Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1219: The Opener Arrives

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about baffling flamethrower Jordan Hicks, Rich Hill‘s latest blister problem, the Orioles’ unlikely 13-hit, zero-run game, Albert Pujols‘ prospects, Ryan Zimmerman’s slow spring training and slower start, and more. Then they bring on writer Joe Sheehan (23:23) to discuss the Rays’ “starting Sergio Romo” strategy, whether it will catch […]

Hey you in the car in front of me, I got a message for you, could you pass it on to the guy sitting in the car in front of you, ask him to pass it along too. If we all drive 25, we're getting nowhere. If we all drive 75, we'll get there faster. If we all drive a hundred and five We'll get to have it on time Hello and welcome to episode 1219 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello, Jeff. Hello, Ben. Hello. So, you know we're going to be talking about Sergio Romo today. We got the tweets. We got the emails.

We got all the messages about Sergio Romo. Yes, it is a very Effectively Wild-esque thing that the Rays did. I have the fun facts handy here, courtesy of ESPN. So, Sergio Romo had 588 relief appearances before he started Saturday's game. That was the fourth most relief appearances ever before a player's first start. And then, of course, he started Sunday's game as well. And also, according to ESPN, he became the first pitcher in 38 years to start back-to-back games after pitching at least one inning in the first game. Of course, there was that Zach Granke case from several years ago, but he had not actually pitched an inning in the first game. Of course, there was that Zach Greinke case from several years ago,

but he had not actually pitched an inning in that first game. So we'll talk about the Romo tactic and just in general, the evolution of baseball tactics in just a bit with Joe Sheehan. But before that, anything you want to banter about? Oh, okay. So Jordan Hicks, I guess, sort of a little bit. I was going to bring up Jordan Hicks too, actually. That's funny. It's obligatory. I'll make it into a listener email because we did get it at a listener email. I think we were both going to bring this up anyway, but Damien says, I assume you're getting queries about this and don't know if I missed a previous deep

dive already, but I can't make heads or tails of Jordan Hicks' rate stats, his FIP, his XFIP, and his 105 mile per hour fastball. So yeah, that's what we were going to talk about, Damien. Okay, so I'm actually, I'm going to write about this after we record this podcast, I think, because it seems like the time is right and I can get some viral hashtag clicks. So Jordan Hicks, for anyone who missed it, threw a very fast bad pitch over the weekend he also threw other faster good pitches so jordan hicks threw a ball it was uh what 105.8 i believe miles per hour brooks baseball has confirmed uh 105.8 he threw another some others that were in that vicinity no i'm sorry i got that wrong 106.1 i believe really was uh yeah even harder than what i said i guess that's not the official right brooks baseball always differs a little bit from mlb for whatever reason so i'm guessing that statcast

says something slightly different maybe brooks is like park adjusted and that's what it was but anyway interesting that if so that the park adjustments made it even faster than it actually was why don't i why don't i just tell you right now because i can search on baseball savant and then that will tell me the StatCast thing. So when I go to baseball savant, and I type in Jordan Hicks, and I buy it sometimes. I believe it was like that one plate appearance against Oduble Herrera. He was like 105.1, 105, 104.3, 104.2. It was like the five fastest pitches of the season so far, I think, were in that one plate appearance.

Yeah, he was uh he was feeling it okay so at baseball savant their fastest velocity is 105 for jordan hicks that's fast and he has a whole bunch i mean he's got a 105 105 104.3 104.2 103.7 all this stuff from uh from sunday and then a couple fast pitches from saturday he was feeling it this weekend so 105 if you go on Brooks Baseball and you sort for a role this Chapman he's topped out at 105.85 so here's look here's the thing we can't actually I don't think that they can measure velocity to such a such a reliable accuracy that we can see who is faster than the other Hicks and Chapman have basically topped out at the same place they've thrown on the 5106 Jordan Hicks while we're here uh jordan hicks has struck out we we've

done a lot of brian mitchell updates on this podcast jordan hicks has a lower strikeout rate than brian mitchell and a higher walk rate than brian mitchell so if i can uh he's thrown 22 innings yes 22 innings yes he's got 16 walks and nine strikeouts he is the hardest throw in baseball he has the worst strikeout minus walk rate in baseball among all pitchers greg holland is actually worse his teammate greg holland if you if you set a minimum for 10 innings pitched then holland is at negative 7.7 percent and hicks is at negative 7.4 but uh yeah yeah

if you set a minimum of 20 innings you know 20 and buy some extra time jordan hicks has baseball second lowest strikeout rate he's ahead of only alex claudio who throws like 45 miles per hour and never walks anybody so jordan hicks has terrible numbers and an e-array of 2.05 and his uh his x-fib is terrible his peripherals are bad so there were a few things here i think when well we might as well just talk this all out because this will make my article very easy to write because you can just do all the editing right now so the first the first thing to say i think is that j Jordan Hicks throws very hard. We know that for a fact. And mentally—

We talked—yeah, like, what, his first outing of the season? Maybe we talked about maybe whether Chapman would be dethroned this year, whether he would no longer have the highest average fastball velocity in baseball. And it looks like that's going to be the case, unless Jordan Hicks hurts himself and throws softer for a while or something. the case unless Jordan Hicks hurts himself and throws softer for a while or something. He's currently leading Chapman by two full miles per hour, 101.5 to a measly 99.5. But of course, Aroldis Chapman is good. Jordan Hicks, not entirely clear that he's good.

Yeah. So Hicks does have the highest average fastball ahead of Chapman and Tehran Guerrero, Jose Alvarado, Justin Anderson, all these people we've never even written about anyway yeah so throws really hard and so mentally uh intuitively hard pitch means it should be hard to hit that makes plenty of sense and if you look at the history of higher velocities they do miss more bets so step one jordan hicks looks like he should get strikeouts step two he's wild so that would take away from his strikeouts step three throws a sinker he doesn't get he doesn't have one of those chapman rising fastballs he actually throws a fastball that just i assume he aims it low doesn't mean he always throws it low because again he's very very wild yeah but he throws a i would guess it's a low spin fastball it's just one of those like gets a decent amount of run, but not a lot, and it sinks.

That's why he gets ground balls in weak contact, but he does not throw a swing and miss fastball, even though that seems wild to say because it can be 105 miles per hour. But the one thing that really does, I think, help to save Jordan is that he is he does get a bunch of grand balls but if you look at his entire professional career starting in 2016 he has allowed four home runs total he's allowed one home run in 2016 and then he allowed three home runs in 2017 and that's it that's everything that he has done and so he's run pretty decent eras as a professional even though his strikeouts have never been good uh his walks have never been good uh and he uh he's just avoided the long ball so in a way jordan hicks looks like he should be

really good but actually he's bad but actually he's kind of good right it's fun he there's only one of these yeah matt trueblood wrote about him recently at Baseball Perspectives and kind of made that case. Like he has a 9.4 deserved run average or something right now, which is truly, truly terrible. But Matt was making the case that maybe that underrates him because he is actually good at not being hit hard. I mean, I don't know whether even that holds because in terms of just the quality of contact, I think he also still gives up pretty hard hit balls. I mean, he's not getting soft contact. He's not giving up the hardest contact, but he's closer to the top of the average exit velocity leaderboard than the bottom. Maybe that's very slightly because he's throwing 105 sometimes And it comes in harder, it does go out a little bit harder Although not as much as most people think

So that could have something to do with it But it's kind of like Craig Kimbrell, right? For years he's had that fun fact where Craig Kimbrell, when people hit the ball Actually hit it pretty hard against him and do pretty well And it's just that he misses bats so often that it doesn't matter hicks does not but he also has as you mentioned the 60 percent ground ball rate which is really great he also has a 194 babbitt which is why he has this huge gap between his era and everything else but you just kind of wonder what his career babABIP will be, whether he'll be one of these guys who can

beat it. And just eyeballing his minor league BABIPs, it doesn't look like he really showed that ability, at least over the long run. He didn't pitch all that much in the minors, but his longest stint at any one level was A-ball. Last year, 78 innings, he allowed a.316 BABIP to minor league hitters and a.318 BABIP last year also in high A. So it doesn't really look like this is an ability he's demonstrated necessarily long term. So if you do just adjust that up to a.300 BABIP or something, he's not going to be good anymore unless he figures out something else, which he very well might, right? anymore unless he figures out something else, which he very well might, right? I mean, part of the reason that Chapman is so good is that he has a really good slider and he throws a change up and he can get whiffs and change pace with those pitches. And last time I checked, Hicks was throwing fastballs something like 80% of the time and his slider doesn't seem to be all that good, really. So if he's able to change that at some point,

if he can make his other pitches good, then maybe that would improve him too. Yeah, he's at 75% sinkers right now and 22% sliders. So if he can change that ratio or make the slider better, then maybe he'd be great. If he can make the slider better. Yeah, so you can, just for the sake of comparison, like you could look at a role with Chapman. He's always thrown hard and his career BAPIP is 283.

Mauricio Cabrera, the last guy to, I think, try to challenge Chapman for velocity, his BAPIP was 282. Now Cabrera also, he only had the one year in the majors, didn't allow a home run. Chapman, of course, has not allowed a lot of home runs. And I think one of the reasons that these players allow a little more contact than you'd expect, even though Chapman's always cutting strikeouts, but batters will shorten up. They will have to change their swings when they go up against somebody like this because they know that they have to sacrifice something if they want to catch up and make contact.

But with Hickson, it got me thinking because there was that clip that Pitcher Ninja, what, Rob Friedman, I believe is his name. Is that right? He posted like the, I don't know, definitive clip, whatever you want to call it, of Hicks throwing a ball that was like 106.1 or whatever it was recorded as. It was bad. It was a wild pitch. And, of course, if you watch the clip, it's kind of deceptive because the catcher's glove moves over and everything makes it look like the ball moves more than it does. It didn't move that much. It was just a bad pitch.

But it went super viral, you know. Everybody was like, oh, my God, look how hard he's throwing. And it made me wonder, like, where we are now is I don't think Jordan Hicks at his present level of talent, I don't think you or I think that he's actually a very good major league pitcher. He's wild. He just throws hard. But on the other hand, he does do something that maybe only one other person on the planet can do. does do something that maybe only one other person on the planet can do so what this kind of gets at the heart of why are we what do we want out of the sports that we're watching do we want to see the players who are the best or the players who are the most freakish because right now jordan hicks is

almost unparalleled even though he's just brian mitchell by his results or something he does do something that you just don't see so if jordan hicks throws a bunch of say jordan hicks comes out he hits 107 miles per hour in his next outing and it's like ball three he falls behind a guy three no but he throws 107 miles per hour is that awesome as a fan is that better than watching him like strike somebody out in three pitches throwing 94 i don't know i guess maybe it is because we have plenty of people who can do the latter. I mean, we're going to talk to Joe about Josh Hader. Josh Hader's stats are incredible. And so he's an outlier in that respect as well. Hicks is an outlier himself in a different way.

I mean, I don't know. We have enough guys, I guess, who are striking out 15 hitters per nine or whatever now and throwing 98 or 99. So to have one guy who throws 105 sometimes but can't strike out anyone, I mean, that's fascinating. Just the fact that he pairs this stuff with these stats, that is unique and unique is interesting. So I'm glad that Jordan Hicks is currently the way he is.

I mean, you were looking at a situation right now where Jordan hicks has baseball's second lowest strikeout rate and bud norris is ninth bud norris adam adevino is second there's just i mean there's no like real adam simber adam simber is just i mean he's just a side armor basically and which is cool and i like him he's got a funky little wind up and everything and he's just a righty but his fastball is 86 his fastball average is 86 and he's struck out 32 percent of everyone he's faced which is way better than jordan hicks except adam simper has a higher era than jordan like these things hicks is breaking some things i think it's easy if you're really impressed by hicks's fastball it's easy to be dismissive of the peripherals and just say, well, it doesn't matter because he's so hard to hit.

He allows soft contact. In reality, he doesn't allow contact that's that soft. He will allow more hits, just maybe not home runs. But the walks will catch up. He does need to do better. Yeah, he's one of the worst in O-swing rate, right? So he doesn't get people to chase outside the strike zone. But then I think he's also one of the worst in swinging strike rate

in zone pitches, so guys aren't swinging through his pitches in the strike zone either. I don't know. Something's got to give here. Maybe it's his elbow before anything else. Who knows? But it's a very, very strange statistical profile. I can't believe how bad Greg Holland has been. Maybe spring training. I mean, you look at Hollandand has been maybe maybe spring i mean you look at holland you look at uh alex cobb you look at lance lynn turns out maybe spring training does serve a purpose uh i know that they didn't get a whole lot but greg holland right now i was uh i was looking greg holland is throwing 12.1 innings we don't have any analysis here on greg holland but in 12.1 innings greg holland has allowed 11 runs with 14 walks and 9 strikeouts.

Greg Holland, Cardinals gave up a compensation pick to sign him. And he's been much, much, much worse than Bud Norris. Bud Norris. Yeah. Speaking of spring training mattering, we never checked in on Ryan Zimmerman after essentially taking spring training off. Remember we talked about that, how Zimmerman didn't really have an injury. It was just the idea was to prevent injuries. He just would not play in games. So he was like working out and playing in backfield games and hitting 800 or something

against low level players. But he had like one plate appearance in an actual game and people were wondering, is this going to catch on? Is this a trend? Well, Ryan Zimmerman hit 184 in April slash March with a 245 on base percentage. I think a lot of people concluded he is done. He's over the hill. He has a 1,000 plus OPS in May now currently, so it looks like maybe he's not actually done. Maybe the back is not completely debilitating. Anyway, doesn't mean that the way that he approached things in spring training was directly related to his slump in April. But I wonder whether he thinks it was or other people think it was to the extent that he'll have difficulty doing that again.

Because it made sense in theory. the extent that he'll have difficulty doing that again because it made sense in theory an older player who has had some issues staying on the field just take it easy when the games don't matter but i don't know maybe there is still some value to shaking off that rust we always talk about how spring training is too long and guys today don't need it but there's i guess one data point pointing to the fact that maybe they do. So Albert Pujols has an 84 WRC+. Yes. And unlike last season when he was an RBI machine, this year he's actually been very slightly unclutch. Again, I don't think we care about this very much.

But Pujols has hit four of his, I don't know, six home runs with the bases empty. He has just not been very good in almost any situation. What do you do? This is a different podcast conversation. One I guess we've already had, but all of the one positive thing the Angels had for Alper Pujols last year, it is not coming true. I only am noticing this because I'm looking at the bottom of the Wins Above Replacement leaderboard. Pujols is only 13th worst. Good for him.

Tied with Marcelo Zuna and Louis Brinson and Victor Martinez. So lots of talent down there. of the uh wins above replacement leaderboard pools is only 13th worst good for him tied with marcelo zuna and lewis brinson and victor martinez so lots of talent down there but here are the bottom five names in fangraphs wins above replacement i'll start from fifth worst stephen biscotti dexter fowler ian desmond cole calhoun chris davis there's a lot of good players we're just hanging out yeah as the worst players in the sport right now. Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, now that Pujols' big milestones are behind him, I mean, when you're at his level, there's always some milestone that's just around the corner, but he has the 600 homers, he has the 3,000 hits, so that's not propping him up anymore. There was no way to release him when he was on the verge of getting those numbers.

But now that he's past that, I would expect the clamor to build. I mean, the Angels are doing pretty well. And maybe that takes some of the pressure off. On the other hand, because they're doing pretty well, they're very much in the race. And that puts the pressure on. So I don't know. I don't expect anything to happen imminently But I think when we talked about this prior to the season Did we say maybe like midway through 2019

Is when we expected the end to arrive Just because they'd give him this full year To show that something has changed Maybe even give him part of the next year He has a lot of respect and status in the game But at some point you've probably got to pull the plug. Yep. All right. So not much else of interest happened this weekend other than things that we've already talked about many times. Rich Hill popped his blister again after two

pitches this time. Poor Rich Hill. This is, I mean, it's getting to the point where you wonder whether this is a potentially career-ending issue here. He comes back in two pitches, which I don't even understand how it's possible to pop a blister after two pitches. Like, did he develop the blister on the first pitch and then pop it on the second? Is it just happening that fast, like time-lapse finger photography? How is this even happening? You'd think that they wouldn't let him come back unless the blister was gone or manageable. And I don't know, at this point, maybe you just kind of run him out there because there's clearly no proven way to fix this. So that happened. Shohei Otani was good again. That happened. And I don't know, you just made a good Twitter joke about the Orioles and how they've been using one-inning starting pitchers for years. They also did a very Orioles-esque thing on Sunday, which we got a question from listener Tate about, and he said, I was looking at the box score from Sunday's Orioles-Red Sox game,

and the Orioles got a base hit in every single inning, finishing with 13 more than the 12 the Red Sox got and still managed to lose 5-0 in typical Orioles fashion. My question is, how uncommon is this? It seems pretty improbable. How often do teams get this many hits without scoring? That's an easy play index, of course, so I did play index it. The most hits ever without scoring a run is 15, which was done back in the dead ball era, essentially, 1918, 1913. The Boston teams each did it. Then there were three instances of 14 hits without a run. Again, 1928, 1916, 1913. It's been a while. Then you get to 13, and there's eyeballing it like, about a 15-16 way tie at 13 hits without scoring a run. So this is not unheard of, but the most recent time it happened was 2008.

So definitely weird to get this many hits without scoring a run. Poor Orioles. In 2015, the Astros lost to the White Sox 6-0, but the Astros had 16 total bases. So we're using a different metric here. 2014, the Astros, oh, well, Astros again lost to the Rangers 4-0. They had 15 total bases. I was thinking about Rich Hill a little bit because, of course, it's very, it's sad. Hopefully he's still able to come back and pitch and just get over this.

He will at least be a guinea pig for whatever cutting-edge blister treatments people are developing in science. They have enough money in science. Who needs to study pancreatic cancer? We have blisters. And when you click on any tweet that's announcing Rich Hill injury news, of course you see some of the worst people who follow sports responding to the tweet. Just talking, you know, whenever a player gets injured, there is a certain segment of the fan base that assumes that player has zero drive or incentive to be good. The players are always soft when actually it's, if anything, the skin is too hard and it tears for Rich Hill. But it just feels bad that you could have, for other reasons that you and Sam have talked about, he is a living baseball miracle.

Sam have talked about. He is a living baseball miracle. And if his career is going to end like this, just in fits and starts of being a pretty good pitcher, but just never quite being as reliable as you want him to be, it just feels sad that the baseball miracle could have his career wind down if people just frustrated with him as opposed to celebrating every single time that he's actually able to take the mound. Yeah. I mean, I guess this is the way that you would have expected it to end because this is the way it was for year after year after year. I don't think people even realize like he was in the big leagues every year for a really long time, but it would just be for very short stints and then he'd get hurt again or he wouldn't be good and he'd get sent down or he'd be an indie ball. So I guess this is kind of the predictable way

for things to wind up if that's what this is, that he kind of would reach the peak of the parabola and then head down again and be kind of an inconsistent, sporadic presence. But I'd like to see at least one more stretch of vintage Rich Hill because that was a lot of fun. Yeah, me too. All right. So baseball is repeating itself. Vlad Guerrero went four for four with a walk off so before we begin to repeat ourselves we will take a break and we'll be back in just a moment with joshian I'll never get to see you again Oh, son, how that's true If I ever deserve

If I ever deserve Oh, son, we'll break through So on Saturday night, the baseball writer Joe Sheehan of the Joe Sheehan Newsletter and elsewhere tweeted, Mike Trout is batting second. Sergio Romo started tonight's game. Josh Hader went two and a third innings in relief. Remarkable to think about how far tactics have come in a short time. And I've been reading Joe for years, not necessarily accustomed to him praising the tactics of Major League teams. So this seems like a change and one that we've seen played out on Major League fields all year. So we wanted to have him on to talk about this evolution. Joe, welcome back.

Good to talk to you guys, fellas. How you doing? We're doing well. So I guess we'll start with Romo since he started Saturday and Sunday and everyone is talking about this and everyone is talking about this, and everyone is arguing about who came up with this idea first. I know Brian Kenney wants to think that it's his idea. He did label it the opener, maybe, or maybe he even didn't. I know you wrote about it in 2016, too, and Brian Grosnick wrote about it at Beyond the Box score back in 2013. Anyway, it's been floating around for a while, this idea of starting a game with a relief pitcher. Can you explain the strategy and the theoretical edge here? Because it's not that simple to explain what the difference is. One is that we know the starting pitchers are only getting 16, 17 outs for the most part.

There's a class of maybe 30 to 50 starting pitchers that you go into a game and say, okay, this guy can maybe get us into the seventh or the eighth inning on a given night. But for the most part, because the way starters are developed now to go maximum effort and not worry about in-game durability. We know about the third time around the order penalty, which dictates that whether because of familiarity or fatigue or a combination thereof, a pitcher is as most vulnerable when he's going through the third time around the order. And we know that the first inning, and this is the important part to me, the first inning is a high leverage situation. You're facing the top of the order in a tied game. If you're the home team, occasionally, excuse me, if you're the road

team, you might occasionally have a lead. But for the most part, the top of the first inning is going to be a high leverage situation, which we put all those things together. You know you're the road team, you might occasionally have a lead. But for the most part, the top of the first inning is going to be a high leverage situation. When you put all those things together, you know you're going to be using a few relievers in the game. Why not use a relief pitcher who, by and large, the third best relief pitcher on most teams, the guy who might pitch the seventh inning, is going to be better at run prevention than the third starter or the fourth starter or the fifth starter on most of these teams. Why not use that pitcher in what we know to be a high leverage situation as opposed to guessing when the high leverage situation might come later in the game. So there's no one reason why this works. It's kind of a combination of a number of things that

we've kind of learned over time. And because of the evolution of starting pitchers and the evolution of relievers, we can say that, and the way I put it the other night was the third best reliever on most teams is going to be better than the third best starter on most teams. So with the – there's implementing the strategy in theory and there's implementing it in reality. And of course in this situation, one of the reasons this is able to work was Sergio Romo is, he has maybe a bigger platoon split than anyone in the world. And he was going up against a team. This was advertised in advance, of course. Everyone knew the Rays were going to be doing this. And the Angels have one lefty on their roster, and he sucks.

So how many, how often is there even an opportunity to do this against a team? Because you can't really necessarily take them by surprise with the reliever you're going to start. So is this one of those things where it's Rays versus Angels here and then there's very few other chances? Or is this more broadly implementable? I think the righty-lefty aspect of it was just a bonus. As you mentioned, Romo, in his career, he's got the drop-down motion, the slider. He's always been tough on right-handed batters. The Angels are basically just – it's Orange County's baseball team. It's all righty.

And you go – you look at that. That's a bonus, though. I think that if you did this with your typical seventh-inning guy who doesn't have as large a platoon split, even a left-handed pitcher, and you telegraphed it, as you say, you announce our starting pitchers days in advance in baseball, I don't know that teams would necessarily have a counter for this. I think that the average reliever is going to have, and this is actually a difference, you know, relievers tend to have

lower platoon splits than they used to, because you think about the model of the seventh inning guy 10, 15 years ago, you know, Jeff Nelson, 20 years ago, right-handed, maybe drop down, maybe three quarters, fastball slider guy. Those guys are generally throwing cutters or two seamers now, four seamers. They're not throwing that big wicked slider that gives you the big platoon split anymore. So I don't think, I think the platoon split was a, it was a bonus, but it was a secondary part of this. I think you can do this for most teams with good bullpens and, you know, middling rotations. I don't, and again, I don't think you're doing this every day. I think you're doing this in two, maybe three rotation spots.

You know, the Rays, you mentioned Romo. I think the other reason the Rays have been a candidate for this is that they lost Honeywell, DeLeon, and Eovaldi in spring training. They lost three potential starters. So they've been kind of faking the rotation all year. They've been kind of going with tandem starts in two spots. So this is just kind of an evolution of, okay, how are we going to get around the fact that we just don't have enough starting pitchers? And the part that trips me up is the idea of the pitcher being able to go

deeper into the game. So the idea here is that obviously the third time through the order penalty still applies to someone like Yarbrough, but the idea is that he won't be facing the top of the order. He won't be facing Trout and Simmons and those guys the third time until he gets deeper into the game because in theory or in practice on Saturday, Romo would just strike out the side and then the pitcher will come in, the nominal starter will come in in the middle or the bottom of the order. Is that the idea? So he'll still be suffering that penalty, but it might not matter as much because the hitters aren't as good? That's the idea? That is an additional bonus. And this is kind of a soft grayish area that I'm not completely on firm footing of. But what I would put it is the most dangerous part of a game is batters 19 to 23, when you have that third time around the order against the top of the lineup. And essentially what you're doing now is you're shifting the third time around the order, the initial anyway, to the bottom of the lineup.

So that basically the good hitters are probably not going to face the same pitcher three times in a game. You're taking that advantage away from, as you say, Trout, Cozart. We're going to pretend Cozart's a good hitter for the purpose of this answer. You know, Simmons, Pujols, we're going to pretend, yada, yada. And that, yeah, you're shifting that initial. Because I had somebody say to me, we've obviously been talking about the third time around the order in the postseason now for three or four years. And I had somebody say to me over an email, isn't this just an artifact of the fact that the third time around the order is more heavily weighted to the top of the lineup?

Because figure pitchers get to the third time around the order and don't make it all top of the lineup because you figure pitchers get to the third time around the order and don't make it all the way through. They don't get to 27 batters. And I think that actually makes sense. And I forget if Mitchell, who I believe was the first person to present this, I forget if he's addressed that in his research. I'm sure he has because he's a thousand times smarter than I am. But to answer the question, Ben, yeah, I think that if you're only facing the bottom of the order three times, it is a, it should be less damaging to your chance to win than facing the top of the order three times. So now that we actually have seen this, this is something that I think internet baseball writers have been talking about for a number of years, all those different

strategies to try to get the extra edge, you know, ways that you can manage a game differently. And now that we've actually seen it take place two days in a row over a weekend, how does it feel to you, I guess, and if you can speak for the broader community to see this on a field? Because in a sense, with all the discussion, this has been so played out on the internet that to actually see it, it's almost like, well, yeah, of course someone finally did it, but like we already settled this in a way. I don't know. I think you might know what I'm getting at.

So how did it feel to actually see it versus having talked about it exhaustively as a writer? Well, yeah, as Ben brought up the tweet that I sent out on Saturday night because my Saturday nights are just so exciting. It's seeing everything. It's Mike Trout batting second, and a lot of places where the best hitter now bats second. Or Josh Hader's usage so far this year year i believe now has five multiple inning saves um and they had the two and a third inning out of the other night uh josh hater's a great story for his performance but he's also a great story for his usage and you know it's i've been arguing baseball for 25 years since you

know the rec sport baseball pre pre prospectus days in college and you know being involved in prospectus from the early going and having watched these conversations develop over 20-odd years, it's just really something to see how data-driven baseball has become and to go from a place where it was, you know, what are you guys talking about? You don't know. You didn't play the game. This is all garbage.

Nobody would ever use this. I mean, I grew up in an environment where the voices of the game summarily rejected this, whether inside or outside. The voices of the game summarily rejected this, whether inside or outside. And now I'm living in a world where 30 teams are, if not completely data-driven, certainly partially data-driven. You know, where you have Joey Gallo facing the 7-0 defense, and you have, finally getting back to an argument, you mentioned Hayter. Let's use our relievers for multiple innings instead of stacking them in these one-inning roles. Let's get away from worrying about a scoring rule the save driving usage let's opt let's eliminate the 290 obp 65 steel leadoff hitter this has all happened that this isn't stuff we

debate anymore and it's just funny to kind of look at the way the game is played and managed and run and now and say, all the fights have been won. And mind you, it's not everywhere. Earlier Saturday, you know, I watched Mike Matheny hold back Bud Norris for a save and watch Greg Holland blow a game. I mean, it's not perfect everywhere. But when you kind of look back and see where we were in 1995 when we were working on the first Persus book to where the game is now it's it's fascinating and that's a continuum that's not you know five guys of prospectus changing the world that's alan roth and bill james and craig wright and michael wolverton who you know it was incredible early guy at prospectus that kind of nobody really talks about anymore and on through you know guys like don malcolm who was doing the big bad baseball

book and you go forward to mitchell Tango and Ben and Jeff and Dave Cameron at Fangraphs. This is 25, 30, 40, 50 years of people looking at baseball and saying, this would be the better way to do things. And the game now saying, oh yeah, we're going to listen to those guys. We're going to hire those guys. It's fun to watch. It really is. It's fun to have been a very small part of that. You wrote recently, as I think we've all written at some point, about how bunts and sacrifice bunts have just completely dropped off the table in the last few years. And that is, I think, a result of all of the analytic stuff that we've been talking about. But it took a

little while. There was a little bit of a lag time between Moneyball popularizing the idea that you shouldn't bunt all the time and teams actually not bunting all the time. So do you think that in-game management, do you think that that lagged a bit behind that? I guess the front office restructuring and the player evaluation changes and the roster construction changes came first. changes and the roster construction changes came first. And then some of this other stuff followed along a little later, just because I guess in-game moves were the province of the manager and the manager maybe wasn't quite as on board with these new age ideas. That sounds about right. I think that when looking at the numbers for position player sacrifices, which is what you mentioned I wrote about, there was kind of a dropoff into the turn of the century. And then for about a decade, they were flat.

And then this decade, they've completely fallen off. And I think that is kind of reflecting. I know people don't like this idea, but the idea that the front office and the manager are kind of working together as opposed to the front office sets the roster and the manager runs the dugout. I think that took some time to come into vogue.

And now we have more and more managers simply on board with the idea that you don't automatically, you know, bunt the runner from first to second in situations that we might have, you know, 25 years ago. And it's funny, if anything, I complain. The other night, the Diamondbacks actually got caught off guard. There was a runner on second, nobody out, tie game, bottom of the ninth, which is one of the few situations where a sacrifice bunt is in order.

And the Diamondbacks actually got caught on, they got surprised by it and ended up losing the game. So it's funny to see a situation where, you know, an auto bunt is in order and the team wasn't even ready for it. So bunts are becoming surprises again. I do think that we've done a, we did a poor job for a while of explaining that it wasn't the physical act of bunting we were against. It was, you know, auto sacrifice bunting in situations where it hurts you. Because people say, oh, he bunted for a hit. That's a good thing. That's always been a good thing. Now, of course, we're at a point where players

are saying that they're not bunting against the shift because they don't know how to bunt anymore. Could be a fun little side effect consequence of all the railing against sacrifice bunts is nobody just knows how to do it at all. Because Joey Gallo could boost his average about 50 points. In theory. Maybe more. I don't know. What we can do is, after four generations of this, it'll be like pitcher hitting, where they can to do it at all because joey gallo could boost his average about 50 points in theory maybe more i don't know what we can do is after four generations of this it'll be like pitcher hitting where they can't do it anymore and we just have a designated bunter yeah so related to i guess

lineup construction is technically in-game management but also it's mostly pre-game management it's almost entirely pre-game management and going to the uh the mic trap batting second thing this is a another one of those sabermetric principles where i don't know this was researched even before tango and mitchell lichtman and andrew dolphin wrote the book but just talking about how you want a really good hitter batting second and of course anyone who remembers baseball in the 90s would remember some sort of bat control guy batting second and uh now it's gotten better currently i'm gonna go back to tops plus love using it couldn't do better than tops plus right now number two spot in the order has a tops plus

of 112 meaning it's 12 better than average and if you reflect back on i don't know the year 2000 it was 97 so joe why don't you just talk us through a little bit the evolution of batting second in the lineup i mean i want to say the first reference to lineup construction I ever saw was the 88 baseball abstract, where Bill James kind of broke down and showed what the optimal Red Sox lineup would be. The 88 baseball abstract is kind of the start of my getting into all this. And there were fairly primitive lineup simulators that would say, really, the biggest thing was don't have the back control low OBP guy batting second. Don't have the big steel low OBP guy batting leadoff. That was the biggest thing is get your best hitters more at bats and get your on-base percentage guys in front of your power.

And we were talking about this early on for years. And there's actually a counter argument to this, which says that lineup construction doesn't actually matter all that much. And the simulators that we have indicate that it ends up being upwards. Maybe the biggest difference between the best and the worst lineups is maybe a win a year. My argument's always been it's a free win. And I've also felt that that understates the chaining effects where if you get your on-base in front of your slugging, that should produce more runs. But over time, the argument has slowly taken hold and not uniformly jeff is that tops

plus i don't know if you have it there is 112 the highest or is it still third or fourth the the top lineup spot let me tell you right now it uh it's the highest since the year uh 1911 let me let me rephrase do you do is it the is our number two hitters the best hitters in baseball now we saw the reds experiment this with joey vato i remember doing a thing for si and that like five years ago and they got away from that this isn't uniform it's also roster specific and this is also and to kind of tie this back to romo this is all personnel management as well the gains that you get in optimizing your lineup won't always exceed the losses in personnel management. If I've got a superstar who really wants to bat third, I don't necessarily know that I pick up a whole lot moving him up to second. If he's an incredibly bad base runner, Miguel Cabrera is the best Tigers hitter.

But when he's on the field, I'm not sure I gain a whole lot moving him up to second. There are soft factors here. The Sergio Romo thing, the Rays had to buy into that. Romo had to buy into that, and I give him a lot of credit for doing that. I give Kevin Cash a lot of credit for presenting it to him and saying, hey, look, this isn't going to work if you just tell your seventh inning guy, you have to be ready at 1 o'clock instead of 3.30. So number two batters are not the best hitters this season,

I can tell you by T-Opius Plus, maybe unsurprisingly. So I'm just going to read down in order, starting from the leadoff spot, 103, 112, 126, 120, 108. And then it gets worse from there all the way down to the pitcher spot. So it is still 3-4, still the best hitters in baseball. Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, number three is still better than number four, even though I believe that is what is advised against. It is, because frequently the number three spot will bat with two out, nobody on in the first.

So it's actually a relatively low leverage spot. I want to say the fifth spot is where you're supposed to actually be putting your guys, but it's hard to take a really good hitter and quote unquote drop him down to fifth that feels like, well, he's not going to bat in the first inning, and we're not going to get our best players. And this was where you're kind of trying to balance interests. The things that generate the most runs in a simulation versus the general principle of get your best hitters the most played appearances. But I definitely think that lineups are more optimized than they were 20 years ago. But let's also make the point, there's a much more narrow range of player skills, batting skills, than there were 25 years ago. We've eliminated the guy who hits 275 with two home runs. That guy doesn't exist anymore. I did a

piece for Fangraphs about a year ago, and one of the hooks in it was comparing Larry Boa to Freddie Galvis. They were Philly shortstops 40 years apart. And they had the same value, but Boa hit no home runs and Galvis hit 20. Galvis is 30 pounds heavier than Larry Boa at the same height. And they're doing the same job, but the shape of their performance is completely different because of the way the game has changed. We don't have Omar Marino types in the game anymore. Vince Coleman, guys like that just don't exist in baseball anymore.

So when you're building a lineup, you don't have as many archetypes to choose from. So it's not surprising that it was the Rays to be the first to try this Romo tactic. They've kind of been on the cutting edge and been the experimental team for a decade or so now, maybe more. And they've even tried things with pitchers before, whether it was the Steven Jelts gambit back in 2015, where they would start him in NL Parks and then replace him with a pinch hitter. So you'd almost have a DH and then you'd have a pitcher who could go longer. And they've had this four-man rotation all year in the bullpen days. So not shocking to see them being the ones doing

this. And that is partly because of the limitations of their roster and their payroll. But maybe that's one of the changes over the last few years is that it's not just the Rays or the Indians or the teams that can't spend as much as other teams. Like it was the Indians maybe who pioneered the extending young players and locking them up long term at low dollar amounts. And then every other team picked up on that tactic. And now there isn't really any difference between the teams that really need to fight and scrap for every win and the teams that have $200 million payrolls in terms of how progressive their front office is. It seems like that difference has just been entirely leveled now. So if this kind of thing was an advantage for the small market teams at one point,

it doesn't seem as if it is anymore, even if it is the Rays still pushing boundaries in a few ways. Yeah, it's hard to find advantages. I wasn't on this train 15 years ago when people said, well, if Moneyball came out and this is how small market teams are going to win. And smart people were saying, well, what about when everybody does this? Where's the advantage then? Aren't we just back to money? And I think to some extent that's been proven out. The correlation between payroll and success, it's not as great as everybody thinks it is, but it is certainly when you see teams like

the Yankees and Dodgers, particularly the Dodgers winning the NL West five straight years, it's not as great as everybody thinks it is, but it is certainly, when you see teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, particularly the Dodgers winning the NL West five straight years, it's hard to not be concerned about, you know, how are teams, if the spread of payroll is going to be, you know, $165 million, how are the teams at the bottom end of that

going to compete? And they're going to have to compete, especially when the rules are constantly restricting what they do. The last couple of CBAs have actually made it harder for small market teams to use their money wisely in the international market or in the draft. Everybody's kind of being funneled into a very limited number of ways they can compete for talent. So I think this is one of the challenges that MLB faces when we go into the 2020s,

the next round of CBA negotiations. It's not good. I know it's fun to talk about the Braves and the Phillies and some of the surprises we've had, but at base level here, it's not good for the game when 10 or 11 teams go into a season kind of agnostic as to whether they win the next game or not. And then you have teams like the Orioles that come into the season and think they're going to win, but they don't. So that's always a little fun.

But they're always going to be bad. Did we do this? Oh no, I think we did this, Ben. How long is it going to be before Team X gets to the postseason again? Man, if you had to draft all 30 teams on that right now, the Orioles would probably be the top pick. Yeah, them or the Tigers, right? Or, I mean, I don't know if the Reds are ever going to come out of this.

This is a very different podcast than the way I read it. Well, the Canolis Mariners, I don't want to pick on Jeff, but yeah, if the Mariners don't make it this year, they join that group. They're definitely not very good. So as far as Josh Hader, there are a few molds being broken here. One, maybe Josh Hader is breaking the current mold of a closer, which is funny because, of course, the Brewers had Corey Knievel as a dominant closer last year,

and he's back. He's healthy now. But in any case, Hader is sort of occupying an old reliever role. But the other mold he's breaking is the mold of believable statistics because there's no reason that anyone should have twice as many strikeouts as innings pitch. He's allowed seven hits. Seven hits? Anyway, I didn't know that he had only allowed seven hits, but Hayter in a sense is sort of a continuation of what Rysel Iglesias has been doing less dominantly in Cincinnati. Blake Trinan is tied with Hayter

for the most saves this year of more than one inning. Trinan also less dominant than Hader. Is this something that you think we're going to see more of as starting pitchers are throwing fewer and fewer innings? Do you think that more innings are going to go to anonymous relievers or to the best relievers as teams sort of try to stretch them out beyond the 60-inning role that they used to have? Here's a great podcast answer. I don't know. I think we're still kind of in the in a transition period and especially we want to focus on you know glacis last year hater this year i did a query the other night looking for uh players who've had you know x number of multiple innings say or two innings as i might have looked up and it was a

glacis hater and then a whole bunch of i think you had to go back to like doug henry for the last guy who'd had this this many henry it was a brewerver, I want to say, in the 1990s. I don't know. I think that it gets into issues of roster construction, which is something I've talked about with you before, Ben, on the podcast. And are teams going to continue carrying eight pitchers, or are they going to say, not only are we going to use one guy for multiple innings, we're going to use a few of these guys for multiple innings, and we're going to say, not only are we going to use one guy for multiple innings,

we're going to use a few of these guys for multiple innings. And we're going to carve back a roster spot for a position player. And how does that then change the middle innings with getting platoon advantages? It's a constant kind of back and forth. I'm in favor of a rule change that would cap eligible pitches for a game, eligible pitches for... Derek Gould's actually proposed eligible pitchers for a series. I want to see things that force a better pitcher-header balance, but I also want to force teams to develop and select pitchers for endurance, which I think

would help the strikeout problem within the game. All of this is intertwined. All of these conversations are kind of of a piece. It's very hard to just pick out reliever usage and not end up talking about all of the other stuff we're talking about here. So I'm not sure where it's going to go here. I want to believe teams are going to restore a little bit of balance, start using their better relievers over multiple innings, start selecting them for those skills, because I think it's a more interesting game if that happens, as opposed to this is our seventh inning guy, this is our eighth inning guy, this is our ninth inning guy. They all strike out 30 or more percent of the batters they face. They all have a three and a half to one strikeout to walk ratio. And on any given day, there are 75 of them pitching in Major League Baseball and you

can't name 50 of them. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the strikeout thing because when Jeff asked you earlier what it's like to see all this stuff actually happen on the field, and you said it's fun to see, a lot of people would say that this is not fun to see. We know Zach Cozart says it's not fun and it's bad for baseball, and he didn't really give any reason for why it's bad for baseball other than that it's weird, which is not a great reason. Maybe the real reason is because Sergio Romo struck out Zach Cozart. That could be one reason. But that's the thing is that Romo came in and the strategy worked and hey, he struck out the side. So even more strikeouts in baseball this year. And of course, you don't love the extremely strikeout heavy brand of baseball either. But I thought you wrote an interesting

edition of the newsletter recently that I mentioned on the podcast about whose fault this is and whether the responsibility lies with people like you who've been writing about this for the past couple decades or not. Because I think it's inarguable that sabermetrics, that this analytical way of looking at the game, has rubbed off on baseball teams and is having some impact on the way the game is played. But you argued essentially that you don't feel culpable for making this happen, for ruining baseball if someone thinks that baseball is currently being ruined. No, I've liked Dave Cameron, which is why he got out of the media and started working for a team. It's all his fault. No, because it was never, I guess the way I'd put it is the perspective of writing about the game has largely been how do teams do things more efficiently.

Certainly this was when I started out. I think there's certainly a broader range of writing today. Kind of the data scouting approach is kind of probably what dominates today's writing. But we were writing about these things. We're like, you know, these teams are doing things badly. They should do things better. And teams themselves have absolutely no responsibility to the larger picture, I don't think, anyway. I think if you're Haim Bloom, or if you're David Stearns, or if you're Matt Klintak,

your job is to pick up wins for the Rays, the Brewers, the Phillies, and not to think about whether the game is, as a whole, healthy. And this is where I feel like the commissioner's office and his advisors and whoever else need to step in and say, the game doesn't work as currently constituted. And there's an argument that it does. And Ben, I know you're kind of of the opinion that the strikeouts aren't as big a deal. And Jeff, I think you are as well.

It's the league's responsibility to step in and say, our game is out of whack. How do we put it back into whack? And the NFL constantly makes changes. The NBA made very important changes about 15 years ago that eventually gave us some of the most highly entertaining basketball that's ever been played. The NHL had a problem in the 1990s. MLB, the last significant change was the strike zone modification in 88. Before that, you've got to go back to the DH. MLB doesn't do this. strike zone modification in 88.

Before that, you've got to go back to the DH. MLB doesn't do this. MLB doesn't, whether it's Kuhn or Uberoth or Selig or Manfred, they never sit down and say, what should baseball actually look like? And I don't know necessarily that I have an answer to that, but I can say that strikeouts being more frequent than singles is odd. Strikeouts being more frequent than hits is completely out of whack.

Home runs being 4% to 5% of outcomes seems a little high. Home runs being the production of 40-odd percent of runs scored seems high. There's not enough variance in gameplay. And it's not the responsibility of the teams to do that. It's the responsibility of the league to keep those things in balance. MLB almost needs constitutional convention, a Vatican II, where you sit down and say, what are we supposed to look like? How much money should the big market teams be distributing to the league? What's a reasonable range of payrolls and should that be restricted? How much money

should be going to the players? What should the ballparks look like? What should a baseball game look like? A lot of what's happened is just evolution in the absence of a guiding hand. I think at this point, baseball needs a guiding hand. So how do you develop that argument in what I would say is a convincing way? How do you get that beyond just a matter of opinion? Because even if you did something to, I don't know, mitigate the strikeouts, you move the mound back or you lower the mound or something like that, and then no matter what you end up with, no matter what style of play, you are, you know, Ben and I are of the opinion of, eh, baseball is going to figure itself out. And you are maybe a little more pro-intervention, but, you know, baseball could make the argument, and they have made the argument, that they do a lot of studies, they ask a lot of people, they ask around, and they are making more money than ever.

People don't seem to actually mind the way that the game is today. So how do you make your most convincing argument that something needs to change? I don't. The best counter to any of this is the cash registers ringing over and over again. But I will say this. Baseball, capital B baseball, I'm at Major League Baseball, is less and less in the business of selling you nine innings of baseball and more and more in the business of selling you baseball-themed entertainment or spinning off billion-dollar businesses from baseball. Thinking about MLB Advanced Media here. And getting publicly funded ballparks built from which they can gain a lot of their revenue by putting in things that aren't necessarily connected to the baseball game but have a baseball game going on inside every you talk about studies all the research shows that baseball has the average

largest highest average age of anybody who watches the games and that's not that hasn't changed i think since i've been caring about the question now you can still make a lot of money selling the game to 50 55 year olds and i do think baseball is something that people do tend to come to, at least now when they're older. But I don't know. I think the best thing baseball can do, leaving aside the stuff we've talked about today, the single best thing baseball could do today is just throw an ungodly amount of money into getting kids to play baseball. I'm not talking about paying them to play baseball. That's the shoe company's job in basketball.

them to play baseball. That's, you know, the shoe company's job in basketball. I'm talking about fields and equipment and organization and hiring adults and getting kids to play baseball. The thing that makes you a baseball fan is playing the game. And I think what we've, I don't want to say soccer is a sport of the future. I mean, we've been saying that since I was in third grade. But I do think the increasing interest in MLS and the Premier League, all the European soccer, is because more kids are playing soccer, have been playing soccer now for 15 years. I think baseball's got to drive it that way. I don't think, I think baseball should be fixing the game on the field. I think baseball should be working on its business structure.

If nothing else, guys, baseball stopped, I mean, I grew up with Selig, who would stop at nothing to tell people baseball players were horrible, greedy cheaters. And we don't do that anymore. For nothing else, baseball's done a really good job of stopping the anti-marketing. Baseball sells itself better than it used to. But the single biggest thing baseball can do now is take some of the enormous amount of money in the game and use it to get kids playing baseball. So you're as good as anyone at writing about the big picture stuff in baseball, but you've also devoted a lot of columns over the years to the small picture stuff, to the individual moves where the manager perhaps threw away some win expectancy and broke down why that was the case. And I think that is— Sounds like a wasted life, put it that way.

Don't stare at it too closely, man. I think it's easier and more tempting to do that sort of thing now than ever, just because we have Twitter and we can all react and criticize every move in real time in unison, which becomes our national sport come October when we all do that. But do you feel like you have less material now, now that relative to when you started writing about baseball, there are many fewer moves that merit criticism, both in terms of transactions and in terms of actual in-game moves? So do you feel yourself struggling to search for topics that once would have been the low-hanging fruit? I would say there are a couple of weeks a year where I struggle to search for topics, but it's not because of that. It's just because that happens. I probably

write less about individual games during the season now, but that's mostly because, particularly in the newsletter, I'm writing for a smaller audience, 17, 18, 19 hundred people. And the chance that everybody's watching the same game is just nil. If I pick on a move, I mean, Mike

Matheny's a universal joy for everyone. I can always write about the Cardinals. I actually had somebody suggest to me that if I did a regular P, regular section on just Mike Matheny bad moves, I could pick up some subscribers. I haven't done it yet, but we'll see what happens. But no, a lot of it's just that not everybody's watching the same game,

particularly now. Maybe 30 years ago you could have done that because everybody's watching the Sunday night game or everybody was watching the game of the week. But now you're just watching your own team through various means. That's actually one reason why October is kind of fun because I do get to just get all that out. We're all watching the same games in October. And that's why it's easy to do that, to go a thousand words on whether Joe Girardi should have challenged a call or a pitching decision or a center fielder breaking the wrong way on a ball. That's why it's kind of fun to do that

because I really don't do that in the regular season anymore. And I don't remember if I was doing that at Prospectus for 10 years. I probably was. But now, no, if anything, Ben, I find myself doing more bigger picture stuff now. That's just my interest. As I get older, my interest is kind of trying to put the game we're watching

now and the trends we're watching now into the larger scope of history. Because talking to you, it's hard to describe the strikeout era if you don't remember watching 1980s baseball. And I'm not suggesting we bring back artificial turf. I'm really not. But it's hard. In the same way that I couldn't't maybe there are people older than me that would have said well yeah you enjoy barry bonds and alex rodriguez but man you never saw

ernie banks and willie mays that's absolutely true so i've become more interested in the history and how we got here you know reading things like peter morris's books and i was i'm actually rereading lords of the realm at the moment because it came up on twitter and just history matters to me now and fitting modern baseball into the 140 year continuum and figuring out where it's going to go over the next 20 to 40 I don't know and and it's that that's the stuff that interests me so I don't really write about Mike Matheny you know god bless him but he's really the one guy now yeah it's it's I mean Gabe Kapler yeah he did the dumb thing his opening weekend and then the way he used uh Ramos and uh and Neris the other day kind of got some people up in arms. But for the most part, this is – and this gets back to what we talked about in the middle of the podcast, which is the game is run so much better now that 1999 Joe Sheehan would kind of be like, this is ridiculous.

I need to find another job. There are a lot of people that say 2018 Joe Sheehan should as well, which is fair. Yeah. Well, Mike Matheny has been a renewable resource for writers for several years now, but at some point he will not be a major league manager anymore. And we might really be down to no one who is making those sorts of moves because that's the way it was with front offices for a while where there was always one holdout or two holdouts. Right. Dave Stewart, it was the Diamondbacks. It was the Twins.

Maybe we're still old school. And then they both had regime changes in the same offseason. And now, I mean, there's still a spectrum, but the people at the bottom end of the spectrum are more advanced than the people at the top end of the spectrum a decade or two ago. So I think that's reflected in the coverage. The coverage now has moved more from the game should be better. These people are doing it wrong. This is how they should be doing it, which for all the accusations of arrogance, I think has been proven to be right. It now really focuses on, with the help of statcasts and high

definition video, the mechanics of the gameplay itself. It's certainly moved from the front office and the dugout to the field. The newer innovations in baseball coverage, GIFs, StatCast data, and frankly, the greater level of access that outsiders now have. I am not sure if I had the level of access in 1998, I would have necessarily done it the way I did. But it was only in 2008 that the BBWA even started letting outsider riders in it. So I look at what Anino Saras can do today and the way he's using that access, and I'm just in awe. I'm just so amazed at the work that he's doing. Coming at it from a stat hit perspective and appreciating the data and then going into the player to say, well, how are you generating these results?

I think the data scouting focus of modern baseball writing has generated an enormous amount of content that simply wouldn't have been there 15 years ago. baseball writing has generated an enormous amount of content that simply wouldn't have been there 15 years ago. Well, it'll be interesting to see whether these one-off strategies, whether it's the Rays with Romo or the Brewers with Hayter, I mean, if these are the right ways, the optimal ways to do it, then you could say that every team that is not doing that, which right now is just about every team, is doing it wrong. So we will have to see some sort of evolution there, even if, for the reasons we mentioned, the Romo tactic doesn't become commonplace. And even Eric Neander of the race told Ken Rosenthal that if he were the Astros, he probably would not be doing the Romo strategy. But the hater strategy, for example, that's something, again, there maybe is not a hater

in every organization, but that's something where if it makes sense and it seems to, then there are a lot of teams leaving potential wins on the table there. So there would have to be some sort of evolution there, and maybe there will be more things to chronicle and more things to criticize, and we'll never completely be out of this material. But it has changed quite a bit. Well, I could start collecting Social Security in 17 years. So I need 17 more years of mistakes. But one of the things I'd like to see more is these teams that are out of it use themselves as test bets. Could the Reds turn Amir Garrett into this type of player? Could the Padres experiment with all kinds of things? Could the Marlins? The Marlins right now should have turned their year into a total experimental, how are we going to eventually win games? We're going to learn things with the 25 guys, 30 guys, how are we going to eventually win games?

We're going to learn things with the 25 guys, 30 guys, 40 guys we have now to help us win games in a couple of years. I'm not sure enough bad teams are experimenting that way. A lot of the – you mentioned the Rays, the Brewers. These are 500 teams that are trying to win this year. And I'd like to see a little more wacky strategies coming out of places like San Diego and Kansas City and Miami, other than banning radio reporters. All right. Well, you can find Joe on Twitter at Joe underscore Sheehan. He is in Sports Illustrated. He's at The Athletic. He's in Baseball America. And of course, he is at the Joe Sheehan newsletter.

What's the best place and time for people to subscribe? Anytime, 24-7. Facebook.com, Sheehan Newsletter. I post excerpts there. I take questions, feedback. There's a 10% off discount for a one-year subscription. I get it out there. This is a long URL, but there's a lot of archive stuff just from the stuff I've written over the years. Joshianbaseball.blogspot.com. It's just where I post things where it's, hey, this came up and I'm going to run a full article from 2012. But really the Twitter feed gets all the information at Joe underscore Sheehan. All right. Always a pleasure. Thanks, Joe. Guys, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan. Thank you very much. By the way, Jeff and I answered a listener email not long ago about the

staying power of the phrase Andrew Miller role or Andrew Miller type role. We were somewhat skeptical that it would hold up as all these other innovative bullpen practices take its place. We're talking about Romo today. We're talking about Hayter today. Hayter is maybe more of an Andrew Miller than Andrew Miller was. But listener Thomas Scott emailed us today. He sent us a list of Andrew Miller role references just from the past month. And he says he thinks it is sticking in the baseball lexicon. So he sends us examples of Jordan Hicks being described as in an Andrew Miller role. That's from 101sports.com. Insiderbaseball.com says that Josh Hader is in the Andrew Miller role.

Phillies Nation says that Serenity Dominguez could be used in the Andrew Miller role. FakeTeams.com says the Diamondbacks have Archie Bradley in a hybrid Andrew Miller role. And NewYorkMetsReport.com says that Robert Gesellman and Seth Lugo will combine for the Andrew Miller role. So the phrase is still floating around. Oh, and after Jeff and I talked about Rich Hill and his blister, Andy McCullough tweeted that Hill has been experimenting with various treatments for the blister, including receiving laser therapy, chugging apple cider vinegar, and urinating on his hand. Somehow hand urination sounds like the least unpleasant option there. Andy also says that Hill plans to ask MLB if he can pitch with tape on his wounded left middle finger,

which sounds like it might be a little bit unfair, but you know what? I'm willing to bend the rules a bit if it brings me back, Rich Hill. Another PSA, if you are in the Kansas City area, which obviously most of you are not, there is an Effectively Wild meetup later this week. Matt Eli, who is organizing that meetup, asked me to mention it. It's this Thursday at 5 p.m. at the Kansas City T-Bones game. That's

the T-Bones of the American Association. That's IndieBall. If you're interested in going with some other Effectively Wild listeners, you can go to the Facebook group, just click on Events and you will see it listed there. You can RSVP and discuss. I guess it's actually a bar and then baseball. Even better. Alright, that will do it for there. You can RSVP and discuss. I guess it's actually a bar and then baseball. Even better.

All right, that will do it for today. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners already have Scott Brady, Jordan Smith, Mike Lehrman, Mike Flack, and Jason B. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group

at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. All of your reviews and ratings help provided they're positive ones. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thank you. The story of God's review Endlessly It's just that we Imagine the awesome