Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1176: The Best Tape of Our Lives

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the installation of a humidor at Chase Field, how peak Ichiro would have hit at Coors Field, and what to make of reports about players in the best shape of their lives, then answer emails about which team performances would qualify as surprising in 2018, projecting players who’ve […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1176 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. How are you? You said Fangraphs as if you were surprised by that in a copy, like brought to you by Fangraphs. Oh, this week it's going to be Fangraphs' email show. I'm fine. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. So we're going to do our belated email show that we skipped over last week. Bit of banter maybe before we begin. There was some news recently that there's going to be a second humidor in Major League Baseball. Back off my stat blast. Oh, is that your stat blast? Okay. Well, Chase Field is going to have a humidor, which has been rumored for several years. I don't know what form your stat blast is going to take. I was just going to cite some previous research about what the impact of the humidor would be. I don't know if that will conflict with what you're going to say later.

Even if it does, who cares? Well, this has been in the works for a while and seemingly almost happened last season. So Alan Nathan did an article for the Hardball Times last year around this time, and he estimated somewhat imprecisely that it would probably reduce home run production at Chase Field by 25 to 50 percent. If you had to pin him down on one number, I think he estimated 37 percent. So I think the effect on home runs at least could be even more pronounced possibly than it was at Coors Field. Chase Field has the second highest elevation of any major league park, but of course it is a lot drier than Colorado is. And so there is maybe an even bigger effect forthcoming from making the balls humid, storing them in a more humid environment for a while. So I don't know that we necessarily need to care about this, but I guess we can be aware of this. I'm heading off any questions we might receive about what the impact of this could possibly

be. of this. I'm heading off any questions we might receive about what the impact of this could possibly be, but it obviously affects both teams that play any game in Arizona and might affect some players more so than others. But I don't know that this would have any sort of huge effect on the Diamondbacks competitiveness. And I don't know why they particularly care about having a humidor or not. Although I did read some quotes last year to the effect of pitchers complaining about the grip of the ball, maybe because it's so dry. So I don't know if this has more to do with that than it does with the actual offense. Well, I guess we'll touch on that a little bit in the stat blast. Looking at the updated Fangraphs Park factors, which are based on five-year data samples. Over the past five years, the Diamondbacks

have had the second most hitter-friendly ballpark overall, behind only the ballpark that has the first humidor. Coors Field, still hitter's paradise. The Diamondbacks have shown, well, this is a park factor of 105. What that means, look, I don't know. I don't care. But it's high. It's higher than 100. 100 is average. Diamondbacks, second most hitter-friendly ballpark. But interestingly, if you just look at the home run rates, Diamondbacks still high, but they're behind. This is just going by teams, not ballparks. I can't think that fast. Yankees, Phillies, Rockies, Brewers, Reds, Orioles, and White Sox. So the Diamondbacks are there in. Chase Field would be eighth place in home run park factor. So I know that it has the reputation of being a hitter friendly ballpark because it is a hitter friendly ballpark but it's i at least based on the numbers it's not

like the home runs are out of control certainly not in the way that they would be in yankee stadium take three yeah by the way speaking of offense friendly parks there was a rumor sadly since debunked by ken rosenthal that the Rockies might be interested in signing Itro Suzuki, who is still unemployed. I wish that were the case, but seems probably not to be. Anyway, I was just trying to imagine what Itro's career in cores might have looked like. Oh my God. Forget about the home run hitting that everyone has speculated about whether he could actually do, and people have said he could do based on his batting practice displays. But just the singles enhancing and BABIP enhancing power of Coors Field with Itro in his prime.

Can you imagine what Itro's BABIP would have been like in Coors? have been like in Coors? For most of his 20s and 30s, when he was with Seattle, I don't have handy his exact average BABIP over that time, but it was not at all unusual for him to post BABIPs in the 380s, 390s even. And Coors, which has the biggest outfield in baseball, I can't even imagine what sort of force he would have been like the ultimate singles hitter in the ultimate, well, everything park, but especially singles hitting park. I can't find, I'm struggling to find, doesn't baseball reference have a tool that converts numbers to different environments? And right now I can't actually find it. But if you figure that in 2004 in an extremely pitcher friendly ballpark, Itra batted.372.

Like, I know Sam Miller, for any newer podcast listeners, Sam Miller of ESPN.com recently wrote about how no one's ever going to hit.400 again. And, well, somebody could have in 2004 if only he had played in a different environment. And while I wouldn't—like, the Rockies don't really need Itra, although their outfield is not very good outside of Charlie Blackman. But if they were to sign Itra, which I know that they're not, that's a guy that you play at home only, I think, as sort of a home road platoon. I don't know who you put on the road, maybe some power hitter. But Itro in Coors Field even now, you could probably manage still like a 350, 360 bat, because he still puts the bat on the ball.

And there's so much outfield space that the ball would just find the ground a lot more often than it would Miami or Seattle yeah that would have been a lot of fun got to find those neutralized batting stats they're they're somewhere on here on baseball reference I'll dig them up I don't know if they would properly account for how much better each row would be because it's probably just like a generic park factor that applies to any player and each row might benefit more than the typical player going to Coors Field. But still, I will find that number because it would be fun. Okay, we're going to try this. Okay.

The run scoring environment. What run scoring environment do I want? I want 2000 Coors Field. The year 2000? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right there. It's an option.

It's one of two options. 2000 Rockies or 1968 dodgers yeah because 2000 coresifying barry bonds's stats is always the most entertaining thing to do but yeah give me each row okay so each row would have hit 400 four times his rookie season 2004 uh 2007 and even 2009 he would have hit 405 419 402 and 410 his lifetime batting average would be 366 and he would already have nearly 4 000 career hits if only i don't know whether i'd rather have that or jean-carlos stanton in course which has always been a fun hypothetical too i think i'd rather have itro in course forget sam's recent article about 400 being dead 400 would have been back and better than ever. I'm

sad that that never happened. Reanimated. Yeah. The other news I just wanted to mention briefly, a lot of yucks were gotten out of the story about Matt Kemp showing up to spring training in the best shape of his life, reportedly having lost 40 pounds, which as you pointed out on Twitter, if you just reframe every story about a player showing up in spring training in the best shape of his life as how bad a shape he was in before this, then it gets even more entertaining. The even more amusing part of this, of course, as many people pointed out, is that Kemp showed up to spring training in better shape last year too and had the same sort of story written about him.

And he had lost 15 pounds at that point, reportedly. And obviously, he had a lousy season. So I don't know if it actually helped. But, I mean, it's not obviously impossible that a player can show up to spring training in the best shape of his life in consecutive springs. spring training in the best shape of his life in consecutive springs. In fact, Sam once pointed out that Russell Martin was once reputed to have shown up to spring training in the best shape of his life for five consecutive springs, which is possible. You could keep getting into slightly better shape every spring. I don't know if it's new and noteworthy every time, but he was kind of the king of that for a while. I did do a little study on this three years ago at Grantland because it is fun to mock.

And I mean, we understand why all these stories come out this time of year because people show up to spring training. And it's like when you would show up to school after summer break or something and you would notice that kid had a gross bird or something, or you would take note of it because you're seeing people for the first time in a while. And if you're a writer reporting from spring training, there's not that much else to report on. So that's why we get this wave of best shape of his life stories every spring. And I went back to 2006 and I came up with a list of 199 player seasons that were supposedly best shape of his life guys. I think it was like 164 unique players. Did you do manual research to find all 199? I did a lot of Googling.

God, I did that with LASIK surgery one time and it was miserable. Oh yeah. Craig Calcaterra at Hardball Talk has been flagging these guys for a number of years, so that helped, but I definitely did some supplementing myself. But I did find that there did seem to be some sort of effect. It wasn't dramatic, but I forget what I did. I think I compared projections for the best shape of his life guys to their actual stats and then had a control group of non best shape of his life guys and compared them to their actual stats. And I found that hitters didn't really hit any better, but they did seem

to get more playing time and they also seem to be better on defense possibly. And then I also found that pitchers got slightly more playing time and were a little bit better also at pitching. So I did find that there was something to that. It wasn't like a massive effect or anything, but I mean, one of the reasons why people pointed out aside from the fact that there's nothing else to say on February 10th or whatever is that you would think it would matter if an athlete was in better shape. And so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect maybe a slightly reduced injury risk or a little more durability from one of these best shape of his life guys. If I were a fan of a team that had a best shape of his life guy, or I owned one on a fantasy team

or something, I would be moderately pleased to read one of those stories. It's not totally meaningless. It's fun to mock, but I think there is some tiny bit of signal there. When the stories are written now, of course, this has been a meme for like 10 or 15 years, and that's just on the internet. So every writer who writes one of these stories is conscious of it. So I wonder how the stories themselves have changed at all. I mean, look, I don't read them, so I can't really give any insight myself. But I wonder if they're framed in any such way or if they're sort of tongue in cheek or give a nod to the fact that this happens all the time. But, I mean, you're right.

You're right. You can get into better shape every single offseason, especially if you assume, well, maybe training techniques are probably, you know, trending forward. It's one of the reasons we think players now are better than players in like 1942. Also the war. But, you know, there's other reasons as well. However, it seems to me that as a general rule, your body will find its natural level. It will get to what it's going to get to. And congratulations to everyone who is in really great shape on February 14th. But the season starts in a month and a half, and then it continues for, let's face it, basically forever. The season doesn't end. And you can't keep up your off-season training regimen during the season, and players' shapes just get worse. So congratulations to anyone who's starting from a uh a higher starting point i guess but outside of that things are going to

look probably pretty normal within three months let's give it three months yeah right yandi ds will still be enormous but everyone else i mean you you hear about guys who lose weight during a season or they gain weight during a season and then they come into the next season intending to do something about that. My favorite type of this story is the guys who yo-yo from one opposite training technique to the other where they'll bulk up one spring and they'll put on a bunch of muscle. And then you'll read the story next spring where they're like, I bulked up too much and put on too much muscle. And so this off season, I focused on flexibility and core exercises and yoga, and now I'm more loose and limber. And then the next year they probably go back to bulking up again because they break down in the middle of the season or something. So anyway, it's a fun genre of story to track. That one is fun. There's so much experimentalism in it because, you know, you want to be in better shape. You go into the offices and thinking like, oh, here's the thing

that went wrong with me last year. I want to do better than that. But you don't really know whether it's necessarily a flexibility or a strength problem. But also if you have like, I don't know, let's say, let's say hypothetically a partially torn UCL. You can get your abs in as great shape as you want to. That UCL isn't getting any better. All right. You have anything you want to touch on before we get to emails? Not really. Although I did.

Let's see. Now that everyone writes for The Athletic, that means that everything from The Athletic gets retweeted into my timeline. So I'm aware of now every article that's being written about baseball, which is not bad for centralization, I guess. But I did see an article that was framed around how the Cubs went from being on Yu Darvish's partial no trade list to recruiting him as a free agent, which seems like an interesting premise until you realize that Yu Darvish had good teams on his no trade list so that he figured he would be traded to those good teams and therefore he could extract some sort of compensation. So really not a good starting premise at all. This is an interesting banter.

This is just media criticism, but I'm allowed to be sort of mad at the athletic, even while rooting for them to succeed. So take it, athletic. I hope you do well, but also you're annoying. Yeah, we'll be talking to two athletic writers next time. Followed by two more, followed by two more, followed by God knows

where we'll be in a few years. It's getting really hard to avoid them. I think you should start a spinoff media criticism podcast where you just critique other writers' premises and reporting techniques. I enjoy this new look for you.

Would you like to co-host? I guess so. You wouldn't know how to record, right? So I better. Please don't ever leave. somewhat more predictable than most seasons, or at least he says we're heading into a season with a fair sense of how it is likely to pan out. And so he says, what is the least that needs to happen for you to be excited by the unexpected? Where is your surprise threshold? Clearly, if the Detroit Tigers or even the Marlins were to take a pennant race, it would be astounding. This would be one

could say maximum surprise. It is also so unlikely that the possibility of it happening is vanishingly small. On the other hand, the Yankees could win the World Series, even if they're not your first prediction, that outcome has to be relatively likely and therefore unsurprising given their team roster and last year's performance. So what is the most likely event that would still count as unexpected? What is the most probable outcome that would still count as a turn up for the books? What's the least that would have to happen so that your response shifts from huh across the surprise threshold to well, I didn't see that coming. I mean, at the end of the day, last year, the last four teams alive were what the the Astros,

the Yankees, the Cubs and the the dodgers all of whom made perfect sense the world series came down to the astros and the dodgers which made perfect sense and even within that world series there was game five which i will never forget for good reasons and very obnoxious reasons so even last year coming down to an extremely predictable conclusion that was a really fun world series and so was the world Series before it but also last year people might remember that going into last season it felt like everything was almost exactly as predictable we thought we yeah pretty much knew the playoff picture maybe there was a American League wildcard slot or two up for grabs but we thought we knew the entire picture going in and then the Giants and the Mets fell on their faces and then the

Diamondbacks and the Rockies took their spots. And that was interesting enough. Of course, the Nationals, Cubs, and Dodgers were supposed to make the playoffs and they all won their divisions quite easily. And in the American League, we expected the Red Sox, the Indians, and the Astros to win their divisions and they did exactly that. But, you know, the Brewers were a fun surprise. The Diamondbacks and the Rockies counted it as surprises. And the Twins made the playoffs very briefly, which was exciting.

And even though the yankees are the yankees and they stand for everything the yankees have ever stood for they were still kind of they had one year of being fun and nairn judge had like the greatest rookie season in forever so even with a really predictable alignment last season we had three three legitimately surprising playoff teams and and the World Series was fun, even though it was the two teams you'd expect to be in the World Series. So there is so much baseball that even if the projected standings came exactly true, there would be a lot of intrigue in there anyway. Right. I mean, in a sense, it is unsurprising if there is a surprise because you expect there to be a surprise somewhere just based on the odds.

I mean, any one team might be the favorite, but certainly you don't expect every favorite to actually do what it is favored to do. So I don't know, just going division by division. I mean, if a team other than the Yankees or the Red Sox won the AL East, I would be surprised. If you look at Pakoda, which seems to love the Rays every year, possibly for good reason, because as you pointed out in a recent stat blast, they seem to have been incredibly unfortunate or unclutch in recent years and their actual talent may be better than their results. But I'd be surprised if any non Yankees Red Sox team won that division. That would be more than a

huh, I guess for me, or, I mean, it varies by division. Like I would be pretty surprised if any team, but the Indians won the AL central,, I don't know, and I'd be pretty surprised if any team but, well, I don't know, the Dodgers or even the Nationals won their divisions. I mean, other divisions at least have good teams in them that you could see things breaking right. But I guess any team that is currently projected to win a division would qualify as passing the surprise threshold for me if they did not win the division. Other than, let's say, the Yankees or Red Sox, whichever team you like there, just because I don't think either one is that clear a favorite. And I don't know, maybe you could put the Cubs into that group. I think the Cubs are the best team in the NL Central, but there are at least two other decent to good teams in there. So if the Dodgers don't win, if the Nationals don't win, if the Astros or Indians don't win, that would surprise me. But I would also be very unsurprised to be surprised about it. We get a question like this every so often, but what would you do if the projected standings did come exactly true? Pick your projection

system. I don't care which one you're looking at, whether it's Fangraph Supercoder or Clay Davenport, but you got standings and then exactly those standings happen. What do you do? Probably blog about it. I don't know. I mean, I'd just chalk it up as a fluke. I wouldn't expect that baseball had suddenly become more predictable in any long-term way. I mean, there was that year where the opposite of that happened. What was upside down. That was great. That was wacky. Yeah. I remember Grant doing an article maybe at the All-Star break or something where he pointed out that the reverse of the projections was closer to reality than the actual projections. So that was weird. And we wrote about it and it didn't really mean anything because projections went back to being just about as telling as they had been before, which is not all that telling, but more telling than anything else we have. So I don't know. I guess I would write about it and talk about it on a podcast, but wouldn't make much more of it otherwise. I noticed you said

blog about it. How often do you refer to what you do as blog anymore? Not often. I don't know what the distinction between blogging and not blogging now is. It seems to have become pretty meaningless. I mean, what you do is generally regarded as a blog post, I guess, but it's not really different in any way from what I often do. So I guess it's like the format of the site more so than the content of the article at this point. On the rare occasion where you're interacting with people in person, and they're people that you don't already know, how do you talk about what you do? How do you describe your job? I just say I'm a writer, and I hope they don't ask any questions. Not much of a conversationalist, are we? No, not really.

Not unless I'm on a podcast. All right. Question from, well, Rebecca. This is sort of a projection-related question. She says, in the White Sox preview, Jason Benetti spoke about a player's mental state. This was Tim Anderson, I believe, and its impact on his game after the murder of his close friend. Generally, fans do not know these major elements of players' personal lives, and it seems natural that both good and bad events impact a player's game. Do you think there's any way to account for this element of their output in longer-term player evaluation?

No. Yeah, pretty much no. No. Yeah, pretty much no. Pretty. I mean, so if you take the average person over the course of let's call it nine months or whatever, 12 months, let's give them the whole year. There are a lot of life events that happen to people that can be good or bad or somewhat neutral, whether it's there's a birth or a death or someone is ill or someone is no longer ill or there's, I don't know, your car gets hit in the parking lot and you really liked your car or anything similar. Look, there are three kinds of life events. I'm struggling here. I don't know how you, if you were going to do some sort of objective study, this is going to get weirdly cold.

Of course, Tim Anderson is dramatically negatively affected by the death of a loved one. But that's also not the only thing that happened in his life. There would have been other lesser unfortunate events and there would have been some positive events as well. And I don't really know how you account for what is weighing on a person the most in a good or a bad way i can't begin to imagine how you measure those things and aside from just doing a general mental evaluation which is i think something that a lot of teams do often looking for baselines so you will generally have to try to identify a player as being i don't know what's the positive version of depressed i don't know if there's a positive well sure yeah the opposite of that i guess yeah you would have to try to figure out where a player would rate on the the depression to neutral to happy scale and just kind of monitor that over time but outside of that there's i can't imagine there's

any way to account for it like what's the effect on the Marlins when a tragedy happens to a teammate or the Cardinals or the Royals or the Mariners before? Just anything like this. It's just so deeply complicated and it seems to defy objective analytical study. Yeah. I mean, often these stories do come out. You hear about a player being bereaved. The player will often take time off on bereavement leave, or there will be a birth or something that will be a happy event,

but maybe also a distracting and sleep-sapping event. And often, there will be relationship issues and divorces and new loves and who knows what's going on. But often we hear about those things. I would assume that just as often, if not more often, we don't hear about those things. The teams certainly hear about those things much more than we do. And so teams take those things into account, maybe not in any kind of rigorous statistical way, but just being aware that this guy had something else going on in his life and maybe you could expect him to be a bit better. But I don't think there's any way to just automate the trauma and apply some sort of

trauma tax to a player or something. Just, you know, I mean, how could we classify the impact that it has on a player's emotional state and motivation and everyone responds to tragedy differently? And so essentially, no, there's no way to do it on kind of a one size fits all basis, but it's something to be aware of.

Like, again, it sounds callous to put it in these terms. I'm not suggesting like suggesting this guy's a sleeper because he had a horrible year last year where someone he loved died. It's a bounce back season coming. It's probably not best to think about it that way, but there might be something to that, although I wouldn't encourage anyone to think about it that way. This player is going to have a big year, a year after the fact that his house burned down. Right.

I would imagine there would be other factors here, but probably the most measurable aspect here would be anything that comes at a sleep cost. Because just generally speaking, I think that when you are at the field, it's just like any other workplace, most people are able to kind of put the distractions, the preoccupations aside when they're at work, and you just kind of focus on the job, especially again, major league baseball players who are selected for their ability to just focus on baseball. And so if you are in a great mood or just a really distracted mood i i would guess that doesn't really show up very much on the field but if you are just not sleeping because say you had a new baby or you're just really distracted by something else that's positive or negative then of course a lack of sleep now if you if you're ben lindbergh a lack of sleep seems to be fuel

but if you're the average human being a lack of sleep seems to be fuel. But if you're the average human being, a lack of sleep is a problem. It is a detriment. And God only knows what Ben Lindbergh could be if he did sleep. Less productive, but more productive? I don't really know. But you are the freak. Most people are not freaks. So if players aren't sleeping, then I think that would show up performance-wise because

your performance would just be worse. Not sleeping is bad for you, for most athletes. And I think that's not a coincidence that a lot of teams are starting to track that i think i was skimming an article about the phillies and gabe capler and everything yesterday and i think that they're gonna they're like tracking everything yeah like everything that their players are doing and i would not be surprised if that included sleep measurements so that you have a sense of who is sleeping how well and for how long. And the Phillies are not the only team that would be doing something like that. I know that the Mariners are trying to implement some sleep studies and a lot of other teams have been doing this for years.

And so if you are not sleeping, that's a problem. I think that's something that players didn't really pay so much attention to even two decades ago. But it is changing. And so that would be probably an area where something like this would show up the most. But we certainly can't do anything with that from the outside. Yep. All right. You want to do that stat blast you've already teased?

Let's do it. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. So you brought up the Alan Nathan article about a hypothetical humidor in Chase Field, which is no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. It is now in the realm of the thetical. Or just going to bypass that and move right on to, of course, there is only one other humidor in Major League Baseball. The one in Coors Field, as you mentioned, it was installed just prior to the 2002 season. So this is a pretty simple stat blast that just looks at the effect of the humidor, which is something that has been studied a million times using the same numbers, but I'm just going to repeat them now. So I looked at all home versus away performance covering five year spans,

five years before the humidor and five years after. 1997 to 2001 and then 2002 to 2006 i combined rockies and opponent numbers in coors field and of course rocky and opponent numbers away from coors field so i didn't uh i didn't do the analysis uh as tightly as i would have liked to i just used some ratios because i was in a rush uh call them rushios. So for the five years before the humidor, the ratio of runs in Coors Field on the road was 1.53. So that's 53% run inflation in Coors Field, which is amazing. Just to put that in raw numbers, there were about 3,600 runs scored in Rocky's road games. But in Rocky's home games, there are more than 5500 so that is a massive increase in runs of course everybody knew that so in singles there is an increase of about

28 percent doubles 23 percent triples 53 percent and home runs 57 percent walks were up seven percent and strikeouts were down nine percent so then, Humidor is installed, 2002 to 2006, runs inflated by only 30% now, singles 18%, doubles 16%, triples 64%, home runs 29%, walks 6%,

strikeouts down 8%. And so what is most interesting here are the effects of the Humidor. And so this is just now expressed in changes. The park effect, I guess. So I measured some sort of haphazard change in park effect. And Coors Field, just in terms of run output, played 15% more neutral. The single inflation went down 8%, doubles down 6%.

Triples actually increased a little bit, but triples are noisy because there are so few of them. Triples did increase a little bit. Home run rate went down 18%. Walk rate went down only 1%, and strikeout rate went up only 1%. And the latter stuff is interesting because, as you mentioned, it sounds like the predominant reason, at least publicly, that Chase Field is installing humidors is because pitchers were complaining about grip. And, of course, I have not gripped a baseball in Chase Field, and I'm sure the pitchers have found it rather unpleasant, I guess. Didn't really stop the Diamondbacks from having a really, really good pitching staff last season and making the playoffs, but whatever. But the humidor in Coors Field, just based on walks and strikeouts, it did make the ratios a little bit better, but the humidor in Coors Field just based on walks and strikeouts it did make the ratios a little bit better but the effect was very minor and you would figure that if

pitchers were gripping the ball better and getting the movement or whatever it is the the tackiness that they preferred post humidor didn't really show up in walks or strikeouts which are the two areas where you would think that it would show up. Mostly what happened is that the ball just came off the bat slower, which is what was expected, and so it didn't carry as much, and so all of the drivers of run scoring were reduced. But of course, Coors Field remained extremely hitter-friendly. As I mentioned earlier, it remains the most hitter-friendly ballpark in the major leagues. That is almost certainly not going to change, just as a consequence of having all the outfield area that is the elevation at play not just the dry air chase field it's going to be different as you mentioned alan nathan said home runs could go down about 37 which would be

extreme coors field did not experience that but it will be interesting to watch the the walks and strikeouts because based on the only other example we have they're probably not going to budge very much and last year the diamondbacks struck out a whole lot of players now i haven't actually pulled up the uh the actual diamondbacks pitching splits but as i'm saying this you might be able to hear me type because i am doing two things at once and so just looking at last season i have no idea what this is going to reveal let's look at the diamondbacks pitching splits from last season the suspense is moderate. Last year in home games, Diamondbacks actually allowed a higher ERA than they did on the road, which is an indicator that it was still a hitter-friendly environment, even in a single-season sample. But the Diamondbacks struck out 9.3 batters per nine innings at home and 9.2 batters per nine innings on the road.

That looked pretty normal walk rate pretty normal i understand that pitchers would complain about the grip i understand the balls would feel different but i wonder now to what extent they are feeling something that isn't necessarily there but you know what i probably shouldn't speculate until after we see the humidor installed because we only have again the one sample. All right. Well, this is interesting. I was thinking of your as you had speculated that it certainly seems as if Comerica has a notable park factor for strikeouts because the batter's eye is really big and dark and doesn't have fans as close to it, like the center of the batter's eye as a lot of parks do. And so a lot of hitters will say they get a great view of the ball. That's not something we typically think of as

impacting performance, the batter's eye. It seems as if the purpose of a batter's eye everywhere is to be a good backdrop for hitters to see the ball against, but some batter's eyes do that better than others do. And apparently Comerica really depresses strikeouts and also leads to harder contact. So it ends up being something of a hitter's park, even though it's really big and you do get the occasional just crushed fly ball that would be out anywhere else that does not go out in deep center at Comerica. So it's not always something obvious like elevation or altitude or humidity or something like that. Those may be the main drivers, but it can also be some element of the park construction that you

might not even consider until you dive into the numbers or talk to the players. Yeah. It's fun to play with the park factors because of course there are the obvious ones like home run park factor or just runs but like the phillies ballpark and the reds ballparks inflate strikeouts at least according to the numbers at fangraphs or you you think about how whatever the oakland stadium is called now inflates infield pop-ups which is true yeah it does have a a higher than average pop-up factor, but Citi Field actually rates number one in increasing pop-ups for reasons I can't really begin to explain. You have ballparks that increase or decrease ground balls, like Coors Field actually increases ground ball rate, which is probably not a surprise. Pitchers are trying to get ground balls in that ballpark, so of course that would make sense. But then you have a ballpark like, well, Citi Field, or our final year of calling it Safeco Field, which actually decrease ground ball rates.

So there are a lot of park factors that are obviously there because they're borne out in the numbers. And we have several years of data to prove that these factors have come true. But that doesn't mean that we really have explanations for them. It's just this is what happens. And it makes good sense why like strikeouts would be reduced and walks would be increased in Coors Field but why would the same be true and another example that I could wish that I could pull off the top of my head yeah Detroit we think we have an explanation for that but we don't really know but it's still there and

it's it's sort of it's a question that is simultaneously answered and not. We know that the effect exists, but we don't have a perfect explanation for it. All right, let's move on to the next question. So as soon as the best shape of his life story subside, we'll start getting the reinvention stories of mechanics and swings and swing changers. So David asks, what exactly are these players doing to change their launch angle? When someone tells you that a hitter's launch angle is 200th in the league, are they measuring from the top of the whole range? Too high a launch angle is not good. Are they measuring from the sweet spot of the launch angle curve. And that's the thing. It can be kind of complicated. I think very early in the StatCast era, back in those distant early days of the StatCast era,

we would just cite a player's average launch angle. And in theory, if a guy does increase his launch angle and go for more loft in his swing it should show up in the average most likely but that's probably not the best way you can do it i think typically people have tried to look at like the percentage of batted balls in the sweet spot for home runs i don't know whatever it is 25 degrees in that sort of range 20 to to 30. So there are a number of ways you can break it down. And just doing the average launch angle may not always be the best measure because you might have guys who have a much different distribution of launch angles around that average launch angle. So that is not always the most telling, which is unfortunate because it's a lot more complicated

to look at it any other way. And it's a lot easier to say just this is the average and it's higher or lower. But there is some added nuance and complexity to that. And as to how they're actually doing it, I couldn't really tell you the specific drills that they are doing. But I mean, part of it just seems to be being conscious of the fact that they want to hit five balls and swing on something of a higher plane instead of trying to hit line drives or trying to hit balls on the ground as many players were

taught coming up through amateur ball. There are kind of two different ways that you would try to increase your launch angle in terms of expressing like 200th place it's no different from looking at grand ball right or fly ball right we have these statistical measures where we don't necessarily have better or worse like you if you rank 200th in batting average you know that's from the top because the top is the best batting average. But there is no best launch angle. Everyone is different. But if you want to change it, if you're, say, I don't know, let's just take a player, Yandy Diaz would be one. Yandy Diaz hits the ball hard, hits the ball on the ground or on a line. If you want to try to change that, players can try one of two things.

I think a more difficult thing to do is to alter your actual swing, which is something that some players have done. That's just, you'll hear about swing playing and you just try to instead of swinging down on the ball or or trying to hit the ball straight you kind of meet the pitch on its trajectory and all pitches are sinking by the time that they get to home plate and so you you want to sort of swing up to meet the ball and so you just it's essentially you swing with a minor form of an uppercut and so that way you are your ideal contact would be to put the ball back in the air but the other way to try to do this is not by changing your swing at all but by changing the pitches

that you swing at if you are a hitter and you find that say you roll over on a lot of pitches that are low and away which is not uncommon that's where a lot of grand balls come from then maybe you go into a season saying you know what i don't really want to swing at those pitches or if i'm going to swing at them i don't want to alter my swing midway and and just try to make contact maybe i would just be more comfortable swinging through that pitch if i happen to swing at it and then wait for for something else something more drivable and so you will have some players like i i might be getting this backwards but i think that last year aaron hicks started swinging at a lot more pitches up and way fewer pitches down and aaron hicks of course had a a very good season i don't think that he was making way better contact and i don't think that

he really changed his swing he just changed his distribution of pitches that he hit and there are pitches that are easier to lift than others and so if you are if you have a pitch that's up maybe you have to sort of swing up to get it those pitches just historically have gotten more fly balls and so those are those are two ways to do it you can also i think you know saris wrote about this some time ago but you can also try to meet the pitch out in front of the plate which would be another way to try to lift it there are all kinds of different techniques some things work better for certain players some players just don't really want to change their swings and some players aren't built for it i think gregory polanco has

said that when he has tried to hit the ball in the area just kind of messes him up a lot less is written about the players who try to change their swings and fail because those those cases are not as i don't know fun or clickable or something but if it was super easy to increase your launch angle and start hitting a bunch of dingers look i get it a lot of players are hitting a bunch more dingers but it's really still quite difficult and pretty much every single player in baseball is making tweaks all the time some of them are more dramatic than others but there is definitely a let's call it a publishing yeah bias so if there is utility in having these stories now even if they're sort of eye rolly a little bit because it's spring training at least right now if you were reading about altered swings or altered approaches you don't have the same

publishing bias because you don't have explanations given for players who have already succeeded. So last year, Jason Hayward came to camp. He had a brand new swing or he had a swing from 2013 or whatever it was, but he was going to swing differently and he was bad. And that's interesting because we just usually don't get that. So he's trying to change his swing again. We saw the article not too long ago written in the Kansas City Star about Jorge Soler, and he has been working out with Yonder Alonso's coach or instructor, whoever it was that got Yonder Alonso to hit better. Jorge Soler has been working out with him. Don't know if it's going to work, so that's going to be fun to watch. These things are more interesting, I think, when you get them before the season begins. Guys who added a new pitch and guys who didn't. And it seemed to have some effect, but obviously in many cases it doesn't.

I see that Ron Gardenhier just said that Travis Wood has a split finger now, but I think that was a joke about the fact that he evidently almost lost a finger in a crossbow accident this offseason. Which, how are people still getting into crossbow accidents? But I guess i can imagine yeah i was reading that travis wood had a pin inserted into his right index finger after an early january bow hunting accident wood got his hand caught as he was prepping a crossbow and told reporters wednesday morning that it nearly snapped his right index finger into the good news is he's a left-handed pitcher the bad news is he's not a very good one. That last one was not in the copy, but I chose to add it.

All right. Sean, Patreon supporter says, if a 500 team played another 500 team 162 times, but one team played each game like game seven of the World Series and didn't suffer from any fatigue, while the other team would have to take fatigue into account and pace itself for 162 games. How many games would you expect the latter team to win? Or I guess the former team to win. Assume both teams have to use a rotation rather than start their best pitcher every game. However, the first 500 team, the one that's really, really trying, may shorten its rotation as is done by most playoff teams. So basically you have one team that has the same talent level as another, but it is in playoff mode.

It's pulling out all the stops and can continue to do so somehow without suffering any ill effects. Okay, so no fatigue effect for the first team? Right. So they're still using a rotation but they don't need yeah they're well well i guess they have some sort of fatigue effects or they would just use the ace every day they're using like four yeah yeah right they're doing what postseason teams do they put their worst starter or two in the pen or leave them off the roster and ride the bullpen a little harder give a greater percentage of their innings to their better pitchers. Okay, so same talent, but no fatigue. I would think that the first team would probably win

95, 90 to 95 games over the other team, same talent level. But if you get to, it basically comes down to bullpen optimization and getting to skip your worst starter. I think that that would, that makes a pretty significant difference. You're just not giving in to bad pitchers anymore. And what a great way to win out the small advantages in the end, which over 162 games makes a huge difference. Right. Yeah. I mean, the starting talent levels are the same,

but in effect, the talent levels are very different. You do that post every year when the postseason starts about how Team A may be better suited to the postseason or like the actual players on the postseason starts about how team A may be better suited to the postseason or like the actual players on the postseason roster would be projected to be this good over a full season. And some teams gain a bigger boost from going from regular season roster to postseason roster than other teams do. And especially lately, we've seen some teams just concentrate really high percentages of their innings in their top three starters and their top two or three relievers. And yeah, that obviously makes a very big difference. So I would think your estimate is about right. I can't

really be more precise than you were, but it sounds like roughly the the same range and then of course you have managers who are maybe making moves that they wouldn't otherwise and you know not that all managers are like using the closer and tie games on the road even now in october but that sort of thing is more likely than it is during the regular season so yeah and you know you're not giving days off to guys. You're going with your starting lineup every single day, your A lineup. So yeah, it makes a major difference. All right. Let's take a next question from, let's say Michael in Centennial, Colorado. He says with the inactivity that has plagued the

free agent market seeming to consume my very soul through inertia, I decided to look at a free agent tracker recently to remind myself that free agents had actually been signed this offseason. I noticed that not only is Nori Aoki heading back to Japan, but that Dylan Gee and Mike Bolsinger have also agreed to play in Japan. My question is that if this inactivity in the MLB free agent market continues, could Japanese teams take advantage and sign players they otherwise would not be able to in previous years? If so, how could this be done? No, I don't think so. I don't remember if I responded to this email or not, but I had a response that seems to have slipped my mind so whether whether japanese or korean teams could sign available free agents so of

course we've seen a few players talk about going from making like minor league money in north america to making seven figures in asia but there are already limited roster spots over there you have a lot of free agents who are confident that they're still going to get jobs in the states and there's just a sort of general resistance it's a pretty major upheaval to just uproot and go to another continent and an extremely unfamiliar culture to play baseball for a season or two and then try to come back and re-enter the market but i do think that this would have the most profound potential effect on i haven't run the numbers but i've heard at least anecdotally that there are a greater number of unsigned minor league free agents right now as well and it makes sense because everything is sort of affected from the top down

not only is eric cosmer holding up logan morrison but logan morrison is holding up i don't know lucas duda and lucas duda is holding up etc etc etc minor league free agents are some of them are still holding out to sign with teams because as a minor league free agent you want to sign with a team where you think you're going to have a good shot to actually get to the majors and right now there are certain areas where the outlook is remaining unclear now this is probably expressing it in two dramatic terms because there are not that many actually good players like meaningful players that are still on the market it's like hosmer and Morrison and Jake Arrieta and a few others. But I think that you could, I don't know exactly when players tend to sign with Asian teams.

I don't know if rosters are mostly set by now. I don't know enough about how that works. But I would think that you could probably pluck a few minor league free agents away before you could pluck away like a John Jay or a Melky Cabrera. I don't think that's going to happen. They're just going to play with the Marlins. Yeah. We've answered questions in the past, I think hypotheticals about how huge a premium an owner in NPB say would have to pay for like a prominent free agent to get him to play in Japan for a year. And I think we generally agreed that it would be a really high premium for a year. And I think we generally agreed that it would be a really

high premium for a year. And for a long-term deal, it might just be impossible because players might not even entertain the idea. So I don't think that most major free agents would consider it. I think they'd probably rather sit out a portion of the season then do that. And I think you're right. I mean, often NPB teams are kind of plucking away the leavings of major league teams and they're going for quadruple A guys, guys who've been good in triple A, but just it's a numbers game. They haven't gotten a shot or they haven't been able to succeed in the majors. Maybe they can't hit velocity or something like that. to succeed in the majors. Maybe they can't hit velocity or something like that. So there should be a higher percentage of those guys unemployed right now. And some of them will be more desperate than they otherwise would be. And the money is good. The money is better than they would make,

even if they did get jobs, let alone not getting jobs at all. So I'm sure that it is making Japanese teams' job of recruiting a little bit easier. But yeah, again, it's not going to be one of the big name top 10 type guys going over there. Okay, it's next November. Bryce Harper had a good season. He's a free agent. And he's got, I don't know, what, like a $500 million free agent contract that's out there. know what like a 500 million dollar free agent contract that's out there and at the same time let's say oryx the oryx buffaloes offer bryce harper one billion dollars i don't know that's like a trillion yen or something maybe maybe you make the offer in the trillions just to try to

get them but would a billion dollar offer lure bryce har Harper for the same number of years? So essentially doubling the money, even though I think, I don't know much about Bryce Harper's lifestyle, but he'd probably be settled with $500 million in the States. But I don't know, maybe the extra $5 million would really put him over the top. Yeah, I doubt it. I think, I mean, not to poo-poo the difference between half a billion and a billion, which is half a billion dollars. That's a lot of money. But in terms of quality of life for not only him, but many generations of his descendants, not sure it would make that much of a difference, assuming he is at all responsible with his money.

And I mean, I think he's a guy who enjoys the limelight. He is someone who has the potential to maybe make the Hall of Fame someday if he has a long, successful career. You have to factor in endorsement money. I mean, I guess he would get some if he went to Japan too, but not probably as much as he would have the potential to get here. Japan too, but not probably as much as he would have the potential to get here. So I just don't think he would be interested. I think he'd be flattered, but say no thanks. Okay. What if it was the Toros de Tijuana that offered him 1 billion? Now it's still a different league in a different country, but it's close to the American border. It's less of a culture shock than playing in the middle of Japan. It's actually a shorter season. Torres de Tijuana last year

just only played 110 games. They also won their league, if that makes any difference to Bryce Harper. So he seemed to be pretty good. He could also play for the Rialeros de Aguascalientes if he wanted to, or the Acera. There's a lot of options in the Mexican league, but you figure Bryce Harper at elevation,

billion dollars? Nope. If there's an expansion club in Mexico City at some point, then I'd like to see Bryce Harper play there. But nope, I can't see anyone at that level of salary and renown going to a lower level league. I just, I don't think the payoff is there. Sonoma Stompers offer Bryce Harper $1 billion. Wow. If you could be in a book written by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, maybe that changes the equation a little bit.

All right. How many wins above replacement would Bryce Harper be worth in that league? Well, actually, just at the end of the previous episode, I made a little mention of a study that was done on Mike Trout in the Pecos League. And this was done with the baseball sim out of the park. And I think it concluded that he would be worth almost 900 more and play until he's 50 and win 24 MVP awards over 30 seasons. and win 24 MVP awards over 30 seasons. And his lifetime earnings would be under $50,000 in the Pico Slick.

But I mean, that would be a different kind of fun. I don't know. I still don't think it would be at all appealing to a player, but it has to be somewhat, I don't know. I guess if you're Bryce Harper, you've already had the experience of putting up improbable numbers in lower level leagues. Like you've already hit 500 in high school or whatever. So maybe that experience isn't as enticing to you. I would have a lot of fun just completely running roughshod over the competition. That would be worth some amount of money to me. I guess the interesting book there would be,

what are the six MVP awards that Mike Trout didn't win? That's what I was wondering about. And the best thing about it was that, of course, he is a first ballot Pecos League Hall of Famer in this simulation, but he only gets 97.9% of the vote. Maybe Miguel Cabrera goes to the Pecos League when he goes yeah i linked to that last time in the the show page at fangrass but i will link to it again today for anyone who missed it all right a couple more clark says given your email bag is running dry i figured i'd ask you

a ridiculous question thinking there's a higher probability of getting it answered now very smart clark suppose you are the owner of a brand new baseball team who for some reason is able to poach players from any other team, Trout, Kershaw, Altuve, Judge, Harper, whomever you want. However, the rest of your team must be filled by people who have never played an inning of professional baseball at any level. No major leaguers, no AAA guys, no Sonoma Stompers. You're not allowed to participate in the draft, nor can you sign international free agents. Finally, You're not allowed to participate in the draft, nor can you sign international free agents. Finally, you're not allowed to have minor league teams to train up players. If someone goes on the DL, you need to sign a new guy who has never played professional baseball to take his

place. The question is, how many best players in baseball do you need to field a competitive team if the rest of the team is filled with people straight off the street would 10 of the best players in baseball be enough or would you need more oh god what happened why do i own this team uh i mean they would be so so bad you would have for any position player hitless you just you'd never you'd never reach me we've had that conversation before as well yeah i think sam may actually be working on an article about this now we've definitely answered that email You'd never reach me. We've had that conversation before as well. more concrete numbers on it which would probably help us answer this question but haven't seen that article yet so what do you think oh my god okay so if you had if you had one if you had one empty spot in your starting lineup i think that's manageable you'd have a lot of intentional walks and your team would probably rank as unclutched because teams could just kind of

walk players get that third out from the automatic out and you could i mean you can't you would lose every single game that the pitcher was throwing and you so okay so let's see where's the number let's say let's say you could absorb two dead spots in your lineup let's just say so let's see that gives you seven you need seven best players in your lineup and you can sack it you can throw away one rotation spot maybe, I guess. Maybe. So then you'd need four more. But of course, you also need a bullpen. You need a pretty full roster. Yeah, you really do. Maybe.

I'm thinking like at least 15. But then you've got injuries and fatigue as well. And this team could really, this team would not be good. Because we answered a question about whether the Yankees could win the division with Michael Schur as their fifth starting pitcher, right? And you concluded no, that they couldn't because someone who is just not a player would be so bad. I mean, the difference between a best player in baseball and the typical player in baseball is big, but it is dwarfed by an enormous amount by the difference between a typical baseball player or even a replacement level baseball player and us. I mean, the gulf is massive there. So you need way more best players in baseball to make up for having average people.

Yeah. No, I mean, I'm thinking now i'm starting to think at least 20 yeah 20 of a 25 because i mean any sort of injury you can't call anyone up there's no one there's no one good right maybe you find out someone off the street has a great arm you had no idea you get lucky but no those players are going to suck they wouldn't even necessarily know the rules yeah god's sake let alone anything else yeah so no now i'm going up to 22 i'm getting close to 25 here i mean well when you get to like 22 or something like that then you can it depends on how you use these guys obviously if you can kind of cheat and like just have them ride the bench then you can get away with it like you could get away with just a shorthanded roster, essentially, of best players in baseball that just has three

or four dead roster spots. You just never use the last couple of guys in the bullpen or a couple of guys on the bench and you'd still be fine. But if you actually have to use these guys as one of your regular starters or someone in the starting lineup or even a regular bullpen guy. It's just such a degree of self-sabotage that we've never seen before that I agree with you. I don't think you could survive more than two of those guys seems like the absolute max to me in any kind of prominent role. So what would be more deflating let's say so you take mike trout first what's more deflating for mike trout you join this

team let's call them the marlins you join the marlins and then every single player around you is dropped and replaced by people off the street or the marlins drop everyone, replace them with players off the street, and then they get Mike Trout. Which one's worse? I think the first one. Just seeing everyone shatter around you? Yeah. Because maybe if the roster's already empty and then they acquire, you think, oh, there's more coming. Right.

Whereas the first time, you're like, oh, no. Yeah. Oh, no. This is just like my dad. You know what you're getting into at least so and of course you could probably come up with ways to compensate for these players like even if you have to use them regularly like on defense at least i guess you know if you have to stick a guy out in the outfield you just basically play almost as if he isn't there right and you

just shade everyone it's like almost a two-man outfield where guys are playing in the alleys, that kind of thing. So you could probably slightly minimize how terrible that person would be and come up with some compensating strategies, but that would only help so much. Think about how many of those people off the street you'd need to start replacing because they get so dispirited that they just stop playing baseball. After like four days, they just realize like, I'm humiliating myself. I don't want to do this anymore. So not only would you have terrible players, but you'd have constant emotional turnover. Right. Yeah.

I mean, I guess it would kind of take the pressure off that you're on a whole team of terrible people. Sam and I once answered a question, I think, about whether we would even like want to play single baseball game just to get a baseball reference page, basically, which is something we briefly considered doing with the Stompers just at the end of the season, just so we would have a baseball reference page. Ultimately decided not to exploit our power like that. But if you had the opportunity to do that, I still don't think I would just because it would be so humiliating and you'd look like you were trying to call attention to yourself and people would be mad at you for doing this. And it would just be a really unpleasant experience. I think not worth it. But if you were on a whole team of people who were put in this position, it would be slightly different. i would feel a lot less

pressure i think i might even have fun in that scenario so i don't know but obviously you'd get some people who just have performance anxiety because everyone would be watching this to see how terrible they are i think i definitely would not want to take even one single at bat in the major leagues but i think i'd love to face like three batters just to just to know how bad i am you know because if i just go throw with a friend then i think hey i got something in my arm this could be i just want to i just want to have any of that lingering question just completely obliterated from my mind so that i know for a fact i didn't go into the wrong profession right all right and last question been a while since we've taken one of these, a terminology question. This is from Ari. He says, when is a time sharing at a position a platoon? When based on head in this matchups, when based on any type of pitcher hitter matchups, when done for defensive reasons, based on who's pitching for one's own team, always, no matter the reason, or even if there is no reason. team always, no matter the reason, or even if there is no reason. The Mets are talking about having Travis Darnot and Kevin Ploiecki split time at catcher. I'm seeing this referred to as

a platoon, despite both being right-handed hitters, neither of whom has a big platoon split in either direction. The arrangement seems like it's just there to keep both catchers fresh during a long season. It's essentially an acknowledgement that neither one is much better than the other, and so the best use of both is to keep the other rested. The use of the word platoon for this arrangement seemed wrong to me, but is it? So I just pulled out the Dixon Baseball Dictionary, and I guess if you have a very strict definition of the term, it could be correct. So there's an entry for platoon player, which just says a player who is alternated with another at one defensive position. So by that very basic definition,

Ploiecki and Darnot would fit the description. So I guess technically you could call them platoon players. There's also an entry for platoon that says to use two or more players on an alternating basis for the same defensive position or designated hitter, thereby taking advantage of each player's offensive and defensive strengths. And then there's a second definition, a group of players who alternate with each other. Platoons usually involve a right-handed batter who plays against left-handed pitchers and vice versa. So technically, I guess it is not incorrect in that they are alternating with each other. And I guess you could even say that you're taking advantage of each of their offensive and defensive strengths and that you're getting them healthy and using them as much as you can. But it's certainly not in the spirit of how we tend to use platoon. And i would probably call it a timeshare yeah the way that i think of a platoon is that it would i would consider it a platoon if it's based in any way on some sort of

splits and right whereas if it's just playing time then i don't think of that as a platoon but i'm not gonna lie to you haven't thought about it too deeply yeah it doesn't have to be handedness it could be i don't know having like a guy who works better with a pitcher or something like i i don't know is it a platoon if like half of the pitchers prefer one of those guys as a personal catcher and the other half prefer the other guys that's reason enough to me that's a i would call that a platoon ifatoon. If it's only we're going to do a 50-50 share because we want to give players rest and there's no other strategic benefit, that would be the one exception to me where I think it would not be a platoon. But then if that's the one exception, you might as well just fold it in with the platoons because what's the point of having one specific situation where you refer to it as something else? Yeah. All right.

situation where you refer to it as something else. Yeah. All right. Well, we will stop there because our next 20 questions are about economics, inclusion, and free agency. I think we've both reached our fill of those. It's funny. I think we could probably both describe ourselves as skeptics, maybe, just about the idea that there is something like an existential crisis currently taking place in the baseball market. Certainly there is something happening, and it's a historically anomalous offseason in some ways. But I think maybe we are closer than the typical writer toward this side of the spectrum that says that when we look back, this might not appear so significant. Or I think it could be the prelude to something significant.

And maybe this is the beginning of something that we'll be talking about for the coming years between now and the next CBA. But I'm not sure that it's actually as disruptive as it's been made out to be. I think most of the players will get signed for something approximating what we would have thought they'd get signed for. And particularly on the topic of tanking, which we discussed recently, I think both of us are maybe more in the camp that says that this is not all that different from what we've seen historically. And if it is different, it's not necessarily worse. Is that a fair

characterization? Yeah. And I wish it were in any way easier to them. I think our shared hypothesis is that, again, what we're seeing in terms of what teams are trying to do is not a deviation from what has happened in the past. I wish that were in any way easier to demonstrate, but we can't just go back and look at old standings or old payrolls because it doesn't really work. As we've mentioned before, you can't really identify team direction easily at all. You could, I guess, you probably have a spreadsheet somewhere of how much war teams have added, and maybe that would be a useful way to go about it. But still, that's really tedious work to get to a conclusion that i don't know might not be very firm i think that it's absolutely true that players could stand to make a greater

share of the revenues and that the compensation system is i don't want to say broken but it's not optimal especially when older free agents aren't going to get the money that they used to because you know aging curves i think it's right absolutely true money needs to be shifted to younger players and the arbitration system needs to be destroyed and replaced with something better that i have absolutely no qualms with that idea but something being broken with the market right now i that's that's different i don't care it's mostly scott bors fault and the fault of the agents i think that maybe maybe you and i are just kind of more plugged in so to speak with people on the team side as opposed to agents who are talking to these reporters and of course the agents are all frustrated because they have these

these clients but teams want to win if anything the the urgency the desperation to get good is higher than ever and it's true like i know people would say oh the the rays aren't trying to win right now but they sure as shit are trying to win they're trying to win in the only way that they know how and sure they could maybe spend more money and the the owners could put a little more toward payroll but that is a a different conversation the teams are all trying to be successful and just because eric Eric Hosmer is holding out doesn't really change anything to me. So I'm restating your point. and worrisome is happening just because, I don't know, I generally just think that there tends to be a recency bias about a lot of things and kind of the idea that whatever is currently happening is the worst and scariest thing that has ever happened. And that's something

that people always think about whatever is happening. So I probably just have a harder time being convinced of that. But the reason I bring this up is I just I hope for many reasons that this doesn't turn out to be the prelude to years of labor strife and economic discussions, because for me, at least, it's not the most entertaining topic to talk about or write about. And it's not something you can ignore either if you're attempting to cover baseball. Obviously, it's important. So you have to have some sort of opinion and you have to address it one way or another. But I would rather be weighing in about other things, I think. It's not my training necessarily the way it was like Dave Cameron's background as an economist. And he was well-versed in that subject, whereas I am much more of an amateur and don't necessarily feel like I have a perfect handle on all of the

complex market dynamics. So for many reasons, I hope that this doesn't turn out to be something that's going to dominate the discourse of baseball for the next few years, just because I hope that players can get paid and I hope that baseball can continue without a showdown or work stoppage. But also, selfishly, I would rather not have to constantly return to this topic over the next few years. I'd rather talk about what would happen when you build a baseball team that has some of the best players in baseball, but also a bunch of really terrible players. All right, we can wrap it up there. By the way, brief follow-up on one thing from yesterday. On the Indians preview, Pete Beatty wondered why Jose Ramirez's Twitter handle is Mr. LaPara. He put out a call for anyone familiar with Dominican slang. We did get a couple of responses on that. The baseball writer Octavio Hernandez says that it's hard to translate because it's an idiom, but it's something close to Mr. Better Than You. And another listener on Twitter, Dave DeWitt, pointed out that there is a Roc Nation artist named Mozart LaPara.

And his bio on the site says, LaPara, to stop, is Dominican slang meaning the fear that his opponents would feel when the time came to freestyle face-to-face with him. So, same sort of idea. Now we know. Also, congratulations to Chris Mitchell, our guest on episode 1173 last week. He was the stat guy in our Stats vs. Scouts episode about prospects, the proprietor of the Cato projection system for minor leaguers. Happily, presumably for him, but sadly for us, Cato projection system for minor leaguers. Happily, presumably for him, but sadly for us, Cato will no longer be in the public sphere. Chris has his final post up at Fangraphs this week. He says he is embarking on a new opportunity in the baseball industry

that prohibits him from working in the public sphere, which means no more Cato. He can't be any more specific about that, but we can surmise that some team has licensed the system or employed him in some kind of consulting role. So good for him. Glad we got him on one more podcast, but I will miss that system and that annual exercise in future years. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Thank you very much to everyone who has signed up in the past week. That has been really nice to see. Today's five listeners to thank include Brent Villard, Mike Anderson, Ryan Quans, Eric Stephen, and Adam Scher. Thanks to all of you. You can also join

our 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 coming. For me and Jeff, replenish our mailbag via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. We will, of course, be back very soon with another team preview podcast. Next up, the Chicago Cubs and the San Diego Padres. It's true We can't come back It's what we can't bear to lose