Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1229: Say it Ain’t Shohei

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Masahiro Tanaka‘s double hamstring strain, Joey Gallo‘s bunt against the shift, and Nationals reliever Justin Miller‘s amazing stats this season. Then they discuss the short- and long-term effects of Shohei Ohtani’s elbow injury, critique several baseball-fixing proposals by Nick Elam, inventor of basketball’s “Elam Ending,” and wrap up […]

🎵 I love you baby, ain't gonna lie 🎵 🎵 Without you darling I can't be satisfied 🎵 🎵 If things are going wrong for you 🎵 🎵 You know it hurts me too 🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1229 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, who has a cold. Hello, Jeff, who has a cold? Hi, Ben, who doesn't? How are you? I'm doing well. You didn't sound like you had a cold on that high.

Maybe you're overcompensating for your cold by projecting even more. You have a podcast voice, and I have a podcast voice. And it sounds the same as usual so far. So we are going to talk about a few topics today. One of them will be somewhat depressing, but we will talk about it anyway. I mentioned very briefly just in a note at the top of last week's last episode that Otani was injured, that he is on the DL, that he has a more serious UCL sprain than we knew before. We'll talk about that again in a minute, even though there has been no hard news.

Just a couple of quick things I wanted to mention first. Since we're speaking about pitcher injuries, there was one on Friday night that a lot of people were tweeting at me about because of the content of our last podcast and my last article for The Ringer, which is that Masahiro Tanaka was injured in interleague play. Yankees were playing the Mets and Tanaka was batting, of course, because it was at Citi Field And he was on base and he was trying to score on a sacrifice fly and he did But in the process, he strained both of his hamstrings, which is not something that I really recall happening. I mean, he was placed on the DL after the game with two strained hamstrings at one time. Usually it's just one. That's usually how it works. But trying to sprint was just so taxing that he strained both of them at the same

time. His body just said, no, what are you doing? You don't do this, you're a pitcher. And so I got a lot of people tweeting at me about, oh, well, if we had a DH, this wouldn't happen. And then a lot of other angry people tweeting at those people saying, these are athletes, these are baseball players, they should be able to run 90 feet without hurting themselves. Anyway, this is far from the first time that a pitcher in the DH league has hurt himself hitting. You can all think of examples, whether it's Chiming Wong with the Yankees or Adam Wainwright a few years ago, or Alex Wood or Max Scherzer or David Cohn broke a finger bunting once. I mean, there are many, many examples of this. Josh Beckett, I linked to a bunch in my article last week. So I don't think

this is the strongest argument for why there should be a DH in both leagues, that pitchers hurt themselves occasionally batting or running. But I think it is an argument because we want to see these guys pitch. We don't really want to see them run the bases. And whenever they hurt themselves running the bases or batting, which is something they're bad at, it deprives us of them doing something they're good at, which is what I would rather see. So I don't know that it's like the deal breaker here when a pitcher hurts himself and it's the slam dunk case. This is why we need a DH. But I think it's on the long list of possible reasons why. Yeah, I would think that it's maybe the second reason, a distant second behind that they're terrible. It's a waste of everyone's time to watch them hit. But also, pitching is just so dangerous. And I've been coming more and more along to the idea that

pitching is unpredictable. They all just get hurt. Everyone's trying to throw really hard. And there's no sense in investing in any of them anyway. This is not some sort of like anti-labor perspective, but more a open your eyes and look at what is happening to pitchers kind of perspective where they just get hurt and as long as they're going to throw harder and harder they're going to continue to get hurt and they're already going to do that doing the pitching part of their job so don't make them do more than just i know look i get it if you should be able to swing and run to first base and not strain even just one, never mind both of your hamstrings. I don't know how.

Foam roll, dude. But anyway, it's so dangerous. And I know that there's only a few pitchers who get hurt running the bases. And, you know, last year one of the most prominent pitchers in baseball got hurt on like a dirt bike or an ATV or whatever it was. You can't just put them in bubble wrap when they're not on the mound. But pitching is so hard, and we're not close to any sort of pitching health breakthrough. So just don't expose them to further risk. Just between innings, let them just go sit down, maybe soak in a hot tub,

and then when the inning break is over, dry them off all real quick-like, and then they can go back to the mound and continue to pitch because we don't need to have more pitchers missing time. That's the last thing baseball needs. Right. I agree. And I don't know whether AL pitchers are more likely to get hurt batting when it's interleague play than NL pitchers are. A couple of people asked me that. I don't know. I haven't seen a study about that. It would be pretty small samples anyway. I haven't seen a study about that. It would be pretty small samples anyway.

But the point is, whenever this happens, no matter the league, it's always a shame in the way that it is, obviously, when anyone gets hurt, but particularly when a pitcher gets hurt doing something that doesn't involve pitching. It seems like a real waste because so many pitchers get hurt doing pitching that we don't need to add to that total. And we're going to talk about one of those in just a second. Only other thing I wanted to bring up before we get to Otani is Joey Gallo. Joey Gallo bunted this weekend, Friday to be specific. He was playing the Astros and they were shifting.

It wasn't the full four-man outfield shift, but it was still the bunch of people on the right side of the field shift. And this time it was in the sixth inning. The Rangers were down 5-3, so they needed base runners. I think no one was on and Justin Verlander was pitching. So Gallo figured, well, I'm probably not going to hit a home run against Justin Verlander, or at least my odds are reduced. So he bunted. And at least for this situation, it was pretty much a perfect bunt. If he had been a faster guy, perhaps he could have even gotten to second base. But it was just, you know, it wasn't directly down the line, but it was close enough to the line because there was no one at all on the left side of the field. And I miss this, we didn't talk about it at the time, but this is actually the second bunt that Gallo has laid down this year against the shift. He did one in late April that was also successful against the A's that time. And according to some stories in the aftermath of this second bunt, he has been working on it and he's kind of picking his spots to do it. And it worked. It worked well. And the interesting thing is that

in his next plate appearance, a couple innings later, the Astros were not shifting quite as much. I don't know whether there was anything else different about the situation. Charlie Morton was pitching this time instead of Justin Verlander, and the Astros had a four-run lead instead of a two-run lead. But this time they had a guy, the third baseman was playing shortstop essentially. So he was pulled over, but not completely absent from that side of the field. And that time Gallo did not bunt. He pulled a grounder right into where the shift is and the playing deep second baseman fielded it and threw him out. But anyway, we were wondering why he doesn't do this. He did it and it worked. I don't have the Darren Willman tweet in front of me,

and you can't really search baseball savant for bunts anyway, but I can go to the Fangraph Splits leaderboard. Something that Darren Willman tweeted out shocked me. So here is a, I looked at the Fangraph Splits leaderboard looking at bunts with a traditional shift on, and I'm going to, there are a bunch of players tied for two. This is this season. Lots of players, like a dozen players,

tied with two bunts with a traditional shift on this season. John Jay has three. Tucker Barnhart has three. And in first place, Rugned Odor has 12. 12 bunts with a traditional shift on that. Two of them are sacrifice bunts. Only four of them have been hits. I don't know exactly what has been going on. That's probably a post that I'll

write this week or something, but Rugnado Door, in case anyone hasn't been paying attention, and you shouldn't be, but for anyone out there, last year, Rugnado Door's weighted runs created plus was 61. That's bad. This year, it's 58. It's worse. We talked a lot about Chris Davis in the last

episode. It's only fair that we should also mention that Rugnado Door is terrible. But at least credit to him. He's trying to bunt last episode It's only fair that we should also mention That Rudin at a door is terrible But at least credit to him He's trying to bunt against the shift The shift that will never go away Because that's the way that he hits Yeah, that's right But anyway, you can kind of see the cause and effect there

If you're Joey Gallo You see that one plate appearance you bunt And there's no one on the left side of the infield The next plate appearance After you've laid down the successful bunt There is someone over there now you still ground out anyway it didn't really help him in that case but the odds at least are improved so there is kind of that cause and effect you bunt successfully and the other team maybe respects your bunting abilities a little more so it's good i think that gallo did. And Gallo's season as a whole has not

gone particularly well. He is, as we speak, exactly a league average hitter, a 100 WRC plus. He still is hitting home runs. He has 17 homers, which is good. And as it turns out, he's striking out about as often as he did last year and walking a little less. And the power hasn't been quite as extraordinary. So that's kind of reduced his overall value to the point that bunting probably makes more sense for him now. So I'm glad that he did it. Agreed. Have you heard of Justin Miller?

Yeah. I don't know if we're talking about the same Justin Miller, the reliever Justin Miller. Yeah. I would like to bring something to your attention in case it is not already to your attention. So Justin Miller, if you look him up on Baseball Reference, you see a beard, there's a person behind it, and he's wearing an Angels baseball cap. Justin Miller doesn't play for the Angels, hasn't played for the Angels. In fact, wait a second. Well, he's never thrown a game in the major leagues with the Angels.

So I got to figure this out real quick. He was signed by the Angels in November 2016 and released in July of 2017. So maybe in the minors. So he was a minor league. Anyway, Justin Miller, he's 30 years old. It's his birthday in two days. I mean, whatever. Happy birthday, almost, Justin Miller.

So here's the thing about Justin Miller. Through 2016, he last pitched in the major leagues in 2016. So from 2014 through 2016, he pitched about 90 innings, and he had an ERA of 4.99. He's just a generic strikeout in an inning, but, you know, a few too many walks, a few too many hits, all that stuff. Generic relief pitcher, Justin Miller. Justin Miller is with the Nationals this season.

I'm going to combine. He's pitched half the time with AAA CRQs and half the time with the Major League Washington Nationals. Justin Miller's thrown 22.2 innings total between AAA and the Majors. 22.2. He is allowed four hits, zero runs, three walks, one intentional, and he has 40 strikeouts. Oh my goodness. Justin Miller, in the major leagues alone, he's thrown nine innings now with the Nationals over the course of the past two weeks. Nine innings, one hit, no walks, 17 strikeouts. Justin Miller.

I know no further information, but he has faced 28 total batters, and one of them has reached base. One of them. He's holding opponents to an OPS of.073. So I'm just going to go ahead and write this down on my little note list to also dedicate something to Justin Miller because what in the hell is going on? This is a textbook example. You know how Sam was on and we were talking about how you always find these relievers who do amazing things in like nine innings?

And here's Justin Miller doing amazing things in nine major league innings. And you knew about it. I didn't know about it. I don't know what leaderboards you are constantly sorting to discover Justin Miller so soon, but you have. Did you watch a Nationals game and happen to see Justin Miller? No, of course not. I just went to Brooks Baseball. I typed in Justin Miller, and I got three different Justin Miller pitcher options, two for the Dodgers.

It's the perfect generic name for a reliever. And oh, by the way, he throws a fastball and a slider just like all the other ones do, but just unhittable. So I don't understand why anyone ever pays a lot of money for relievers because you just don't know. You just don't know what's going to happen. Well, I'm looking forward to reading your post and finding out what exactly is going on with Justin Miller. Unbelievable.

He has open direct messages. We could get him on here. He has 533 followers, if this is the right Justin Miller. You should have 100 times that. Yeah, well, I look forward to seeing what you discover here. This is very fascinating. All right, so let's talk about pitchers getting hurt for pitching-related reasons. There is really a rash of pitcher injuries, like all within a day or two.

On Friday and Saturday, It was just one after the other. It was Otani, obviously, but then Noah Sindergaard missing a start, his finger issue recurred, and Joris Familia went back on the DL with a shoulder issue. Steven Strasburg went on the DL with a shoulder issue. Sixto Sanchez got hurt. It was just on and on all of a sudden, which is kind of always happening in baseball in a low-grade way. But there was just a sudden injury stack here that drew our attention to the fact that, yeah, pitchers are still fragile and breakable. And of course, the one that hurt the most for us, I don't know which of them literally hurt the most, but for us, the one that stung was Shohei Otani, who I think we've all kind of had it in the back of our heads all season

that this could happen because we knew that Otani last year had a grade one strain of his UCL, which is the least severe strain. And at that time he had PRP injections and rested and rehabbed, and he came back, and I don't think it's affected his performance, but we know that A, he's a pitcher, B, he's a pitcher who throws really, really hard, which increases the risk, and C, he already had some low-grade damage, at least to his elbow. So now we know that he has a grade 2 strain, which is more severe.

Grade 3 is the most severe. That means like a complete tear. So this is still just a partial tear, but lots of pitchers have Tommy John surgery on grade 2 strains. You don't have to wait until it's completely torn. And so he is having PRP again. He is having stem cell injections this time. The plan is to wait three weeks to see how he responds or doesn't and then decide what to do.

But I mentioned briefly on the last episode the data here. It is not encouraging. According to John Rogel's Tommy John injury database and his records, roughly half of pitchers who have had PRP injections for a UCL injury have ended up having Tommy John surgery. And when you look at the guys who've had stem cell injections for this issue, it is perhaps even less encouraging. Everyone has either been out for a really long time and then had Tommy John surgery or at least been out for a really long time, including Garrett Richards, Shohei Otani's rotation mate. So this is sad. And obviously, Otani has been, if not the best story of the season, definitely one of them. And we've talked about him just about every other episode. And now he is going to be out for the all-star game,

almost certainly. But that's kind of the best case scenario. Worst case scenario, he is gone until 2020. So I am a pitching health cynic. Maybe that's come across. I assume I still have this idea to pursue an article about how Tommy John cases are underreported or injury extent seems to be downplayed. Anyway, so I can't help but assume that for Otani, surgery is inevitable, especially since he had the PRP last offseason and the strain only got worse. So look, I don't know.

Maybe he'll only miss a month or two. But this didn't really come together for me until I was watching a Ken Rosenthal video that he was doing where he talked about the fact that, okay, well, if Otani has surgery and given how tommy john works then he'll miss pretty much all the next season too and mike trout is only under contract with the angels through 2020 we might only have one season of otani and trout as teammates barring anything else happening any trade or further injury or anything but the the sort of ironic is going to be the wrong word here but

in a sense you look at where the mariners are now in the standings and their closest threat is the angels by a considerable margin and now the angels playoff case has been diminished pretty significantly with the otani news so in a sense the mariners could have a playoffs but almost sealed up because of news related to Shohei Ohtani, which is exactly what they wanted to be the case several months ago, but just kind of now in reverse. Now, that's a different topic for a different day, but I'm just trying to find any sort of positive angle or levity, just anything.

You know, when God closes a door, he opens a window, right? So I think that's the expression. So maybe Shohei Ohtani is hurt, but Zac Eflin is a thing now. So, you know, one pitcher just steps in to replace another different conversation, different team. But there's no good way to put it. Shohei Otani, the most interesting player in baseball, will not be playing baseball for at least, I don't know, what? They say like three weeks down and then reevaluate. But even there, even if he's doing better, he still has to build back up.

It will take weeks, of course, missing the All-Star game. Now, the interesting conversation will be, do they bring him back as a hitter before he comes back as a pitcher? I have no idea what they would do in that event. And maybe that's something that you have an idea about right now. Well, I don't really because this is obviously a unique case, as Otani is in a number of ways. There have been position players who've had Tommy John surgery, and generally it takes them less time to return than it does a pitcher. So in theory, maybe Otani could come back sooner as a hitter only and then continue to rehab as a pitcher while he is hitting.

I don't know that they would risk that with him. It just seems like everything with Otani, the risk is magnified, of course, because he is potentially such a great pitcher that I don't know that they would risk that. I mean, certainly they're not going to have him keep hitting now. that they would risk that. I mean, certainly they're not going to have him keep hitting now. Like you could make a case that if he's hitting every day now, if he DHs just every day, even if he doesn't play a position in the field, if he DHs every day, he could be almost as valuable as he was to the Angels DHing, say, three days a week and then pitching once a week. So you could say, well, just put off the Tommy John, just have him be a hitter. The Angels need every win right now. And it's possible that they could do that.

But I think there's just enough of an unknown here that you're just not really sure whether his hitting exacerbated this problem or the lack of rest. You know, I think they were really careful with him. You couldn't be more careful with him. They were pitching him once a week. So, you know, you can't really have him be part of a rotation and pitch him less often than that. So you could speculate maybe that it's just less rest and recovery than a typical pitcher has because he was swinging and DHing and taking

batting practice on the days in between. But I don't know. That's complete speculation. I just think that they probably won't risk it if they are still attached to the idea of having him be a two-way player, which is, I think, what he wants and what they have granted him from the start here. So I do wonder whether long-term this would make him more likely to specialize, but I don't think we really have to blame the two-way thing. It's tempting because that is the most salient thing about Shohei Otani is that he's a two-way player. We look at it and say, well, he's a two-way player,

and also he has an injured UCL and may have to have Tommy John surgery. It's tempting to connect those things, but I don't think we need to because so many other pitchers who are not two-way players have this same problem. So it could very well be the fact that he's just a really hard-throwing pitcher who has probably worked harder in Japan than he might have been here. And that's all you really need to explain it. So I don't think we need to blame his unique attributes for this injury, really. No, I agree with you there. If anything, it would be a lesser cause. Now, it was the other week that the Angels held Otani out from the start against the Yankees, citing workload management.

And that seemed weird at the time. You wonder a little extra now but on the other hand there was their report that so itani was removed from his most recent start with a blister right and now everyone is like cynically tweeting at the angel saying oh yeah blister way to report the news or whatever but it seems like the angels themselves were surprised and itani did come out with a blister and then as he like the game adrenaline was wearing off he said oh by the way my elbow is also stiff now right so in that sense it seems like this kind of took everyone by

surprise i don't know how much of this is true or or what else has been happening in the past but yeah i i don't think that you should blame the two-way playing at all i don't i just haven't been exposed to people who are blaming it so maybe that's a credit to my own internet curation Because I don't know what the point would be of blaming that If you are pitching less than other people are pitching Seems like that should objectively reduce your risk So if anything, being a two-way player Kept Shohei Otani healthy for longer

Which is good Maybe Yeah, and we don't necessarily know that that was the first time That he had felt elbow stiffness this season So it's possible that that workload management thing was related to a prior complaint. I don't know. But I think the problem here is that, I mean, there are many problems here. We're being deprived of perhaps the most entertaining player in baseball. I don't know if Otani had caught on to the degree that I thought he might. I don't know if Otani had caught on to the degree that I thought he might. I don't know if he had become a cross-sport sensation or really roped in casual

fans or non-fans of baseball or transcended baseball fandom. It's hard for me to gauge, but I didn't get the sense that he was a huge national figure really. But certainly among fans and among us, he was absolutely riveting. And I think we saw enough of him that he could definitely make this two-way experiment work better than anyone has for a century. And I think it was always kind of a provisional thing this season where we knew that he wouldn't work that hard this year. They wouldn't really push him as a pitcher, and he'd only DH a few days a week. And we were looking ahead to, well, maybe once he gets a full season under his belt and is healthy and successful, they could ramp up his usage even more. Now, maybe that's unsafe, but I think one of the real bummers here, speaking of bummer, Aaron Bummer was also demoted to the minors. Sorry, Aaron Bummer,

that is a bummer. But Shohei Otani, I think now if he does return in 2020, it's really going to take a long time to build him back up again because he barely pitched last year because he had what an ankle injury and so that held him back on the mound and then this year he gets 49 innings in essentially before he gets hurt now if he misses the rest of this year and all of next year and comes back in 2020 he's going to be probably on an even stricter innings limit than he was this season, potentially. So even that year, he's going to be starting once a week, if not less often. So then you have to think, well, we're going to have to wait another year after that to really see him fully operational and at the peak of his powers, if he's even allowed to exercise them at that point. So it pushes back the timeline for when we could see Otani really maximizing his potential,

which is just a shame. And you remember when we were talking to Dennis Sarfatti over the winter that Sarfatti said that he thought Otani was actually more likely to end up a long-term hitter? Yeah. It factors into that a little bit. You can see how the calculation could be. Well, we have this sensation, and we know he could be a two-way player, but now there's going to be pressure on the Angels to bring Ohtani back for 2019. If he were just going to hit, he'd be fine. He could do it. In fact, he could even be an outfielder if they wanted to do that. They have a sudden opening in right field. We'll see how the next season goes, but this was always going to be the threat. Well, at least one of the threats, the other threat was going to be he can't hit, which I don't think is going to be the case. But having him gone, this changes the calculations considerably.

Because if the Angels, they basically can either have Otani in 2019 or not, depending on what they want to do with him. And that is not only a complicated decision for Otani specifically, but it also is complicated because of the presence of the terrible Albert Pujols, who is still climbing leaderboards very, very slowly. And yeah, it's just really, really gravely disappointing. I know when Jeff Passon's report came out in the winter meetings that Otani had had PRP and he had a grade one strain, I think that's when, I'm not going to say the glass shattered, but it just, the myth was made real a little bit in an unfortunate way. You'd have this image of Otani as the perfect baseball player and then you think, oh, right, but also he's a pitcher half the time and pitching is terrible. You should never do it. You should never tell your kids to do it. You should never tell your kids to do it.

You should never tell your elders to do it. No one should do it. No one should pitch. They should be machines. Machines should pitch with random pitch sequences. So that kind of brought the idea to the forefront. Now it was also good timing, I guess, on Pass and Spart to have that article go and it would generate maximum buzz.

But then it just kind of kept it in the back of your head because ordinarily with pitchers, it's so easy to forget that this can happen almost without notice. I mean, for God's sake, just in a start yesterday, James Paxson had a reliever warming up behind him when his pitch count was 50. And I saw that on Twitter and I thought, oh, no, it's happening to all of them. Now, thankfully, that was just a cramp. But who knows? You just whenever there's you, Darvish is now maybe out until the all-star break, if not longer, because of a forearm strain that seems to be, guess what?

Underreported at the first case. Who knows where that's going to go? I think you're right that Otani hasn't caught on to the extent that we thought he could or should. I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that the NBA finals and NHL finals just ended. I don't know how much divided attention there was. I know that if you look at things on Twitter, which is in no way reflective of reality, but it's all that we were exposed to really because we didn't talk to actual people. You see, whenever you write an Otani article, I think like two-thirds of the responses are you know there's other stuff going on stop writing about otani so much uh i don't i think that you and i are in the uh upper i don't

know first percentile of people interested in what showing otani can do yeah but you do wonder did he would he need a full season to catch on because Because, I mean, what's your sense of how much Ichiro caught on? He was a national sensation, right? I'm obviously an international sensation, but he caught on in the States. I think so. Yeah, I think one thing that held Otani back, I mean, A, he's on not a great team and a team that plays many of its games when half the country is asleep. So that's an impediment. But also, I think just having him pitch once a week, you know, and then having his starts postponed sometimes, and you couldn't really count on him pitching on any particular day. I think that

hurt a bit. And then having him rest the day after and also the day before his starts and then only DH in the middle of weeks usually. I think that probably was part of it. He just wasn't an everyday player really and so you couldn't count on him being in the lineup or being on the mound. I think that had something to do with it and I don't know maybe he needed to be better than he was even to be a true sensation. I think that if he had had a full healthy season, he probably would have gotten better at both things. And maybe that would have helped. Maybe word would have spread. But yeah, I don't think it was as much of a sensation. I don't know. Just every time I would write about him and if anyone said, you know, you've already written about him a few times, there are other things going on, I'd think, yeah, but this is something that hasn't happened in a century.

Really, it hasn't. This has not happened in our lifetimes or just about anyone's lifetime. So you almost can't undercover it. cover it. And I still think that's the case, but unfortunately we won't be able to cover it as he is just slowly resting and hoping that his elbow repairs itself. But I think that another thing, you know, we treat Tommy John surgery now as an automatic, like, okay, well, it stinks. He'll be gone the rest of this year and next year, but then he'll be back exactly the same in 2020. That's not necessarily the case. It is a pretty reliable surgery as arm surgeries go, and most guys do make it back, and most guys do make it back at their previous level.

But not everyone does. There are guys who have to have the surgery multiple times. There are guys who have to have the surgery multiple times. We talked to Johnny Venters, who's one of those guys, and there are guys who never make it back or never make it back with the stuff that they had pre-surgery. I mean, that does happen. It's what, like an 80% something like that return to previous level rate roughly these days, which is good, obviously.

That's four out of five, but there is the one out of five who does not. And so we have to remember that too. There is a chance that Shohei Otani doesn't come back as a pitcher as effective or with the same stuff he had before, in which case it would obviously make it much more likely that he becomes a position player only. I guess this feels a little bit like when this happened to Steven Strasburg, who of course was not a two-way player, but who was the one of maybe the biggest, he was the biggest sensation that I can remember. I don't know how it happened.

Maybe that was just a peak prospect hype if we've reached peak prospect hype. But Strasburg, I don't know. I remember tuning into his debut like it was game seven of the world series it was just like a nationals pyrus game and the nationals weren't good yet as at least as i recall but everybody on the internet at least again bubbles here but everybody tuned in to watch steven stras start his first game. I don't know exactly, I don't remember how or why that happened, but he was so good, and everybody was so excited to see Steven Strasburg pitch, and his debut was fantastic. I think it struck out like 14 batters or something like that, seven innings, very, very good start, and two months later he had Tommy John surgery, or needed

Tommy John surgery, and it was just super deflating. Now Strasburg has come back, and I wouldn't say that he's ever quite reached his rookie level, but he's been very good. Now, granted, he's hurt again. That just seems to be the thing that happens to pitchers. But that is at least a very encouraging case. Matt Harvey was able to come back from the Tommy John part. A lot of other things have broken down there, including maybe him psychologically.

But I guess the solace is right that otani can do two things and if he can't pitch he can do the other one but yeah it just it feels like you could take otani getting hurt but you just wanted that full season first you know yeah but to only have two months to get the glimpse to see how good he could be on both sides and then have it taken away that just that hurts a lot it does yeah and, I guess the best case scenario for him here is that he does a Tanaka or does a Garrett Richards and doesn't have the surgery. But in both of those cases, I mean, it almost makes me hope that he just has it and gets it out of the way. I think there's some time to play with here because of where we are in the season and with the calendar. Like he can take a few weeks now, I guess, and see whether

his elbow miraculously responds to the treatment because it probably doesn't really push back his return as a pitcher at this point. Because if you figure that, you know, it takes, I don't know, point because if you figure that you know it takes I don't know somewhere between a year and 18 months to come back he has some time now just because of where we are where he's probably not costing himself days of health during the season because he's going to miss the rest of next season anyway and then there's the whole offseason so there's a little leeway here where he can see if something happens. But, I mean, even with Tanaka, right? Tanaka had the same affliction. He had PRP.

Everyone at the time said and wrote, oh, he should just have the surgery. This never works. And he has pitched ever since with probably some degree of strained UCL or compromised elbow. And he has been, I guess I would say, an effective pitcher. He has not been as good a pitcher as he was in his rookie year. Now, I don't know if that's entirely because of the elbow or because of normal aging or the league adjusting or other factors that would have happened anyway.

But, you know, he has pitched, but he hasn't been very durable. I guess, you know, his last couple of years he did make 31 starts and 30 starts didn't go particularly deep into games, but wasn't really on the DL either. And now it's his hamstrings that are sending him to the DL. But I don't know that he's been the same pitcher. There's been this constant fear that any pitch will be the one that actually does tear something and sends him to surgery. And with Garrett Richards, he was out for, what, 11 months and then came back. And, you know, he's still effective. He's still hard throwing. So I guess he's a success. Like there was this long period where it was, is he making any progress? Is he going to come back at all?

Is he just wasting time? Should he have the surgery? Ultimately, he's here and he's pitching and pitching pretty effectively. So I guess that's someone you can point to in the same rotation and say, this is what could happen with Otani if he doesn't have the surgery. I don't know. In both cases, it just kind of feels like you're playing with fire, and maybe you just get the surgery out

of the way. And if it does go well, then you have sort of a grace period of several years where generally you have a lower risk of recurring elbow injuries. And I mean, even in Richard's case, I know he didn't have Tommy John, but he started six games in 2016 and six games in 2017 for all intents and purposes he was out for two seasons so even that case is only modestly encouraging it's also funny because right before we started recording we had the idea we're just going to banter a little bit about otani and then get into the main topic i don't know i don't know we might just actually fill up the whole episode with this but i'm going to let you take the lead here and see where this goes. But we do have a report here. Ken Rosenthal did tweet. I guess there's been a tweet going around from Pedro Gomez or something saying that Otani's going to have Tommy John.

Yeah, he said he was like hearing that, which, you know, he's like everything I'm hearing has been that he'll have surgery, which I don't know. I'm hearing that out of our own mouths right now. So I don't know whether that is any better source than that. But what did Ken say? So Ken is just quoting Angels general manager Billy Epler, saying, There have been no changes in Otani's diagnosis, and neither our physicians nor medical staff have recommended Tommy John surgery or said it's likely. So, yeah, nope, still feels like it's going to happen, but I understand. Yeah, so I understand. and is not compromised by this injury. But yeah, historically speaking, the odds are not great right now.

And it is sad and just feels like a why can't we have nice things kind of case. But here we are. So we will at least have to try harder to have things to banter about for the rest of the season, potentially, if we can't just do Otani updates every episode or so. So yeah, we did talk about Otani for longer than I'd planned. So maybe we can go a little bit more

quickly than I had expected through what I had thought would be the main topic today. So Jeff Passan wrote something for Yahoo on Monday. Essentially, he talked to Nick Elam, who is a guy you may know from his innovative solution for basketball. I think, I don't know much about basketball, but certainly from the brief basketball watching I have done, I know that the last few minutes of basketball games can be excruciatingly long and boring and time-consuming because everyone is fouling each other. And so Nick Elam came up with this idea. He's a professor at Ball State and also evidently a former high school baseball coach and part-time groundskeeper for the Reds, which is interesting. So he came up with this Elam ending, as it's called, which would stop the clock at the first whistle with less than three minutes left

in an NBA game. And then however many points the team in the lead has, you add seven, and that would be the target score to end the game. So quoting from Passant's article here, if there's a foul with two minutes and 55 seconds remaining and the Warriors lead the Cavs 106-101, the clock vanishes and it becomes the first to score 113. And so there's less incentive for the Cavs to foul there and Golden State would have the advantage that would sort of suit the lead that they already had. So anyway, a lot of people hope that this gets adopted in the NBA. The basketball tournament, which was a five-on-five contest with a $2 million prize, did use the Elam ending last year during play-in games. So Jeff went to Nick and said, well, can you fix baseball like this?

Do you have any innovative baseball ideas that would address that sports ills? And so Elam comes back with many suggestions, which Jeff details in his article. Elam comes back with many suggestions, which Jeff details in his article, and I thought we could run through them quickly and see whether we think they make sense or would solve anything. So I guess the flagship proposal here, number one on the list in Passan's article, is the dynamic strike zone. So this one is essentially that the strike zone changes in size with each successive strike. And the idea is encouraging batters to put the ball in play early in the count by expanding the size of the zone as the plate appearance continues. So the zone would be a certain way before you get a strike. So like belt to the top of the knees.

And then when you get one strike, it would be belly belt to the top of the knees, and then when you get one strike, it would be belly button to the top of the knees, and then two strikes, the letters to the hollow of the knees, and so on and on. And you'd kind of need the automated strike zone to make this feasible. I guess you could tell umpires to do this, but we already have enough problems with umpire imprecision, so you'd probably need the computers calling strikes to make this happen. But the idea would be that basically as the count goes on, the batter becomes more and more disadvantaged, and so there's more incentive to swing early on in the plate appearance

when the strike zone is smaller. And in theory, this would maybe make contact more likely, shorten plate appearances, improve pace of play and time of games. What do you think of the dynamic strike zone? Sure seems like strikeouts would skyrocket. That's the thing, right? It seems like that wouldn't necessarily fix the maybe primary problem here? I mean, I guess, yeah, if you swing on the first pitch when you have no strikes and the zone is small, then pitchers would probably put the ball over the plate unless they would just try to like throw it out of the zone to try to induce a swing and then get that strike one

expanded zone and then they can really go to town. I don't know. Why do you think it would increase strikeout rates? Because I kind of agree with you. go to town. I don't know. Why do you think it would increase strikeout rates? Because I kind of agree with you. So the zones that are laid out in the dynamics, what is it? Like it's knee to belt, the knee to belly button, the knee to letter. Like knee to belt is already basically the zone. So you don't have a small zone on the first pitch. And so I think that you just have pitchers, instead of coming out trying to necessarily just throw a fastball strike one or whatever, you would have pitchers who are so good at missing bats bats you'd have pitchers come out and try to get a swinging strike or maybe just mess up your timing on on pitch number one and as soon as the pitcher gets ahead all of a sudden well now

the zone is bigger so then the pitcher can elevate go above the belt with a fastball or something and and so when the zone is bigger that's going to make walks go down it's going to make strikeouts go up and so all the pitcher really needs to do is throw a strike one, which I know is not a given, but pitchers are so good at missing bats now. It's why strikeouts are so high. But if anything, my guess is that this would increase strikeouts and reduce base runners, which is not the solution to baseball. Because when you take walks away, I know walks aren't thrilling either,

but you would at least i haven't thought this all the way through but you would at least need to start with a smaller zone than the zone we already have like i don't know mid thigh to belt now that's stupid that's a stupid game but that would at least maybe allow strikeouts to not skyrocket but as is this does i know that this would sort of incentivize batters to try to get ahead early, but already I think that batters are trying to swing early in camp because they know that when the pitcher gets ahead, when there are two strikes, batters are screwed these days because pitchers are too good.

So they're already in a way incentivized to try to make contact early. They just can't because it's hard. Yeah, right. And the thing that this idea doesn't mention and the article doesn't mention is we already have a dynamic strike zone, not by design, not formally, but in practice we do. Right. Umpires change the size of the zone. They change their likelihood of calling strikes based on what the count is. And currently they do it in the opposite way. Currently, they do it in the opposite way, right? So if a hitter falls behind in the count, if it's a pitcher's count, then the strike zone shrinks. So like the smallest strike zone in baseball is an 0-2 pitch. The zone is tiny on 0-2 compared to 3-0.

And there are a lot of theories for why this is the case. And there are a lot of theories for why this is the case, but I think one of them is that umpires are kind of compassionate. Whether they realize it or not, they want to give the disadvantaged player a helping hand. And I think it makes plate appearances more competitive and maybe more entertaining in a way. I think that you could say it's unfair and it's inconsistent, but I think that pitchers and hitters generally understand that this is the way things work and it's the way it's always worked. And so they know, I think, that they are more or less likely to have a called strike in a certain count. But right now, when you get behind 0-2, you have a tiny zone. And so you can maybe afford to take a borderline pitch or you're less likely

to get rung up on one under this proposal the o2 zone would be huge right so you'd be in even more trouble and once play appearances got to two strikes they would be even more likely to result in strikeouts like at that point i think it probably makes the plate appearance less entertaining because if you do get strike one and strike two, then it's just even more likely to end in a strikeout or something unexciting.

Agreed. Yeah. So I don't know that the dynamic strike zone is necessarily going to fix any of baseball's ills. Maybe it would increase pace of play, but at a cost of even more strikeouts

and fewer balls in play, at least. As I'm reading it, I don't know, maybe we're misinterpreting this in some way. So the next proposal is move the pitching rubber to the true center of the diamond. So there are 90-foot bases. The distance between home and second base is 127 feet and 3 3⁄8 inches. So the middle of that evidently is 63.64 inches, which is not a very elegant number, but then neither is 60 feet 6 inches, where it's been since 1893. So this would be moving the rubber or moving the mound back about three feet, a little more than three feet. And Elam is certainly not the first to propose this. And I like thisci had just written an article about lowering the mound, which of course has happened within living memory. And so that's the obvious thing you could do is lower the mound.

And Verducci said it might decrease stress on the elbow, which would help solve the other problem we were just talking about. But according to some research that had been done before I wrote that article, there's no evidence that that is the case, that it would decrease strain. And if anything, pitchers getting less of an advantage from the mound, maybe they would throw harder to try to compensate for it and it would actually backfire. Anyway, I don't think we need to lower the mound. I think moving it back is really effective and pretty unintrusive. Like I don't think anyone would particularly notice if the mountain moved back a couple feet. And I think it really would have a big effect. And so I wrote this, I will summarize what I wrote here in my article back in 2014,

because I think it's still relevant. So for one thing, this has happened in baseball history. So in 1881, the minimum pitching distance was moved from 45 feet to 50 feet in an attempt to help hitting, and it worked. The strikeout rate fell about 8%. Batters gained about 23 points of on base, 18 points of slugging. That was before pitchers were even throwing overhand, so maybe we can't really apply it to today, but it happened after that when pitchers were throwing overhand. In 1887, there was the pitcher's box, so the front border stayed 50 feet, but its back border, where the pitcher was required to keep his back foot, was five and a half feet farther away, the pitcher was required to keep his back foot was five and a half feet farther away. So this was essentially 55 and a half feet. This time, strikeout rate fell by 37%. There was a 71-point

increase in OPS. And then there was another five-foot back move to the current distance in 1893. That time, 38% decrease in strikeout rate, 92-point rise in OPS. So if you were just to use those previous examples, you could say that for every foot that the pitcher's mound moves back, you get a reduction in strikeout rate by seven and a half percent. So I don't know that it would necessarily hold exactly the same today, but that gives you a ballpark estimate, no pun intended. And there really is a big difference. I talked to Alan Nathan, the physicist for that article, and he said that if you move the mound back five feet, a pitch that looks 95 now would look only 87 to the batter in the sense that the flight time would be the same as a pitch released at the current distance that only goes 87. So there would be like a 10% increase in flight time, even more than that increase in the time available to the batter to make a decision about whether to swing or not.

So Alan and I were saying that five feet is probably too much. Alan was saying maybe like two feet would make sense, and I ran that by Brian Bannister. He had a couple minor objections, but nothing that seemed to preclude this. So I think that's actually probably the best solution to all of this. No one would really notice all that much. I don't think it would dramatically affect how pitchers prepare or their mechanics. Obviously, they'd have to be a bit more precise about releasing the ball if they want it to end up in the strike zone.

But I like this idea. It's not new, but I like it. Yeah, I agree. I just pulled up an article from – well, you know what? It's funny because I think what I did was – yep, no, pulled up the article that you were talking about while you were talking. So Alan Nathan in here, you cite him saying that basically one foot of extension is equal to about 1.5 miles per hour of perceived velocity now there used to be a little nugget of conventional wisdom that said one foot equals three miles per hour of perceived velocity that seems to not be true that seems exaggerated so let's just stick with 1.5 so anyway uh i can go and and say all this to basically

repeat what you just said so there's no benefit to me doing that, but I agree. I think that if you move the mound back a foot, two feet, three feet, that does kind of solve, or at least it could kind of solve everything. Now, it would, like you said, affect pitcher command a little bit. They would miss by a little bit more. Already, you've looked at command effects, which is imperfect, but if you figure pitchers on average miss their target by 10 or 12 inches then move the man back probably gonna miss by 13 14 inches so maybe you make the zone a little

bit bigger to to compensate for that you can find a balance i don't know you you're gonna be testing this out at lower levels anyway i don't think it would do a lot to increase injury risk maybe you would have pitchers at first trying to throw harder, thinking that if they throw at their max, then it'll be like the mound didn't move back at all. You would have to discourage pitchers from doing that because they would hurt themselves and it would be stupid. So if you could just do that,

it does seem like moving the mound back would be more functional than moving the mound down. Now, I don't know what would happen to the numbers if you moved the mound down, but that would require a change in pitcher mechanics. Whereas if you move the mound back, it really shouldn't. It should all be the same. So that one I, like you, am in favor of. Yeah. The other thing is that it's only fair, I think, to move the mound back relative to where it's been since 1893, given that pitchers are way, way bigger than they were in 1893.

So it's not that they're releasing the ball from the same place they were back then. They're releasing it from much closer than they were back then, not only because they're much taller, but I would think probably they're also just getting more extension the way that deliveries have changed. Guys are probably using their legs more and just striding farther. So the ball is being released a lot closer to home plate than it was when the mound was originally placed where it currently is. And aside from that, the fact that guys are throwing so much harder today. So you have those two things working in tandem. And really, just to

give hitters a leg up to where they were in the past, you need to do this. It's not really fair that they are having to contend with different conditions in this way. Like hitters don't get, I mean, they don't get to hit from farther back now because they are bigger than they were in 1893. So I think it just makes a lot of sense. And it's something that you wouldn't really notice even. So I like that idea a lot. The other one here, we've got the three batter minimum for relief pitchers, another Elam idea that has been proposed by just about everyone in some shape or form.

I think Buster Olney proposed just in the last week four pitchers a game. Jim Cott, Ken Rosenthal, everyone has had the basic idea of limiting pitcher usage and limiting pitcher changes. Do you have any general thoughts on that? As a fun fact, so I looked up using the play index, relief appearances that go two batters or fewer, and they're actually on the decline. I don't know if you knew this. You probably did because you and I have both observed that relief appearances on average are getting longer. But in 2015, baseball reached a maximum of 2,585 relief appearances lasting two batters or fewer, which would be two or one. Can't really appear for none.

So in 2016, that number dropped by 322. And in 2017, it dropped by 322 and in 2017 it dropped by another 47 so right now we are on pace for 2019 relief appearances of two batters or one which is actually just 78 of what it was in 2015 now this is still a high number but in a way whether intentional or not baseball is kind of self-correcting here also as noted in the article you would be excluding short relief appearances that end in inning you would also of course counting in these numbers are maybe relievers who show up face one or two batters and then lose so that's also in the numbers that would be excluded so i sort of get it we've talked about

this before where i think that you would have to have an injury carve out because you can't just have a pitcher keep pitching when you start and if you had an injury carve out then teams would find a way to abuse that i know in the article it says that the opponent would have the option of accepting intentional walks up until the pitcher has effectively faced three batters but i don't think that a team should be penalized if their pitcher gets hurt. So I understand it's in there as a control against fakes, but also I don't like the way that the incentives play out. Yeah, I don't know. It feels a little heavy handed, I guess, to tell teams what they can or can't do when it comes to using pitchers. I think there's a strategic element there maybe that would be lost. And I don't know, maybe it sounds like I'm using the rationale that people use for pitcher hitting

instead of the DH, but I don't think that's quite the same. You could always have a pitcher hit for himself if you want. Teams just don't want to. So I think that there are probably more elegant, more organic ways to do this, but there are definitely benefits. And if you had guys not able to pitch in outings as short as they currently do, maybe you would have them throw a little less hard too, just because they would have to conserve their energy. You'd have to be sure that you could get through a game with X number of pitchers. So maybe you guys throw a little less max effort. Maybe that helps with injuries. Maybe it helps with the strikeout rate. So it is something where you could see it having

a broad benefit. So I'm not entirely against it, but I think I'd rather try one or two other things first. Agreed. All right. Next one, embrace regionality in a way no other sport ever has. So to quote Elam here, the contrast between MLB national TV ratings and local TV ratings speaks to its disproportionately regional appeal. MLB could embrace this phenomenon by eliminating leagues and divisions and adopting a 90 wins and into the playoffs format.

It would temper big market versus small market complaints, would guarantee that the most deserving teams qualify for the playoffs, guarantee exciting celebrations by requiring teams to clinch a playoff berth by winning a game, would add a freshness to the playoffs by having a different number of qualifiers year to year, and would bring about many other benefits. So what do you think if you have to, say, win 90 games to make the playoffs and it doesn't matter what division you're in or what other teams do i've never considered the logistics of having an unknown playoff format going into the playoffs it seems too difficult to be realistic now i haven't run the numbers to see him well i'm gonna run the numbers right now so you uh buy me some time. Well, I wonder whether the races would be as exciting. I mean, there wouldn't really be races.

There would be each team racing with itself to get to 90, which is, I don't know. We'd all just be looking at the projections, which we already do, but looking at the projections and the projected win totals, and it's just, well, is this team good enough? I mean, I guess you'd look at the strength of schedule and it would matter how good your opponents are to some extent, but not as much. Like right now you end up with some pretty unfair scenarios where a team is good enough to make the playoffs in one division, but happens to be in a different division or have a better team in its division. And so it doesn't get to make the playoffs it's not really fair but it is maybe more intriguing more exciting more interesting to discuss didn't buy enough time couldn't run the search but yeah i agree i think that i understand having a cutoff

but a big part of the fun of the standings is having teams relative to one another and yeah when you it wouldn't completely eliminate that you know you could conceivably have two teams playing at 89 wins the last game of the season and and that would be a thing but it seems it seems too unrealistic i do understand the idea of eliminating divisions i think that it's now i there are travel considerations that do matter here and that would have to be something that's conquered i don't know if you've dug into that before but it's not easy to have travel even though it's not talked about very often it is difficult to have teams traveling all over the place it does seem like a disadvantage for teams who are way in the west coast up in seattle not easy but at least theoretically it there's no reason really to have divisions just have one big free-for-all and then you designate probably five

the top five teams from each league then make it the playoffs it helps you have a balanced schedule we should have a balanced schedule it's kind of weird that we don't it's kind of like when we had six teams of the antel central and four in the al west i can't believe we sustained that for as long as we did because that's just ridiculous but uh yeah so in in theory i sort of get it but i don't like the 91 cutoff. it in the sense that it might increase grudges a little bit. Like if you knew that your opponent picked you to play because they thought you were bad and it gave them the best chance to win, I think that might actually help a little bit with just the intensity of the series. But in general, I don't know that the current playoff format is actually a problem. I think

that once baseball gets to October, everyone is pretty intensely interested in everything and everything feels like it has high stakes. So I don't know, this wouldn't really help with the regionality, what can be an issue in the playoffs. Like if your team is eliminated, then given the way that baseball fandom currently works, you might just not watch the rest of the playoffs. This won't address that. It will just change the playoffs format in a way that might make it a little more exciting, but I don't know that the playoff format is unexciting as it is. So I kind of just don't care about this one. Right. This doesn't solve anything. And it also, again, makes travel issues a lot more complicated because teams don't know where they're going to go. But just in general,

a lot more complicated because teams don't know where they're going to go. But just in general, I am pro-grudge. I like when teams are annoyed by one another. Now, when you have a playoff series, it doesn't matter if it's like the Orioles against the Angels, teams who have, as far as I know, no reason to care about one another. But if they face each other, when you have a playoff series that goes five or seven games, then you're going to develop a grudge anyway, just because you always it's like a roommate you know you just kind of get annoyed increasingly over time yes a grudge will develop but i do i do like the angle of oh this team picked us we should go beat them but yeah i mean you should always be motivated to beat them anyway so it's

probably not worth doing all right we can probably blow through the rest of these. Making the all-star game, old players versus young players. No, stop right there. Don't care. Okay. Yeah, I like this, but I still won't really care about it. I mean, I think that it makes sense in that AL versus NL just has no juice anymore whatsoever because we have interleague play all year. There isn't really a strong league identity.

So old players versus young players, like there is a tension there, right? Because old players are always worried about young players taking their jobs and young players are always worried about old players having the jobs that they should have. So there is like a longstanding animosity between these two groups in a way. And probably it's been exacerbated more recently because there's the whole economic issue now because young players don't make money and old players make money and so i feel like these groups already are maybe not getting along as well as they once did this might be dangerous i don't know that you want them actually playing each other because there might be some genuine animosity here beneath the surface but as a showcase for like, here's the next generation

of stars and here's the old generation that we all know and love, you know, it's like a dad playing his son in a pickup game or something. And it's like, will the young buck dethrone the old guard? I kind of like that, you know, whatever. It's the all-star game. It doesn't address any major ills of the sport either way, but sure. Fine. I like it. Yeah, sure. You could do, you could do something like that, but I do, you got one other solution, which I kind of like is you can, you can have all-star teams selected for each league or whatever you want. You can have people vote, but then you have a team that represents major league baseball, and then they play against the futures team because

they play the futures game a day or two before the all-star game and then if you have the prospects who aren't in the majors yet play the all-stars that would be fun that i would i would actually watch at least once yeah all right a full slate of day night double headers the first saturday after the all-star break i i don't know we're getting into into Medusa territory here. This is not going to improve the game or hurt the game in any significant way. I don't know. I guess it would be kind of fun. That would be so much baseball. It would be a total overload. It would be like an antidote, a nice respite after the all-star break and having no baseball. But players would dislike it because players, I think, don't really like doubleheaders, even if it means an extra off day somewhere. And it's almost too much

baseball to watch in one day, right? Like every team is playing a day-night doubleheader on one day. I guess you could just totally immerse yourself in it and it might be fun, but I feel like it would just be exhausting. Right. That's far too much baseball. Everyone would would hate it but i do think that if you could do it in such a way that so right now the all-star break usually goes from monday to thursday if you could extend it i think players would take a double header uh in exchange for one more day off i think during the week so in that sense it could be player friendly but i don't. You'd have to pull them. All right. MLB draft held live at the All-Star game or over the All-Star break instead of just during the season as it currently is. This is, I guess, not an Elam idea. It's a Ben Heisler idea, but it's in this article anyway. The idea is that this is the one time during the season

when there's no actual action going on. And so the draft would have everyone's undivided attention and, you know, all the stars are in town. So maybe they would go to the draft and watch the draft. I don't know if they probably wouldn't, they would probably rather do anything else in the world than that. But I don't know. I think all the like, how do we make the MLB draft big ideas are kind of doomed to be fruitless because it's just not going to be big. It's just the way that baseball works. You don't have visible college baseball stars the way you do in basketball and in football. You don't have guys for the most part who are going to be your stud in the very next season.

There's a long development process. It's very hit or miss. I don't think there's really a way to overcome that. So we're talking small measures on the margin here. And so I don't know. I mean, I think baseball people would hate it because this is the one time that like baseball operations, people get to go home and have a break. And this would be like putting their busiest thing of the year in the one time that they have a break so i think they would probably totally hate this i don't know it might delay the start of some like short season leagues that have a lot of draftees you'd have draftees sitting

around after the end of their college season and not doing anything and being rusty so yeah so you would be delaying players arriving in the minor leagues uh you would do delayed by what a month and a week or something like that you would be pushing bet already teams don't really get into trade negotiations most of the time until after the draft so now you're just making july just a cluster for people who are working in baseball ops like you said you're not going to be able to make the draft very popular but then you know if you listen to harold reynolds instead of just holding the draft at the all-star game you can just draft them right into the all-star game they're already all hall of famers right so just throw them on the field but yeah it's a it's not a good idea keep the draft where it is all right and then the last things here there's just a little grab bag of

fan servicey ideas so the first one get rid of the rule that calls a player out when his hand or foot slips off a base and super slow-mo instant replay catches it we've discussed this i think there is the the pretty good dave cameron proposal about there kind of being like a safe zone above the base so that once you do touch the base you kind of have a little leeway to take a foot or a hand off the bag for a second. I think we're probably both in favor of that or not against that. Anyway, it's not a new idea. We've talked about this.

Next one, incorporate PA announcers more into each game, not in an over-the-top way, but just announce more happenings. So he's saying like announce the pitcher's number of strikeouts in the game after each occurrence, announce the player's season total after every home run, double run scored, RBI, et cetera, announce career milestones. It's kind of like if you've ever been in a press box, you know that someone who works for the team's media department after a pitcher is removed from the game, like they'll say, well, his official line was XXX, and here's how many strikeouts he had or that kind of thing,

but making it something that all of the fans could hear. I guess the idea is just to make them more engaged in the game. I don't know. I think that everyone who wants to be is kind of on the at-bat app on their smartphones anyway at this point. I just don't know whether this is a problem or would help. Right, and I think a lot of these things, I mean milestones, when it wants to be is kind of on the at bat app on their smartphones anyway at this point i just i don't know whether this is a problem or would help right and i think a lot of these things i mean milestones those are already celebrated they go on the scoreboard irrelevant information goes

on the scoreboard i think the idea here is to sort of mimic if you have a somebody scores a goal in hockey they'll say like alex suveshkin is 35th goal of the season whatever but there's also only like five goals in a hockey game and in baseball there's a lot of events and i think fans would if anything be like shut up make the pa guy shut up i just want to have a conversation with the person sitting next to me so i i don't i don't get what this solves yeah and then lastly encourage spontaneous celebrations mlb should crack down further on retaliatory beanballs, and by doing so, encourage batters to celebrate home runs and big hits, etc.

Sure, I think we're in favor of certainly cracking down on retaliatory beanballs, and if that means increased celebrations, great. I guess that's good too. Yeah, let them have fun and not have weapons thrown at their persons. I think we're in their favor. All right, so that's that. I don't know. On the whole, I'm giving these proposals, I don't know, like a B or a C or something. I think that the best ones are not new and the new ones are not the best.

So that's what I'm going to say. But I don't know what we would do without the how do we fix X sport. Like that is just – it's evergreen. It's just a reliable well that writers, content creators can go back to year after year. I don't know if there's ever a state that baseball or any sport could get to where we would all just say, yeah, you know what? This is pretty good. I wouldn't change a thing. Like even if you took like, I don't know, the five most popular proposals and you surveyed every baseball fan and you just implemented the ones that had the broadest consensus and agreement

and you did that and you said, here's what you wanted and we're doing it. I'm pretty sure that the next year you would just have just as many articles about here's how we fix baseball and here's how we could tweak things because I think it's partly actually addressing real problems and it's partly just that things that aren't problems kind of get boring after a while and suddenly it looks like a virtue to change things for no real reason other than changes more interesting than status quo this is how we just perennially get this type of article. I don't know that there's any change you could make that would make this go away. Yeah, I don't know why there's been this rush of them recently with the Jim Cotton, Buster Olney,

and this one. I don't know why all of a sudden we're seeing fixed baseball articles from all the major outlets, but I can give you my number one proposal to fix baseball in 2018. Bring back Shohei Ohtani. Yes. Yes, please. I wish we could snap our fingers and make that happen. All right. So that will do it for today.

For those of you wondering about the status of the legendary Nick Markakis' effectively wild fun fact, things aren't looking good. Or maybe they are looking good. Depends on your perspective. On Monday, MLB released an All-Star Game Vote Leaders update, and Nick Markakis has the second most votes of any NL outfielder, just a few thousand votes behind Bryce Harper. Nick Markakis has almost half a million votes.

So it looks like the longtime fun fact about Nick Markakis being perhaps the best player of all time without either an All-Star appearance or an MVP vote is about to come to an end. At this point, it would probably take an epic slump combined with someone else having a great hot streak or some amazing fan or team-led campaign for Marquecas not only to be overtaken as a starter but not appear on the roster as a reserve. As you'll recall, Marquecas currently trails Mark Ellis by 1.4 baseball reference wins above replacement on the all-time list of best players without an MVP vote or an all-star appearance. Markekis actually has more war, according to Fangraphs, so he may already be the best such player, but the man

deserves to be an all-star. What can we say? Currently has a 139 WRC+. By baseball reference war, he is actually the second most valuable NL outfielder behind Lorenzo Cain, who's getting jobbed in this voting. So, rather than organize an Effectively Wild campaign to vote for other outfielders, so as to preserve this Nick Markakis fun fact, I guess we should just accept it,

resign ourselves to it, try to be happy for Nick Markakis. He's 34, he's had a good career, he's having a great season. He deserves to end this fun fact, as unfun as it will be to go on without it. You can support the podcast. You should support the podcast. Eh, I don't want to tell you what to do. But it would be swell if you decided to support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount. The following five listeners have already done so.

Emile, Greg Mitchell, Sean Hooper, Mick Reinhardt, and Andy Karl. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. We are now past 7,900 members closing in on 8,000. Maybe we'll get there this week. Maybe you can help us get there. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at

fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. You know how this works. We'll be back later this week, probably emails next time, but we'll see what stories baseball gives us. Talk to you then. Don't go away Don't go away Don't go away