Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1144: The Explosive Edition

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo, Shohei Ohtani’s true two-way prospects (look, there’s no other news), MLB’s extraordinarily slow November, and trampoline pitching, then talk to volcanologist Erik Klemetti about how baseball would weather volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and other fascinating but terrifying geologic events. Audio intro: Miniature Tigers, "Tell it to the Volcano" […]

Tell it to the volcano, from what I know you're going down the hole. Down you go, down the hole. Tell it to the volcano, save your sorrows. Tell it to the volcano. Hello and welcome to episode, I'll do it Ben's way, 1144 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben.

Hello. Really rolled off the tongue. 1144 saved us some time. I'm just feeling it now. It really gets you amped up. It builds momentum. And today we're going to be joined by a very wonderful internet friend of mine named Eric Clemente. He's going to talk about volcanoes, but in sort of a baseball way.

We tried. Anyway, baseball, it's on you. If you want us to not do this anymore, you need to make something happen. But before we get to Eric, I think we have a little bit of banter. And I just wanted to quickly throw out, because I just saw across the Roto World transaction wire, the following words all in a row. Twins signed catcher Williams,udio to a minor league contract. This news unlikely to have any impact at the major league level, but for anyone who is unfamiliar with Williams, that's Williams with an N, Astudio,

he is a 26-year-old catcher. He's listed at 5'9", 225. You can think of that whatever you want. But Astudio became, I think, very, very, very minorly internet famous some years ago when people noticed that, oh, if you've ever tried to design a baseball player who doesn't strike out, he would look like this guy because he doesn't strike out. And for reference in the year i don't know which is the best one here in the year 2011 for example astrodio with the phillies rookie league affiliate he batted 220 times that's again 220 plate appearances and he struck out twice he struck out two times the

year before that he struck out four times the year after that he struck out five times last season he made it all the way up to the diamondbacks triple a affiliate he only batted 128 times i'm going to assume he got injured but not only did he have a very good batting line but out of his 128 plate appearances he struck out five times that's a strikeout rate of 3.9 percent and i looked at everyone in the minor leagues last year who batted at least 100 times and there were only two lower strikeout rates. One by Gabriel Moreno with the Blue Jays Rookie League affiliate. Then there's Brian Torres in the Indians and also Brewers Rookie League affiliate. They struck out 3.7 and 3.8% of the time.

Astro Dio struck out 3.9% of the time, and that was up at AAA. So he had easily the best strikeout rate at a high level now Brian Pena the veteran catcher he was with the Royals AAA affiliate he struck out just 5.2 percent of the time I didn't know that but I don't care because Williams Astudio has made it to AAA he's now with the Twins and as you look at his history he's actually hit he's hit decently well he doesn't walk but he doesn't strike out he He doesn't walk, but he doesn't strike out. He doesn't hit for power, but he doesn't strike out. He just hits everything. He is one. I know there's there's a lot of ways you could go with this, but he is one of the most extraordinary, most exceptional. I don't know. Pick your word. If you think unique is one of those words that has gray areas, which I think by definition it doesn't, whatever. He is a unique kind of baseball player, and he has a job. Yeah, he's definitely, if he makes it up to the majors, he's going to be like the hipster fan's favorite player

because there's so much about him to be amused by or that is endearing. And he's a fine framer, according to Baseball Perspectives' stats as a catcher. He is listed at 5'9", 225 And if we assume that maybe one of those numbers Is exaggerated upward And one of them is slightly depressed Then that is not your typical baseball build So between that and the strikeouts

And the framing and everything I think I am certainly ready to love him So I hope he makes it up to Minnesota. Absolutely. His last year in AAA, the league average swing rate was 46%. Astrodio swung 59% of the time. The league average contact rate was 78%. Astrodio's contact rate, 89%.

He saw fewer than three pitches per plate appearance, which is just bizarre because I'm going to guess he just swings early and swings at everything and he puts the bat on the ball so as frustrating as i think it is and can be to like pitch to jose altuve there's another little version of the same kind of dude who has kind of a different skill set i don't think anyone would consider astro dio fast anymore but if he can frame and he can make contact you know you don't need to hit the ball that hard to hit home runs at the major league level these days. All right. Couple other quick things before we get to Eric. We can't go a whole episode without at least mentioning Shohei Otani.

So I just wanted to mention briefly I was listening to Joe Sheehan's podcast yesterday. Joe is great. Subscribe to his newsletter if you're not already. And he is an Otani skept skeptic at least when it comes to his prospects as a two-way player and that's certainly fair and we've seen you know a no one really succeed at being a true two-way player for a very long time and some players who have kind of flirted with it it hasn't really worked out it sounds like anthony ghost by the way is is going to be the latest one to do that.

I know he is someone you've written about in the past, but he recently made a conversion to pitching, right? And he was signed to a minor league deal by the Rangers, and he's going to be pitching in relief and also playing center field. So you get those kind of fringy guys on the back of the roster who do this or try to do this, and maybe it saves you a little roster space or helps you put a 16th reliever on your roster or whatever. But I think Joe is skeptical about Otani's ability to do it on a regular basis, and I think that's totally reasonable. I just wonder, because Joe's argument is basically that it's really difficult to do. And obviously that's true. The fact that no one does it is good evidence of the fact that it's difficult to do. And as he mentions, a lot of people who end up being pitchers in the major leagues are good hitters at some point in their lives. Maybe they're the best hitter on their little league team or their travel ball team or their high school team, but they stop developing that skill because pitchers aren't selected for that skill.

So it just falls out of use. They don't practice it. And by the time they get to the majors, they're hopelessly, helplessly overmatched. Even if they maybe had some hitting talent, it's basically just gone and atrophied. So that's his concern about Otani, that it's just really difficult to do both of those things. And while I agree that it's very difficult to do both of those things, I keep thinking he's already made it, essentially, as someone who can do both of those things, right? Because he's been playing at basically at quadruple A level because the best evidence we have suggests that NPB is somewhere between triple A and the majors.

And he's been the best hitter or one of the very best hitters in that league, and he's done it at a young age. So the fact that he has already developed his offensive talents to that degree, to me, I mean, he's gotten to the point now where I think we can already say he's made it. Now, there are concerns about how hitting what he hit in Japan translates to the majors for any player. You know, it can be tough to transition if you're a power hitter in particular. You might lose a lot of that. So there's that. And then there's also the concern about just whether teams will be willing to think out of the box enough to find ways to use him as a hitter and also to risk his pitching skill by using him as a hitter.

So those are all good reasons, I think, to doubt that he can do this. But to me, the talent is there. I'm less concerned about just how difficult it is to do because he has demonstrated that he can do it, I think, at least enough to be competent, if not necessarily a star. Yeah, right. this isn't like a brendan mckay situation where you have a prospect who's coming out of i don't want to say nowhere but coming out of a low level saying i can hit and i can pitch this is like you said he has already demonstrated otani didn't just have a great offensive year in 2016 he had a very good offensive year in 2014 he had a good offensive year last year when his season was cut short by injury.

He had a 942 OPS in the NPB last year while he struggled to pitch because of an injury. But he's been a very good pitcher for years. He's been a good hitter for years. Not necessarily an excellent hitter, but a good, legitimate power threat. And incidentally, this has nothing to do with anything, but you mentioned Anthony goes, and I will say to his credit, even though he allowed nine runs in 10.2 innings as a high A ball pitcher last year, he did strike out 14 batters out of 45. So he had a, he struck out 12 batters per nine innings, which is pretty good. There's something there for Anthony goes, something there for the Rangers to dream on. But anyway,

this is about Otani, not Anthony goes. otani will be in the major leagues next year anthony goes almost certainly will not and yeah i think it's fair to be a skeptic of of how good otani can be i i don't think that i necessarily buy him as someone who could be a regular outfielder and a regular pitcher that just yeah i find to be unlikely but yeah but the idea of of him being able to hit at least as well as like madison bum garner and maybe be more than that then there's a lot there so it's fine to be skeptical but there's thinking otani can have a 900 ops in the major leagues and there's thinking he can manage a 750 and i think he could manage a 750 mike league manages 750 right okay another quick thing just a follow-up really. We

talked on the previous episode about the slow month that we've just witnessed and I ran some numbers and the book is not quite closed on November because we're speaking about halfway through Thursday and that's the last day of November. So a couple more moves might squeak in under the wire here, but I was able to confirm with help from Baseball Reference and Baseball Prospectus that this is the least active November in terms of trades and signings of Major League players, players who appeared in the majors in the most recent season since 1991. And of course, in 1991, there were four fewer Major League teams. There were like 300 or more fewer baseball players who appeared in the majors. So it is quite notable that this is the slowest month in terms of activity, at least trades and free agent signings going back 26 years to when baseball was completely different. And if you break it down not by number of moves, but by the quality, not the quantity, but the quality of the players moved, it's pretty similar.

Just whether you look at kind of career cumulative war of the group produced to date or just the combined single season war in the most recent season, this is a very sorry group, and it's something like the worst group or second worst group war-wise since the mid-80s. So this is basically a collusion level month. This would not really have looked out of place in like the mid to late 80s when teams were actively conspiring against players. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it has to be largely Otani and Stanton related and all the factors that we discussed yesterday probably playing a part too. But to me, I think, you know, as simplistic and

obvious as it is, I still think there's something to the Otani and Stanton effect. And I think it's mostly Otani as well, because look, of course, you can say every single team can fit him in. So why bother? But the reality is that Otani will be one of the starting pitchers. Teams have a limited number of spots available. Otani is everyone's probably number one priority. And then you wouldn't want to, like the Rangers signed Doug Fisher, but that's because they need like seven starting pitchers so they went and they got one because they have room not many teams have that kind of room right now so you need to know what's happening with otani before you move on to other starters and depending on what you do with your starters that affects what you're going to do with your bullpen so i do think otani has a lot of this i think we'll see the activity ramp up as things narrow down otani

is presumably going to if he hasn't already just narrow down his pool of actual reasonable suitors i think there's already as we talked about the other day there's already an understanding of how many teams are probably involved and i don't know if it's six or eight or ten but some teams will fall away from that and then they will get busy on the market but then those available pitchers if they are free agents aren't necessarily going to want to sign contracts until they get as many teams involved as possible which will require Otani further narrowing his field so it's Otani I'm going to somewhat go against what I said just the other day and say yeah it's it's mostly Otani yeah and I was able to to look also just at kind of the general shape of the typical offseason.

And in the past, what period did I look at? Something like eight offseasons. There had been about 20%, just a little more than 20% of all trades and signings occur in November. And then December is about double that. It's a little more than 40%. That's the most active off-season month. And then January is about on par with November. And then February is less busy and March is not busy at all in that respect. So it is unusual. I mean, November is not the busiest and most active month in any off-season really, but this is extreme.

And as we speak, there has not been a single either top 50 free agent, according to MLB trade rumors, not a single top 50 guy has been signed. I think they had 13 honorable mentions. None of them has signed. And even just comparing that to last offseason, which was not particularly active by November standards. And I think that was maybe partly because teams were waiting to see what happened with the CBA, which was not agreed to until December. But even last offseason, there were, I think, 13 of the top 50 were signed during November, including Yonis Cespedes, who was number one overall. And then there were more trades consummated as well,

including the big Mariners-Diamondbacks trade with Segura and Walker and Marte and Hanegar and all those guys. So even compared to last year, which was not at all abnormal, if anything, it was abnormally inactive. This year, just, I mean, it completely pales in comparison. So this is a total outlier and it's strange. And I guess the saving grace is that if this has been a boring month, it just means that the remaining months will be more entertaining

and active than usual because all these guys are going to get signed. They're going to get jobs. So it's going to have to happen at some point. Shout out to Yusmero Petit who signed a two-year deal with the A's. And basically, though, if you're wondering why we are spending this baseball podcast interviewing a professor of geosciences, there's your answer. Yeah. And the very last thing, we've had numerous tweets about this and Facebook threads about it. We are talking about one of your favorite things, volcanoes, later in this episode. So let's talk just for a second about one of your least favorite things, trampolines. And as many people have pointed out, the writer at the Sporting News and River Avenue Blues and other places, Seungmin Kim,

tweeted yesterday he unearthed a YouTube video that is on YouTube in full. There's almost a half hour clip there, but it's like a Japanese game show, which is, you know, that's all you have to hear usually to know that it's worth watching. And this is evidently from 2002 when there was an MLB Japan All-Star Series, and a bunch of well-known players went over to Japan. And this clip includes Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Bernie Williams, The clip includes Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Bernie Williams, and it has them facing strange obstacles, the kind of things that we often talk about in our listener email show, Hypotheticals. And most notably, there is a pitcher jumping on a trampoline pitching to Barry Bonds, which is a confluence of frequent podcast topics. Did you see this clip? I have a vague recollection, actually, that we discussed this very clip like last January. I feel like this went around before, except that the

YouTube video was posted in May of this year. And I can't remember, there was, I feel like, another Japanese game show clip with baseball players where maybe they were facing like super fast pitches or something like that. I think that's another one that sometimes circulates so i think this is a newer upload of an older well we know it's an older video because it's 16 years old but i have i have definitely seen this on youtube before and i i think i think we have talked about it probably back in our initial trampoline phase probably so do you have any thoughts upon watching it again or reviewing it from when we last talked about it i think the notable thing i mean obviously this pitcher gets some serious air

here and bonds at first looks lost but then eventually he gets a hold of one hits a home run he is barry bonds and i think as kazuya mazaki faithful listener patreon supporter pointed out in a tweet, you get pretty good downhill plane, get good trajectory on your pitches if you're like 20 feet up in the air as this trampolining pitcher is. So as dangerous as trampolines are and as hazardous to your health, this does seem like something that would be very advantageous for a pitcher, at least until he hurt himself horribly.

Well, it does, but it also doesn't, right? Because you get that plane and presumably just like how we know baseball lowered the mound to make hitting more possible back in 1969 you get the downhill plane you get the weird angles but you also just don't get any sort of drive toward the plate i we don't have a radar gun on how fast the guy is throwing but you know barry bonds did catch up with him in a very short amount of time and he was able to hit a home run against something he'd never seen before in his life. I assume, unless this is some sort of weird Barry Bonds training technique that he's actually been doing for a very long time. Probably not.

No one would volunteer to be that pitcher. But if you're a pitcher, if you're throwing 90 miles per hour from a trampoline, great. You will be the best pitcher in the world. If you're throwing 75 from a trampoline great you will be the best pitcher in the world if you're throwing 75 from a trampoline maybe not how slow how how much do you have to lose from your stuff before you lose the advantage because yeah you're effectively coming from all kinds of wild arm angles but you can't be getting that forward momentum that you would from an actual mound true very true yeah i would you know it's probably just like a rich hill kind of thing, varying your release point. If you can vary your

release point so that at one point you're releasing the ball from six feet or whatever, and the next one you're releasing from 20 feet, I'd imagine that might confuse a hitter, although that would probably also impair your command. So pluses and minuses, and there's always the injury risk, which is really not a risk. It's a certainty. All right. Let's take a quick break. We will be back in just a moment with Eric Clemente. My heart's trending just for you. It wasn't any equate. And my heart's trending just for you. And when the walls came crumbling, crumbling down. When the walls came crumbling, crumbling down.

So today we're going to be joined by someone I think is probably my coolest internet friend. Today we're going to be joined by someone I think is probably my coolest internet friend, and he is also the author of a post on my old blog, Lookout Landing, that I thought was the coolest post we ever ran on the website, and I was very pleased to run a post talking about the potential destruction of Matt Rainier and its various implications for the Seattle Mariners. We are joined by Eric Clemente, who, let's see, according to the Denison website, is the associate professor and chair of the geosciences department. You can

follow him on Twitter at Eruptions Blog. He is also the author of Rocky Planet for Discover. He just wrote a post that was published on Thursday titled, Humans are creating the newest earthquake zones in North America. It's the off-season. Nothing in baseball is happening.

So let's talk about stuff that could be happening for baseball that has nothing to do with a hot stove. Eric, if you have a minute, which you very clearly do because you're here as a guest, why don't you explain anything further about who you are and how you and I are even connected on the Internet? So hi, I'm a professor at GSIS, how you and I are even connected on the internet. So hi, I'm a professor of geosciences, and I have taken a weird roundabout route to get here, as everybody does. Everybody's career doesn't kind of follow the plan they expect. But I'm a volcanologist here in the middle of Ohio,

which is not exactly the place most people would think of for somebody who studies volcanoes. But you know, you go where the jobs are. But most of my work these days is out on the West Coast looking at volcanoes like Mount Hood and Lassen Peak and fun stuff like that. And I was trying to think back to exactly these memories of trying to remember how you met someone, especially on the interwebs. It's hard to remember, and I actually don't recall any specific interaction other than, you know, I'm a big baseball fan. I have been since I grew up in north central Worcester County in Massachusetts and attempted as a little leaguer to emulate Dwight Evans batting stance as much as I could. But, you know, people who like baseball, people like volcanoes. So it seems natural that certain people will like both. And I think that's kind of how we

got to where we are. Do people like volcanoes? Or is that just Jeff mostly? Are most people afraid of volcanoes? Do they avoid volcanoes? I feel like I should mute myself and leave you two alone because I don't want to obstruct any of the potential bonding that could happen here i mean there it's there is a large body on the internet of volcano aficionados and you know i guess it's like with what there's probably a group of people on the internet who like almost anything um yes but but volcanoes there's a lot of them out there you know back when i was writing um my previous blog which is just about which was just about volcanoes, there were a healthy population of people who would leave comments that were not horrible comments, but good comments. And they were really into volcanoes to the point where a group of the commenters splintered off and formed their own website of volcano discussion that they could do on their own. So whatever.

Wow. It's just like this podcast inspired a baseball block banished to the pen. Yeah. It's weird how it sort of takes a life of its own and you're kind of sit there watching it all develop and hoping it doesn't somehow come over and destroy you in the process. There's probably another similarity between what we do where Ben and I, when we write about baseball, baseball is a sport a lot of people played when they were very young. And even though it's changed in recent years, a lot of people have been resistant to sort of the analytical techniques because people think of baseball in the same way that they did when they were 10. And I would imagine when you're talking about volcanoes, I've seen the sensationalist headlines that get written in newspapers. Everyone freaks out about Yellowstone.

It seems like it's also a subject where people think of what you do in the same way that they thought about volcanoes when they were in the second grade. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that most people's, I guess, most people probably, the average person doesn't think about volcanoes much. But when they do, when they do, they think about volcanoes as being the things that are going to kill people. So it is very much, I think, a sort of visceral reaction. And for those of us who study volcanoes and think about them every day, you realize that, as I like to remind my students, volcanoes spend most of their existence not erupting. So there's not really you can as long as you're paying attention, you're probably not going to off yourself. Although, you know, volcanologists on a fairly regular basis do off themselves on volcanoes. Not as much recently, but in the past, it definitely happened.

But it's something that I think people, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who when presented with videos of volcanoes erupting, wouldn't think it was really cool. But there's an awful lot of sort of colloquial quote unquote knowledge of volcanoes that people have that just is very sort of antiquated or just out and out wrong. Yeah. Maybe baseball is the most volcano-like sport in its structure in that there's a lot of standing around and waiting for something to happen and just everything is dormant and standing still. And then there are brief bursts of violent activity and intense activity that we then can analyze at length. Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of the

times what volcanologists, what we're trying to do is we're looking at what a volcano has done in the past to figure out what it's going to do in the future, which is what people spend an awful lot of time in baseball trying to figure out. So, you know, you look at a volcano starting to show signs that it's going to erupt like a gung, one that's currently erupting in Indonesia. And there's, in the past, it's had some big eruptions that had significant impacts on, you know, the last eruption in 63 killed somewhere over 1500 people, I believe. But, you know, it's also had other periods with smaller eruptions. And it's the same way, you know, trying to look at how, what to expect out of a baseball player is that people will remember the big eruptions at a volcano, just like people might remember, I don't know, Brady Anderson hitting 50 plus home runs and the

rest of his career was definitely not that way. But that's kind of the image some people have of Brady as player. Right. Yeah. And I remember reading from in Nate Silver's book that predicting earthquakes certainly and probably volcanic eruptions too, I would imagine is even more difficult than projecting baseball players because you don't have as much data. Maybe you can't say how many eruptions this volcano have in the last three seasons and will weight the most recent season most heavily. I mean, maybe the principles are the same, but the predictability of it seems not to be. Yeah, I mean, it's challenging because, you know, if volcanoes were baseball players, it'd be like trying to predict how baseball players' performance, how it's going to happen in the future if players have been playing for, you know, a few million years and you

weren't there for most of it. And you had to kind of guess based on scattered remnants of newspapers scattered around the volcano of box scores exactly what that player had done and uh you know when you start getting really down to it when you're trying to understand volcanoes it'd be like i don't know burying the stadium five kilometers beneath your feet and then trying to figure out what's going on down there it's like you need some sort of uh you're you're just missing a volcano version of Retro Sheet or Baseball Reference, and you're just piecing together old newspaper box scores. that, where they have compiled from what they can gather out of the literature and historical records, every eruption and non-eruption that then has been discredited for, you know, all, almost all the volcanoes that erupted in the last, oh, I think go back probably a few hundred

thousand years. So it's good, but you know, a lot of this evidence has just been erased completely. So not going to ever find some of the smaller evidence of smaller things that have happened. So in theory, the reason we wanted to bring you one, first of all, wanted to have you as a guest just to nerd out. But also because there are a lot of potential effects of the earth sciences and even volcanoes specifically on the game of baseball. And this is something we can discuss. This is something that you did write about. I think it was five years ago that you wrote your post about Mount Rainier and its potential consequences for the Seattle Mariners. So why don't we just quickly kind of reflect on those? Because I don't know, I don't think that

there is a major league baseball team that is closer to a considered active volcano than the Mariners are. Oregon still doesn't have a major league baseball team and the volcanoes in California aren't so close to the California baseball team. So if you, if you might, why don't you talk a little bit about the, uh, the effects that Mount Rainier could have on the Seattle Mariners and I suppose their AAA affiliate in Tacoma. Yeah. I mean, Rainier is an interesting case of course, because it's parked relatively close to both Seattle and Tacoma. And if you look at some of the U.S. Geological Survey hazard maps for Rainier, they clearly show that it's points in the past. Mud flows have come down off Rainier when it's erupted and gone all the way down into Puget Sound across

what is now Tacoma. It's a little harder for that sort of material to reach Seattle, but the eruptions and the cascades tend to be explosive eruptions with a lot of ash, and that ash can spread quite widely. And that would be the biggest hazard for Seattle would be ash falling, depending on which way the winds are blowing and the size of the eruption at Rainier. So really what it boils down to is that if you were to have a big eruption, or even any sort of eruption at Rainier, that getting in and out of Seattle would become very problematic, both in terms of maybe ash on highways making and they'd have to take the train down to the next game. And the ash, if the eruption was big enough, the ash could spread laterally to the east across North America and close airspace. So you have this in the middle of the season and travel schedules could definitely get interesting for teams if they're trying to

go from whatever a Sunday night game to a Monday game across the country and they have to fly weird routes or take the train. The Mariners already have it hard enough in that area, right? Because they're usually the team that has to fly the most total miles over the course of a baseball season, or at least they were until recently. So that's even rougher than if there's a volcano eruption that makes them take a detour. Yeah, I mean, and there are other volcanoes that are a little less well-known, close to some of the other teams, like Los Angeles. There are small cinder cones that exist off to the east of the Los Angeles area. And then there's some rhyolite domes, sort of little sticky explosive eruptions that

happen down in the Salton Sea area as well that are places where you're going to potentially have, you could have eruptions, and that would be fun to see what would happen if you had an eruption in the LA basin. Or there's Clear Lake, which is just to the northeast of San Francisco, where there are Clear Lake, which is actually a place where there's a couple volcanoes right around the lake that produced some explosive eruptions in the past. And in fact, they do all the geothermal energy there because there's some nice hot rock down beneath the surface. If you go down to the coast on the peninsula near San Francisco and go at Fort Funston, there's a place where you go down to

the shoreline and you walk along and then there's suddenly this like bleach white layer of rock in the cliffs that's maybe about eight inches thick. And that's actually ash from an eruption out by Lassen, which is a couple hundred kilometers away. So it's not out of the question that you have a big enough eruption, you could impact San Francisco. You know, at that point, probably worrying about what's going to happen to the baseball travel schedule is going to be some of the least of our worries. But it's, again, interesting to consider what the consequences might be. It's all right. This is a hyper-focused podcast, and we have a hyper-focused audience. And so,

you know, it is the baseball travel schedule that is relevant to us. And so if I'm getting a message here, it's that the West Coast should be concerned about more than just the massive earthquake for which it's overdue. The earthquakes are probably the top hazard. The Cascades right now, so the Cascades are the volcanoes running from Northern California, Lassen and Shasta, up through Oregon, all the way up into British Columbia. And, you know, they're a quiet bunch of volcanoes as volcanoes go. St. Helens is really the only one that's erupted in the last 100 years. But there are a bunch of volcanoes scattered around California, like I was saying, and into

Nevada. And of course, all along the sort of Yellowstone chain there. So the West Coast volcanic eruptions are something that I would say is not to be neglected as something to be concerned about, especially if you're somebody living near one. So if you're living in the areas of Portland near Hood or living in Bend in Oregon where you got a bunch of volcanoes all the way around you, it's something to bear in mind because it's not out of the question that these could start acting up again. I was wondering, this might get a little too deep, but with certain eruptions that take place, eruptive force can temporarily stunt tree growth, correct? And I don't know the specific relationship there, but the tree rings are tighter together. I believe I've seen that in some of your posts and things that you have retweeted. So, okay. So hear me out, hear me out. People have been boning bats because they try to get the wood to be more dense and they remove,

or they smooth out some of the pores that are in the wood. But hypothetically, if you were creating baseball bats out of trees where the tree rings are closer together near the surface because of some sort of eruptive activity do you think maybe this is more of a physics question do you think that that could make the bat feel more dense maybe lead to greater power output yeah i guess how do i approach that you haven't considered this question before? climate of a hemisphere or global climate, then the tree rings are going to be stunted if you cool the climate and potentially allow less sunlight to reach the surface because of all the volcanic aerosols like sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere that is reflecting sunlight back into space. So you'd end up having stunted growth in places where the climate was no longer as favorable for plant growth.

So it's kind of a signal. Most eruptions, you know, you'd have to think of a really big eruption like the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago or so that you have like a decade of cooler temperatures that might give you enough tree rings to make a difference. But otherwise, it might be like two seasons worth of slower growth, and then everything goes back to normal. So I would say that you would be probably hard-pressed to find trees that would have enough stunted growth to make a difference would be my totally wild speculation. So in the event of a catastrophic volcanic eruption, there might be a very small incidental effect on the

manufacturing of baseball bats. That's what I'm getting here. Yes, that a massive super volcanic eruption could see an increase in home runs across the league. Although, in that case, you get a lot of ash released into the atmosphere,

you get some global cooling or at least some counteraction of global warming. And we know that increasing temperature leads to balls flying farther. And so in that sense, maybe it would be good for keeping the home run rate down. Is there any potential for the current eruption that is going on or threatening to go on actually leading to a downturn in temperatures or a temporary pause in the rise of temperatures? Now, I mean, for the eruption in Indonesia right now to have a dent, they have to get a lot bigger because a lot of it has to do with getting material up into the stratosphere. And the eruption plumes right now are not tall enough to do that.

Not enough stuff's coming out. So, you know, you have to really go back to probably Mount Pinatubo in 1991 to get a climate signal. And it's like maybe half a degree cooling. So I would imagine it'd be tough to see, you know, I don't know. I've never looked at to see what, you know, home runs in 90 versus 92 to see if we see any signal of that. They were going up, I think, at that time. What is it, Jeff? It's like 10 degrees is an extra 3.6 feet or something like that is what Alan Nathan spent. Yeah, I have the note written right here that I think when I was looking at Alan Nathan's work earlier this morning,

it was about a third of a foot per one degree. So I guess that would be one foot for every three degrees. This is in Fahrenheit. I understand most scientific research is done in Celsius. But so yeah, that would, you have it almost exactly correct. 10 degrees, about a little over three feet. So I mean, if you had, let's say, an eruption like Tambora in 1815, that actually created, you know, the year without a summer when it was snowing in new england in july maybe you know you'd have a season that that you could see temperatures actually dropping that much for part of the summer in the northern parts of the north america so that it'd be interesting to see you'd also have like you know july snow outs where you which would make for a season that i don't know how you if you if you're canceling a lot more games, how you fix that easily.

Yeah. Well, so I guess that as nice as it would be to lower the global temperature a bit, I guess the widespread death and destruction and starvation and famine and possibly fewer home runs that would result from such an eruption, maybe you would make that something that you can't really root for. It's a challenging thing to root for, for sure. Is there a... Year of famine slash year of the picture. Yeah. Is there like a moral hazard in your job in that you want stuff to happen so that you can study it, but often when that stuff happens,

it means that lots of people and things get destroyed. I mean, you are... Let's see. One of the things that... Let's say for right now with the eruption going on in Indonesia, one of the things that a lot of the volcanologists that I know are most interested in is making sure that the people who are living near the volcano understand what the hazards are. So that's really, you know, in the end, what we'd really like is a significant eruption that isn't going to have large global impact happening away from where people are. So some of the eruptions that have happened recently, let's say like on the Chilean or Argentinian border in the Andes, where there aren't a lot of people, are nice because they're spectacular, but there's not a large population center or large population nearby. Because in Indonesia, a lot of these volcanoes, with 100 kilometers of the volcano, there's a couple million people living. So it'd be better if that number is down at a couple hundred

people that can easily get moved out quickly. But it is, yeah, whenever, you know, and a lot of geologists, we run into this problem is that we study things that are destructive because we're trying to figure out why they happen so we can protect people. But in order to understand them, we need to have them happen so we see what's going on. So it's there is that sort of you feel bad to be excited about some of the stuff that's happening. You can sort of justify it by saying, you know, what's bad for the present is good for the infinite future. So in that sense, you might be able to rationalize it away a little bit. To some degree, I guess, if you can save people. I mean, that's kind of a lot of the advances that have happened in volcanology were spurred on by big disasters. So like the eruption that happened in Columbia in 1985 at Nevada del Ruiz that killed, the mud flows killed over 20,000

people. That was one of these moments that the volcanology community is like, hey, we got to get better at making sure that people understand the hazards of volcanoes. And that's helped a lot. And if you actually plot numbers of deaths in eruptions versus time in the last 150 years, there's the blip of that eruption in Colombia, and there's a blip at the eruption of Palay in Martinique in 1902. But otherwise, the trend is, especially in the 20th century, is down. So we seem to be getting better at making sure fewer people are dying interruptions, especially over the last 50 years. I think baseball is probably overdue to expand. Right now, we've been sitting on 30 teams for, what is it, 20 years, just about. And baseball, bringing in a whole lot of revenue, probably

could stand to add two teams, and it could stand to add two teams in the near term future and Montreal has been bandied about and as far as I know geologically speaking Montreal kind of boring but you've got two locations that have been proposed Portland being Portland Oregon being one of them and Portland is an area that would be potentially susceptible to earthquake effects and also volcanic effects but then you also have Mexico City a more adventurous proposal but it's a gigantic city, a whole lot of people, a whole lot of baseball fans. And Mexico City sort of comes at you from three angles. You've got Popocatépetl, which is just constantly erupting relatively nearby.

I would assume you have some pretty significant tectonic effects. And you also have a city that is more than 7,000 feet above sea level. So if you were coming at this from both the earth sciences and also baseball fan perspective, can you think of a more interesting, reasonable location for a baseball team to end up than Mexico City? Define reasonable. I got one city that pops straight into my head when you're talking about that, but it would be interesting, but I don't know how reasonable it is. You could plop a team in Tokyo. That would be a place where you could get lots of people, lots of earthquakes, lots of volcanoes all sitting right there. But that would be one heck of road trips for certain teams if you had a major league team playing in Tokyo.

Well, I can bring to your attention that there are baseball teams in tokyo they do they do exist and i i have to admit that i don't know enough about their own their own history of let's say scheduling difficulties vis-a-vis tectonic events yeah and that's a i don't remember when what months the japanese league runs. And I can't, I recall that after the big earthquake, the Tohoku earthquake that generated the big tsunami, there was a, I want to say there was a delay in the season because of it. And I can't remember the details now, but you know, it's just one of these things that if you are in places that are geologically active, it's just something that you're going to have to be prepared for that you might have a big geologic event in the middle of your season. And Mexico City would

definitely be a place that you would expect that you might have disruptions because of Popocatépetl getting more restless or an earthquake causing damage to the city and those sorts of things. Although, you know, the same thing, Portland would be the same way as Portland. It's got the hazard of earthquakes. It's got Mount Hood and St. Helens nearby. It's got its own lava field with the, you know, not aptly named boring volcanic fields just to the east of the city. So there are definitely opportunities there for geologic delays to the season that have to be dealt with. So far, the closest that I think we've had for that sort of thing in most of the last 20 years would be some of the changing of venues after Hurricane Harvey or something like that. Yeah. If you're interested in the altitude

effects, I tried to write about them earlier this year, the last time everyone was talking about Mexico City as a potential expansion site, and I approached it from a physics perspective and from an actual empirical perspective, looking at the stats there, and it would be really, really extreme. Like, if you think Coors Field is extreme, this would kind of put that to shame, and you can't really use a humidor to great effect there because it is pretty humid typically in the summer. So you can go read about that at length if you want to try to see how I forecasted the home run effects, but I did not cover the volcanic effects. That was outside of my area of expertise. I mean, is it the sort of thing, and this is where my lack of knowledge of all of the

rules of baseball is like, could you design a stadium to mitigate it rather than changing the balls, change the stadium? I don't know, have 20-foot walls on all sides of the outfield or something? Yeah, it's tough to do. I mean, in Coors Field, they kind of tried to do that in that they have the biggest outfield or something. Yeah, it's tough to do. I mean, in Coors Field, they kind of tried to do that in that they have the biggest outfield in baseball. And that's one way you can keep home runs down, except then you give up lots of other types of hits. And so Coors Field always has the highest batting average on balls in play. So you're kind of screwed whatever you do in one way or the other. I mean, that would make an argument for if you had a team in Mexico City with a big outfield, they just always play with three infielders and four outfielders

and try to mitigate that influence there. I mean, in theory, people have proposed for Colorado, the idea of like a pressurized dome. And I don't know, I don't know if that exists. I'm sure that it could exist if you spent enough money on the stadium but then if you have a pressurized dome has i assume the answer is maybe yes but has architecture advanced to the point where you could build a dome that large that could still withstand say the event of significant ashfall or i'm now the granted look the the under the undertone of this entire conversation is if something big happens there's probably going to be bigger issues than the local baseball team. But that being said, could a baseball stadium dome hold up to the tremendous weight of considerable ash fall? It would depend on how much is the ash fall. Because ash, you sometimes get the impression watching movies or news footage that it's kind of like snow.

But of course, it's like snow if the snow was a couple, two or three times as dense as regular snow. So it builds up a few centimeters and then maybe it rains a little bit and that stuff gets heavy fast. centimeters and then maybe it rains a little bit and that stuff gets heavy fast so i would imagine i can't think of there hasn't been a lot of architectural design thought to my knowledge of exactly how you build volcano proof houses other than making sturdy roofs because otherwise you know you're more concerned about earthquakes associated with the volcanoes. So you build houses that are seismically prepared for such things. But in terms of ash, you know, I don't know if anyone's spent, I'm sure somebody has, but I can't think of off the top of my head of studies where, you know, is there an optimal shape to the roof to keep, you know, people design roofs to keep snow off. So ash might work the same way. to keep snow off so ash might work the same way so do you design a stadium that has a dome shape that would have the ash come sloughing off instead and bury the people waiting outside but it is an interesting question to my knowledge no one's ever thought about it and you know they haven't ever you know none of the kind of the soccer stadiums in mexico are domed to my knowledge

maybe they are but i don't think they're domed because they're worried about ash fall. So I would imagine that the volcano you probably get the most questions about is Yellowstone. Yellowstone happens to be located near zero Major League Baseball teams, and it happens also to be located not too close to any major population centers. I don't want to demean the population centers that are relatively close by to Yellowstone, but they're not enormous. So you've written several times about how you think Yellowstone is overblown, and there's no evidence it's overdue for a massive eruption, etc. People can read your material if they want to have more knowledge. But how large do you think, how large of an eruption do you think we could see at Yellowstone around which

they could continue to play the Major League Baseball season? I mean, the largest eruption that we've had in the lower 48 states in pretty much the history of Major League Baseball was the 1980 eruption at St. Helens. That, to my knowledge, had absolutely no impact. It was in May, so the season was going. It had no impact. That was about a VI-5. VI is the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

A 5 is a pretty big eruption. So you'd probably have to get up to something bigger than we've seen anywhere on the planet in tens of thousands of years before you start seriously being concerned about the viability of the major league season, which I guess in my mind, I look at it as that anything that would impact the viability of a season as a geologic event is something that's also probably impacting the viability of modern human society. So take it as you will. You need to have a big enough event that the fabric of society begins to crumble. Then we can be talking about what happens to all the games that get canceled. I can tell you this much. I hadn't looked this up before, but so the big blast when St. Helens finally really blew its top in 1980 happened on May 18th. As you know, it was the morning of May 18th. And on Sunday, May 18th, the Seattle Mariners were playing a game in Chicago. And then Seattle somehow, seemingly without incident,

which I hadn't considered before. But considering that a minor league game in Spokane was ashed out because of the eruption, I'm a little bit surprised. I would like to read more about that flight path. I imagine thinking of the ash from that St. Helens eruption mostly went north and east. So I would guess that if they're coming from Chicago, they just swung south and then out around to the west of the volcano and probably wouldn't have a huge problem. As long as they're happy with the way the prevailing winds are sending the ash to that easterly direction. So maybe an eruption – St. Helens is not in the same location as, let's say, Rainier, which is a lot closer to SeaTac and the airports. But apparently it didn't cause them too much concern. same location as, let's say, Rainier, which is a lot closer to SeaTac and the airports. But apparently, it didn't cause them too much concern.

They made it back to Seattle. How big an earthquake do you think in magnitude could be withstood during a baseball game? I guess this is depending on the structural integrity of the ballpark and everything. But, you know, obviously we've seen a World Series interrupted by a serious earthquake. But if we're talking about one that does not cause that kind of destruction, maybe, but, you know, makes it difficult to do something athletic because the ground is shifting beneath you? How big an earthquake could we possibly play through? I mean, there's a relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake and the duration of shaking. So for something like the big earthquake that they had in Japan, that was large enough that they had shaking that lasted a few minutes. But for something smaller that wouldn't be as destructive

that you would be canceling the game for things that are happening outside the stadium, you're going to have shaking that is not particularly long. So it just might be the sort of thing that everyone will feel kind of queasy in the stadium, which could lead to weirdness. But you probably wouldn't have... I don't think there's's anything that i can't picture an earthquake that would have an impact on the game that would cause the game to have to be at least paused that still wouldn't cause greater damage around that would necessitate the ending of the game because it's the shaking is proportional to that the magnitude so something that's small enough that it's not going to cause destruction you'd probably just things would seem maybe weird the cameras might shake a little bit you know i don't know i don't think it'd impact how the players

were feeling and it's weird because i guess the field itself because it's unless it's like an astroturf field which there aren't many left i guess actually there's no astroturf field, which there aren't many left, I guess. Actually, there's no astroturf, is there? It's all next turf or whatever. But you have a soil substrate underneath the grass and that some of that is actually probably going to absorb the shaking. So the field would actually probably feel even less shaking than the people in the stands. To bring this back to the beginning, we were talking about Mount Rainier and the Seattle Mariners, but just the other week you did write your latest article that you wrote about Glacier Peak. Glacier Peak is a relatively anonymous, unknown cascade volcano that is where Mount Rainier is southeast of Seattle. Glacier Peak is northeast of Seattle, but I don't know if there's any meaningful difference in distance between the two areas as the crow flies. And Glacier Peak, as you've written, is both poorly monitored and extremely explosive. So if you had to actually hazard a guess between

Mount Rainier and Glacier Peak, which volcano do you think has the better chance of actually, let's, we're going to use baseball still as a framework, which volcano do you think has the better chances of impacting the baseball schedule? I mean, that's a tough one. I would venture to say that Rainier is more likely to have an eruption because it has more history of eruption. And this is getting back to the same sort of comparison we're talking about before is that, you know, Rainier has had more eruptions that we know of historically. So if you were to just look at the probability, it has the highest probability that it could erupt again. Glacier Peak, on the other hand, hasn't had as many eruptions that we know of. So it is a lower probability eruption,

but it might be a bigger eruption when it happens. So in terms of disruption of a baseball season, I'd still probably lean on Rainier, even if it's not as big eru know, in terms of disruption of a baseball season, I still probably lean on Rainier, even if it's not as big eruptions, just because I think any eruption of Rainier is going to cause people to freak out, especially in the Seattle area, maybe. So there might be some delay for, you know, if the Mariners are at home, they might move the venue of the game to someplace else. But in terms of national impact on the season, a big eruption of Glacier Peak, which seems to have more of that in its record,

might be the place you'd look if you wanted to disrupt the baseball season. But yeah, it's weird because Glacier Peak, because it is remote and has been glaciated, we probably don't know about some of the eruptions that have happened it's like again and extrapolate what you think a player is going to do the following season if half the games were played in a closed off stadium that no one could watch and then hoping that you could sort of guess based on everything else what was happening in those

games so i'd say rainier say Rainier would be my pick, although it's kind of a close call. So my takeaway here seems to be that it's difficult to come up with a geologic event that would disrupt a baseball game in some intriguing way, but would not also cause a number of other effects that would probably dwarf baseball in importance. Yeah, I mean, short of, let's say, a meteorite landing in the middle of the field during a game, it would be hard to envision something that could have a local impact without disrupting everything else around it. So, you know, one could imagine a small meteorite hitting the middle of the field and putting a big crater in the field.

And I imagine that would disrupt the game. I doubt that it's in the rule book. Yeah, Sam Miller would be very pleased about that. Then you'd have a pit on the field. Perfect. Yep. So that would be the only thing I can really think of. I don't know.

What is it? Parikutan? Is that how it's pronounced? Parikutan? Parikutin? Is that how it's pronounced? Parikutin? Parikutin. So if you had, if you potentially had, you know, you mentioned that there's the boring lava field in and around the Portland metro area. You say, let's say Portland gets a baseball team sometime down the road. And then the boring lava field decides to, decides that the path of least resistance for the next eruption just happens to be somewhere in the outfield. And you could have a cinder cone that pops up underneath the stadium and then emerges.

That would create some larger metro effects, some urban hazards. But at least initially, you would have the singular effect be on the baseball stadium. So maybe this is just a problem of your own imagination. Yeah, I mean, I guess you'd have to, you know, if let's say Portland does get the next team, you go down to those city council meetings and tell them they got to put the stadium far from the lava fields for fear of a lava flow eventually impacting a game. Because, you know, that would probably be a challenging thing to work around. Do you think Rob Manfred has ever said the word volcano?

Well, maybe the farm team, right? I don't know. I just, I hope that Fangraphs has an earthquake contingency plan because with both of you and Dave up there in Oregon, it's a tempting fate. I don't know if there's a line of succession there editorially, but maybe that's a conversation you should have. I've thought before about, I don't think Fangraphs is in position to offer long-term sabbaticals. And so in the back of my head, I think, you know, if there were a big earthquake, it's kind of like a vacation. All right. Well, we'll have to talk to you again sometime, Eric, about extraterrestrial volcanology, because that's maybe more in my wheelhouse.

That's where the real action is. Although that'd be even more difficult to come up with a tenuous baseball connection, probably. It'd be fun, but yeah, it'd be hard to, again, you know, I'm trying to think, could you have an erupting asteroid hitting the Earth? Probably not.

It'd be kind of fun to think about. Well, Eric, you say that you tell your students that volcanoes spent most of their time not erupting but in the same way jean carlos stanton spends most of his time not homering we still find him to be incredibly interesting and so the last thing i'll ask you because this is something i've struggled with over the years when uh trying to come up with a good volcano or more broadly earth sciences related team name if we were to name if we're going to have a new team say you put it in portland and you wanted to capture something of the the local spirit and the the geologic history i've tried to think of the

best team name that you could uh the best mascot and i always liked the the sound of the word pyro classics but that's just stupid. That sounds like a single A minor league affiliate. They would never get that name. And I think Lahar sort of reflects a really terrifying and common experience, but Lahar would never fly. It's not plural necessarily, and it's just an unfamiliar word. So have you ever come up with a good team name that has something to do with volcanoes or at least geology? I mean, that would be the thing is that you just if Portland were to get a team, they just have to figure out how to negotiate with ISER to get their name. Because volcanoes would be the obvious name for a Portland team in many ways.

I don't know if that has ever come up in the past of having to negotiate a name from some other team when you get an expansion. But I can't think what else would be. That's the problem is that when you have something like a volcano, a lot of the words associated with it also have to be associated with events that killed lots of people. But then again, there are teams out there that are called the Tornadoes, and there's the Carolina Hurricanes, and there's things like that that have that association. So I don't know what you'd – if you couldn't – let's say, for argument's sake, Salem-Kaiser refused to give up the name, and Portland absolutely wanted a volcanic name associated with it. Wow, that's a hard one.

There are lots of things that don't make sense. You could call them the Pahoy-H hoys but that would be awkward and amusing so you know the closest thing again you could also think like the torneos kind of sound cool but no one knows what that is it's a it's an earthquake related to magma moving underneath the volcano but uh i think without having being able to name yourself the volcanoes, it's hard to come up with a name that would be volcanically associated without just weirding people out. Oh, you mean Plutons wouldn't catch on? The Plutons would be a good name, but I don't think it would be selling a lot of jerseys right off the bat. Well, Eric, I would like to thank you for indulging me and I think to a slightly lesser, but more than he'll let on, lesser extent, Ben, for this topic that, you know, as long as baseball is going to do nothing, I've wanted to have you on here anyway.

I love talking to you. You are probably the coolest person that I know on the Internet. I'm sorry, Ben, but Eric, you have a great job. And thank you for indulging us one more time. It's been a lot of fun and it's great to be able to talk about volcanoes on a baseball podcast. Yeah. We talked about baseball during an eclipse not long ago, and then months later we saw baseball during an eclipse. So I'm hoping that nothing that we've actually talked about happens today, as fascinating as it might be scientifically speaking. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Sean Viziac, Jem Organ, Greg Granchick, Patrick Eschenfeld, and Fergal O'Neill. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Thanks to all of you for listening this week. You can give us something to talk about next week

by emailing us questions and comments at podcast at fangraphs.com or by sending them to us through the Patreon messaging system. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and earthquakes and volcanoes allowing. We will talk to you next week and in the world it seems to we twist and turn away but it never will escape

high in the trees watches the sky begins to glow Moving across the dusty earth Waiting for something to occur