Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1187: The Baseball Bounce Pass

Episode Date: March 8, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays’ latest Tommy John surgery victim and the team’s potential plans for a four-man rotation, players’ decreasing IP and PA totals, exhibition-game walk-off celebrations, Marlins spring-training invitees, and Jon Lester’s new bounce pass to first base, then answer listener emails about lower-level clutchness, how quickly changes to […]

🎵 I still go on And even if I know that you're right I still go on I still go on Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs. Hello. Hello. Doing an email show today, but a few things we want to banter about first. And one of them, unfortunately for Rays fans, if there are any of you out there, lost another promising prospect to Tommy John surgery. This time, Jose De Leon now joins Brent Honeywell on the disabled list for the rest of the year with a new UCL or will be about to and this is interesting because at the same time roughly Kevin Cash, Ray's manager, told reporters that they are considering going with a four-man rotation all season filling in with bullpen guys

when needed. Now I don't know if this is just because they have lost all of their other pitchers to Tommy John surgery and they now only have four left, or if this is just a Rays-style innovation or return to how teams used to do it. And it's interesting because a few teams seem to be pursuing six-man rotations, as we talked to Pedro about in the Angels case on our last episode. And we answered a listener email not long ago about whether a team might go back to a four-man rotation sometime soon. And I think we acknowledged why that might make sense, but also didn't really expect it to happen, at least not yet.

And maybe we were wrong. Yeah, I guess this is partially also going to be a function of, aren't there like six new off days during the regular season, I think, as part of the calendar? Yeah, season's starting a little earlier and has more off days built in. Yeah, right. So it is interesting to have this going on because there are teams all over the place that are talking about the six-man rotations. Also, eight-man bullpens, such that benches are going to be about two people long. You wonder why Mike Moustakas doesn't have work?

Nine-man bullpen in the Phillies case, possibly. I mean, that's probably why Reese Hoskins and Tommy Joseph are playing everywhere, just because somebody has to. I don't even know who their backup shortstop is in this case. But yeah, it's hard with Honeywell and DeLeon. I mean, of course, now the Rays look a little worse for selling J.C.O. to Rizzi for basically nothing, but I don't know what you're supposed to do about that. It's a little disappointing just from the perspective of the Rays can't really literally afford anything.

They certainly couldn't afford for that much to go wrong. But I'm confused as well. DeLeon barely pitched last season, as I recall, because he had a variety of injuries, including something with his elbow. So I basically don't know what happened between then and now. I don't want to say that he should have had this a year ago because I don't know nearly enough. But it feels like this is something that's been talked about as a very strong possibility for a long time. And it's weird that it only just now became official. But yeah, it's going to be a four-man rotation out of partial necessity.

And also, I'm looking forward to Yanni Chirinos, but there's not a lot of us. Yeah, I mean, they still do potentially have five decent starters even after losing these guys. And I don't know. I mean, on paper, it makes sense because if you have starters going less deep into games, then in theory, you could at least try to condition them to come back more frequently. Maybe they just don't need as much time off between starts. And obviously if you do use a foreman rotation, you can potentially just cut out your worst starter

or move your worst starter to the bullpen and concentrate your innings among your better starters the way that teams do in the postseason for instance so there is a potential advantage to be gained there if you have the right group of guys or if you can condition the right group of guys so you look at the raise now and you figured it's easy to forget about nathan yovaldi who's going to be a part of the rotation he's coming back from tommy john surgery and sort of the uh the drew smiley and michael pineda way that their teams hope that they're going to.

So I can't tell how much of it is being, I don't know, galaxy brain versus how much of it is just being stubborn. But I still look at the Rays and I still see like a pretty good pitching staff and I still see a team that could surprise a lot of people. I still think this team could finish 500, if not a little better. But, you know, I've been saying this since they traded Odo Rizziizzi and dickerson and since then they've lost two of their brightest young pitching stars so i uh i don't know how much more there is to say i know teams have averaged i just ran some numbers actually earlier for a post on on wednesday and teams have averaged about 10 or 11 starting pitchers every single season this has gone on for a while we knew this to be true and in the case i don't i guess you look at someone like matt Andrees and a few pitchers in their bullpen,

and you can see sort of the two to three inning guys that they're hoping to sequence together for the fifth rotation spot. But even that bullpen doesn't look very good to me. So it's hard to imagine wanting to make more of it. But, you know, as we talked about the other day, who should ever try to guess what relievers are going to do? I'm not going to fall into that trap. And lines blurring between starters and relievers. Maybe this is becoming a less meaningful distinction anyway. I was thinking, I wonder whether the lack of signings, the slow moving market, the guys who are either not getting signed or are settling for less than

they hope to settle for. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that players just aren't getting the playing time that they used to. The best players in baseball are not accounting for as high a percentage of their team's innings or even potentially their team's plate appearances. percentage of their team's innings or even potentially their team's plate appearances. I was looking at this the other day. If you look at the number of hitters who have gotten to, say, 650 plate appearances in a season, it's really dramatically decreased. The number of qualified hitters hasn't changed that much. That's like guys who get to 502 plate appearances, whatever it is. And that number hasn't really decreased that much. But if you raise the minimum to 650 plate appearances, in 1998, which is the first season with 30 teams, there were 64 guys who got to at least 650 plate

appearances. Last season, same number of teams, only 37 guys got to 650 plate appearances. And you and I and Sam and a listener were having a discussion about why there are fewer 100 RBI guys today. And that was my best guess is that there are just fewer guys getting a very high number of plate appearances. And obviously we can see what's happened to starting pitchers. They're topping out at lower and lower and lower innings totals and the innings are just getting distributed across a higher number of pitchers on a team so in that sense you wouldn't want to pay as much for say just a generic good starting pitcher maybe as, as you would have, say, a decade ago,

two decades ago, you know, inflation adjusted, just because you're not getting as much out of those guys anymore the way they're being used. I don't know whether that really accounts for some of the surprising contracts or non-contracts that we've seen, but it is sort of something to think about. Those guys just potentially are not quite as valuable anymore i do think that would make a difference with with someone like a back of the rotation starter now granted andrew cashner has still found some money and so is jason vargas guys like that but you think that if you're like a number four number five starter your team's not going to want to use you in the playoffs anyway but with someone like i guess who are the two

causes right now mike mostakis and neilakis and Neil Walker, their wins above replacement still reflect their playing time. It is a counting stat. So in a sense, you're still talking about guys who even with diminishing playing time should be good for two or more wins above replacement. So I don't think that's a huge part of it. I think in their cases, it's just a positional glut and or maybe a case of Moustakas holding out for too much money. But this is certainly something that I can see happening to enter the rotation starters because more money is just going to shift into the bullpen, which we've already seen. Yep. And you've got some teams trying to rest players more often in an attempt to improve them. And maybe it does. So maybe guys are not less valuable because they're playing a little bit less. Maybe they're getting an extra off day here and there, little more willing to put guys on the disabled list for

nagging injuries that maybe in the past might not have actually put them on the disabled list, although maybe it would have impaired their play and made them less valuable that way. So I don't know. This is more relevant for starting pitchers, I think, than it is for position players, certainly, but something to keep in mind. So I'll change gears here now, And I don't know if you heard about this Tuesday. I'm going to guess the answer is no, because there was the result of a spring training game involving the Mets and a split squad Astros team. So what happened? The Mets beat the Astros nine to five and the Mets beat the Astros split squad team nine to five because Phillip Evans, a baseball player, hit a walk-off grand slam. One of the most dramatic outcomes, even with a tie game, still a dramatic outcome.

Hit in the air, deep to left. Ferguson back. That ball. Score! A walk-off! And a grand slam to win it for Philip Evans. Everyone should be happy to hit a walk-off Grand Slam. And so, how was that covered?

If you go to the MLB.com scoreboard, you'll see the spring training results. And there's a little video that gets embedded to the right-hand side of any box score on the scoreboard page. Many of you should know what I'm talking about. Load up the page, scroll down, you see the Astros 5, Mets 9, and there's a video ready to play on the right side. Is that a video of Phillip Evans hitting a walk-off Grand Slam? No, it is Hinch comma McHugh on spring work. One minute and two seconds. It is a conversation with AJ Hinch and Colin McHugh about him getting his work in. And you might be curious, how do you celebrate a walk-off Grand Slam in spring training, Phillip

Evans? There is a video clip. It does exist it does exist so you know it's still there if you want to see it but i know what sam has written in the past about how you celebrate like who you go mob for like a like an error right or a yeah yeah like a walk-off that is a result of something that otherwise would be pretty non-heroic like you know something that would be an out or an error right right so let's say you want to know how you celebrate a spring training walk-off philip evans hit a walk-off grand slam circled the bases seemingly without smiling or celebrating at all and he returned home not to a a mob of teammates but to two teammates i don't know who they are they have high spring training numbers

so you know they they certainly want to enjoy this while they can he returned to one teammate offering uh an above head double high five one teammate who did jump in the air and grab his helmet although the video clip cuts off before the helmet is removed so i don't know and also there's a bad boy so two people and a bad boy walk off grand Slam. Phillip Evans, just excellent career highlight, just about a month too early, unfortunately. Yeah, that's too bad. That's not the time you want to use your highlight for the season, so hopefully you'll have some more.

Young players always trying to make a statement in spring training, and a huge one here for Phillip Evans. I also want to mention a Jon Lester throwing to first base update, just since that's been a beat that this podcast has covered over the years. He is now trying to bounce throws to first base. He calls it the Jordan to Pippen bounce pass. He is working on it in camp. And the idea is that this will somehow get around the mental block he has about throwing to first base. And I mentioned at the end of a recent podcast, there's just a Hardball Times

article about the physics of bouncing throws on the infield, which was inspired by an older Effectively Wild email. And it is a viable strategy, if not necessarily an advantageous one for most players but for lester if this is a way for him to get around that hang up he has then great it just it really just adds to the strangeness of this story and my fascination with it that he can now i mean it's always been amazing that he could pitch perfectly well while being handicapped in this way when it comes to throwing diverse base, which is another form of throwing and seems like a much easier form of throwing, and version of the yips, often it seems like the more time they have to think about something and the more sort of manually controlled the motion is, the more difficult a time they have with it. So it sort of makes sense, even if we haven't really seen many analogs in the past to this, but the idea that now he can bounce a throw so he can essentially make a throw to first base just aiming at a different spot, it seems like it's almost the same thing. Like if you could throw to a spot in the field that would then enable you to bounce the ball to first base, is it that large of a leap to go from that to throwing to first base directly and just kind of cutting out the bounce. I mean, evidently it is. I'm not going to question if he thinks this is something

that would benefit him, but it just, the plot thickens. I thought maybe this story was over after he did manage to have a couple of successful pickoffs last year. Not that they looked great, but he managed to do it. but now we've got the bounce pass pioneered by john lester what was it he picked off tommy fam i think it was in like june and uh there's there's something to be said i think people look at that and think that it's going to be like a hollywood story of man conquers fear by succeeding once that's really not how it goes i'm scared to death of like a knife edge ridge top if i'm on some sort of climb and if i get to the top of something and i'm on a knife edge ridge top and

i got scared and then i descend however i did get to the top i'm not all of a sudden no longer terrified of a knife edge ridge top it's still terrible every time i want to throw up every single time so i don't know where the idea comes from that you can just get over something by succeeding one time and then everyone loses their minds over the fact that you managed to do something elementary to players who were playing in Little League. So Jon Lester clearly

didn't conquer his thing. I don't know if it's more... If you're Jon Lester, you're beyond the point of humiliation. This is just part of it and you just go home and you console yourself with $155 million and a World Series championship. But I don't know if it's more humiliating to not be able to throw to first or to be working on such silly ways of throwing to first. Like, would it be better if he just never did it and people just got used to the fact that he never did it and that's it? Of course, there are some throws to first you'd have to try to make.

But I don't know. the bounce thing is weird if it if it works you know at least if you're throwing to first you're always throwing to the same place in theory but if you're trying to bounce a throw then it matters where you are on the field and so you don't have some sort of like constant reference point to try to bounce the ball so i don't know i don't know if we're going to see it i don't know if we're going to see it on purpose but you know if if we can see the phillies swapping outfielders because they think it's gonna give them some marginal advantage maybe we'll see john lester bouncing the ball everywhere except hopefully home plate yeah i mean he's tried everything right he's tried underhand he tried throwing the glove itself with the ball in it so i don't know where else he can

go now the bounce pass he did have a second pickoff in the playoffs last year. He got, I think it was Ryan Zimmerman in NLDS game four. It was not a great pickoff throw, but it was good enough. So he's gotten past it to a certain extent, but not all the way, and the story continues. But really, I don't think he needs to be embarrassed about this on any level now because he's shown that he's really good anyway,

which is even more impressive, frankly, since I think it seemed to all of us that this would be a major impediment. And he has shown over the last few years that it's not at all, that he's still really good, even though everyone knows about this. So more power to him. Ready to play a game?

Sure. Okay. I haven't arranged this. This will be done on the fly, but I'm going to play a game. I'm going to give you some last names, and I want you to tell me whether that last name refers to a player who is or is not in camp trying to win a pitching spot with the Miami Marlins. Okay.

All right. Great. I will do no better than random chance, but let's try. Okay. Carr Wallace. I'll say he's real. Are you saying that he's trying to make the Marlins? Yes.

That's just, it seems like a hard name to make up. Yeah, right. That's a football player. Oh, okay. Mazza. No, not a player. That is a player in camp with the Marlins. Okay. Okay. Mazza. No, not a player. That is a player in camp with the Marlins. Okay. Okay. Let's go with, I don't know, Needy. No. That is a pitcher on the Marlins 40-man roster. Okay. All right. All right. We're going to go with, excuse me, Paffrath. Paffrath? No no that is a football player okay uh yamamoto i'll say not in marlin's camp uh he is in marlin's camp okay okay that is uh so you're

one for five i believe so far we're going to go with a i don't know it'll be a good one to choose here let's go with a rotomire rotomire a rotomire road de e road de meyer de meyer all right i'll say he's real he's a football player so you officially went one for six michael always plays these games with me and it always becomes more about my trying to guess what he is doing than it is about who's actually in camp, because I don't know. I should have known. I think when you took longer to come up with a name, it was not a player. It was a football player. So you must have been looking at a list or something.

I probably could have gamed this game that way. Profootballreference.com. Very useful. Jay Rotemeyer played professional football between 1948 and 1952, but I don't know if he's still alive. He played football, so probably not. There are five players on the Marlins 40-man roster, five players on the 40-man roster,

who don't even have MLB.com profile photos. Wow. Miranda Gonzalez, Brett Graves, Pablo Lopez, Iliaser Hernandez, and James Needy. They're all there. They've been on the 40-man roster for presumably enough time to have been at photo day. Nothing. Anyway, go ahead.

Continue. If you say so. I'll take your word for it. They might be football players. All right. Let's get to some emails. So let's start with this one from Anthony. When does clutch matter? It's pretty

well established among analytically inclined fans and teams that clutchness at the MLB level isn't really a separator because of a selection bias. That is, when you are unclutch, you probably don't even make it to the majors. So if you make it that far, you are probably not liable to fall apart under pressure. At the same time, there must be some level of baseball at which certain players are mentally affected by big moments. I'm curious as to where you think that cutoff would be. Presumably not AA or AAA, but do you see a real disparity in players' clutch performance in A-ball college? If there is a real discrepancy at the low levels of the minors, should scouts or teams mark down an A- player for a 500 ops with runners on base for example in a way that no one should or would at the major league level so the separator that i

came up with when i was uh thinking about this because i emailed back is the best i could do is think about when someone is brought into the affiliated professional ranks i think that that's around where something like this would be selected out. But I was just thinking even that might be too strict because I don't know who is actually prone to breaking down under stress at all, at least among sort of somewhat mature pseudo adults. And like what – there's no equivalent for writers. Certainly, we don't face deadlines. I don't remember the last time I faced an actual like deadline, and I don't know when you have either. But you're a host. I don't know.

How many times have you done a live podcast? Just a few, I think. Not all that many. I have deadlines, but generally, they're not quick turnaround, writing under the gun type things, although that happens occasionally. Yeah, but it's infrequent. But like when we did our live podcast with Fernando Perez last summer, I thought that was fun. Now that was in front of a large and rowdy audience. And I think that you had mentioned something about being a little bit nervous beforehand.

Maybe I'm making that up, but your performance was outstanding. So even if you were feeling the pressure, I don't think that it affected your performance at all. Yeah, you know, if there's a large public speaking appearance, I'll get, you know, slightly nervous, but only to the extent that I think it probably enhances my performance more than detracts from it. So it's not something that rises to the level of really hampering me, but I'm sure there are situations I could encounter. Certainly if I were to play professional sports, that kind of pressure would probably be pretty debilitating for me just because I would be so out of my element in a way that I'm not if I'm hosting a podcast, for instance. So if you have the type of personality that makes you very prone to performance anxiety, maybe you just don't try out for a team at any level.

Maybe you don't play for your high school team. Maybe you don't play for your college team. for your high school team. Maybe you don't play for your college team. So certain people probably self-select and kind of weed themselves out from the beginning, really, as soon as you're old enough to tell your parents you don't want to play or something, you kind of separate yourself. So that's probably part of it. And of course, the pressure ramps up, I suppose. I don't know. I mean, it seems like kind of in a vacuum, you would say that there's more pressure in a professional game than there would be in an amateur game. There's more at stake, but maybe that's not true. Maybe the pressure that the participants feel isn't really all that different. And you can play in pro games in the minors where no one's watching

and the results don't matter all that much. And you can play in pro games in high school or college where you have big crowds and lots of people care about the outcome of every pitch and swing. So I don't know if there's a level where suddenly you start feeling it. Like, you know, going to a big league ballpark, maybe that's different in a really quantifiable way from everything else. I don't know. But it's hard because you're probably not going to get that many people who just completely fall apart, you know, like with runners on base as opposed to no runners on base or something that, you know, I don't know that the relative pressure is all that different. But you might have some people who are slightly affected in that

situation, and it would be hard to detect that difference at any level, really, because the sample is always going to be pretty small. Yeah, I think one of the fundamental things that maybe not enough people appreciate about anxiety or feeling stress is that they can often be sort of almost independent of circumstances. They can just manifest almost at random. So even though as a fan, you can say, oh, look, the leverage index in the ninth inning was five as opposed to like 0.25 in this blowout.

I'm not convinced that would actually matter that much if you're a player. If you're going, if you have to throw an inning or taking it bad or something, I would imagine that just being out there, being the focal point of all the attention, probably applies so much pressure that anything sort of situational beyond that might, I might go so far as to say it's negligible. And so I would think maybe, as I think about it, again, on the fly, I doubt that players, I'm sure that they're aware of the general leverage of the situation that they're performing in, but I don't think that they feel it in the way that we would think they would statistically.

I suspect that at-bats just feel like at-bats, and either they're all pressure-filled or they're not. And I wonder if maybe the greatest form of wilting under pressure might be how a player handles a slump or underperformance, whether the player can get out of it. handles a slump or underperformance, whether the player can get out of it. Because I know that when I feel the lowest about my own work, it's usually when I feel like I'm in a rut and I need some way to break out of it. It has nothing to do with the importance of the next article or podcast. These are all very important, but it's just a matter of how work has been lately. And so I imagine that if you have a player who's gone like two for 40 and he's just in a rut, then that is when the pressure will probably build internally the most.

And if you can't snap out of that, I don't think that you'll even get to keep playing at a high amateur level to say nothing about the pros. Right, yeah. All right. Kieran says, Annoyed by everyone talking about the surge in home runs and not leaving him alone, evil Rob Manfred tells

Rawlings to switch tracks. Keep the balls within specs, but at the very bottom of the allowable range instead of at the top of the range that we seem to have now. How long would it take to notice that something is up? How long until you were sure that something is up? And I answered this

email and I said a month at the most and it depends how the balls are affected. If they're affected in such a way that exit speeds are suppressed, then we might notice even more quickly because exit speeds are on screens now. You see them all the time. They're on MLB.com. So if suddenly we stopped seeing those upper end of the range exit speeds, that might be something that you notice right away. So I think a month, if only just because

often the way that we divide things up in our mind or when we're doing analysis or when we're looking at splits, we look at things monthly, but it might be even faster than that. I mean, if it's a dramatic decrease just because we're all paying such close attention to the baseball and to home runs and to exit speeds and all of this that someone is bound to notice really quickly. Yeah, these things don't bounce around that much. And you'll see the numbers stay down maybe in April because it's cold, the coldest during the baseball season in the first month of the year so i think that if if home runs were down for like the first two weeks then you'd say well it's probably been cold and you know batters have been facing a disproportionate number of the best pitchers the front of the rotation pitchers whatever and so you would sort of keep an eye on it and write it off but i agree i think after a month you would have a very very strong suspicion

and then you and rob arthur and mgl would actually go do the clinical studies of the ball and confirm that, oh, these are wet sponges. Right. And that's kind of the problem. Again, I don't really think that MLB intentionally tempered with the baseballs, but if they chose to intentionally temper with the baseball now and said that, well, even if we didn't mean to have the ball behaving this way, it is behaving this way, and we don't want it to behave this way, so let's change things. I think that would make it just so much more obvious that the ball was related before that it would be really hard for them to change the ball now without also admitting that the ball was changed previously. So it's the sort of thing where, you know, if they had showed up to spring training this year or opening day came around and suddenly home runs were down everyone would know right away and it would be even more suspicious i think if that changed after all this scrutiny

so that might prevent anything dramatic from happening in the other direction anytime soon i wonder if we should be keeping a close eye on like the the afl and the levels of the minor leagues to see if the balls start doing something different there because baseball aside from the current keeping track of humidity and temperature thing that they're doing i don't think baseball is going to do anything at the major league level on purpose with so many people talking about this without testing at first because very obviously minute changes to the baseball can have gargantuan effects on the game itself and so i think that if they're going to do anything i would expect it to be somewhere

hidden in the low levels like they've done with like the pitch clock before or the pace rules or the what the runner on base and extra innings kind of thing so just something to keep an eye on because something tells me that if baseball does want to do something to the baseball then rob manfred is probably not going to go public with it first yeah and in recent years it seems like the home run rates in the minors and majors have diverged which is another one of the things that makes the home run rate surge seem somewhat suspicious even if you look at triple a for instance where there's a lot of overlap in the player pool with the majors. There's been a change in the majors relative to AAA, and those balls are different and are constructed in different facilities. So that has been yet another data point suggesting that something has changed.

I think that was some of the most compelling evidence that you provided in your article, like a year ago or something, looking at players who spent time in both the majors and AAA. Right. Yeah, exactly. Okay, Andrew, Patreon supporter, says, Let's say you're Billy Bean. As a result of the MLBPA's grievance, you're ordered to add $50 million in payroll by the end of spring training. Considering your team, what do you do? Take on the Matt Kemp salary for prospects?

Sign Arrieta and Lucroix? Extend Chris Davis? How does it change if you're the Rays or Pirates or Marlins? And for people who aren't aware, the MLBPA lodged a grievance recently for these teams because they are worried, concerned that those teams are not doing what they're supposed to be doing with the revenue sharing funds that they've been getting, that they've not been plowing them back into the team or the organization the way they're supposed to. So this hypothetical team is forced to very quickly splurge on something in order to escape that scrutiny.

Well, if I'm the A's, I give $35 million to Jake Arrieta, and I give $15 million to Jonathan Lucroy. If I'm the Rays, I give $35 million to Jake Arrieta. I give $15 million to Neil Walker, in this case. And if I'm the Pirates, I give $35 million to Jake Arrieta, and I give $15 million to either Jonathan Lucroy or Neil Walker. And if I'm, who's the other team, the Marlins? Who cares? Just any, they all, any of them. Yeah, get your players some headshots on their MLB.com pages.

Photographers, I'm learning, are expensive. Paper photographers, yeah. All right, let's see. Okay, I'll take this from Campbell. Why are people so down on Shohei Otani's hitting? I get that he's probably more valuable as a pitcher, but saying he'll be bum-garner seems really harsh. This guy had a 1,000-plus OPS with 22 homers and 382 at-bats as a 21-year-old. That's really good in a quadruple-A league. That's also while putting up a 186 ERA in 140 innings. All of this while reportedly having good enough athleticism to be at least average in the field.

It just strikes me that Bumgarner would not be able to do this in Japan, even if he went full-time hitting. Otani was literally pretty much the best hitter in Japan while being the best pitcher, while being 21. The Bumgarner comp just seems really light. What gives? And we've talked about this probably briefly before, and I sort of think the same thing. Maybe I just want Otani to be a good hitter because it would be fun for him to be a full-fledged two-way player, but just based on the talent and the performance, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that he could be a valuable major league hitter I think probably a lot of it has to do with the track record of hitters who've come over from Japan

which is not as encouraging as the track record of pitchers who've come over from Japan other than say Hideki Matsui we haven't really seen someone come over and be a big power threat in the way that Otani is purported to be. So it's partly that. There just aren't a lot of guys you can point to who had this type of game in NPB and came over and were able to replicate it. And then I think it's also largely just the fact that we haven't seen anyone actually do this in almost a century in the way that Otani is attempting to do it. And I think part of it is just not even so much about the talent, but just will he have the time? Will he have the ability to maximize his talent while still focusing on pitching?

Or will he eventually be relegated to a part-time or pinch hitting role so i think that's probably a big part of it as much as any kind of concern about his actual underlying ability it's healthy to be skeptical it's probably the right thing to be skeptical and i suspect that this is coming from sort of a even a coincidental sort of mental regression of what you think otani is going to do because the alternative is you figure he's going to be the best player in baseball and you know right it's just hard to imagine that i also suspect a big part of this is just sort of maybe imagining that there's too great a gap a greater gap between major league baseball in japan than there actually

is it comes from you could it, somewhere in between national pride and national arrogance, I guess, to say that the Major League pitching is just so good that Otani's never faced anything like it. The greatest possible counter-argument to people who say that Otani is going to get exposed

as a hitter in the majors because he's going to have to split his time is that he's already been splitting his time and he was great. So he is his own proof of concept he's just hasn't been his own proof of concept in the major leagues but was it dennis sarfatti we were talking to who said that he believed that otani would eventually end up a hitter instead of a pitcher i've heard that opinion from more than one person affiliated

with professional baseball and travis sochik is in the process of writing an article at Fangraphs about how he believes in Otani as a hitter, and all the people in Angels camp have been saying that his power is for real. Pedro just said it the other day, talking about how hard he hits the ball. And yeah, I am naturally skeptical and I guess regressive in this way myself, but I feel like as a consequence, I've missed out on building up the hype that i wish i now felt yeah right well you don't want to get carried away with the hype and it's probably better or

safer to assume that the thing we haven't seen in so long we won't see so i understand that but it does seem to me that he has achieved enough and has the pure talent that it's not far-fetched that he is a different beast from bum garner for instance so i think he can be better than that for me it's just mostly a question of whether he'll be given the chance to be better than that which remains to be seen all right stop last sure they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or o b s plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways here's today I should do it now. So I have been collecting some spring training statistics because it's never too early to try to see what baseball is going to look like in the season ahead.

Teams have all played somewhere around a dozen games. A few have played like one fewer but almost every team has played at least 12 games some of them are all the way up to 15 and so at this point even though spring training is chaotic and a mess and they don't play in major league ballparks and the rosters are composed of a whole bunch of nobodies that even the marlins don't have pictures of still you and i have both found in the past that spring training numbers league-wide are pretty well predictive of what the season ahead is going to look like in terms of, you know, walks and strikeouts and home runs and all that stuff.

And so I will just share with you a few things about the league so far in spring training as we try to get a peek of what is to come in 2018. I will not ask if you have any guesses because you needn't guess. You already know. Strikeout rate up. Walk rate up walk rate up ground balls down home runs up the probably the biggest change so far that i've seen is uh in spring training let's say 2015 home runs on contact so home runs divided by all batted balls

the rate was 3.3 percent that was in 2015 before the all-star break when the ball seemingly changed 2016 4 percent 2017 4 percent this year 4.4 percent that's another nine percent increase over last year's spring training i don't know how much that means i didn't even think about the fact that they must use regular major league balls in spring training i didn't know if they had their own thing going on but here we are home run rate is up. Strikeout rate is up an entire percentage point from 20.4% to 21.4%. I don't know how much that's going to be real, but last spring it was also up a full percentage point from the season before. Strikeout rate has continued to grow in spring training just as you would expect. Walk rate is actually at its all-time high, where all-time goes back to 2006, which is not all-time.

But still, we're looking at 13 years or maybe 12 and a half 12 and a half months is really what this is forget years walk rate is at nine percent so at least walks are up maybe there's just pitcher rustiness i don't know i don't want to make too much of that right now but what's frustrating me right now is nowhere seems to keep track of just regular batted ball numbers in spring training baseball savant used to it's not available anymore i don't know why but majorleaguebaseball.com provides only the absolutely infuriating ground outs and air outs so they keep track only of where outs are made but i mean it's something right it's better than nothing so i can tell you that three years ago the ratio of ground outs to air outs, I hate this,

but we're doing it anyway, was 1.27, last year 1.23, and so far this spring 1.17, implying fairly strongly that there are more balls being hit in the air if you figure that the outs are made at similar ratios every single spring. So we've got home runs up and fly balls seemingly up and strikeouts up so the big breaking results from the first half of spring training is that baseball is going to continue to follow the trends it was already following for a number of years yeah that is not surprising in the least but i'm looking forward to having all the same conversations that we had all of last year all over again but even more extreme so yeah i'll be curious to see whether this changes at all by the end of spring training

and i think when i did my article on this last year it was like at the very end like the last day or so and yeah maybe i'll do something again at that point i don't i haven't compared to see whether in past spring trainings the first half has looked any different from the second half, but it's plausible at least given that research has shown Max Markey did a cool study years ago at Baseball Perspectives that shows that I think pitchers are behind the hitters early in the season, and presumably that's even more the case very early in spring training so it's possible I suppose that at least the home run rate could come down a bit over the rest of

spring training but I don't know if that will be the case it's you know getting warmer all the time certainly and the strikeouts are still up so that would argue in favor of you know pitchers being effective or at least hitters just swinging for the fences even more than ever so i would be surprised if it changes dramatically in the next two to three weeks so yeah this is further confirmation that baseball is going to be like last year except even more so the batting average on balls in play is held almost exactly steady for the entire data span runs per game is at 5.25 that's basically where it's been for a few years batting average on base percentage selecting percentage none of them look too different but

if you'd like to read all of these numbers again you can probably check fan graphs because i'm always desperate for posts and i'm probably going to throw some plots up and say look at this baseball is exactly what we thought it was going to be again. Yeah. All right. Question from Steven, who says, just sitting here, putting off writing my dissertation and thinking about future baseball. My question is how big could MLB potentially get as far as number of teams and still be recognizable to us today? No major U.S. sport has broken the 32 team threshold.

And something about that number tells my brain it's the upper limit for a viable league in the current American plus some of Canadian demographic context. Maybe 34 just feels less round to me. I don't know. Could baseball somehow operate with 36-plus teams in a truly international format come 2100? Assuming, you know, we're still alive and baseball is still extant. What about an inter-solar 128 Team league in 2300 Go Europa Hyper Sox

So, I don't think There's necessarily a Limit, except that Once you get beyond a certain point And it wouldn't be far beyond the point where we are Now, you just Stop profiting, essentially There are only so many markets in this country or

in North America that could easily support a Major League Baseball team and actually have it make money and be viable. And I don't know, maybe that's two more teams than we have today. Maybe it's no more teams than we have today, given that even now there are a couple of markets that are barely hanging on. So, you know, you could make the case that baseball would possibly be in better shape in some ways if it were at 28 teams or something like that. So the league makes a lot of money. And if you wanted to add four more teams or something, you probably could. I don't think anything would fall apart. It would just be a drain on everyone's

resources, essentially, and it just probably wouldn't be worth anyone's while. But in the long term, if baseball manages to continue expanding the borders and appealing to people in other markets, there's no real reason why we couldn't have teams in other countries and other continents, especially if, you know, Elon Musk makes it possible to travel everywhere very quickly. That would be the main holdup apart from just getting enough interest. So I would assume that eventually baseball will be bigger than it is now before it gets smaller someday. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think we're basically at the right point right now. I don't think there's a pressing need to expand. I mean, you live in one of the markets where people always talk about adding a team potentially,

and I don't know whether you think it's even all that viable in Portland. I know that the soccer team is popular, so there's that. Yeah, we could probably support a baseball team here. I don't know if the city actually wants it or if the public actually wants it, but there are a lot of people. The city is growing really fast. And in the question, it asked about what about in the year 2100? Well, in the year 2100, there's going to be a hell of a lot of cities as big as Seattle

or, I don't know, even Houston with the way trends are going. Unless, you know, unless there's a seventh extinction event, which is not improbable, but that's going to get into a different podcast subject. Right. Well, we'll get there someday. All right. Nick in Chicago says, extremely long time listener, first time emailer. I have contemplated much deeper questions than this in the past, yet these are the questions that drive me here. Under what scenarios would Jason Hayward opt out of his contract? Is there anything the Cubs could do to goad him into it? I can only think of a few scenarios, but I'm not sure how plausible they are. in 2018. Two, the Cubs bench him immediately, limiting him only to defensive replacement playing time. He becomes super pissed and opts out due to pride and ego. And three,

the whole clubhouse turns on him and treats him like the stinky kid in fourth grade. The situation becomes so untenable that he has to opt out. Is there any scenario I'm missing? I feel terrible for thinking about it this way, as I'm usually on the player's side when it comes to getting paid. But it's so darn hard when it's your team and there's a huge free agent class coming next year. Okay, so let's see. Hayward has an opt-out after this season. And he has another after 2019, but we're talking about this year, right? So he would be opting out of five years and $106 million.

And so that's basically the the justin upton contract and hayward is still young so i i'm not sure hayward would need much more than just having one of his best hayward seasons you know uh if he could re-enter the market as someone who had two down years but came back played good defense he's still not old at all still in his 20s and if he hit if he put up like a 120 wrc plus i think he could he could do it he'd be a better player probably than justin upton now as for the possibilities of just the cubs benching him or the team turning on him i don't really know what hayward's recourse would be in that situation but i don't think that he would give up 106 million dollars to the benefit of the team

no i think stubbornness would lead him to stay on the team and just i don't know how professional he is but i know that if i were in that situation i'd probably just become like a real asshole yeah just try to stay out of spite yeah just try to jerk my way off the roster you know just kind of i don't know i don't know if that you can't really like threaten your teammates you know because then that's you can get on the restricted list or suspended you're not going to be paid but you know you could just like you could be a real piece of work in there. Just like, just really, really make them hate you. And I don't know, maybe you go so far as to like get people sick.

But, you know, then that gets into legal trouble. Yeah. I mean, I think it's obviously extremely unlikely at this point that Hayward bounces back to that extent. He'd be on the same market as Bryce Harper. So even if he did have a five or six win season, he probably wouldn't be the best right fielder out there. I think there'd be a lot of skepticism about him just because we've seen him go from being a really good player to being a really poor player and getting, you know, benched in the playoffs or at least not having a prominent role. So I think that even if he came back and had like

a peak Hayward season, he wouldn't get as much as, well, obviously he wouldn't get as much as he would if he hadn't had the lost years. And I think that would really hold him back because he's always had kind of complicated hitting mechanics and a swing that has lots of moving parts. And, I mean, if he were to do this, he probably would have to have rebuilt his swing in some way and come back as a completely different guy. And some teams buy into that sort of thing,

and other teams are wary because the track record isn't there so i i don't know it depends what the market looks like next year if it's another market like this one was then maybe there's just no way he could do better than the contract he already has but if spending bounces back and he bounces back all the way yeah i could see it but the odds of that happening are, what, 5%? So Hayward is going into his age 28 season. So he'll be going into age 29 next year if he were to opt out. And let's say that he has the exact same season that he had in 2015.

He had a 121 WRC+. He was worth 6.1. Fangraphs wins above replacement as an everyday player. I mean, Eric Hosmer just got however much money and his i know that there are different cases here but it's not like osmer has this track record of perfect consistency you know so that wasn't held against him and you can see that if hayward re-entered the market because he had a great season all of a sudden you can spin him as a recovery story he did this excellent job of putting all these struggles behind him you've

got the story about him giving that world series speech even though he was down on his luck and he was hardly even a contributor to the cubs and you could say look at how good of a leader he is how good of a role model he put all of that selfish stuff aside and still tried to lead the team psychologically you could you could really just go back spin that say that he's a leader who's just been fighting his own battles but he's still there for the team and yeah i think that even if he just wound up signing for almost the exact same money in term that he was guaranteed he could at least find it i think on the market he just needs to have one of those big seasons again and wouldn't you know it but he's had that season like three times yeah although it was always largely based on defense in his case which i think a lot of people were

always sort of wary of him just because the defensive metrics said he was great. The hitting metrics never said he was that type of player. So given that often his value was based on defense and our evaluations of defense are a little sketchy, which, you know, maybe is not the case for teams now that they all have stat cast and can actually come up with accurate Defensive measurements for outfielders So maybe that's not as big a concern But given that he'd be at the age

Where speed is starting to decline And you wonder about defensive skills Slipping maybe that would hold him back too I don't know his defensive run saved Hasn't really budged His out above average According to stack ass last year he was uh seventh place he was uh in between kevin kiermeier and jackie bradley jr he was ahead

of billy hamilton these are good names to be around yes defensively so defense is still there gerard dyson is still doing what he does into his mid-30s so i don't know i think that if he had that season i think he'd do better than five one or six all right question from rebecca continuing on the outfield switch topic from a recent podcast what are your thoughts on fielders rotating based on park factors the size and difficulty of right and left field varies greatly from ballpark to ballpark yet teams tend to keep outfielders on the same side this is a good question so we were talking about the ph Phillies swapping outfield spots based on the tendencies of the hitter. So what about swapping based on the ballpark characteristics? And I have a spreadsheet that was sent to me by Greg Rabarchek, who works for the Red Sox now and created HitTracker online.

And it's from 2015, so it may have changed a little bit. But it has the square footage of every outfield in baseball, left field, right field, and center field. So I just took a look at this, and there certainly are big differences between some right fields and left fields. And there are 10 right fields, or at least there were, that were bigger than the left field in that park. There was one park, Rogers Center, where they have exactly the same square footage, and then the remaining parks, the left field is bigger than the right field. So there are substantial differences in some cases. Fenway Park would obviously be the biggest difference in right field minus left field. Right field is 8,600 square feet bigger than left field

in Fenway Park. And after that, Minute Maid, Wrigley, and AT&T. Then on the other end of things, Yankee Stadium has the biggest difference where left field is bigger, in that case by 4,200 square feet, just ahead of PNC Park and then Target Field and Angel Stadium. So it does swap in certain cases in certain parks which side is bigger and perhaps more challenging. And I did read a story this week about how if JD Martinez plays corner outfield for the Red Sox this year, I think Alex Cora said that at home he would play left field and if he played on the road he would play right field and Mookie Betts would then maybe move to center field in that case but you know that's JD Martinez who is a very bad defender based on the stats that we have so maybe that's an unusual case but in theory it's a good suggestion, I guess. Has there ever been actual evidence shown that the size of the outfield meaningfully affects the utility of a defender? Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like it's something that's been so frequently argued against that no one thinks this is an old MGL and Tango Tiger topic where they've said that there's really not that much of a relationship.

Because already, even in a small outfield, it's not like outfielders can cover all the space and so if you increase the volume of a left or right field what you're effectively doing is increasing the amount of space where players can't make a catch and so you're just saying well look how much easier it is for a ball to go over this guy's head or to fall in front of this guy so i'm not sure if it outside of a situation like fenway and i don't know maybe in san francisco you want a better arm in right field just so you can relay the ball faster from the deep part of triple's alley but outside of that I'm really not sure how much of a difference it would actually make I think it's one of those things that's kind of counterintuitive until you think about it closely yeah I think yeah you may have changed my mind about that I guess you're right and maybe in certain cases you know maybe

if the fence height is a certain way or the foul And maybe in certain cases, you know, maybe if the fence height is a certain way or the foul territory is a certain way, and you think that that suits one fielder over another, but I think, yeah, you're probably right about the square footage. Maybe not mattering all that much. That is a frequent topic of discussion along with like whether you have a weaker fielder or a stronger fielder, if they're next to each other, if that affects their performance, or you want to shade the better fielder one way to cover for the lesser fielder's weakness, that sort of thing. But yeah, it's a big outfield.

There's a lot of territory, and no one can cover it all. Speaking of which, let's end with a couple of Mike Trout hypotheticals here. One of them has to do with outfield and throwing. And earlier today, Sam Miller tweeted his Trout count is what I'm calling it, the number of times that Mike Trout, or actually just Trout, has been mentioned in his inbox. And I sent you this tweet according to Sam's search of his inbox. He has 1,412 emails with the word trout in them. I then responded to him with my trout count, which is almost twice as

high, which is counting Gchat conversations, but I'm at 2,770 for my trout count and you have yours, right? What's your trout trout count I don't remember it off the top of my head but it was right around same it was 1400 something but yeah right around the same range now that's inflated because I get a lot of just press releases and stuff from the league or from teams but

I also like to delete a lot of emails just because I don't know it's fun for me I like pressing the button and making things disappear and then I get the trash. So it's also in no way reflective. Yeah, I never delete anything. I archive it all. So if I ever got it, it's there. I love it. I could never be president. You think the president monitors his inbox very carefully? I'm not sure that's a prerequisite. So yeah, so we've mentioned lots of trout hypotheticals. Obviously, if you host another one that is. It's very similar. So this is from a listener named Sam.

Something that has always bothered me about baseball is MLB's high carbon footprint. 162 games a year means thousands of flights when one flight is enough to account for one person's, quote unquote, fair share of carbon emissions for the year. Suppose a major free agent next offseason, such as Bryce Harper, had an environmental awakening and refused to fly. This player would play only in his team's home games and whatever road games were close enough to travel to by train or bus. How much would this depress the value of his next contract? Would teams located close to other franchises be more likely to sign him? Would signing this player be worth the resentment he would likely receive from other players? Assume that this player would still travel to all postseason games. And this is related to Trout because we got a very similar question from Sean, Patreon supporter, who says, how much value would Mike Trout lose if he were not allowed to fly on a plane? So whatever, you get placed on the no-fly list. What are the reasons? Yeah, I don't know. You get flagged for potential sabotage or something.

You can't fly or you're just a conscientious objector to flying. Whatever the case is, you can't fly. How much does that affect your value? I feel like we answered a question once about, like, if Clayton Kershaw could only pitch in Canada or something, what would he be worth to the Blue Jays, something like that. So this is not quite that extreme, but still it would be tough to make it to all of the games. Well, let's see.

People have researched how much teams have to fly, right? So theers always like have the most travel miles but who tends to have the fewest okay so actually a few last season the a's traveled the most miles with nearly 48 000 mariners were third place but the fewest miles traveled were the pirates at just under 22 000 so unfortunately the pirates don't spend this kind of money so they can never sign Bryce Harper in the first place. Sorry, Bryce, or Pittsburgh, I guess. So let's just put them on the Cubs. The Cubs are a second lowest 23,130 miles traveled last season. And that makes sense. There are a lot of teams who are sort of close to Chicago. It's a major hub. There'll be a lot of trains and buses probably leaving them from there. I don't know if we could make a road trip right after home game, but I guess that's why they give you some extra time so

put them on the cubs i i can't do this on the fly but how many games do you think you can play this is the 81 at home he's gonna have the what how many in chicago on the road is that well probably not many but just they must play some number every single season and then you could well here's a handy little map that they have of the pirates he could go to cleveland where i guess he probably wouldn't play much detroit well he probably wouldn't play much milwaukee he could get to milwaukee no problem he could get to st louis with probably little problem certainly he could get to pittsburgh and cincinnati he'd still get into a lot of games. You'd never see the NL West, but even that would be, well, gosh.

Right, and it depends on the series. If you had an off day between series, then if he's willing to take a train all of that time or something, he could get there. I mean, the more he has to travel, the more it might affect his sleep and his performance. So possibly it would just affect his actual stats, too, as well as his playing time. But yeah, there are certain teams that would just be ruled out of the pursuit, essentially. He would never want to go to them. They would never be the high bidders. But for the right team, I mean, he'd still be really good. He'd still be very valuable. Yeah, if you want to guess, if he played for the Cubs, he could probably get into like three quarters of their games or thereabouts. And so what's three quarters of what he did last year, right? Yeah, right.

Maybe it keeps him healthier. So if you project him for, I don't know, six more than three quarters of that, it gives him four and a half. And I know that there are a lot of – it's not convenient to have him out of the lineup, but that's nothing new for teams with Bryce Harper. And then if he can go to the playoffs, then those are the games that really matter. So he'd still be a very good player. And then he would have to probably ask out of the All-Star game, wherever that's being played. Yeah.

All right. Merlin says Jonah Carey spoke to Buck Showalter on a recent podcast and toward the end asked Showalter who the best player he'd managed was. Showalter optimistically answered, that's still going to happen down the road. Jonah joked that he took the comment as a signal that the Orioles would pursue Mike Trout when he reaches free agency, to which Showalter responded, Well, if that means you think he's the best player, you know, if you think he throws well enough to be in that category, dot, dot, dot. And then he just stopped talking until it became clear that this seemingly incomplete sentence was in fact over. Moving past how that's ridiculous, like losing a wildcard game with Zach Britton still in the bullpen, I wondered if it's established that Trout's arm is his weakest tool, and maybe not great by big league standards but just how bad would trout's

throwing have to be to make him not the best player in baseball or to make him below average below replacement level etc well can you change his position or not i know we we emailed about this but i'm not clear if you have to keep trying the outfielder if you can move him to first base because i think that if you can move him to first it makes things better but if he is in the outfield i couldn't i didn't want to run the math i thought about writing a whole post about this but it just got really complicated really fast yeah but every single ball hit every hit that is hit to him is at least a double and you know at most much more than that if the ball is hit to his side and he has to go to the fence, then that's an easy inside the park home run, of course. And so there are a lot of runs being given up just on extra bases because he can't throw on hits.

And then he could. Yeah, everybody's always moving up on any fly ball hit the left field. It gets bad really fast. And I don't I don't want to overstate things, but I don't think he's playable. Mm hmm. Yeah. I don't know if you can compensate for this by i mean can you have him relay it to another fielder or can he literally not throw the ball can you not propel the ball forward at all does he just have a really weak arm does he have to actually run the ball wherever he wants it to go so if he wants to throw it a second he has to run to second do you then have him stationed shallower? And maybe he gives up more hits because you're trying to balance what would hurt you the least?

I don't know. But if you can't throw at all literally and you can't move him to a position where that wouldn't be as big a deal, then, yeah, I think maybe that's one handicap that even mike trout couldn't conquer what if uh what if he could throw the ball but he could only use an open palm so the the rob abanis basically oh god another player just yesterday i forgot who it was somebody somebody lawn darted cameron perkins cameron perkins is a reserve distant like the 40th man on a 40-man roster kind of outfielder for the mariners i haven't seen video yet but he uh what usually happens in these cases is that the outfield is about to make a throw and then he at

the last second he thinks i don't want to throw this ball and so what he ends up doing is spiking the ball a mile high and that's exactly what cameron perkins did yesterday according to twitter and uh turned into a triple i gotta find video find a video of this. Yeah. Of course, you could still use Trout as like a pinch hitter or a DH. I mean, if you can use him as that, then he's still really good. But yeah, center field, that's not going to work. What if, say you use him as a DH, right? And then he hits a home run, and then he tosses his bat. How do people look at him and say,

just do with the ball what you did with your bat, but stronger. It's like a Lester style situation. If we just have the situation where Mike Trout just physically can't open his hand or open and close it or just drop things,

does he just round the bases with his bat? I guess so. Would that be considered menacing if he got toward first base and he still had the bat in his hands i don't know all right let's end with one more mike trout question and one more question period this is maybe my favorite of these so this is martin from canada who says, into rookie of the year Mike Trout's body. To make things easier, let's ignore temporal paradoxes and causality, aka old brain, new body Trout does not relive the exact same timeline. I'm asking about experience, not deja vu recall.

How much would having about 10,000 plate appearances worth of MLB experience in a rookie's body make Mike Trout better? Or would this type of body swap be more effective for pitchers? All of that experience on the mound and a fresher UCL to deal with, I know that's assuming the transition to a new body wouldn't cause injuries and or wildness that we've seen pitchers go through after undergoing massive weight changes, but the thought of a 21-year-old Mariano Rivera with all of that experience,

and he trails off there so Mike Trout say the 40 year old Mike Trout's brain or the experience part of his brain transplanted into 20 year old Mike Trout's body how much better would he be okay so he was worth 10.3 wins above replacement in 139 games in 2012 so the first thing that came to my mind was oh he would have a far better idea of how to read pitchers this is something we've seen byron buxton and billy hamilton talk about as base runners but mike trott was already 49 out of 54 stealing bases that season and how often was he actually on first base with the base open in front of them so i don't know there's not a whole bunch more base running he could have done. Maybe you add a couple runs worth of stolen base value, but even that is already a lot of value. His instincts running the bases would just kind of be better in general, but his base running was already, I think, the best in baseball that season, so nothing to be done there. He'd run better routes.

routes but yeah i think i mean pitch recognition i think is the biggest thing i mean there's just seeing thousands and thousands of pitches and being able to recognize what they are and knowing when to lay off i mean i think that's probably the biggest advantage of experience for a hitter but it obviously varies by player i mean in mike's case, he was the best player in baseball beginning in his very first season. So maybe he benefits less from this than other guys who their raw talent didn't make them as good as Mike Trout's raw talent made him. And so proportionately, they benefited more from experience than he did. On the other hand, we have seen him improve in demonstrable ways, which you have often chronicled, where he'll be weak at one sort of section of the strike zone or something. Pitchers were beating him with high fastballs for a while, and then he just decided that

wasn't going to happen anymore, and he came back and was great at those too. So he has learned and changed and improved over the years. So he'd have the benefit of all that experience right away. And I mean, I guess pitchers could then try to exploit something else about him, but there's already so little to exploit that I don't know that there would be anything else. So I think he would be better, but I don't know if he would be the biggest beneficiary from this he's so good yeah yeah i mean he's not really his physical skills haven't really declined other than maybe his speed so i think his defense is probably not what it was as a rookie but his offense is better if anything i mean he's a

better hitter today than he was then so i i just don't know how i mean is any of that experience maybe maybe all of that's experience i don't know but he's only so much better i mean what did he have like a 160 something weighted runs created plus as rookie, and now he's up to like 180-something or 170-something? I mean, he's better, but, you know, not that much better. So I guess you could say that what we've seen so far is him benefiting from five or six years of experience, and he's better hitting-wise, but not massively better. And he's better hitting-wise, but not massively better. I think, you know, he's the best hitter in baseball now, and he was like the second or third or something best hitter in baseball then.

So I'm just, I'm not sure. I'm not sure he's had to learn anything in the major leagues since he came in. I mean, he was the best base runner when he was a rookie. He was arguably the best defender when he was a rookie. That gone away which is interesting under chronicled perhaps but his offense is basically as perfect as it can be and so i don't really know what he's learned you know aside from he's he's able to adjust to the things that pitchers try to do to him but that's just the mark of any great hitter and he was already a great hitter he's so good yeah i i mean if you're like a swing change guy or a new pitch guy who just gets dramatically better mid-career and you can just you know have that from the start of your career instead

that makes you much better assuming that like the pathway is the connections between neurons you know everything that's strengthened that helps you develop the muscle memory to do that, assuming that is transplanted back with your brain, but you still retain your, you know, rookie caliber reflexes and all of that, then in that case, you'd be way better. In Mike Trout's case, I just, you know, there's an upper limit to how much better he could have possibly been. So I'm going to say if you give him the benefit of experience, I'll say Rookie Trout is two wins better than he actually was. Something like that, maybe. I'm going to give him one.

Just one more win. Okay. Although, well, I mean, do you give him more games? You know, he was called up late because of a variety of reasons, but 139 games. But, eh, no, whatever. 11.3 wins of every place for me. Yep. All right.

Sounds good to me. So we will end there. Oh, my God. He's good. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. There are various perks available on the page if you sign up at certain levels, but the best perk, presumably, is that the podcast still exists. Five listeners who have recently signed up and pledged a small monthly

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so we will be back next time with the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Milwaukee Brewers. Talk to you then. And I cried, cried, cried tears like I had cried in years I had to say goodbye I had to say goodbye