nakashima having a down season, it's been a rough 2017 for the Nippon Ham Fighters. Actually, it's the Nippon Ham Fighters. I never know which word to put the emphasis on there because it's not actually Ham Fighters. It's Nippon Ham Fighters. But it is much more fun if it's Ham Fighters. Anyway, they won the japan series last

year with the best record and now they are 33 and 56 so that's not good they uh have lost otani for most of the season and had other things go wrong so it's been a steep fall for them this looks like uh it's like a vaguely andrew mccutcheony swing this This is fun. I know everyone's already written their Otani thing, which is actually kind of a shame because when he comes over, everyone is going to have to do it again. So whoops on your part and on Sam's part and et cetera. But this is just a beautiful swing. Just a beautiful, simple swing.

He's got the leg kick. He's got the fly balls going on. He and Josh Donaldson could probably have a good conversation if josh donaldson weren't such a dick well i hope that otani stays healthy for the rest of the season and then we get to see him soon after that in mlb another follow-up we have talked about strange stances and there was one submission from george bissell of baseball prospect, former part-time co-host of Effectively Wild during the season preview series. And he wrote in to note that J.J. Stankovitz of CSN Chicago wrote a piece on last Thursday regarding the unique batting stance of White Sox rookie outfielder Adam Engel. What's really interesting about Engel, who was the MVP of the Arizona Fall League pushed far back, away from his body, and were level with his head. His bat

pointed straight up in the air, and his right back arm was raised above his left, front one. On first glance, you had to wonder, how can that be comfortable? That's something that I probably wouldn't coach a little kid to do, Engel said. But there was a well-thought-out method to Engel's stance. He used the word tension in describing what he was trying to avoid by thrusting his hands high and away from his body. And as White Sox hitting coach Todd Steverson noted, nobody does anything well when they're tight. And then as this article chronicles, Engel has since lowered his hands, dropped his back elbow. Then he went through another change almost a month later where he brought his hands even lower than that. So he has continued tinkering.

There's then a quote from Steverson who says what we said when we talked about this first, which is that, quote, at the point of contact, 99% of every hitter looks the same, et cetera, et cetera. So another weird submission, recent arrival to the majors. And I do like the guys who tinker with their stances constantly. Like when Cal Ripken would do that, he was such a constant in the lineup, but he would look different all the time. So I like that. It seems like it's harder to maintain a really high level when you're changing all the time and you haven't just decided on one strategy that works, but some guys get away with that. Yeah, it's fun, but it invites criticism in the way where like Jason Hayward is also known as a constant thinker. And then if you're slumping or underachieving, then people decide to blame. Oversinking it.

Yeah, exactly. The whole reverse narrative thing. You can see in the pictures of Engel as he develops that he's, as he's adjusted, he's gradually become more and more normal looking. But when I was reading that article, before I scrolled down and actually got to the pictures, I read the description and I tried to mimic what I thought the stance was just using my arms from the description. And it is really quite uncomfortable. And then I got to the picture and realized, no, I'm doing it. I'm doing it right. So I don't know what Adam Engel was thinking. I was reminded last night during a five hour Mariners game that ended shortly after midnight, or for you, shortly after three in the morning, that Kyle Seager has a pretty ordinary stance,

but his, I don't know, load, I guess, what he does just immediately pre-stance, he does this kind of like knee squat as if he's kind of lowering himself onto a toilet seat that he doesn't know what temperature it is, you know? So it's a fairly distinctive motion. I don't think a lot of players do, but, you know, that's it's a fairly distinctive motion i don't think a lot of players do but you know his uh his stance is normal and his his swing is normal but i don't know once you start running out of interesting stances then you have to start looking for interesting priest dances because that's where that's where you can really still have your quirks that's where each row has

his old bow and arrow thing and and that that you don't need to coach out because that doesn't mean anything yeah all right you ready for emails or did you uh want me to coach out because that doesn't mean anything. Yeah. All right. You ready for emails or did you want me to ask you for your Eduardo Nunez trade take? Oh, heavens no. I know. I didn't think so. There were hugs.

I saw it on Twitter and there's a line and Trevor Cahill is on one side of the line as we've already discussed and even someone like Brandon Maurer because I have one fun fact in Brandon Maurer, even he might be kind of

on the other side of the line although if he were traded in isolation probably not Tommy Canley definitely Tommy Canley is like way on the other side of the line love writing by Tommy Canley but Eduardo Nunez no that's that doesn't that doesn't meet the threshold these are these are tweet worthy trades these are not like if you call up what's the Deaver's 20 years old yes yeah if you call up a 20 year old a few days ago and then you trade for eduardo nunez and the argument is that you should still start the 20 year old just it's not it's not worth it kudos to the who cares yeah yeah i kind of agree eduardo nunez was interesting to me at one point because he had like the highest infield fly ball rate ever and i wrote a long article about it, positing that he was intentionally

trying to hit pop-ups because he was hitting so many of them at the time that it seemed that way. But unfortunately for us, and fortunately for him, he has gotten that under control to a certain extent, which has coincided with his improvement as a player. He's actually been like a league average hitter over the last few years, which has a lot to do with his getting the pop-up rate under control. But now I'm not as interested in him because he's just an average player who doesn't have a crazy pop-up rate. So congratulations, Red Sox. My absolute favorite thing about Eduardo Nunez, and like you, we've been monitoring Nunez for a while because he was a shortstop with the Yankees for some time, and there were occasional conversations about who's going to follow Derek Jeter and can Nunez for a while because he was a shortstop with the Yankees for some time and he there was uh there were occasional conversations about who's who's going to follow Derek Jeter and

can Nunez play shortstop and the answer was a conclusive no and here's how we know that in 2013 Nunez played 608 and a third innings as a shortstop for the Yankees that's uh roughly a half season's worth and you might already know this but in case in case you don't remember the numbers so we have ucr ultimate zone rating and drs defensive runs saved these are the usual advanced defensive metrics that people play around with and that year is a shortstop nunia's again half a season's worth half a season's worth i'm just going to say that one more time half a season's worth playing shorts up nunia's ucr negative 20.6 drs negative 28 in a half season yes one of the few shortstops with worse defensive ratings than Derek Jeter possibly was the one guy who was discussed as his heir for a

while there all right so actual emails let's get to Mike D in st louis who says if a team could trade for all the players who did the best against them would that improve your team by decreasing your opponent's value does this question make sense for example when bud norris first came up for the astros the cardinals could not hit him for about five games and i think the obvious answer here is is no because if you just go after guys who have hit you well in extremely small samples and that's your only reasoning for acquiring them that is not going to be a great rationale for making those moves it's super small sample etc but there has to be some truth to performance versus certain teams right like we'll never be able to tell when it's real and when it's not from afar. And maybe even if we were there, but if advanced scouting is a thing and it matters and certain teams are better at it and more perceptive than other teams are,

then there have to be times when one team really does know how to get a guy out and another team does not know how to get a guy out, right? does not know how to get a guy out right and i don't know how long that would last because players change teams players change themselves the teams change their pitching staffs and their hitters and so they can change their approach they change advanced scouts everything changes constantly and people are moving from one team to the next so it's not likely that you would have like one hitter who just legitimately owns a team for his whole career or something other than just happenstance or the fact that he is good and plays them a lot. But there do have to be some meaningful differences in certain matchups between teams and players.

Negative 28 as a shortstop. The worst. We have 15 years. We have 15 years of defensive run save data. And I'm going to go back to 2003. Okay, so looking over the 15 years, I looked up the worst defensive seasons as a shortstop by DRS. One measure. Worst one, 2005 Michael Young. Negative 32. Michael Young played 1,356 innings. Here are the three.

Here are the worst defensive seasons by DRS as a shortstop. Michael Young, negative 32. Orlando Cabrera, negative 29. Hammy Ramirez, negative 28. Eduardo Nunez, negative 28. There's one that stands out, and here's what it is. Nunez played 700 fewer innings as a shortstop than those other three players. He was twice as bad. Unbelievable. Oh, also the name after Eduardo Nunez, Derek Jeter. Yeah. Didn't Nunez make a ton of errors also, like in addition to not having range? Yeah, it was both.

So you have an infielder with awful hands, bad range, and a hitter who constantly pops up. And people are like, maybe he'll be Derek Jeter's heir. Nope, that's not going to work. And now he's okay. Yeah, it's amazing. and yet he still does play shortstop from time to time, right? I mean, he is. He's played 11 games at shortstop this year. He's, he's a utility type now, but he didn't get banned from the position permanently. Anyway, he's worked very hard to make himself better. Yeah, I'm trying to pull up a play index split. Okay. I'm going to look up players who are the best against individual teams. So the play index, I don't know if I've run this query very well, but I've done something quick. Play index on Baseball Reference allows you to search for performance by opponent, which

is neat. And I decided to search for individual players against opponents. And I searched for the players who did the best relative to themselves against specific opponents, because it kind of gets to the heart of this question. And I set a minimum of 1000 to play an appearance not against an opponent, that would be crazy, but just for a player's career. And here are some names at the top of the list. We've got one Jim Bottomley, fun name. OC, I'm going to get this wrong. So I'm just going to click through this page to see how this is pronounced. Blue G. Didn't know there was a Blue G in baseball history, but here we are. Osi? Ozzy? Ozzy? Ozzy Blue G? This is a tough one. Yeah. Brother of Otto Blue G. Ozzy, I think.

So it's short for Oswald Lewis Blue G. Oswald, Aussie, but maybe Aussie with two S's. I don't know. I don't know what they did in the 1920s. In any case, we have a Bluegy, which I'm really uncomfortable saying. We have a Harry Hooper, a Pi Trainer, a Stan Heck. Great name for a hitter. Jim Bottomley. He was 34% better than his usual self against Philadelphia.

Aussie Bluegy, 33% better than his usual self against Philadelphia. Ozzy Bluegy, 33% better than his usual self against Baltimore. I don't know how meaningful these things are, but for example, even Joe DiMaggio, 27% better than himself against Baltimore. So why don't we look into that? Why don't we see what was Joe DiMaggio doing? Let's just say if you could, if you were Baltimore and you're like, oh, this guy keeps killing us, we should trade for Joe DiMaggio. Yeah, that's going to make your team a little bit better. Okay, so Joe DiMaggio actually was 27% better than his usual self against the St. Louis Browns, who eventually became Baltimore. So DiMaggio, for example, he had a career OPS of a wonderful 978. However, against the St. Louis Browns, against whom he batted a thousand times,

more than a thousand times. Wow, I really did set the split quite high. He had an OPS of 1.115. So DiMaggio was spectacular against St. Louis. I'm just going to go back in. Of course, the, yeah, the Browns were bad, I think most of the time. So that would probably explain it. So that that's the other thing you'd have to adjust for opponent quality here. If you really wanted to see if the person has exceeded their regular performance oh yeah okay so we can we can actually make this more fun so it turns out that what i just queried was players who were better against specific opponents after having faced them a thousand times so i got that wrong that was actually quite substantial so now i have set a minimum of 100 plate appearances. Now we're getting somewhere. Now we're getting somewhere because, okay, the best split for any player relative to

himself against one specific opponent, I'm going to have you guess because there have only been several thousand baseball players in history and dozens and dozens of teams. So who's your guess? It's not even close. Todd Zeal. Eric Fames. Todd Zeal, right. That's just what I was going to say. Oh, man. Okay, so Todd Zeal. Todd Zeal, ordinary. He did end up on a Hall of Fame ballot,

didn't get much in the way of support. He had a career OPS of 769 over he played more than 2,000 games. But here's the thing about Todd Zeal. He is the major league all-time leader, according to the play index, in a stat known as TOPS+. And his stat lead is because he demolished the Anaheim slash California slash Los Angeles

Angels. Todd Zeal had that 769 career OPS. His second best OPS against the team was 978 against the Chicago White Sox. It's good for Todd Zeal. He had a 1.356 OPS against the Angels in 118 plate appearances. He was 146% better than his usual self in that split. Second place on this list, Bob Turley, who demolished the Twins. Wayne Krenchicki was great against San Diego. Julio Lugo destroyed the Phillies. And Bob Friend was no friend of the Cubs. He had a T-OPS plus of 225.

If you're a Cardinals fan, you might remember that Jim Tomey killed you. If you're an Indians fan, you might not remember that D'Angelo Jimenez killed you. Steve Lombardozzi was brutal to the Tigers. It's a fun list full of quite bad players with the occasional decent player mixed in. So yeah, I don't think that teams would benefit from picking these guys up. The best indication would be if someone's killing you, that player is probably killing other teams, and then that means he's a good player. And so you should pick them up. But what you said about teams knowing how to get an opponent out or not knowing how to get an opponent out, I could see that being one of those things that would have been more meaningful a couple decades ago than now, because now I

imagine teams have fairly similar scouting and approach styles. But yeah, that probably used to be a thing. Right. You could never really know whether it was a thing or it was just a small sample. So I'm sure that there have been bad moves made because someone made a decision based on what they saw. Like we were talking to Shingo yesterday about his site, Stats Ninja, and how you can just by chance see a guy be great or see a guy be terrible. I mean, that's a scouting term, right? Like when a scout sees a guy have a great series or something, he'll say, like, I saw him good. And other times you'll see him bad and you just have to try not to make a decision based on that so if a guy comes

in and has a great start against your team that is nice and you should factor that in about as much as you factor in all the other starts that he makes so don't put too much weight on it. I've got one more. We're looking at Len Sakata. Len Sakata played for Baltimore, Milwaukee, New York, and Oakland. And he's at the other end of this list. You can search for worst performance against individual teams. So Sakata, never much of a player. He had a career war of about four, but he played in more than 500 games. He was kind of a utility infielder type. He had a career OPS of 616. However, you look at all of the teams that he played fairly regularly, and his second worst performance against the team was a 489 OPS against the Seattle Mariners.

However, he batted 109 times against the Chicago White Sox, and he had seven hits, and he had an OPS of 240, which means he had a T- OPS plus of negative 22. He was, what is that? 122% worse against the White Sox than any other team. That is officially the worst versus opponent split in baseball history as recorded by Baseball Reference. And a lot of the other players at the bottom of this list are pitchers. For example, Bartolo Colon has not hit well against opponents who had 500 or better records, which is a split that's also included here. Gregor Blanco point should the returns the White Sox have gotten Over the past year lead to a discussion Over the failure to build around

A core that the rest of baseball has shown To have deemed very valuable Doesn't the amount of talent that the White Sox have gotten Back show how insane it was That they couldn't even reach 500 With the stars they had as cheap as they had them Especially for a nominally big market team I'm not saying I disagree with selling The White Sox had added some veterans Yep. Change for a best case scenario that's Essentially just all the prospects you acquired Turning into the cost control

Cost controlled assets you still Couldn't win with yep Yeah pretty much I mean that's The White Sox had that very Stars and scrubs roster there And everyone would point out Like well they've got one of the best

Pitchers in baseball and they've got these Other few really good players and then they have literally no infield some of these years. And so, like, yeah, it was, I think, a failure of team construction in that way. and built a winner and they tried to do that and failed to do that so so yes i think they can be commended and blamed simultaneously for having failed to build a winner before but having failed to do that moved on from it and employed what seems to be a smart strategy at this point yeah they clearly with with players like eaton and sale and Quintana there is so much surplus value to their deals that the White Sox they didn't have the greatest score in baseball they didn't have close to the greatest score in baseball but they had a fair number of star players of course they were hurt by like Jose Abreu came up and he was a five win player and he hasn't been the same player

since he's been like the one guy in baseball to have hit for more power in 2014, like when home runs were at a low as the home runs have spiked. Jose Abreu's value has done the opposite of that. So that's kind of hurt it. But yeah, they had a dreadful farm system. They couldn't develop anything. They had nearly no infield, couldn't find reliable catchers. Of course, they let Tyler Flowers go, which turns out whoopsie doodle, but they just could never acquire enough depth. And I don't think it's fair to blame rick hahn because he he probably only took over full control of that organization within the relatively recent past but they just they had a different problem from other teams and i think the they're

commended for making the decision to rebuild because they acknowledge that the death just wasn't in there and so they they realized well we kind of blew it but now we have to just let bygones be bygones and make the tough decision to rebuild and so while sure they could have tried again to try to build around the core that they had i don't think it was any more likely to work this time around than before death just wasn't there so they're going to give it a reboot and uh you can at least say that i think given that the white socks have i believe it's the worst record second worst second worst record third worst third worst record of record in base. They're bad. They're bad. It's been a bad season for the White Sox. Everybody knows that it was going to be a bad

season for the White Sox. But I think my sense is that people are probably excited because this stage of the rebuild is I think the stage that fans enjoy the most because it's so exciting to get prospects and nobody likes the very beginning and nobody likes after the prospects are acquired. But before they start coming up in droves where you're just a bad team full of crap like crisp deck or whatever but it's coming i think this is this is an exciting time to be a white socks fan because you're really you're looking at a division where the most impressive team is the indians and they've been they've still been underachieving so i don't know might not have to be long but yeah this is definitely the Sox making a good decision after having made a series of

poor roster building decisions. Yeah. I wonder if this is the most exciting stage for most fans. I think it certainly is for internet fans, listeners of ours, readers of ours, people who understand the value of prospects and know the specific prospects. And I think that has become more true of just fans in general over the last few years. But I'm sure there's still a large swath of fans who just sees the team trading all the good players that they know and doesn't know who the good players that they got are because they just haven't seen them. good players that they got are because they just haven't seen them. And so they think, you know, the White Sox are throwing in the towel and we don't know who these guys are that they got. And maybe we'll see them a few years down the road. So, yeah, I think for a certain type of fan, this is a very exciting stage.

And for others, maybe it's the least exciting stage. I don't know where the breakdown there is. But next question, this is a fun one from Scott. He says, my friends and I were discussing baseball rule loopholes, and we came up with one we weren't quite able to reconcile. Hypothetical situation, bottom of the ninth, tie game, man on third, one out. The batter hits a very deep fly ball to the warning track in center. The runner on third would easily be able to tag and score if the center fielder caught the ball. What's to stop the center fielder from using the outside of

his glove to hit the ball up to himself and then walk into the infield while hitting the ball up and bobbling it with his bare hand? The runner can't tag because the ball was never caught, and the worst case scenario is the fielder mishandles and drops the ball and his team loses the game, which would have happened anyway if he had made the routine catch. We consider ourselves informed baseball people, but apologies if this question is totally absurd and we are missing something obvious. Then we followed up with them and they followed up with us and they said we're dorks. So we wanted to show you what we meant. A quick video is attached and I will play a clip of this video even though you can't

actually see it I want to salute the effort here for pivoting to video in listener email shows okay Ben and Jeff it would look something like this ready the only rule is it has to work and scott continues it's certainly difficult but far from impossible as he demonstrates in this video we were able to do it and we are mediocre at baseball it's something people with elite athleticism and hand-eye coordination could practice and even if it only worked half the time still still worth it. So I didn't know off the top of my head what the rule was that prevented this. It seemed like there had to be a rule that prevented this. It seems like a loophole that would have been exploited a long time ago if it could have been. And so I just for expediency's sake forwarded this to our listener darren who is an official scorer in major league

baseball and he very quickly pinpointed the rule that prevents this loophole from being exploited unfortunately and it is rule 5.09a and this is the rule that essentially defines what a catch is so the rule itself goes through this is a catch and this isn't a catch. And then there is a comment on the rule again in the rule book here, and I will read it here. It says a catch is legal if the ball is finally held by any fielder, even though juggled or held by another fielder before it touches the ground. And then here is the part that closes the loophole. Runners may leave their bases the instant the first fielder touches the ball. So you don't have to have a catch to tag up.

As soon as the outfielder touches the ball, you can start running. And whether he catches it and you're tagging or he drops it and you're just running or he is juggling it because he read scott's email and thought it was a fun suggestion you can leave and tag or try to score or whatever you would call it in that situation so i like the creativity i like the video sadly this is not something you could get away with but but okay so at least for the second part how many runners know that how many people know this rule i didn't know this rule. I'm not a baseball player, but I don't think baseball players know that rule. They would know the rule after the first time,

but this seems like something you might be able to try once. My interpretation of the first thing you said is that you can juggle a ball but still eventually catch it. My interpretation was not that the catch is official even if the ball is being juggled because we know it's not. If you fumble a ball and then you drop it, that not a catch yeah it's not a catch yet it just yeah it doesn't need to be a catch but yes you're saying base runners might not might not know that it doesn't need to be so if if the only issue here is that the runners could start going immediately

yeah they would eventually do that but if it's like game seven of the world series and you're about to lose on a walk-off sacrifice fly which is the worst kind of walk-off and it sucks then try you you should try i don't know how you mentally prepare yourself to do this and you could look like a an idiot on under the national spotlight but it seems worth it because you you gotta figure if it's like i don't know name a runner name any player in baseball i don't know why i'm blanking right now but who's a smart baseball player joey vato joey votto knows everything about baseball but if he's the guy in third base he probably doesn't know that he can start going immediately I could I could be wrong maybe everybody knows this if they played baseball for years but you probably assume

you can't go until catches made maybe I don't know again like like the like the email says it's worth taking a chance if it's if the downside is nothing yeah yeah I don't know. Again, like the email says, it's worth taking a chance if the downside is nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the level of awareness of this would be. It's possible that every player would know this. There is, I think, a wide range of rule awareness, even among players. And some players will just try to exploit little rules that no one has ever heard about. And I know that some teams try to school their players on those rules. Like when I was an intern, one of my jobs was to try to find obscure rules that could potentially be exploited in some way and then just write up memos to like the coaches just saying like, hey, be aware of this rule. Maybe it'll come up. I don't know if anyone ever read those emails, but I wrote them. So yeah, i'm sure some players just uh you know they've never read the rule book and if a situation has never come up maybe they don't know and even if you know this you might still in the

moment in the pressure of that moment and with the strangeness of what is happening not know how to react or have a slight delay long enough that maybe the throw will get you so yeah worth a shot i guess that it's not actually something that legally you could get away with but the element of surprise is a possibility here and if you have nothing to lose sure why not okay i'm gonna count on myself okay so if you're a runner on third base you're conditioned to probably take off as soon as the ball comes down. You anticipate it's going to reach the fielder. And then you stare at home plate and you go to home plate. So now I'm going to think that actually runners would take off every single time.

So now I think that it would not work. Because they probably wouldn't even notice you fumbling the ball. Because they're not looking at the fielder as soon as the ball comes down they're just timing it and then the third base coach probably says go and then they go so yeah yeah now i think that the upside is almost nothing but again the downside is zero so whatever yeah bobble a ball what why not it'll it'll look different at least they make a fun highlight at least so all right question from, who says, should we be talking about this more? And the this is a screenshot of the all-time grounded into double play leaderboard. Cal Ripken Jr. at the top with 350 times grounded into a double play.

Albert Pujols in second at 349. So he is one behind Ripken for tying this record. And Michael wants to know if we should be talking about this more, which we are now as a result of his question. But should people in general be talking about this more? a good list i think yeah you look at the top you've got cal ripken albert pujols ivan rodriguez hank aaron carly estremski dave winfield eddie murray jim ray julio franco harold baines julio franco stands out he played a while but in any case uh among active players miguel cabrera of course a ton of double plays adrian beltre robinson cano victor martinez etc so it's fun because it's a recognizable stat and pujols is probably going to take the lead by the time this podcast is done being recorded he's incredibly incredibly slow obvious player to shift even though he's righty still powerful still hits the ball hard but when he doesn't he's not only is he in trouble but so is everybody else on the base pads so it is a reflection in part of Pujols's poor speed but

it's also a reflection in much larger part of how good he is, how long he's played, how often he's come to bat with runners on base. So this is, I'll probably write some short article about it when it happens, because why not? Free material, but that's going to be an article that starts with a negative and then ends up as sort of a, let's just say a tongue bathing of Albert Pujols' career. I think that's probably fair. All right. You have a stat segment that was inspired by a listener email.

Should I read that listener email? Sure. All right. It comes from Steven who says, for switch hitters, how closely intertwined are their mechanics between the two sides? Has anyone been, for example, a slap hitting righty and a mashing lefty? Also, can a guy go through a lefty slump while being fine as a righty? My play index foo is weak, so I can't figure out how to look this up. Negative 28 runs is a shortstop.

That is crazy. In a half season. Sorry, I was looking up Pujols. For the record, in Pujols' career The league average of double plays Grounded into per opportunity is About 11% Pujols for his career is at 14% so nothing Too crazy nothing too extreme it has of course

Gotten worse over time as his legs Have gotten worse over time Okay so email sent by Steven so I went into the Archives and I did what I could to Pull up historical data for switch hitters and to make sure that i uh had decent samples i set a minimum of 250 plate appearances against both handednesses so mostly that was a uh constraint for guys facing lefties there are fewer

lefties etc so i i basically went in and i searched for switch hitters who were very different from either side of the plate and i came up with a handful of names that longer time baseball fans might be aware of. So just looking at OPS, for example, the largest OPS difference hitters, switch hitters who are better against righties and lefties belongs to Reggie Jefferson. Reggie Jefferson for his career had an 869 OPS against righties and against lefties. It was 591, which is terrible. That's a difference of 278 points. So Reggie Jefferson, very different hitter. Now, if you look up Reggie Jefferson's career splits, it turns out that, yeah, he faced righties as a lefty and he faced lefties as a righty. But then later on,

he faced lefties as a lefty because it turns out Reggie Jefferson stopped switch hitting because he was terrible at it. He was terrible from one of the sides of the plate. So in 1997, he started to bat lefty against lefties because he was successful batting lefty against righties. And as a fun fact, no, it didn't make him any better. He was actually a little bit worse. So when I looked up Reggie Jefferson splits, I kind of captured him switch hitting and also not switch hitting. But technically, he does lead the list here. My favorite thing about looking at Reggie Jefferson's page is that if you are familiar with baseball reference, you might know that on a lot of player pages, there is a link to something called the the bullpen wiki. It's kind of like a baseball player wikipedia and reggie jefferson has his own page there i will

read to you reggie jefferson's entire biographical information section following his uh just his regular details like where he was born and and his size reggie jefferson section biographical information reggie jefferson had a very odd way of walking when stepping forward he would literally drag the entire top side of his foot on the ground with every step. That's it. That is the entire section. I've never seen a bullpen page like that. Usually it's like, he played for this team and then he played for that team. Yep. Nope.

Never seen a walk critique. I like it. So next in the list is a name that will be more familiar probably. It's Wally Backman. He was somewhat famously platooned back in his day. But Wally Backman for his career, 726 OPS against righties, which that's not very good, but he was even worse against lefties. His OPS was 460. That's a difference of 266 points, an easy second place behind Reggie Jefferson. So Backman was quite useful, I guess, batting left handed facing righties, but then he just could not bat right handed against lefties. He was terrible. His batting average was 165. He slugged 202. He hit zero career home runs, batting righty against lefties. And it got bad enough that in 1992, Wally Backman decided to give up switch hitting himself and he batted lefty against lefties, and he batted one time. He had all of one at bat, batting lefty against lefties, and he struck out. So that's it for Wally Backman. We'll move on from that page.

So you can flip this around, and if you look at guys who are better against lefties than against righties, then at the top of this list for, well, whatever. We're just going to have a little nook logan section in here because why not nook logan uh was a guy who was better batting right-handed against lefties he had an 800 ops batting righty against left-handed pitchers but when he batted lefty against right-handed pitchers he had a 592 ops so nook logan not a very good switch hitter he was a very fast player, but maybe not too surprising. Nook Logan, another guy who gave up switch hitting a little later in his career. So Nook Logan realized, oh, I'm not able to hit righties very well batting lefty. Why don't I

just bat righty against righties and I'll be a little more comfortable. So Logan had a 592 OPS against righties batting lefty. But when he started batting righty against righties, his OPS skyrocketed to 594. That is an improvement of two thousandths of one point. That's Nook Logan. We move on. Another player who had a big split, also a recent player, Bobby Kielty. Bobby Kielty of, I guess, no fame, really. But he had an 881 OPS batting righty against lefties, but he had a 675 OPS against righties batting lefty. Moving on from there, there's one more name who really stands out on this list, and it is Geronimo Pena. Geronimo Pena played in the 90s, and he was also considerably better against lefties than

against righties. This gets confusing. I should just say batting righty as opposed to batting lefty. He was better by 202 points of OPS. Now that is looking at some results, but it's also fun to look at things like walks and strikeouts because that tells you a little something about how players were in terms of their approach. So one name that stands out is one Joe Wallace. Joe Wallace played in the 70s and he struck out twice as often against left-handed pitchers than against righties.

And that is a pretty significant change. I will now read to you a little bit from Joe Wallace's bullpen wiki page. How did he walk? Joe Wallace came up for the Chicago Cubs with much hope in September 1975. A center fielder who would play extremely shallow on defense, Wallace never proved a valuable asset in the field or at the plate. Harsh. He was traded to the Cleveland Indians for Mike Vail during the 1978 season,

and the Indians immediately sent him packing to the Oakland A's. A year later, he was back in the minors and then out of baseball on September 24th, 1975. This is out of order. Wallace broke up Tom Seaver's no-hitter with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning with a clean single to right. Last sentence, Wallace earned the nickname Tarzan because he was fond of cliff diving okay so uh the last name i will bring up is if you uh look at the other side of this list a huge uh maybe the biggest difference in approach for a switch hitter belongs to nick swisher nick swisher career switch hitter when he batted righty

against lefties he had 15 more walks than strikeouts he had basically an even strikeout to walk rate which is a pretty good mark for a disciplined hitter and swisher was uh was pretty good batting right against lefties when he batted lefty against righties he had more than twice as many strikeouts as walks he was still a fine hitter he had a 787 ops so he did not have a massive platoon split. However, his play discipline was considerably different from that side of the plate. So Nick Swisher is one guy who had a very different approach, not identically comfortable from either side of the plate. And one last name I will throw out there just for the hell of it. He wasn't at the top of

any list, but Lance Berkman was a career switch hitter who had a pretty big split. You remember Lance Berkman as being a fearsome hitter, and he was, especially when he faced righties. Batting lefty, Berkman had a near four-digit OPS, 995, but when he batted righty against lefties, his OPS was 777, which is fine, but not actually very good, and Berkman was a career switch hitter. He did it forever. He never really got very good or very bad from that side of the plate he had some sort of vulnerability so berkman outstanding hall of fame level talent against right-handed pitchers which is the better one to be good against but against lefties never quite figured it out well i guess you could do another query to find the guys with the smallest splits as switch hitters but it would

probably just be mickey mantle or something he has 997 OPS against lefties and a 965 OPS against righties. Or maybe Chipper Jones, whose split is slightly larger but still small. It would be the guys that you know of as probably the best switchers ever. All right, this is kind of a question that is a blend of the White Sox question we already answered and the acquiring players who are good against your team question that we led this off with. So this comes from Michael and he says, as of this writing, the Cubs are half a game back of the Brewers in the NL Central. The Cubs just split two games at Wrigley with the White Sox and are set to play two more against them. It was then announced that the Brewers have acquired Anthony Swarczak from the White Sox

for a prospect. The White Sox already had a depleted bullpen from moving Robertson and Canely, which will make the rest of the season rough, including these two games against the Cubs, which presumably the Brewers want the White Sox to win. This case isn't that large, only two games, but could that potentially be a thing teams look at when considering their trades and their trade partners? For instance, if you knew your rival had to play a particular team nine more times in a year, and you only had to play them three times, would you want to avoid weakening that team too much by acquiring one of their players because it gives your rival an advantage? Or is this so speculative about how future games are going to pan out that it doesn't

matter? Or do teams just not even worry about it because it's more important to shore up your weaknesses and not worry about how it affects the rest of the league. Yeah, so it's going to be the last one. And I think the Brewers would rather have Swarczak for themselves than have Swarczak pitching against the Cubs. They probably feel like their odds of gaining ground of the division are better if they have Swarczak than if Swarczak is pitching for a terrible team against a good team because the White Sox are already sufficiently depleted that they're probably not going to win either of the next two games against the Cubs. So it factor, it's, I guess, inconvenient timing for them just because of the opponent. But yeah, I can't imagine it's a consideration. I can imagine

it would be a consideration if some other team were trading for Swarczak and the Brewers would have preferred that to happen later. But as such, I doubt they even gave it a second thought. Maybe they gave it a second thought, not a third. Yeah, I mean, there could be some case maybe where you would consider it, but probably not. I mean, if there were like an ace who was going to be scheduled to have several starts against your opponent or something, and now they're going to be facing some garbage fifth starter instead, then maybe it's something that you weigh into your offer. And I guess if it's a rental and you're only looking at three months of a season anyway, maybe it would make a meaningful difference in how much value you would give up. But I would guess that that case is the exception and that usually this is going to be like when you hear

a hitter or a pitcher say, you know, like he looks at scouting reports, but he has to stick with his strength instead of trying to exploit the hitter's weakness if it's not also his strength. So it's one of those kind of deals. Yes. All right. Question from Brendan. Imagine a world where the Astros are in the NL Central. Oh, wait. That was a reality until Hall of Famer Bud Selig decided that was no longer a thing. How much of this change in leagues would change

the narrative in the major leagues? Currently, the AL is considered the stronger league, but what would it be like having the top three teams in the majors all in the NL, with the talented Cubs vastly underperforming also being in that league? Additionally, the Cubs and Astros are currently the model franchises of the rebuilding model. How much would them being in the same division change the perception of their success since they would probably be beating up on each other for years to come affecting their overall records? That would be fun because then you'd have sort of like a Yankees Red Sox dynamic in the central where you have the two most successful current rebuilds going one against the other. And that would make the long-term organizational planning a little bit different for the astros

in the cups because you'd have two juggernauts but one of them would be fighting for a wild guard spot every year would be a significant disadvantage now it's worth remembering when the astros first switched leagues to the american league they were one of the worst teams in baseball history and the american league still was better in uh in interleague play so one team doesn't really swing things that much but yeah this would if you moved the astros over of course it would change the balance a little bit i would be most interested in sort of that interplay between the astros and the cubs because right now brewers be damned i don't think neither team has a direct rival that quite matches up you can also imagine if like the cubs and the dodgers shared a

division or something like that but it would clearly change things somewhat now if I recall the last time I checked the the interleague split was actually getting a little bit smaller this year so let me just do a quick little uh quick little search to see where things are because when I looked earlier in the year the American League was dominating once again but currently the American League and interleague play is 102 and 96 so it's's getting close, actually, this season. So we'll see if maybe the National League will erase this over the final two months. But American League still seems to be a little bit better. And of course, if you move the best team in the American League to the National League,

then that would make the National League better than they currently are. American League worse. But still, that's just not our situation. It would be fun. It would be a lot of fun to have two dynamite long-term organizations in the same division, because I don't know, you really couldn't afford a big slump in that case. But I mean, there's a lot of things that would be for Trout's latest results as part of my nightly ritual, and it struck me that he is consistently excellent, but rarely has crazy games. In scanning his game log, he has had remarkably unremarkable individual games this season. Only one three-hit game, only two three-RBI and two three-walk games, no multi-homer games.

In 42 of 52 games played, at the point that Eric sent this email. He had had either one or two hits exactly. Small sample, sure, but isn't he kind of always like this, or am I suffering recency bias? Aside from his all-time greatness, is he also an all-time consistent player? I'm not sure if there's a good measure of streakiness, but he must be historically low, both great and awful streaks. From a broader perspective, might this contribute to his low fame slash talent ratio? And there was an article by Rob Arthur, I think it was maybe early this year, about how

Trout is not only historically great, but consistently historically great or historically consistently great. I don't know which way to put that. But the point Rob was making, and I observed something else in an article once too, is just that not only has he been the best hitter in baseball, if you look over a long enough span, but his WRC plus, or however you want to measure his offense, has also fluctuated less than anyone else. Like he's just incredibly great year in after year out and just doesn't fluctuate all that much, except I guess this year he's been even better than before. But for the most part there, he was in a range between like a 167 and

a 176 or something WRC plus just year after year. And so the thing that Rob and I pointed out was that no one else had fluctuated as little from year to year as Trout in addition to the fact that no one had been as good as Trout. So that's another way in which he was amazing. But what Eric is talking about is more of a game-to-game thing, and I don't have a measure of that handy. I know that Bill Petty at Fangraphs and the Heartball Times has done a lot of research on player volatility and looking at this kind of thing, and is there a certain type of player who fluctuates more or less from game to game? And I don't know if he has addressed Trout specifically, but I do remember that one of the things he found

is that having a high walk rate is something that makes you less volatile. Like it's inversely correlated with volatility. And I think that makes sense because if you're someone who has a high walk rate that's probably the sort of skill that is there every day like if you just don't swing at bad pitches you are usually not going to swing at bad pitches every game just about every game it's a it's a consistent skill it's a skill that is meaningful in very small samples so

that approach will serve you well in in every game it's not like if you're a slap hitter who always puts the ball in play and you're very dependent on Babbitt and luck and fielder positioning and that sort of thing, you could have great games and bad games without really doing anything differently yourself. But if you're a guy who walks a lot, then you're probably going to walk a lot unless you're facing an extreme control pitcher. And Trout, especially recently, has been a guy who walks a lot. So it would make sense, I suppose, that he would be fairly consistent from game to game, although I have not examined the contention in any greater detail than that. Since 2012, when Trout became a major league regular, he is the league leader in number of

games with multiple extra base hits. He is the league leader in games reaching base at least three times. He's second in the major leagues in games in which he's reached at least half of the time that he's batted. And he's the league leader first in games in which his single game slugging percentage has been greater than 1.000. So it turns out Mike Trout has been amazing the whole time we were right. One of the issues is I think because he's had worse lineups, he just doesn't pile up the RBI quite like you might imagine a classic slugger like Miguel Cabrera would but Trout has been very consistent he's had those big games he's had them more than any other player at least by those measures Joey Votto was always up there in terms of games reaching base but how many times do you remember Joey Votto being dominant and how

much of that is on Votto versus the fact that he's been in subpar lineups for so long because i think part of that sexy box score is that you see a lot of runs scored and runs driven in and trout just hasn't had very much help because albert pujos keeps grinding into double plays yeah right all right let's do one more here this is a question we got a little while ago, and it's from Jordan. And he says, in a recent, you know, Saris article, it was mentioned that Kevin Pillar made significant changes to his swing over the past year because of articles he read on Fangraphs. Pillar came to the same realization while reading this very site. This is a quote now from an article. To be honest, you'll talk to other people in here and they'll make a conscious effort to think about their launch angle.

I'm just trying to hit the ball hard. He said Fangraphs is the reason I wanted to make a lot of changes. And other players have said similar things. Daniel Murphy, notably, is evidently a huge Fangraphs fan. So the question is, as a Fangraphs podcast, we now have to consider it at least plausible that regular MLB players listen to Effectively Wild, at least occasionally. With that in mind, assuming a hypothetical MLB player was listening, what advice would you pass on to them? Something specific to an individual game, generic strategy that could apply to a bunch of players but could make the game better if adopted at large, or just that they really should start contributing to the patreon once they hit arbitration oh man one one patreon supporter among the major leagues and we would be we could quit our jobs yeah okay so i think that the one piece of advice i would give would be to mike trout and if you are in the outfield and it's a walk-off situation and there's a runner on third and you're about to catch a sacrifice fly and you have no chance of throwing out the runner at third.

Consider bobbling the ball while advancing slowly toward the infield. Who knows what could happen, but you might be able to save the game if the runner or third base coach gets confused. And you never know. The Angels are still kind of hanging around 500. One game could make the difference between a playoff game and sitting at home. Yeah, no, good advice. Yeah. I don't know. There isn't really any one size fits all advice that we could offer to a baseball player. And it seems almost pretentious to try to do that. And in many cases, probably the best advice would be to ignore whatever we're saying at the moment because they know more about baseball in many ways than we do.

So I don't know. more about baseball in many ways than we do. So I don't know, like maybe we could give some media advice just because that is what we are and that is our perspective. Like, you know, don't do what David Price keeps doing would be maybe one piece of advice I could give. Although for all I know, David Price's teammates are fine with what he has done and his frequent bridling at comments by broadcasters and that sort of thing, who have made comments about him and his teammates. fans or I don't know maybe my perspective is just skewed because I interact with a lot of other writers and writers are predisposed to not liking players who bully them and and put them on the spot and and embarrass them in front of the whole team and and that kind of seemingly bullying behavior that Price has done and Brandon Phillips for example example, did with Trent in Cincinnati, that kind of thing. But I don't know. I guess even that seems like self-serving advice. Be nice to reporters. We're

not out to get you. So that kind of thing. But I don't know. Read Fangraphs if you're not already reading Fangraphs. I don't know why you'd be listening to the podcast without reading the site. It's a really hard question to answer because your advice would not be the same to every player. But I don't know, like hire Scott Boris. Is that good advice? So one of the stats I like, I have three things to say, and one of them has nothing to do with the other points. So one of the stats that I like looking at with players is if you don't know that we have a Z swing rate, which is the rate of swings and pitches in the strike zone. And then there's O swing rate, which is the rate of swings and pitches out of the strike zone. I like to look at the difference between the two, because if you are a hitter, you want to swing more at strikes

and less at balls. And by that measure, this season, Kevin Pillar is I think the second or third most improved hitter in baseball. He's still a little bit of a hacker and his numbers are not actually that much better than they've ever been. He's basically right on his career batting line, but his discipline does seem a little bit better, which is promising. He's near a career high in home runs, much like the rest of the league that is named Jose Abreu. Second point, unrelated to that, but related to David Price, one of the narratives that has chased David Price maybe as much or more than it's chased clayton kershaw is the whole playoff choker thing because david price has a two and eight record in the playoffs and he's also been great in terms of

his peripherals he doesn't really walk a lot of guys in the playoffs his strikeouts are there but this is one of those things that makes me almost want to believe in the narrative because he seems like he's so thin-skinned that things could just kind of get to him and that's not fair because i'm sure there are countless cases of players who just get annoyed i'm sure like everybody in the world baseball players are sensitive to criticism we don't at least i know i don't deal with it very well i just don't go on a plane and berate dennis eckersley about it uh but it's enough that I can see why, if you were especially like a beat reporter, I can see why you might put a little more stock in the playoff narrative because you see David Price, you see that maybe he's a little oversensitive and you think, well, maybe the

playoffs just kind of get to him a little bit. And unrelated to that, unrelated to anything we've talked about, kind of like a little sad second, but something I just noticed when I was browsing around, you might remember that last year, Jacoby ellsbury shattered the all-time record for times reaching on catcher's interference in a season the previous record was eight ellsbury reached 12 times on catcher's interference he is currently tied for the career lead with pete rose they both have reached 29 times on catcher's interference the guy in third place is 11 catcher's interferences behind that's a big margin. This year, Jacoby Ellsbury has reached three more times on catchers interference.

That's good for second in baseball. Josh Reddick has reached seven times on catchers interference this year. He is blowing away Ellsbury. Reddick has reached on catchers interference more this season than he had in all seasons previous. The league as a whole, there have been 29 instances of catchers interference. The Astros have reached nine of those times. Interesting.

Yeah. All right. Okay. I lied. I did have one more question on my list. So this is a question from Lillian who says, in the past, you and various guests have mentioned some of your favorite baseball reference pages. Mike Trout is an obvious one.

So is Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. But one I've always considered intriguing is Satchel Pages. Of course, Satchel's story is better told in anecdotes by the man himself or eyewitnesses, but that B-Ref page is nevertheless one to look at. An all-star at ages 45 and 46, a 124 ERA plus from ages 41 to 46 him coming back to the majors after sitting out his age 43 season and putting up 3.4 war at age 45 and of course the mind-boggling scoreless three inning appearance for the Kansas City A's at age five blinking eight what else can you see looking at the numbers what do you imagine page could have put up in the majors in his 20s? Is there a way to retroactively project? So that's tough. Obviously, he is a Hall of Famer, mostly for his Negro Leagues performance. And here's what

we know statistically about his Negro Leagues performance looking at the Negro Leagues database at Seamheads, powered by the baseball gauge, the great sight by Dan Hirsch. So the stats that we have for those years from 1928 to 1924, there are 939 innings on record there for Satchel Paige, and he had a 2.14 ERA in those innings, which is good for a 193 ERA+. So he was obviously fantastic in those innings, which is good for a 193 ERA plus. So he was obviously fantastic in those years. He struck out close to a batter per inning, which I'm going to assume was as impressive in the Negro Leagues at that time as it would have been in the major leagues when strikeout rates were a lot lower. So this is a limited record. I don't know how much is missing from this,

but I would guess quite a lot because he pitched forever and this is only 159 games, 132 starts, but he was fantastic when he was playing in the Negro Leagues and then he was still fantastic at just extremely advanced ages when he finally got to the majors just debuting when he was 41 and having a 165 era plus in 72 innings so i don't know if it would be safe to just port his negro leagues rates over to the majors that seems like probably not except that he was pitching almost that well in his 40s in the majors so it's really hard to say but i mean given that he was pitching almost that well in his 40s in the majors. So it's really hard to say. But I mean, given that he was that well preserved, that he was still an effective pitcher at age 46, if he had come up in the majors 20 years before he did, which is when the stats for his Negro

League's career start, he was 21 at the time. So he could have had easily a 25-year career and just set all kinds of all-time marks, presumably. So I don't have specific numbers in mind, but I think we would probably consider him one of the best pitchers ever if we don't already. Yeah, that's a good answer. Yeah, all right. I mean mean you could probably come up with a more accurate projection if you wanted to go year by year and and look at what guys did when in some cases they did come from the negro leagues to the majors and maybe there's a level of talent in those leagues that you could estimate in those years but satchel page was was amazing and yeah that is one of the best baseball reference pages if only for a zero era at age 58 which i mean on its own i think qualifies

it for the baseball reference hall of fame 1961 at the age of 54 satchel page through 25 innings for the portland beavers oh didn't know that how did he do uh well he uh he did well he did fine yeah all right okay so uh we can end it there unless do you want to tell the the dave bresnahan potato story to close this out because we got an email about the dave bresnahan potato story and you were aware of this and i was not i okay let me let me load up this page just so I can fill in details. I remember when I was a kid, I had one of those books that I guess it's like a child's version of a bathroom book, even though kids never spend that much time in there. But it was just like a little book of, I think, sports anecdotes or funny stories or something. And I guess I can just,

I'll just read these two paragraphs from a website that is called the Baseball Reliquary. It's baseballreliquary.org. We were linked to this. It's a good site. Yeah, they preserve all kinds of interesting things about baseball. And in this case, they actually have the potato preserved here. So I remember reading a brief little quip about this when I was a kid. I'd completely forgotten about it.

And now it has come back because of this reader email. So I will just read word for word probably the most acclaimed baseball in the reliquaries collection isn't even a baseball rather it is a potato which was disguised as a baseball and thrown by former minor league catcher dave resnahan now in a somewhat desiccated state the potato has been preserved since 1987 in this specimen jar, pictured above, filled with denatured alcohol. In October of 2000, the baseball reliquary acquired for its permanent collections what is believed to be the actual potato thrown by former minor league catcher Dave Bresnahan in one of the classic stunts in baseball history.

In August, they got this potato in 2000, and it happened in August of 1987. Wow. In August of 1987, Bresnahan, then a 25-year-old second-string catcher with the Williamsport, Pennsylvania Bills of the Class AA Eastern League,

decided to liven up a meaningless late-season home game. Before the game, Bresnahan peeled and sculpted a potato in the shape of a baseball behind the plate

in the fifth inning. With the potato concealed in his mitt and a runner on third base, he threw the potato wildly past his third baseman, hoping the runner would think he made an errant pickoff throw.

The play worked to perfection. The runner at third trot at home and Bresnahan tagged him out with the baseball, and umpire retrieved the potato and awarded the runner home for Bresnahan's deception. The following day, Bresnahan was fined by his manager and then released by the Bills' parent club, the Cleveland Indians, for what they perceived as an affront to the integrity of the game so the play technically worked to perfection until it came completely apart because it turns out i don't know i haven't i haven't taken we we both took looks at the rulebook because of the uh because of the juggling fly ball thing i did not see anything explicit in the rule book about a potato but it's it seemed

it's a genius move except for the part where you have the ball and then you tag the runner out and then everyone's like well then what was that and it was a potato and you can't have a potato but what what baffles me the most i love it it's just a classic minor league stunt why not do it bresnahan wasn't going to go anywhere what a great idea what a great way to put yourself in the annals of baseball history forever but what i can't figure out is how did he actually what was the mechanism of him making this transfer because he has a potato in his glove but he also has to catch a pitch and then throw the potato and not the ball to third base and i can't i couldn't figure it out it's like you can't keep it in your pocket because it'll be clear that you're reaching back

but how do you have a potato in your glove and catch a ball and not have the potato destroyed and that one i can't i cannot figure out yeah just potato up your sleeve could you do that i don't know yeah i don't know if anyone has more details about Dave Bresnahan's potato hiding. Please let us know. I will read from the little bio page. Although his four-year professional baseball career was over, Bresnahan, much like Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese's film The King of Comedy, became an overnight celebrity. He received numerous interview requests from around the world, and Bob Verde of the Chicago Tribune named him the 1987 Sportsperson of the Year. In 1988, the Williamsport Club held a Dave Bresnahan Day and retired his uniform number 59.

Bresnahan told the more than 4,000 fans in attendance, quote, Lou Gehrig had to play in 2,130 consecutive games and hit.340 for his number to be retired, and all I had to do was bat.140 and throw up a kiddo. All right. We will end there, and I will encourage everyone, if you haven't already seen it, go look at the gif of Alex Verdugo,

the great Dodgers prospect, hitting a home run in AAA off Zach Borenstein's head in the outfield. This is like the Ken Seiko play, but maybe even better, because really this rebound off the head was like way off the head. I don't know if you've seen this, but as Jeff Passan tweeted, he hit it about 360 feet and it went 385. I mean, this was a huge bounce off the head and over the wall.

He wasn't even like on the warning track or anything. This was way far from the wall and it just bounced that far off Zach Bornstein's head. He must have a hard head. So go check that out. That will just add to the weird plays we've been discussing on this episode. And I will remind anyone who had forgotten that in April of 2011,

Miguel Olivo, then batting for the Seattle Mariners, hit a deep fly ball to left field in Detroit that Ryan Rayburn tracked down got to the warning track reached up with his glove and the ball bounced off of his glove and over the fence for the most recent major league equivalent that I can recall of something like this happening but still something about the ball hitting the head instead of the glove just makes it all the more humiliating so congratulations Alex Verdugo I don't know how this factors into the park effects Bornstein should have just bobb. I don't know how this factors into the park effects.

Bornstein should have just bobbled it with his head all the way into the infield. That would have been the smarter thing to do. All right, that's it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Brendan Malone, David Rifkin, Angela Pereira, Joel Berger, and Drew Broadfoot. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Michael Bauman and I will have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up for Thursday, talking to Jay Jaffe about his great new book, The Cooperstown Casebook and hall of fame induction weekend.

Please refill our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fan grass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. And we will talk to you all very soon.