Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1169: Trout on a Trampoline

Episode Date: January 30, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Mike Trout’s trampoline encounter, a Matt Albers update, Ryan Braun’s rumored move to second base, the belated demise of Chief Wahoo, and Ben’s article about the 1995 Homestead spring training camp for free agents. Then they talk to Hardball Times author Stephanie Springer about cupping, magnetic chairs, cryotherapy, […]

Up and down the old homestead, the naked rider gallops through his head. And although the moon isn't full, he still feels the pull, still feels the pull Hello and welcome to episode 1169 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello, Jeff. Hi, Ryan Braun said he might play second to base. I saw that. So I just want to... I'm skeptical.

I'm just going right to the point here. Ryan Braun came up third baseman. He was a third baseman. Okay. 2007, Ryan Braun, third baseman. Much younger. 10 years younger. 11 years younger, I guess.

945.1 major league innings at third base. Third base considered roughly equivalent defensive position to second base in terms of degree of difficulty negative 32 defensive runs saved oh you don't love drs not the stat of choice for you well then let's turn to ultimate zone rating which puts him at negative 28.5 runs as a third baseman but if you like ugr 150 basically yeah a little less a little less than a full season 945 i think standard would be like yeah i don't know 1200 1300 so ryan brown's ucr 150 that's an estimate of ucr for 150 games so like a full season estimate negative 42.8 runs as a defensive

third baseman ryan brown i didn't pull up the leaderboard but i remember writing about this a long time ago at some point. I believe Ryan Braun has the worst defensive season on modern record, and we have that going back about a decade and a half. If it's not actually the worst, because I know Brad Hopp played the outfield once. Yeah, there was an Adam Dunn outfield season that was up there or down there. It's among them.

So Ryan Braun, second baseman. Let's file it away as unlikely, but also file it away as holy hell, I hope we get to watch that happen. Yeah. Well, one thing that was painful for me to watch happen, I hope you didn't see it because you were away this weekend, but on Friday, there was a post on the wife of Mike Trout, Jess Trout's Instagram. It was an Instagram story, so it was one of those things that disappears after 24 hours or something, which is probably for the best. But Mike Trout was on a trampoline on Friday. No!

And yeah. No, no. Nobody told me about this. Yeah, this was posted in the Facebook group, and I saw a screenshot of it, but it was Mike Trout on a trampoline. Serena Williams Trout on a trampoline Serena Williams also recently on a trampoline I mean she's already the greatest of all time but Mike Trout has some some greatness to go here he cannot be getting on a trampoline we were tweeted at also this weekend I think by a regular listener who mentioned that someone in his family had recently suffered a trampoline injury. I believe someone in his charge, and I told him he was warned by us, but didn't heed that warning, and evidently neither did Mike Trout.

So hopefully this was just an isolated occurrence. I've been monitoring Roto-World updates. I haven't seen anything about traumatic trampoline injuries for Trout, so I assume that he survived, but very dangerous. And this seems, I mean, forget about ATV accidents and riding various motorized vehicles. I mean, if you have those things written into your contract as something that you're not allowed to do, you would think that there would be trampoline clauses. We've probably discussed this before. Gun discharges bullet into man.

What do you, if you're playing with a weapon that's going to injure you, it's going to injure, I just don't, why would Mike Trout, why would the Angels, why would his part, it's, Ryan Braun is the fourth, I don't even have the heart to bring this up anymore. That's, that's great. It's a, it's a grave disappointment to me. I am not attempting to exaggerate here. And also, I don't know what kind of trampoline we're talking about. What was he doing?

What was he doing on the trampoline? It didn't look like a backyard trampoline. Again, I'm going off a screenshot here, but it looked like a trampoline park kind of thing where it was like a pad that you bounce off of so yeah and there's a bunch of metal bars but between them uh probably hard to tell but i'm sure there were yeah there's always uh the thing that you can land on and hurt yourself so yeah yep yep yep okay so ryan braun fourth worst season in in the last 16 years by ultimate zone rating. That is not by ultimate zone rating per 150.

That's just fourth worst. Fourth worst. It's behind 2008 Brad Hopp, 2005 Bernie Williams, and 2007 Ken Griffey Jr. Bernie Williams played fewer innings to get to that mark than Brian Braun. So file that away. But by defensive run saved, Ryan Braun is tied for the second worst defensive season on record. 2010 Matt Kemp playing center field for the Dodgers, shows up at negative 33 runs. That's bad, but he played 1,346 innings.

2005 Michael Young, shortstop for the Texas Rangers, played 1,356 innings. He was at negative 32 defensive run saved. And, of course, Ryan Braun, right there at negative 32, with 400 fewer innings played than the two names in front of him. However, shout out to 2013 Yankees shortstop Eduardo Nunez, who achieved a negative 28 in 608.1 innings. Well, in better Brewers news, Matt Albers is a member of the Milwaukee Brewers now, and their ongoing bid to become, I don't know, the official team of Effectively Wild or something. They have now added Matt Albers on a two-year contract. They should add Ryan Webb, former brewer, right?

Ryan Webb was a brewer. Hopefully someone brings back Ryan Webb, who I believe had surgery late last summer. But he'll be back and in pursuit of that elusive save. Anyway, that concludes the beginning of this banter. But please save your emails, by the way, about what would happen if Mike Trout had to play on a trampoline permanently. He would be dead.

That's the answer. Even Mike Trout, I mean, he might be the best trampolinist out there given his other skills. I don't know. But the best trampolinist probably never gets on a trampoline yeah it's the the best way that you can treat a trampoline absolutely the best offense is a good defense yeah in better news and more encouraging news chief wahoo has one more year

left to live 2018 and then he will be done away with in 2019 at least uh in the in the way that we're used to him. I think I read some kind of clause about how maybe you'll still be able to buy Chief Wahoo gear in some part of Ohio, but not on the MLB.com shop, I guess, for people who are so attached to that mascot. But, you know, obviously, I think the end has been coming for some time now, that's been clear. Obviously, I think the end has been coming for some time now. That's been clear. And it's nice that it is official now.

It would be nicer if it were an immediate implementation instead of, you know, we're acknowledging that this racist, distasteful mascot will be no more. But not until 2019. We're still going to go through one more year with Chief Wahoo, you know, I guess to try to be charitable here, not that we really need to in this case, you know, I guess it would take some time to strip away a mascot that's been used for decades from every possible place that that mascot could be. And maybe it's a little late in the offseason to order new uniforms and everything. But, you know, they could have done it years ago. They could have done it at the beginning of the offseason.

Anyway, that's not really an excuse. So it's finally happening now. And it's nice that we'll be able to stop talking about this in 2019. Although I'm sure that we will then transition to perhaps talking about the name of the team, which was also then invoked in the report about Chief Wahoo. And once Chief Wahoo is gone, maybe that will only increase the pressure to change the name. But that is maybe a secondary concern relative to Chief Wahoo, which was extremely embarrassing. Yeah, you have to address the blatant racism before you address the underlying socially more subtle potential racially insensitive subject matter.

I would say maybe we can we can posit here that the we label the chief supporter of keeping Chief Wahoo as being the chief Yahoo of the crowd. I think when I read the part about the Indians being able to still sell gear with the logo, I initially read that as a distasteful concession. But I think somebody who has better understanding of trademark law could help me on this one. But then I read in another article that they have to do that basically in order for the Indians to hold the trademark and prevent other people from basically taking it and then being able to use Chief Wahoo for themselves. And so maybe what this means is that the indians will be allowed to use it i don't know if they have to then make merchandise available with it but you know you can always bury it or i guess maybe they don't have an interest in burying it i'm not really sure it does feel weird to have it delayed until 2019 because i mean i don't know i haven't been to a game in a progressed field so i don't know

if chief wahoo is just like painted on all the bricks everywhere in the ballpark I don't know if he's like embedded on every seat I doubt that he is but I mean it's it's January and if we're talking about patches on a uniform you just take them off if they're even on there and now I was walking by safeco field over the weekend and on the uh on the western side of safeco field they have a bunch of like doors and stadium features that just have pictures of players on the team. You know, like the popular ones. Not like the Mark Zipczynski. But there's Ben Gamble over there and there's Nelson Cruz and Mike Zanino.

But Gerard Dyson's picture is still up. And somebody else's picture is still up who I forgot. Danny Valencia. He's still there. His picture, I forgot that he's even a baseball player. His picture is still on the side of the stadium. And it's January. So those things are going to be amended between now and a couple months from now.

So yeah, weird to have to wait a year for something so minor to go away. But whatever. Can't be too disappointed because at the end of the day, it is going away. And I understand that there are probably some listeners who wish that it wouldn't go away. But I think you'll be fine. Yes, I think so too. who wish that it wouldn't go away, but I think you'll be fine. Yes, I think so too.

And right, I mean, the Block C logo has obviously become much more prominent and Wahoo has receded somewhat. So, you know, it's easier to make this change now than it once would have been. But even so, I mean, you know, you'd like to see it be immediate, but at least we can stop debating whether this is the appropriate thing to do. I think the team has now acknowledged that it is, or conceded that it is, and I think that is the only reasonable opinion to hold at this point. So I'm glad that that moment has finally come, or at least we know when it's finally coming. So we have two guests to get to later in this episode. We are going to talk to Stephanie Springer of the Hardball Times about her recent article about baseball pseudoscience. Then we're going to talk to Effectively Wild listener Michael Mountain about his ambitious and possibly ill-advised plan to tour every big league ballpark this summer in a span of 35 days. But before we

do, I wrote about baseball. So I feel like we should take a moment to mark the occasion. It's been a while, but we teased this on our last episode that we would talk about this. And my article on the topic is up now, so you can go read it, but I will summarize it first. We've been getting email questions for a while now about what will happen if the free agents don't get signed, all the unsigned free agents who are still out there, some fringy, some very prominent. What will happen if they're not signed when pitchers and catchers report, when the rest of the teams report, when opening day is approaching. And of course, Jeff Passan reported late last week that some players have discussed starting their own free

agent spring training camp just to sort of stay in shape and have somewhere to play while they're waiting to hopefully sign somewhere. And there was no mention in that report of a previous instance of this happening, but there is one. And I was not aware of this until fairly recently. You and I were pretty young when the strike was going on. I don't remember being aware of this at the time. And I've talked to plenty of people who were around at the time and paying close attention to baseball who forgot this, so I think it has largely receded from many people's memory, but there was a spring training camp for free agents in the spring of 1995 coming off of the strike. Obviously, there were a lot of players left unsigned that spring just because of all of the labor strife and the various back and forth and the sort of signing freeze that

happened for a while there. The various stages of that process are detailed in my article if you want all the details. But they did this. They got the free agents together. Everyone who was still a free agent was invited to come to Homestead, Florida, where there was an unused spring training facility that had been meant for the Indians, but had been then mostly destroyed by Hurricane Andrew, and the Indians decided not to play there. And so there was this unoccupied facility, and lots of well-known free agents went down there, and they hung out for basically the entire month of April. And it was almost like a gym class sort of situation where you just wait around to be picked. And eventually a lot of the players were, most of the players were, but there were something like 60 guys who were down at this camp at various

points of that month, just waiting for someone to sign them. And it was this strange footnote, this weird blip in baseball history that I really enjoyed learning about. So I talked to Jackie Moore, who was the manager of the team, longtime baseball person. I talked to Lloyd McClendon and Tim Belcher and Jay Howell, a few of the players who were there. And it was really interesting to hear them reminisce about this unique episode in baseball history that hopefully will remain unique. As you are working out at free agent training camp, are you, relative to a player who's on a roster, are you putting forth greater or lesser effort? You know, are you trying not to get hurt or are you trying to get noticed? I was curious about that. I asked the players about that

and they said probably if you watched like the the team practices like drills probably it would look like guys were taking them less seriously than at a typical spring training camp but in terms of like individual guys getting their work in they told me that people were working if anything harder than they would in a typical spring training which makes sense obviously you're you're auditioning for teams and there were scouts there to see these players and you're trying to show that you're healthy. And I mean, it really ran the gamut. There were younger guys, middle career guys. There were guys who were at the very end of their careers like Tim Belcher I talked to. He was available for a few reasons. He was coming off probably his worst season, certainly to that point, he had led the major leagues in losses. And he was also just trying to get out of the American league because he, he didn't want to pitch there anymore because it didn't treat him very well. So he was kind of waiting for an NL team to offer him something. So he was only 33 at the time and he ended up pitching several more years in the majors.

Whereas Jay Howell, who was a, you know, three-time all-Star closer, but at that point was 39 and was really kind of, you know, he didn't have a lot left as he acknowledged to spot. And there were some pretty surprisingly good players. I mean, well-known players who were mostly kind of over the hill at that point, but like Benito Santiago was there. He had just turned 30. He was still a really good player. Mickey Tettleton had just been an all-star the season before, was still a really good player. So some guys just kind of got crowded out by the numbers game of the strike

and just needed somewhere to go and the players association stepped up and organized this camp because no one else would have essentially it was like too big a job for agents to to do on their own and so they would scrimmage and they would practice and do drills and they would play junior college teams high school teams would come in just because they were in kind of an isolated part of Florida relative to other spring training teams. So they were just, Belcher said, like, we were on an island and they were telling me how weird it was. But they kind of think back fondly on it for the most part. It sounded like it was fun.

Like guys would just go golfing and fishing and they were all in this shared predicament obviously of of being unemployed so i mean they all said they kind of look back on it fondly while also still hoping that it doesn't happen again as the as the numbers dwindled and the camp would drop below even like the the number you need to field an active roster what uh how are the conditions in your findings at that point because you know of course at first as players start getting signed then it can be encouraging and you think i could be next and then all the players can still function as a giant group but you know you get down to 40 then 30 and then into the 20s what do you what do you do yeah well definitely as it got down toward the end and opening day was approaching and the players could

kind of read the writing on the wall, it got frustrating and depressing and disappointing. And obviously they'd been watching players get signed for weeks and, you know, were happy for them, but also maybe a bit envious at a certain point. So, I mean, I think at the end of the camp, there were still, you know, 20 guys left or 15 guys left, and some of them did get offers and ended up with teams after that. And some of them just went home and called it a career. But the atmosphere definitely changed as time went on. And, and Jackie Moore was telling me he was, he was the manager of the A's for a few years in the 80s. And his coach for everyone, he was in baseball for almost 60 years. And so he's sort of seen everything,

but had not seen this. And so he was telling me that like, he would just, you know, he'd hear on the news at night that he had lost a player basically. And it was like totally different from your typical spring training where obviously you want to keep your players.

And in this case, he wanted to lose all of his players and wanted the scouts to to pluck these guys out and would be advocating for them and then he'd go home and he'd hear like so-and-so sign somewhere or he wouldn't hear even and he'd show up the next day and he'd just walk around like putting check marks and x's next to people who were still there or not there so it was definitely a strange environment and you know like all these players lived through a much more intense time for labor strife when there was the threat of a strike or an actual strike in every round of bargaining. And they were saying that, you know, they don't think things have nearly gotten to that point today, even though there is this growing unrest.

And Kenley Jansen even said over the weekend, maybe we'll have to strike. So people are talking about this, obviously. And we talked to Jeff Passan about it recently. And if baseball's market is sort of fundamentally dysfunctional right now, then you do worry about something happening. And the CBA is up what 2021 but all these guys were saying you know that even now even as this unrest seems to be building it's nowhere near where it was and players association is you know softer in a sense than it was then i talked to donald fear who was the head of the players association at the time as well and you I mean, that's maybe why the players are in this predicament today is that they haven't been hardliners the way that they were then,

but we're still quite a ways away. I talked to a woman named Alan Price, who has been with the Players Association for decades, and she helped organize that homestead camp, and she still works there now. And she was saying that apart from the fact that there are still many free agents unsigned she doesn't see that many parallels between now and in 1995 just because the toxic atmosphere at that time isn't really in place now and you know i i hope that remains the case but you can certainly envision a scenario where a few years from now when the cba is actually up tensions will have risen back to that point agreed all right well i will link to that story if you want to go get all the details and quotes from the players in the facebook group and also in the show page at fan graphs but

we will take a quick break and we'll be right back with step Springer. So just last week, I saw on Instagram Bryce Harper's back covered in cups. So many cups. I couldn't count the number of cups. His cups ranneth over. And in a bit of excellent timing, there is an article at the hardball times on monday by stephanie springer it's called from cupping to cold water a review of baseball pseudoscience and one of my favorite podcasts the gist does a regular segment called is this bullshit where the host mike pesca brings in maria konnva. They talk about whether something is fake or false or pseudoscience.

And that's what we're going to do. We're going to do is this bullshit baseball edition or maybe just this is bullshit baseball edition. I don't know if there's actually any suspense here. But Stephanie is an organic chemist turned patent examiner, which, frankly, I'd rather talk about that than baseball, I think. But this is a baseball podcast. So she is also a writer for the Heartball Times. Stephanie, welcome. Thank you for having me. So how did you get inspired to write about baseball pseudoscience? I guess I just, I've had a lot of questions about some of the things that we see the team

is reporting on as far as how they're treating players. And I realize that no one else seemed to be really taking a critical look at what some of the practices they've been disclosing are. And, you know, the online baseball community is very critical and very happy to dissect lineups and bullpen usage. And I kind of feel that we really need to take that same critical eye and turn it towards some of the medical practices and or pseudo medical practices that baseball players are using. So I guess we can start with cupping since it's one of the more

prominent ones. So this, of course, became a big thing. It seemed to me, at least when Michael Phelps used it at the Olympics, he was one of the most famous athletes in the world at the time, won lots of gold medals, and he cupped. So what do we know about cupping and the risks and the possible or alleged benefits? Right. So cupping is this so-called treatment that has its origins in oriental medicine. And so it kind of relies on this idea originally that you're helping to manage your body's energy flow. More recently, people allege that by having this soft suction pulling from the cup, you're increasing blood flow to the area where the suction is created. I think the closest thing that everyone can relate to as far as cupping goes

is I think many people in their preteen years probably tried to give themselves hickeys with vacuum cleaners. That's essentially what we're looking at here. Usually the glasses that they use, the glass cups that they use for the cupping procedure, they're heated. And so you have this stimulation between the heat and the gentle sucking action of the cup. There's a lot of mixed evidence, I would say, or lack thereof. And generally speaking, it seems to be one of those things where if practiced safely, it's probably not going to hurt you. It probably won't help you very much. And it's tricky to say whether or not some of the benefits that, say, a player might feel from this. It could just be that he's laying down for an extended period of time while he's undergoing this treatment.

And, you know, how often do they actually have some quiet time where they're laying down and relaxing? I think that's part of the issue here, though, is, again, as you said, with Michael Phelps, there was a burst of activity in the literature as far as baseball players saying, oh, we saw Michael Phelps' cupping marks. We do that, too. We love it. it turned out that it's not necessarily that someone who is skilled in this cupping I would say it's some that someone skilled in this is administering the cupping you started reading about players saying I love it because I can do it to myself my wife does it at home and I think that's where you start to get concerned I hate to say that there's a wrong way or a right way of doing this

when there's really no right way to do something that's not really effective. But at the same time, you start seeing these players saying, oh yeah, I put one of the heated glass cups on my elbow and I was like creating suction on my elbow and it made me feel so much better. When you look at the traditional practice, you see cups on, usually it's a back, kind of like what you saw with Bryce Harper, not that many cups. That was a lot of cups. That was a lot of cups. And so it gets a little worrisome when you kind of think about players doing this to themselves at home on their elbows and on different body parts that maybe aren't really used to being subjected to even like a gentle suction. So let's say, hypothetically, the question I'd like to get to is how something like this spreads, how something like this gets out. I don't know the origin of cupping to the T, but let's say I am the practitioner of some sort of pseudoscientific or I'll call it scientific technique that I've made up.

Let's call it, I don't know, stapling. How do I get players to staple? What do you need in order for this to get out, to proliferate? To really grow virally, you're saying. Yeah. virally the same. So I think what you've seen with, especially because given that its origins are kind of in Eastern medicine, some players would go to Asia and then they would see this practice being performed in Asia in the clubhouses there. And then they'd come back to the U.S. and then they would find, they would tell their teammates about it. They maybe had

already participated in it when they were in Asia. And that's kind of how these things spread. I guess just in general, like clubhouses, it's, you know, it's just a ripe environment for literal transmission of viruses, but also just for something like this to take off virally. I think when a couple of Royals players had said that they had picked it up when they were in, I think, Korea, Matt Belal had said that he had seen it in Korea. And then it's one of those things

where as players move between organizations, they kind of maybe take the practice with them and then encourage other players to do it too. So between that and then say, seeing Michael Phelps using it, that is going to encourage players to maybe it too. So between that and then say, saying, seeing Michael Phelps using it, that is going to encourage players to maybe give it a try. So you mentioned magnets in your piece too. You mentioned the fightin' necklaces that seemed to be everywhere a few years ago and don't seem to be now. And you mentioned that they seem to have

fallen out of favor a bit. And I was kind of encouraged by that. But now I'm not sure I am. I asked Brandon McCarthy if he agreed with that. And he did. He agreed that they don't do anything, but it was more of a look thing, which he says was also stupid, but maybe it was a fashion accessory that just fell out of fashion. But I mean, it's definitely true that in the media, at least as soon as those necklaces started appearing, they were getting debunked everywhere. And so I was imagining maybe there was some player who was going around, you know, printing out the debunkings everywhere. And so I was imagining maybe there was some player who was going around, you know, printing out the debunkings for his teammates or something, but it sounds like that probably isn't the case.

It's possible. I did notice when I was doing the cupping research, I saw that Peter Moylan had said that he gave it a try and he didn't really, he didn't see the point to it. So it was kind of nice to see someone actually say, yeah, I tried try and he didn't really, he didn't see the point to it. So it was kind of nice to see someone actually say, yeah, I tried it and I don't know what the big deal is, but there were a lot of players who, who swear by it. And I would assume that there's a lot of players that

don't believe in it or just choose not to say anything about it, which is totally understandable. But magnets are still a thing in some form, as you also mentioned. Yeah, right. So the fine necklaces have definitely fallen out of favor. And again, it is one of those things where I would hope most people realize that they didn't really do anything. But, you know, they look kind of cool. So people wore them for a while.

And like, you know, most fads, they come and go. I was really surprised by the use of this magnet sphere chair, though, which basically alleges to provide the same thing that this magnetic jewelry was doing, except that it's this huge chair with these big, big arcs of like metal just around the chair to help create a magnetic atmosphere around you. And I think looking at the company's website, this is where you get into one of those tricky things where, well, we're FDA approved, but the FDA approved them for calling themselves as providing enhancing relaxation. It's approved for sitting, basically. Yeah, and you know, exactly. I mean, who doesn't feel relaxed when they sit down? Well, how much do those things run you? Do you know how much your team's... I don't know. Sounds expensive.

I had never heard of a magnet chair before I read your article. And I am floored by the concept of a magnet chair, having now read your article. You should have sat in one. You wouldn't be floored. Well, maybe I've been sitting in one this whole time, just didn't realize it was magnetic. How popular are these magnets? Are we talking like there's three players out there? Or are these like in every clubhouse?

you talking like there's three players out there or are these like in every clubhouse i had actually to be honest i hadn't heard of this until um i started doing research for the article and i actually ran across an older hardball times article where um i think it was in the rockies clubhouse i need to or i'm sorry not the rockies clubhouse but it was a player who who had one of these magnus fear chairs in his house. Yeah, I had not heard of the Magnosphere chair prior to this. One of the things that I kind of started thinking was, oh, so it's AJ Pollock. So maybe people did feel kind of self-conscious about the fight and necklaces. And so now with a Magnosphere chair, you can kind of have the same feel, get the same alleged benefits, but in the privacy of your own home instead of out on the field

wearing your fight necklace. Why stop there? Why not a magnet bed? Just fight and furniture your entire house. Magnet bases, magnet uniforms. Those might be heavy. i guess slow you down but yeah well so you also mentioned heat and cold which have obviously been staples of baseball player training routines for the whole history of baseball more or less but they've recently graduated to maybe a different kind of cold therapy that has some dubious benefits or lack thereof? Yeah. So I think that the cryotherapy is what really got to me as far as going from ice baths. That's pretty harmless. There was actually a really good article where the author talked to Ron Porterfield, who was formerly a head trainer for the Rays.

And he had this whole routine down as far as before the game, they alternate between hot and cold baths. And then after the game, we have them do the same alternation, but it's a slightly different pattern. They're never in one or the other for more than a few minutes. And so then you have this whole body cryotherapy where these giant chambers that it sounds kind of something like Han Solo being dipped in carbonate, right? It's this giant chamber where the player, his whole body, except for his head, is encased in this octagonal chamber. And so this is another one where I was really surprised to see,

I think that the Marlins and the Royals both purchased units. Wow, the Marlins, they have a lot of disposable income these days, I guess. How many units did they purchase with their revenue sharing money? How would you reconcile? We're in an era now where teams are, everyone is staffed out their analytics department so teams are trying to figure out where else they can get an edge and we've seen teams talking about investments and like constant blood testing and nutrition and

sleep studies and teams are trying harder than ever to try to keep their players healthy and just physically optimized this is true in baseball this is true outside of baseball so how do you how do you reconcile that sort of drive with this proliferation of pseudoscientific techniques, even in clubhouses, even with organizations like the Tampa Bay Rays, who you at least would want to think stereotypically would be at the forefront of this is right and this is not right? Well, I think that you have to weigh a lot of different factors. So say, for example, the cryotherapy units, to me, I don't know how much those cost. It seems like a lot of different factors. So say, for example, the cryotherapy units, to me, I don't know how much those cost. It seems like a lot of money that could be spent elsewhere.

I do think that people are looking more at like sports science initiatives, whether that's injury analytics, injury prevention. I think there's more of a look to it. We're focusing more on nutrition, I would say. So like, for example, I know it came up when he first joined the Dodgers and kind of came up again when he came to the Phillies, but like Gabe Kapler's blog, he does a great job of really pushing for nutrition and just, you know, eating a well-balanced diet. So I think that that's something that a lot of teams could look at to really make strides as far as keeping players healthy. And of course, that I think would be a better investment than a whole body cryotherapy machine or cupping. Yeah, I'm reading about the cryotherapy in your

article and the risks of, wow, this frostbite, burns, asphyxiation. This sounds not very therapeutic. Yeah. And so, you know, there was even a death last year, I believe. And again, that was a case where this woman was self-administering, essentially. She got in the machine. She thought she had set the timer. She fell asleep in the machine, which when you consider the way the machine operates, it's not out of the realm of possibility that you will get knocked out.

And then there was a malfunction and she had fallen asleep. So she, and she froze to death, which obviously is an extreme, but you could see too, even if you were to say, well, I'm not going to do whole body cryotherapy. I'm just going to do cryotherapy on say my pitching arm. What if you get frostbite on that arm? And so when you really consider that there's no evidence that this is efficacious, are you really willing to take that risk? And so I think that's where we have to start balancing the idea of what, okay, so some things are going to be harmless and they're pretty low risk, but there's things where they really don't provide any benefit. And if there's an accident, it could be really bad. It could be anything from just a 10-day stint on the DL to losing a season.

And you really have to weigh all of these different factors. I cannot imagine Clayton Kershaw missing a season with frostbite, but I guess there's always going to be. How would you characterize, I guess you're touching on this now, but how would you characterize the risk of these techniques sort of proliferating within the professional athletic sphere? Because odds are if you're going to have a cryogenic chamber that players are using, it will be administered in the clubhouse in Kansas City or Miami or elsewhere.

Someone will set a timer. No one will fall asleep and die, probably, in a clubhouse. With cupping, it seems clearly there's risk of burn, potential infection, but it seems like the risk of a real long-term problem is tremendously low. real long-term problem is tremendously low. And so aside from players just practicing techniques that don't have a very good foundation and truth and that being objectionable from an objective viewpoint, is this like a role model problem, the problem of just supporting industries that shouldn't exist or how would you characterize it? I think it's a combination of different things. I think, so one thing I didn't really talk about in this story was the use of hyperbaric oxygen chambers. I honestly didn't even realize people still use those

because I thought, I mean, they've been debunked for so long now, but it turns out there are baseball players that still use hyperbaric oxygen treatments. And so I think that kind of giving that a quick look, I realized that some of what propagating that was just the manufacturers of this equipment, right? So even like the whole body cryotherapy unit, I ran across that information just based on the manufacturer saying, oh, we just sold a unit to the Marlins. We just sold a unit to the Royals. So, you know, for the manufacturers, they're constantly pushing these goods. And so they can kind of advertise saying, well, we have professional athletes using our equipment. And then the other thing, too, is, again, going back to things spreading through the clubhouse, just word of mouth.

And then that's something where it's really tricky because let's say so someone says, you know, I like cupping. It really makes me feel good. And so then they tell somebody else, well, you know, give it a try. It's not going to hurt. And I think you get into one of these things where let's say somebody tries it and that day they have a great game. It's not without, it's easy for someone to start thinking, well, I gave this a try. Maybe this is what helped my performance today. And so I think that's where you kind of see a lot of, a lot of these ideas and practices that aren't really rooted in scientific evidence. That's how these things kind of spread.

Another thing I wanted to touch on, but I didn't want to single him out, but I guess I will here. You might have heard about Rich Hill peeing on his blisters on his hands. Yes, this is a Rich Hill safe zone. You should always feel free to mention Rich Hill on this podcast. So when I was reading about that, apparently he had heard that from another player. And so he decided to give it a try. And for all you know, next season, we might hear about somebody else saying, well, you know, I was having problems with blisters. So I decided to try peeing on my hands and maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. I guess the way to think of something like that is,

let's say you have a cold. You could take echinacea, you could take vitamin C and your cold will probably go away within a week, or you could take nothing and your cold will probably go away in seven days. It's one of those things where you just, you can't really say for sure if it's really helping, especially when, I mean, essentially you're looking at small sample sizes, right? And a lot of anecdotes where players pass this information on to each other just because it might've helped them. I think Moises Alou and Jorge Posada were also known for peeing on their hands. It was cheaper than batting gloves, I guess. Although Posada said he did it in spring training only,

I guess, to alleviate the calluses that build up after a long off-season off. So anyway, we all make fun of Tom Brady's sort of nonsensical. That's been a common topic lately. And we've covered a number today, but that doesn't mean that we should dismiss any kind of treatment or therapy. Obviously, there are some that work. You mentioned yoga in your article. You mentioned diet and nutrition and customizing those in certain ways.

And as there are just more and more ways that players are tending to themselves and teams are tending to players, I guess there's more risk for pseudoscientific ones to creep in. But more and more, you mentioned the sports science and all sorts of wearable technologies and sensors that measure everything about your workout and your sleep. And, you know, we've talked about like the pirates have sleep, you know, nap rooms and sensory deprivation chambers. And so I guess, you know, it, it makes sense for teams to try a lot of things and some of them might work, but you just have to be careful that you don't end up hurting anyone. Right. And that's the thing.

I mean, you want to try whatever you can to give you any sort of edge. So even if there's something that it might not work or there might not be a lot of evidence for it, you might as well give it a try. And that's when you have to weigh the risks. And something like cupping, it can be dangerous. And it probably doesn't help that much.

But overall, it's probably okay. It's just not really doing anything. So that's where you kind of have to weigh all this stuff where, you know, if it makes them happy, it makes them feel good, maybe it's not so bad. So would you say with something like cupping or these other techniques, recovery techniques, is this just going to be sort of a recurring human problem as it's athletes trying to fill a void where maybe you talk about how even using a basic ice pack remains controversial. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. and that a player might be frustrated.

If you're a starting pitcher and you throw 100 pitches and then you're really sore a couple days later, then maybe you're going to be willing to try something to maybe try to make the soreness go away when the reality is that you're just going to be sore because you put your body through the grinder. You threw 100 pitches the other day and there's nothing you can do about that. But given that you really can't make your muscles un-sore if they've been strained or used exhaustively,

is this just going to be players forever searching for some sort of solution that, at least from where we sit now, isn't going to exist for a very long time? Just a perpetual motion machine of pseudoscientific medical techniques? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's just human nature. And especially when you're a competitive athlete, you're going to try anything to get ahead. And in some cases, you know, especially like going back to like a pitcher, they probably just need some rest. They just need to not give it a hundred percent. And I think when you're a competitive athlete and you're constantly told you're constantly hustling and you're supposed to be grinding everything out, it's really hard to just say, you know, I need to just let my body rest and recover. You want to try something. You want to feel like you're doing something to really help.

So in this sense, I think a lot of these pseudoscientific interventions, again, I think that kind of just goes back to the placebo effect where, you know, if it's not going to hurt them and it makes them feel better, whether it's just they feel people to stop doing something, even if there's no evidence to support that it actually is effective for anything. All right. Well, more importantly, have you examined any patents about baseball? I have not, but I've had a lot of pseudoscientific treatments run across my docket. So I'm really used to people saying that certain things work for treating all kinds of things, and it usually doesn't work. Well, so do you have to give them, I mean, does the patent require any evidence that it does work, or is that not your area? Yeah, so no, it is. So I think one thing when people think of patents, you think of utility, novelty, and non-obviousness.

The other thing that people don't really think about, which is actually what I spend most of my time on, is you can't just claim something without showing that it actually works. You can't just say, I have this idea. You have to support it with some kind of examples showing that you can actually treat a disease with the way you say you can. And so I think that coupled with my typical, I'm a very skeptical person to begin with. I think it really feeds into my looking at these pseudoscientific treatments with the same critical eye. So if the magnet chair is patented, does that mean there was a less skeptical patent examiner out there than you are? I'm sure it's patented. It might be patented for extreme relaxation or enhanced relaxation, whatever the FDA says. But I would hope no one said that it could actually treat any kind of injury. Extreme gravity relief. All right. Well, I could talk about patents more,

and I'm sure Jeff could talk to you more about chemistry, but I guess we should let you go. And people can find your work at the Hardball Times. They can find you on Twitter at Stephanie Kays, K-A-Y-S. You are also nominated for a Sabre Award for Contemporary Baseball Analysis in the same category I am. This category is not big enough for the both of us, but I would recommend everyone go read that article of Stephanie's too, which is called Get a Grip. It's about the surface of the baseball and seeing if there's a non-pseudo-scientific way that you can get the baseball to be tackier, which is really interesting too. So Stephanie, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. We'll take one more quick break and we'll be back with Michael Mountain to talk about his 35-day, 30-ballpark planned trip for this upcoming summer. Road tripping with my two favorite allies. Pulled and loaded, we got snacks and supplies. It's time to leave this town, it's time to steal away. Let's go get lost anywhere in the USA. Let's go get lost, let's go get lost. All right.

And now for something completely different. Earlier this month in the Facebook group, one of our listeners and Facebook group members, Michael Mountain, posted about his extremely ambitious itinerary for a whirlwind tour of every major league stadium this coming summer. It's a ways away. He's planning this for July and August. But it's nice to think coming summer. It's a ways away. He's planning this for July and August, but it's nice to think about it. It's cold. There's no activity going on. There's no actual even spring training.

So I just wanted to think a little bit about the warm summer when baseball will be going on, and Michael will be attending lots and lots of baseball games in a very short amount of time. So I want to have him on to tell us about this plan and how he plans to put it in action. So hello, Michael, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. So the obvious first question, why? Why would you subject yourself to this sort of itinerary? I think

a lot of people have kind of a goal in the back of their heads if it's not explicit to get to every major league park someday, but you are planning to do it in 35 days, which is a little bit different. So how did you come up with this idea? Yeah, well, for me, I think it started a lot like you said, a lot of other people have the same sort of idea that it's on the bucket list for some point down the road. You know, I've grown up as an Orioles fan and I've always been interested in visiting other parks as well. So for the last couple of years, I've been- I see why if you're an Orioles fan, you'd be interested in visiting other parks.

I mean, not to cast aspersions on Camden, which is great, but the actual product itself, not always so great. Camden, which is great, but the actual product itself, not always so great. Certainly. So for the last several years, I have been slowly adding to my personal list, usually checking for Orioles, road games, and other such things. So for example, in 2014, they played for a week straight in Chicago, both the Northside and Southside stadiums. So I got two for the price of one, as it were. But I'm up to about 15 ballparks visited currently, 13 of them active. However, most of the ones I'm still missing are a little more of an effort to get to from where I am. So not just a simple day trip or weekend. A lot of

the Western Division teams and a few in the Central and Florida, etc. So I figured why not try to knock them all off at once and just make a big go at it. So have you scheduled your vacation time? Did you have to save up to have enough time to do this? Yeah, actually, this was originally something I was looking at working up for last summer, but work got in the way a little bit. So as you might imagine, I took the opportunity to build up some of that bank some more that vacation time. And this year, I should have all my ducks in a row.

Yeah. What do you do if you don't mind our asking? I work as a software developer with a consulting group. Are you going around to have 30 different job interviews? If I can turn this into some publicity, who knows? Well, that's probably a good segue into what my next question was going to be, which is how did you plan this? Because just logistically speaking, it is not easy to plan the most efficient route and not only the most efficient, but like one that won't kill you. So how did you actually determine the order that you would do this in?

Sure. Just to start off, it's a little tricky to figure out exactly what you mean by the most efficient route, because of course there are two different things that you're trying to optimize for, right? First of all, you want to make sure that you're able to get around all the stadiums and back to your starting point in the shortest amount of time possible. I now optimize for, right? First of all, you want to make sure that you're able to get around all the stadiums and back to your starting point in the shortest amount of time possible. But then also given that constraint, you are also hoping to spend as few hours actually on the road. So optimizing the travel distance within that. It's sort of something that had been floating around in my head as an idea for the last couple of years, it kind of started as just a fun exercise in trip planning. I enjoy road trips in general,

and this seemed like a good way to have a fun thought exercise and just see how efficient I could be in getting to all 30 parks and back. So about three or four years ago, I started messing around with some spreadsheets and just Excel macros to try and come up with an algorithm that would get me most of the way there. Without getting too deep into the math, this is essentially a variant of a well-known optimization problem called the traveling salesman, which is finding the shortest possible route to traverse a set of destinations and then get back to the origin point. What makes the baseball version a little bit different is that, of course, you can't just go directly to the closest park. You have to also make sure that the team is playing at home at the right time. So I had a couple of things to help me out in

this search. First of all, someone smarter than me has already done some very helpful work in this space. There's actually a book written by Ben Blatt called I Don't Care If We Never Get Back. Back in 2013, he visited all 30 stadiums by car in 30 days, which is even more ambitious than my itinerary here. He's better than you. Ben is a former member of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, which is the same group that produced your guest from earlier this off season, the twins director of baseball operations. Yeah. So Ben wrote an article for them back in 2011, which detailed the highly technical and rather nerdy process of finding this optimal trip using a process called linear optimization. In this case, our objective is essentially to minimize the total elapsed time between leaving the starting city and

returning to it at the end of the trip. So the most interesting part of the article for me was that he actually included a detailed description of how to construct that linear model, which can be expressed in a format that is just read and understood by an automatic solving program. And at that point, you just have to let it crunch for long enough to find an optimal solution. I was also indebted for that step to a web service called Neos Server, which is the network-enabled optimization system. This is a free web service that offers computing time on a high-performance cluster at the University of Wisconsin, which can calculate solutions a lot faster than a regular home computer. calculate solutions a lot faster than a regular home computer. So when I first came across this approach, I tried running an open source solver on my home PC, and it ran for about a month to get a pretty good solution.

So as long as you will be traveling, basically. Exactly. Whereas Neos was able to solve that same model in just a couple of hours. Oh, supercomputers are pretty cool. You have put in a lot of work to develop the uh the plan it's no longer i guess for now it's theoretical this is the plan you intend to execute have you given any consideration to the thought that maybe maybe the goal was to just make the plan because look i i'm talking to you as someone whose vacations are not usually spent

relaxing they're not leisure filled they They're slogs. Are you in any way prepared mentally or do you intend to prepare mentally for the slog that this is certainly going to turn into over the course of five weeks? So I feel like I'm reasonably well prepared for this about as much as you can be without going through the whole thing, sort of on two fronts. The one thing that I have in my corner helping me is that I have previously executed a shorter frenetic trip just doing four games in two days. Back in 2013, I found a midweek schedule alignment that let me catch a Wednesday Baltimore-Philly doubleheader by train. And then Thursday, the Mets and Yankees were both at home on the

same day. So I've had sort of a taste of some crazy travel arrangements working around a set schedule of ball games. And then from the sort of more long distance perspective, I've also done a couple of times back and forth from Portland to Baltimore by car in about three or four days. So that's averaging about 800 or so miles per day, which is longer than any single day's journey I have on this trip. It's obviously a longer total duration, but I feel somewhat mentally prepared for the slog of say, driving from Seattle to Miami in six days. I see. So it's like training for a marathon, sort of. You're building up to it. So you have, what, almost 16,000 miles would be the total,

and something like 600 miles in the average day. So how much sleep are you building yourself in here and how screwed will you be? A, if there's a really long game, are you allowed to leave? Do you have to see the whole game or is it just setting foot in the ballpark? And B, what if there's a rain out? Well, you've hit on two of my most primal fears here, Ben. So thank you for getting that out of the way up front. Yeah, by far the most sort of dread inducing part of the itinerary is the very first day where is my only scheduled doubleheader, a one o'clock game at Yankee Stadium and a seven o'clock game in Philadelphia. So I have six hours between opening pitches and approximately two hours of driving to get. I'm looking at potentially maybe taking an Amtrak Express for that if the schedule works out as well, which might be a

little bit more efficient. But it is still obviously a concern, especially for a Yankees game to go four and a half hours pretty easily. So there's not a lot I can do about that for that specific day. In general, though, the constraints that I built into the trip finding algorithm are set up so that I shouldn't have to be leaving any particular locale before about nine o'clock in the morning. And I should be getting into wherever I'm spending the night by about 10 PM. So depending on games going along, you know, I might have one or two nights where I'm driving a little bit later than normal, or if there's bad weather and I expect a traffic delay, I might have to get up and go a little bit early in the morning. But I feel like I gave myself reasonable margins to not have to stretch

it too thin. Have you considered what the triumph is going to feel like? What happens? The 30th game is over. You're done. You get home. How much time has spent feeling celebratory and how much time has spent thinking that that was a lot of time that you spent of your life? Well, the last game is in Baltimore. So I don't have very far to go after the game at all. And it's on a Friday evening. So I'll have basically all weekend to sort of bask in the glow and, you know, decompress and take stock of what I've just, you know, how I've just wasted a month of my life. But if the last game is in Baltimore, where would you put the probability right now of you watching the Saturday game? game uh probably at about zero percent or just maybe taking a joy ride just uh going out for a quick drive on that day yeah that's probably not gonna happen either yeah yeah so have you

managed to talk anyone into accompanying you for all or part of this odyssey or will you be doing all the driving yourself? Well, let me put it this way. I think I'm prepared to do most, if not all of the driving myself. I have been talking about potentially getting a co-pilot for the Seattle to Miami slog, which as I mentioned is probably the most, the longest sustained run of painful driving over the course of the trip. I have three of my six non-game days are during that six-day stretch. And it's averaging about- And I'm waiting for you on the other end. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm averaging 650 miles per day.

Oof, man. Will you be adhering to posted speed limits during this drive? Is it important that you do? Well... Is he allowed to say? I will just put it this way, that during that stretch, I will be driving through West Texas, where I believe the posted speed limit is approximately 80 miles per hour. So I'm not that worried. Okay. Well, we're definitely going to have to have you back on at the conclusion of this trip, assuming you make it. If you don't make it, that might be even more interesting. So either way. But I hope that we will have effectively wild fans greeting you throughout this trip because it seemed like when you posted this itinerary in the Facebook group, it's been a very popular post and lots of people are, are volunteering to hang out with you at games in their local city. So I'm, I'm hoping there's gotta be an

Effectively Wild fan at every big league game somewhere in the park, right? So hoping we can coordinate that. Maybe we can have you take a picture with random Effectively Wild listener at every stop along this journey. That'd be fun. Yeah. The response from the Facebook community was really overwhelming and gratifying. I got probably at least a dozen people or more asking to stop in and meet up with them at a game or offer to get me tickets if they have season ticket plans, et cetera. So I'm definitely grateful to the community for reaching out to help support me in this. And I am very much looking forward to hopefully making some new acquaintances during the course of the trip. Yeah. Can we make an agreement here? It would be nice to have you on when you're done.

I would also like to have you on after game like 16. Yeah. When you hit the wall, wherever that is, hopefully not a literal wall at any point, but figuratively speaking. I might not be as lucid a guest at that point, but I would be delighted to have the opportunity to record a podcast from a Honda Fit, which is not something that's been done for a while on here. Yeah, that's right. It's the official Effectively Wild car owned by Sam Miller where this podcast started. All right. Well, this is an ambitious goal. I guess I'll say an admirable goal. I don't know. You don't have to consider it admirable. Maybe you consider it the opposite of that, but it's definitely ambitious. So we will remind everyone, assuming you stay the course here before you leave on this journey, and maybe we'll have some sort of tracker set up in the Facebook group so people can greet you as you go and give you some five-hour energy

or something when they see you. But it's a good idea. We wish you the best of luck and we will check in with you again later in the year. Thanks so much. You can also find me on Twitter at MLB Road Trip. Yeah, perfect. That is good branding. All right. Thanks, Michael. Good talking to you.

Thanks for having me, guys. Take care. Okay, that will do it for this episode. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already done so include Will Crummel, Mr. John C. Betzler, Jeff Tansel, Simon Penchansky, and Rob Hamilton. Thanks to all of you. You can join the aforementioned Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes.

And you can keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you soon.