Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1100: Exploring the Longest Play

Episode Date: August 22, 2017

Ben Lindbergh, Jeff Sullivan, and a special guest conduct a nighttime, roundtable discussion (around a rectangular table) in Jeff’s living room about the Effectively Wild eclipse event and Sam Miller’s listener-inspired ESPN article about the longest play in baseball history. Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "Sing This All Together" Audio outro: Belle and Sebastian, "The Power of […]

Why don't we sing this song all together, open our hands and the pictures come. And if we close all our eyes together, then we will see where we all come from. Hello and welcome to episode 1100 of Effectively Wild. Oh my god, 1100. I screwed it up already. 100, that's 100 more than 1000. Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass.

Hello Jeff. Hello. And that man you just heard a moment ago, Sam Miller, who has been absent for a full hundred episodes now, and now he's back. Actually, that's not true. You did a guest episode once, unannounced. But we are all gathered around

Jeff Sullivan's living room table in Portland after our Eclipse event, and we figured instead of going to sleep like we all want to, we will do a impromptu podcast for the people because we're all here in one place for the first time ever and hopefully not the last did you guys enjoy the eclipse it was legitimately more stirring than i thought it was going to be i i tried to psych myself up and this is of course referring to the eclipse itself

the uh the astronomical phenomenon and i had read several articles about people describing it as psychedelic and life-changing and i tried to get myself hyped up and when uh when it actually went to totality i kind of felt a little uh a little happy shiver it was good it was a it exceeded my expectations and all i had to do to see it was sleep behind the best Western hotel. In the shrubs. Among the shrubs. Someone watching you from the distance. Just a casual smoking man at two in the morning. Who we theorized was possibly an effectively loud listener who was just afraid to say hello.

But we met a lot of listeners at the event and it was great. And the traffic was non-existent on the way. So we started super early to get there and give everyone's tickets out. And turned out we got there in even less time than one typically gets from Portland to Salem. Although we had to sit in traffic for four hours on the way back, which is a different story that maybe we'll tell in a moment. But I was impressed by the eclipse. I was very eager to see the eclipse. But even so, I think I was more impressed than I expected to be. And I talked to a senior veteran NASA guy who was at the game. This is the Salem Kaiser volcanoes for anyone who has not been following our eclipse event story. And he said he

was in tears. It was his first eclipse ever also and he knew exactly what to expect but the reality of it was too much for him sam i thought it was rad i didn't expect to be that impressed and i thought that i i thought i would be fairly impressed if i stayed in long beach and watched like the 70 version and that i would be like not much more than fairly impressed if i came up here and saw the totality and uh seeing what like it looked like at 95 and seeing what the world looked like at 95 i now see that it is totally inconsequential and i would never have noticed it in a million years and this was really impressive so i liked it yeah it's astonishing when know, you're at 90, 95% and you realize how little of the sun we actually need.

Yeah. Yeah. We could do with a lot less sun. It was so bright. Like until it was at least 70% covered, you couldn't tell any difference whatsoever. And we all used our eclipse glasses in case anyone is wondering if we were squinting up there like certain others did. But we were all impressed. And I found out after the game that

there were plenty of prospects on these teams. Neither of us was aware of it. We weren't really paying that much attention to the baseball game because we were staring at the sky most of the time. And then after the eclipse, applying sunscreen so that the reappeared sun did not burn me, which tends to happen. So on our way back, we were planning on possibly doing a podcast in the car, but it devolved or evolved into a four-hour karaoke session of the hits of the 90s, which maybe some of you would like to listen to, but we didn't record it. Your highways in Portland are very loud, as you informed me. Something about the surface is loud, so it was not an ideal recording situation.

Although there was no audio recording, but there was a photographic recording of Sam Miller outside of our car. So for any of you who are members of the Effectively Wild Facebook group, you can see a picture of Sam Miller jogging in a black hoodie in 94 degree weather with a fistful of blackberries. So yeah, I mean, the story though is pretty simple. Like there's blackberries everywhere in Oregon. Just like the highways are completely flanked by mature blackberry plants that are at full ripeness right now. And we were, we took about five hours to drive about 50 miles.

Is that right? And much of that, like probably we took three and a half hours to drive 15 miles and a lot of that time was just stopped in looking at blackberries and i i just hate to see blackberries go to waste there's such a rarity like a ripe blackberry off a vine it's just a good gold right and these these were like falling off the vine they were so ripe it was the end of the season so anyway i was eating some and then you got left behind i would have yeah i i did it a couple times and uh the second time jesse ben's uh ben's fiance jesse used the analogy previous to this uh unfortunate uh separation

of uh the voyage of the dawn treader where there's a there's a river where if you dip something in gold i'm sorry if you dip something in the river it turns into gold and people uh just constantly keep saying like oh well just one more thing and then i'll leave one more thing but you can't tear yourself away from this thing that turns ordinary things into gold and so they die and blackberry plants are somewhat like that there so many and the next one is always bigger softer and more uh at risk of being missed by this world and so i picked a few too many and i was just casually walking to catch up and i kept getting about three three cars away and then traffic would pick up a little and uh eventually i was in danger

yeah i had fallen asleep and i woke up to a panting sweaty sam miller re-entering the car yeah the last the last quarter mile was done at roughly a full sprint with your usual black hoodie and long pants and corduroys, the usual Stompers outfit. Yeah. It's been photo documented by, what was, I don't know, the name of the... Ethan Hart. Yeah. Ethan Hart.

Who, this is the thing, this guy pulls up and he's like, you want a ride? Which is unusual. And I thought that guy definitely looks like he was at our game. But like you're on a freeway 30 miles, like you're on a completely packed, completely packed freeway 30 miles from this event. And, you know, he also just looks like a guy in Oregon. And so I thought, I didn't think anything of it. I said, oh, he also just looks like a guy in Oregon. And so I thought, I didn't think anything of it. I said, Oh, thank you. My car's right up there. And he kept passing me and I kept waving and took photos.

Yeah, this is a surprise to all of us, but a pleasant surprise, at least for me and Jeff. I don't know about Sam. So we don't really know what's going on in baseball today because we were occupied with the eclipse and we weren't really planning to record this, but my flight is delayed by many hours. So we have some time and we figured we would talk about something that Sam just wrote because I think it is his self-professed favorite article, or it was as he was in the process of writing it, and hopefully it turned out to be. It's been a big hit, and it started with an effectively wild listener's email, right?

So it feels right that we should discuss it here. So for anyone who hasn't read it, which from the sound of it is not a lot of people, we should summarize what this article was about. Yeah, so the background of this story it's not a lot of people. We should summarize what this article was about. Yeah, so the background of this story is that about a year ago, I was watching a highlight of a Mariners, I think they turned a trip play in 2015. And this was a play that involved a couple of rundowns. And while I was watching it, something just triggered in my brain where I was like, this is taking too long.

This is not, baseball plays don't take this long. And so I timed it and it was something like 20 seconds. And I thought that might be the longest play ever. And so I started putting out calls, asking people for long plays. And I wrote some of them up and I was sort of toying with the idea of what the physical maximum possibility of a baseball play is, because you can really mostly you can really only do one thing as a runner, which is run towards home plate. And it only takes about 15 seconds to run towards home plate. And so even accounting for rundowns, there's not that much you can do before there's no more play left. So I think I got up to like 29 seconds and we talked about it on this podcast last summer. And I got an email from a guy named Dan Bracey who was like, yeah, two and a half minutes. I was in a play that was two and a half minutes.

And I don't remember exactly how Ben and I responded, but we both responded quickly. Like, tell us more. And he explained the nature of this play. And I said, I'm writing about this, which is what sometimes Ben and I will reply to emailers so that the other one can't write about it. And once I did that, I knew he couldn't do it anymore. So I didn't do it for a while, but I always knew I was going to write about this play because a lot of things were really interesting about it. But the main thing is that this was a play I'd never heard of,

which is where the base runner is on first base and other base runners on third base. And the guy in first runs into right field and like way, like he can run way into right field if he wants to and just stops. And that's the play. And from that point on, almost anything can happen. And, and so they, uh, there was a team that did this in the biggest moment of their lives and everything went crazy after that yeah so what were the responses like because i saw from some people were saying like why didn't they just do this why didn't they just do like why didn't you just pitch so yeah so the background first of all everybody who was involved in this play remembers it slightly different and so there was a little bit of rashomon thing going on where uh everybody was really speculating about

how they everybody else felt but they knew exactly how they felt which was like like a lot of anxiety a lot of like tension more tension than they can really remember in any other play confusion some anger some fear even because the crowd started to get really aggressive and screaming at each other and screaming at the coach. But basically the nuts and bolts are that we can piece together from both the recollections of the people involved, but also the two and a half minute radio clip that Dan's dad had of the play, where we hear the broadcaster telling it as it's happening the runner on first john pedrotti who is a sophomore he would go on to become like a team captain as a senior

the quarterback of the school football team he played professionally he was drafted should we say where this was or what yeah sorry yeah this was in rhode island it was the rhode island state championships in 2006 and it was game two in the sixth inning of a seven inning game in a two to nothing game. So everything was very tense. And the team that was on the bases was the team that was leading. So they were trying to squeeze out an extra run. And they had their number nine hitter up. And he fell behind 0-2 in the count.

And they were facing a really good pitcher. So it was just really unlikely that he was going to get a hit to drive in the run. And so the coach called for this play. So I forget exactly where I was in the story, but John Pedrotti at the time was not the quarterback. He was not the team captain. He was just a sophomore. He was the youngest player on the team, had kind of grown into a role as a starting right

fielder, but was still just a kid compared to his teammates. And so he gets this sign from his coach, and he's not totally sure he saw it right. He's sort of scared that he maybe saw it wrong, and he's about to do the most embarrassing thing possible. But that's a pretty clear sign, and he thinks he saw it. And so just uh while while the pitcher is on the mound john pedrotti just runs out into shallow right field and stops and um so the goal of this play is to get the pitcher to balk that's the first goal is the pitcher is going to freak out because the guy is not supposed to take off when he's still on the mound this is a that's actually a somewhat common

play in high school with first and third, where the runner just takes off super early in the hopes that the pitcher will balk when everybody yells, ah, right? And so they practice this a lot. High school defenses practice this a lot. And so the team in question, the East Greenwich Avengers, would practice this. And the standard protocol is if someone takes off, the coach or somebody on the field yells, ice. And that means step is if someone takes off, the coach or somebody on the field yells, ice, and that means step off. Just step off before you do anything. But in this case, the guy didn't take off.

He took off into right field. And so then if he doesn't balk, the second goal is that someone will chase him out there. It's totally legal for him to be out there because until a tag is attempted on you, there is no baseline. Baseline does not exist. If you wanted, you could walk over and order a hot dog, right? The field is yours to play with until the defense is trying to pursue you, at which point the baseline is wherever you are, a straight line from that point to the base that you're going

after so since nobody was trying to tag him he could go anywhere so he goes into right field and the goal is that someone will chase him and in chasing him they will go far enough away that the runner on third can get home and if he goes home then the defender has to sort of spin and throw maybe he's off balance maybe he's way deep Maybe he has thrown the ball to another fielder. And so there's all this opening for the guy on third to score because high school players aren't totally capable of making two throws in a row or that long throw. So those are basically the two ways that this is going to work. Well, the problem is that like Dan Bracey, the pitcher for East Greenwich, does not balk

and does not throw and is not gonna throw and decides that he's not gonna get tricked into going after him. And so his only defense is to stand there holding the ball. And the runner, Johnny Pedrotti's only weapon at this point is to stand there being kind of more and more out of place, hoping that he will tempt the defense into doing something. And so they stare at each other for a really long time. And so technically nothing is happening at this point. Everybody is, well, the ball is being held and the runner is not advancing. But the play is live.

Dan Bracey tries to call timeout and the umpire says you can't call timeout and so he has to do something and in a way i guess i'll just skip to the ending which is to say that this didn't work like the defense never did go after him two and a half minutes pass and then he goes back to first base and so it's the it is both like an obscenely long play and also a complete nothing play. Nothing happened. There's no record of it even in the box score because he didn't advance. He didn't try to steal.

He just took a long lead. Right. Really long enough that the umpire decided a thing was happening, but otherwise nothing happened. But he kind of came close. Like he really did send the defense into like varying degrees of hysterics where some of the defenders were sort of like running around, trying to like counter trick the runner. And the, you know, like the pitcher Dan Bracey was like sort of really getting flustered

because so many people were yelling at him. And he finally gave the ball to the second baseman and one of his good friends matt streich who doesn't even remember getting the ball because he says he blacked out and so again the goal is like that you'll get the defense to do something stupid and the defense did not do something stupid but they came really close and matt streich says that if he tried to throw the ball home he he would have airmailed it into the stands. He was so nervous and his palms were so sweaty that he never would have been able to get a throw off. And the runners didn't know this. If they had, they might have just taken off.

We might have actually seen this play go further and be tested. But as it was, nobody quite knew what everybody else was thinking. They were in such undefined territory that they didn't know what they could get away with. So anyway, eventually, Johnny Pedrotti gives up and goes back to first, and that was the end of the play. So the title of the article had to do with the longest play ever in baseball. And as you mentioned, it was sort of a very exciting play or a complete nothing play and there's no record. So to get into the semantics a little bit, is it a play? Does it become a play when Bracey hands the ball to Stretch? What is this as an

event on a baseball field? I had a really long conversation with my wife about this because she was also like, she was trying to figure out what a play is and i had to decide what a play is and i decided that you are engaged in a play if you can't call timeout because if if the umpire decides that somebody is either at risk or advancing like one of those two things if he's advancing the defense can't call timeout if he's at risk the offense can't call timeout and so he's at risk, the offense can't call timeout. And so that's a play. A play is basically the time between which you can call timeout to the next time you can call timeout.

And everything in between, the umpire is saying, like, play on. And so if you take a lead and the pitcher's on the mound, he can call timeout. And the cat can come out and visit him and they they tried to call time out and dan bracy the pitcher went to the umpire he's like why can't i call time out he's just taking a lead and the umpire in his discretion decided that was not a lead like a lead is not 55 feet out in right field or whatever like he was he was arguably further away from first base than second base is maybe possibly so it wasn't a like it wasn't a lead exactly and so so something was happening where he was both in potentially advancing and potentially at risk. And so that's why I decided to play.

If you had a record kept of this play, would it just read pick-off attempt, pitcher to second? I don't even think it would be. Would it be pick-off attempt? If you were forced to keep a record of what happened in a way that's different from writing a long-form article about it on ESPN.com, what would you do? That's a good question.

I guess you would. Are there other throws that don't get recorded in any way like if you catch the ball as the left fielder and then you throw it in the second cut off man yeah that relay where there's no play yeah does that throw get recorded like the play is f7 right yeah i don't think the who fields it on its way in if there's no out recorded. No, that's lost to history. I guess I'm thinking like if this were recorded on game day, it'll say like a pick-off attempt between pitches. Yeah, so probably that. Yeah, probably that. Sometimes it just says like delay of game, right?

It just says delay. Maybe a play is just a delay. Injury delay, mental insanity yeah what should dan bracy have done i mean it's hard to say confronted with this wacky play that has never occurred and may never occur again that he should have done anything in that moment but what would be the optimal response so what the coach wanted him to do was to was what he ultimately did do which is to give it to the second baseman who theoretically has the best arm in the infield on this team and who can basically just stand at second base stare at the guy on third and wait for johnny pedrotti to get bored

and what dan's dad is yelling during this whole thing is which i think is the right answer and i think dan agrees in uh that this is the right answer is that he should have just gone back to the mound and pitched which is one of the sort of great fun paradoxes of this situation is that this play and a lot of high school trick plays are based on the idea that a runner on first in a first and third situation is more valuable than a runner on second in a second and third situation because there's all these trick plays including you know this in which the first baseman is sort of like a tease a way of trying to distract the defense so there's a lot of you know first and third steals we all remember that from little league where you're sort of hoping the catch will throw down but there's also like various walk-off steals or like short steals where you run halfway you try to get into a pickoff

and johnny pedrotti didn't want to be on second base he didn't go to second but the funny thing is that when he decided to give up he went to first and partly that's because like the ball was a lot closer to second and maybe i mean i don't know maybe matt streitz would have um gone over and like stood there but he wasn't matt the ball was not on second base the ball was behind the mound they practiced a lot of these plays and dan bracy the pitcher recalls he thinks that if if like johnny gets stolen for instance on the same pitch they wouldn't have thrown down they would have given him like you don't throw down on a first and third in high school, especially with two outs and the number nine hitter up in a no-two count.

So he could have had second. He wanted to be on first. And so what Dan Bracey should have done is gone back on the mound, treated it like a lead, put it out of his head, forgotten the fact that like this is weird and like it didn't need to be fixed. It's not Dan's responsibility to fix baseball and put things in its right place he could have just gone that's where he wants to stand then he can stand there and pitched and then presumably pedrotti would have gone to second there was

a pickoff attempt earlier in the at bat so they were at least like somewhat trying to discourage the stolen base but basically they would have happily let him go to second and that's what he should have done but it was weird it was too weird to let it go and like it you know like that i think more than anything else like the the whole point of this play is that you don't think the other team can handle something they've never seen and so they wanted to throw something that they'd never seen and and like truthfully east greenwich couldn't handle this thing they hadn't seen it didn't cost them because they didn't fail to handle it far enough that a run scored but they like in a lot of ways they they did not stick to what should have been the plan

so this was brought to your attention by Dan Bracey himself, and this was a controversial play. You spoke to many people on either side, so now that more than a decade has passed since this happened, presumably you interacted with Bracey first when you were conversing about this play. What was his perspective on... I guess I shouldn't go into the ethics because nothing was wrong,

but a lot of fans and parents were screaming yeah as this play was taking place how did dan bracy feel about the the sportsmanship of this attempt um almost at the time dan was i think was very mad in the moment he was extremely mad uh and like there's a whole sort of epilogue which is like the final twist to this story which i guess we won't get into like if people really want to find out what happened they can read it but like he was really mad at the time in retrospect he's not mad he was really curious to know how like what they were thinking because to him and his teammates and really to portsmouth the decision to call this play at that moment is really baffling. This was not an April game.

This was the state championships. They were like, like Portsmouth was 10 minutes away from winning the state championships, which was even in, you know, even in a state like Rhode Island, it's still a pretty big deal. And, and like they, they talk about this among each other all the time like when he's with his teammates and he gets back with you know his teammates thanksgiving or whatever they talk about this play and they don't like they know portsmouth as like the other guys like on the other side of the state they played them a lot but like these are definitely like the other guy the others and

they didn't really know what the motive was they didn't know who called it they didn't know where the play came from and so it's always been this like really defining moment of their baseball careers that has been unexplained in a lot of ways so he was very curious about it and then like Portsmouth in a lot of ways it's the same they also talk about this play amongst each other when they get back together a lot and the team's coaches are like facebook friends and sometimes they will mention it or people will mention it like if one responds to the other on facebook about something totally different. Someone will be like, remember that play? So like everybody I think remembers the play, but it hasn't really been like the origin of it hadn't,

I don't think was widely known. The motive for it wasn't widely known. And I think that the coach who called it, I think his feelings about it weren't widely known. And it changes whatever you think they were trying to do i think that it helps to know how they felt it went so that you sort of understand like well let me put it this way when i talked to dan i thought like wow the runner bet he's a jerk you know like because you only have one side of the story right and you're like what's that kid doing like and

then even if you know that like okay so maybe the coach called it and you go well that coach that he's a jerk and then you talk to to the runner and the coach and i mean they're not like remotely jerks like they had this idea about a play that might work and it turned out differently than they expected it to and it but it was really i mean like there there was a there was definitely a a rational respectful competitive spirit throughout the whole thing that like probably neither side kind of realized that the other one had what do you think would happen if someone tried the portsmouth play in the majors or in a higher level of baseball i think they get tagged out immediately i mean you can i spent a little bit of time down on the field in my career and first thing that

jumps out at you about major league baseball players is their arms are insane like all of them have the best arm like every infielder their arms are incredible like you just can't even imagine unless you're like down close and you like see them warming up with each other so like they're just so much more competent that like you just it just wouldn't work i mean i i think that would that would probably be bad you'd probably get thrown at too right this would be unwritten rules violations this would be bush league this would be high school ball i guess would it would it depend on the person doing it or is it so seemingly if it was yeah if it were someone who had a reputation for

and like if it were i don't know like joey vato or someone like that who just was known for trying strange things or looking to break baseball in some way maybe but i think you would mostly be made fun of and i think that you'd be made fun of by everybody so that no no retaliation would be needed like you you would just sort of be mocked right and that would be your punishment i can can see Beltre pulling it off. So you have Gianni Pedrotti on first base, and he's looking in for a sign. He thinks he sees the sign for this play.

This is a play they have not run. Of course they've practiced it. They haven't run it. They've practiced it. I think they've practiced it once. Right. I mean, how? And like a couple days earlier,

and they thought, the team thought it was a, like the team thought like it was just a sort of a joke like they were running this fun play just like like it was like a like a trivial thing like the coach found a little loop on the rules and he was having a little fun in practice they ran it once and it worked. And the coach was like, see, it works. So you presumably know, I've forgotten the details, but there's the old story of like the Soviet officer, like replacement officer who thought that the U.S. had launched the nuclear warheads at Russia. Are you familiar with this story? And then his job was to report that the U.S. had fired nuclear warheads and then Russia would retaliate. And that was his entire job. He was like a fill-in.

And so he saw this on the instruments and he thought, okay, it's nothing. And then he saw it again on the instruments in greater numbers. And he said, okay, it's probably nothing. So he didn't report it up the chain. And it turned out to be, I think the idea was that it was light reflected off of clouds. We did not send nuclear warheads to Russia. And so by his not having followed his command, he thereby arguably saved the planet from destruction.

So not to draw too close a comparison between nuclear warfare and a squirrel in the outfield to play on a high school baseball championship game. Skunk. Skunk, I'm sorry squirrel squirrel the outfield happens regularly and similarly st louis yeah you have a skunk in the outfield play you're johnny pedrotti you see you think you see this sign yeah but then he went through with it yeah that's bold that's a bold i would if i if i were in that position i would think i didn't i

know i didn't see that sign i'm looking for that sign i didn't see that thing yeah it's it's interesting because he was young enough that he was you know he was like he trusted his coach now you might also take that same fact and say well he was young enough that he knows that he's fallible right like maybe he missed the sign like he hasn't been playing that long he doesn't you know he's only spending a year with his coach like it's clearly it's the first time he's ever seen this sign for sure right nobody quite remember what the sign was but people vaguely recalled it being like a pretty clear sign like uh somebody said that he thought it was that you put his whole hand in front of his face like a mask like not a an ambiguous sign but it's not just that he had to decide whether he saw the sign like he didn't want to see the sign

he saw the sign he knew he saw the sign like you can't like if you're jonah and you're running away from nineveh like you know that god told you right like he knew like jeff's leaving me like yeah of course so yeah i know the bible yeah so anyway uh so he like knew that he had but then he had to decide whether to do it and uh he said that if he had gotten this as a senior he would never have done it he would have just taken a hit and like ryan westmoreland who was his teammate and was a best player in like rhode island history said uh and who's dabbed as a coach on the team said he would not have done it like under no circumstances would he have taken off but other guys said yeah you know like i'd have done it especially if they were sophomores they said they were sophomores they definitely would

have done so um like it it's kind of a bummer this is not a play this is a play okay so let me before i say why it's a bummer this is a play that people have like fond memories of now like it's a everybody got something out of that tournament again not trying to give away like the whole ending but everybody got something from that tournament that was pretty special in their life and everybody kind of remembers that play specifically is a big moment that happened to them and only them and they were really like kind of it was mostly good memories about it but at the time it was miserable like everybody hated it you know they went home that night like in varying degrees of displeasure it was not a happy time and it was particularly tough because like johnny pedrotti the sophomore the youngest kid on the team who didn't quite know what to do who didn't know the rules who had

who had no idea what he was supposed to do because he had never he had never practiced this play and and he's again like he's the youngest player it's like if you're gonna put that on anybody it's sort of a shame that it had to be put on the sophomore pedrotti on the other hand though he might have been the only player on the team who would have been like there's the sign i'm doing this because he was young because you know that's what you do when you're the youngest young thing you follow the rules you follow the sign one of the the fun things about it is that so we're talking about pedrotti seeing the sign believing that he saw sign, and then going forward with the play. It seems like you could also just decide as a base runner, I don't care if I didn't see the sign.

I'm going to do the play. Yeah. Because you could just take off. And all of a sudden, you sort of entrap the runner on third. He's participating in the play now. This is a play that, in theory, you could just do whenever. You don't even need to see the sign and you know if the if the danger is you just retreat to first there's see there's it's the anti the story that uh that happened if pedrotti hadn't seen the sign but just decided to do it yeah i realize this isn't a question this

is a poor question i have no further questions i've uh i don't know if i ever talked about on this show but i've written about it a lot as like. This is one of my go-to examples when it comes to issues of unwritten rules and what's Bush and what's not. But Ben, do you know what I'm going to talk about? I don't think so. The Stanky play. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've talked about that, I think, at some point. So the Stanky play is in, I think, the late 40s.

Eddie Stanky was a second baseman. i think the late 40s eddie stanky uh it was a second baseman and um the batter sort of like asked the umpire hey could you move over like two steps you know you're like right in my vision and the umpire's like sure thing and eddie stanky goes light bulb and goes and stands right where the umpire was right because if the um the batter's bothered by it and i'm allowed to stand there i'm gonna bother him and so he does this a little bit the guys are like dude come on and then eddie stanky is like ah you know what else i'm allowed to do i'm allowed to do this and he stands right behind the pitcher they're watching me your knowledge movie stands right behind the pitcher when the pitcher goes into

his motion eddie stanky goes into his motion and starts delivering pitches right right behind the pitcher in the batter's line of vision totally legal the umpires are like uh it's just you've got to stop uh there's no rule but you've just got to stop and eddie agrees to stop but then he uh something happens later in the game or later in the series where i think he like slides into third and the third baseman like gets up and like starts like jawing at him like for sliding in too hard or something does something to make eddie stinky really mad and so eddie's like well hey if you're gonna be a jerk then i'm gonna go back to being like the guy behind the mound so like clearly there's an aggressiveness to this tactic in his mind so he goes back to being like the guy behind the mound so like clearly there's an aggressiveness to this

tactic in his mind so he goes back to doing that and uh you know i i don't even like i think that they changed the rules they did yeah pretty quickly like that yeah i think that he i think they found some like totally made up reason to eject him for something else and then they changed the rules but anyway the point is that like nobody listens to that story like you know he's the hero he's stanky like you just the like it's the as russell carlton put it one time like there's something that americans just find distasteful about trying too hard sometimes and i think that if a base runner did that on his own i think he would find no allies even if it worked and i mean honestly a coach found like that he didn't really have any allies and the coach midway through is like oh man

and i don't know why i mean partly it's the pressure the pure pressure of unwritten rules but partly it's just it's just embarrassing to do something weird that doesn't work because then you're eddie stanky the so the coach uh i this wasn't an article the coach who called this he brought up a play that you sometimes you might you might have seen this a few years ago some team did this in basketball i think a couple teams have done it since where it's an inbound play and as you're inbounding the ball one of your guys drops to the ground starts barking like a dog and everybody stops and looks at him and like loses the guy they're defending and you have like an open man who like shoots and makes the basket

it's like the a-rods yelling ha and a pop-up kind of it's kind of like that but you're barking like a dog and you're and like the key thing too i think is that you're not only barking like a dog but you are a child who has been told to bark like a dog by a grown-up who has decided that he can psychologically manipulate other children which is like there's again there's like something about trying too hard that we find distasteful so the coach was like i mean i know that's a bush play like i like i don't want to be that guy right and in a way like all of this stuff is negotiating like the question of whether you're that guy and the uh the whole idea of unwritten rules is trying to convince you that you're being that guy so that

you won't do the thing that is in your best interest like it's trying to force you to water down your own tactics so this was all about whether johnny pedrotti could have done it on his own but you didn't ask a question so i don't have to answer it do you think whether Johnny Pedrotti could have done it on his own, but you didn't ask a question, so I don't have to answer it. Do you think Johnny Pedrotti should have done it on his own? I think that Johnny Pedrotti should have done it again. After he went back to first, when Dan Bracey got back on the mound, he should have gone and done it again. Something would have changed.

Something would have changed so something would have changed dan bracy i think had like the best description of this entire process where he he said it's like an andy kaufman routine but he didn't do it long enough he did it long enough that you got mad but not long enough that the joke kicked in and two and a half minutes wasn't long enough. He could have done it for 40 minutes, right? And then what? Yeah. And then what? I don't know.

I don't know. He'd keep running further into the outfield. He could have. Just take one little step. Yeah. All right. Well, my delayed flight home has been canceled while we recorded this podcast. So I have to figure out how to get home.

I might be a permanent Portland resident. Yeah. So I should figure that out. But we wanted to talk while we were all in one place for once. So I'm glad we did. Thanks for podcasting, pals. Sam's already not paying attention to the podcast. It's over. All right. We will end there. All right. I should mention that two pieces of possible interest to you are up on the ringer now.

I recapped our Eclipse event, and we also published my Salinas stockade story. So you can go check those out now. I've linked them both in the Facebook group. You can also support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Daniel Watkins, Tony Allen, Aaron Gardner, Craig, and Melissa Scroggs. Thanks to all of you. You can join the aforementioned Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Keep your questions and comments coming via email from me and Jeff at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We'll be sure to do an email show if and when I ever make it home. Thanks to all of you who came out to the Eclipse event. Thanks to Meg Rowley and Patrick Dubuque from Baseball Perspectives for helping us. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for helping us at the event and also for helping edit this episode. If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Batman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. We did a bunch of banter and we talked to RJ Anderson, our pal from CBS Sports, about the growing information gap between teams and agents and the future of

labor relations in MLB. You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed and we will be back on the Effectively Wild feed very soon. I'm always looking for a trio, them and me. One for all and we're all for one. Musketeers have got to have the power of three. Power of free