Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1230: Our Cast is in the Jackpot

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the end of Steven Brault‘s strikeout streak, Brandon Nimmo‘s non-HBP, Jacob deGrom‘s and Mike Trout’s latest futile heroics, the Mariners’ luck, leaked umpire audio, Hank Aaron on bottle boning, the new-and-improved Jordan Hicks, Miguel Cabrera being done for the year, post-substitution ejections, and a clever college play, then […]

I hear the jackpot, baby you're really, really, really mine. I hear the jackpot, baby, gee, you're so fine. One little kiss from you and baby I do. I hear the jackpot. I knew I could love Jack Fong Hello. Hello. All podcasts must start and all streaks must end. And sadly, Stephen Brault's strikeoutless streak ended this week. It's over. It ended on Tuesday. I couldn't even bring myself to watch or look at the details.

Do you know who did the deed? No, I was in the same boat as you. As soon as it happened, then I was disappointed and I didn't want to know anymore. Yeah. So he had a great run. I didn't want to know anymore. Yeah, so he had a great run. It was, I think, it tied him for fifth all-time to start a career in number of at-bats by a pitcher. He's tied with Dizzy Dean, I think. I think the most at-bats to start a career without striking out by a pitcher is Fred Hutchinson's 128,

but that was back in 1939 or way, way back in the days when pitchers could actually hit a little bit and not everyone struck out the way that they do these days. So that was a fun thing to watch. But now Steven Brault's strikeout list streak is over. I'm trying to look up who it was who ended our joy just to see. Well, I can tell you that at least Brad Bergeson, he's inactive, but he didn't strike out over 12 plate appearances. It's just not the same. I can't care.

I can't care. Steven Brault is the only one. Now we've got Breivik Valera. He's only struck out twice. He's batted 42 times. That's interesting, but I'm afraid it'll just never be as interesting as it is with a pitcher.

No, it was Silvino Bracco who struck out Steven Brault. So now I know that name. You might not be surprised to learn this, but I'm familiar with him as a reliever who put up very, very good numbers in AAA. He was one of those several relievers you notice down in the minors and you figure, oh, this guy's really good. He could become something. And then, you know, there's some sort of level change between triple a and the majors some say better players are in the major leagues so performance tends to suffer however while one streak ends i don't know if the mets have a streak but they at least have suck going on

a lot so that's kind of a another thing that can this is related to this i have a short little stat blast I put together because I know that you also have one or two or several stat blasts. Possibly three. Yeah. Possibly three. So I can tell you, updated numbers for the month of June. Sort of an arbitrary cutoff, but we're using it. For the month of June, the Dodgers lead all of baseball with an OPS as a team of 9-9-7. That's very good.

Scored 84 runs. They have a lead of 109 points over the team in second place. But we're not talking about the Dodgers, are we? I said the Mets. We're talking about the Mets. The Mets are in 30th place. I mentioned that the Dodgers had scored 84 runs in June, right? I mentioned that they did that over 10 games.

The Mets have also played 10 games in June, and they have scored 14 runs. 14 runs. 14 runs. Their team OPS is 449. It's 107 points worse than the next worst team. Mets in dire straits. Them and the Blue Jays have had almost identical seasons. I don't know how many years in a row the Mets can have like a horrible this specific time of year, but that's kind of their thing, I guess.

Yeah, that question we answered last week about pitchers who had more war than wins. Jacob de Crom is making a real run at being the second ever. So not a distinction you want, but man, he's getting no run support. Why did I mention that? So that's what I put together a little bit. So on Wednesday, the Mets played the Braves and the Mets lost to the Braves two to nothing. The Braves starter, Mike Sirocco, he was good. Jacob deGrom for the Mets, almost equally good, but he had the misfortune of allowing a run. He allowed one run over seven innings. That was enough to earn him a

loss. Jacob deGrom is now four and2. His baseball reference award is greater than his actual win total. So I was curious about pitchers whose teams lost games that they started and they allowed no more than one run and they threw at least seven innings. It is June 13th. Jacob deGrom already has five of those games for the Mets this year. Five games, seven innings, no more than one run, team loss. So that ties him for the sixth most in the expansion era, going back to 1961.

The actual high over that span of time, it's a tie, seven games, Don Drysdale in 1964 and Roger Craig in 1963. They both had seven such games. games now there's one thing i notice here that i did not notice earlier jeff samarja in 2014 i need to dig into this because jeff samarja's team lost five games where jeff samarja threw a total of 38 innings and allowed a total of one run. Hold on a second. The Cubs, he was pitching for the Cubs and the A's. The Cubs lost a game where Samardzic allowed no runs over seven innings. The Cubs lost a game where Samardzic allowed one run over nine innings. The Cubs lost a game where he allowed no

runs over seven innings. The A's lost a game where he allowed no runs over seven innings. And they lost a game where he allowed no runs over eight innings, and they lost a game where he allowed no runs over eight innings. Jeff Smarts got a little bit screwed that season. And Roger Clemens in 2005, also five team losses, where Foster Clemens threw 36 innings and allowed one run. So that's weird and interesting. Anyway, Jacob deGrom is among some somewhat flattering company. And I can tell you the pitchers in the expansion era with the most of those seven or more inning and one or fewer run starts.

Don Sutton leads the way. 30 career starts where he was very good and his team lost. Unsurprisingly to many Mariners fans, Felix Hernandez is tied for fifth place at 23. Justin Verlander is at 20. Verlander is at 20. Well, speaking of the Mariners, I just wrote about them because they are playing better than any team in baseball, or at least winning more than any team in baseball. Over the last month or so, roughly the month that has corresponded with their losing their best position player,

they have been the most successful team in baseball. And their second baseman had been horrible, as expected, but somehow they keep winning and winning and winning, and we've talked about that a bit. I wrote about it from the perspective of the luck that they've had. They've won an extraordinary number of close games, one and two run games. It's kind of a historic pace that they're on. They're also just genuinely playing pretty well on top of that. Anyway, that's why they are clinging to first place as we speak, which is improbable, but also a nice story because I think if anyone deserves a little luck, it's the Mariners and their long-suffering fans. That's what I wrote. But also the last couple Mariners wins came in games where Mike Trout

hit two home runs in each of those games. And I feel for Trout because he now has back-to-back two homer games. He is the first player ever to do that in Safeco Field. So it wasn't a Mariner who did that first. It was Mike Trout. And yet the Angels lost both of those games. Trout is now at six wins above replacement, according to Baseball Reference. So he is still on pace for the best season of all time and the angels are still on pace not to get him even a single post

season plate appearance so that was just two days in the life of mike trout that really epitomized his season and his whole career to this point and president i know the mariners and the angels are tied in the ninth inning right now but if the mariners were to win this game and they've already rallied to tie it up after after being behind six to four so just more weirdly unsustainable clutch hitting from the mariners yeah if the mariners win this game there'll be seven and a half games up on the angels who are yeah i mean i know the mariners are technically in first place in the al west uh i also know that we're in the same boat that we can just kind of forget that that's even happening there's there's virtually no way really unlucky for that to be the case in addition to the mariners being

really lucky so yeah no one no one's buying that but yeah even entering this game the mariners had like 70 percent odds of making the playoffs yeah it's i can't i know this happens all the time but i can't get over looking at at base runs where the mariners have a slightly lower base runs that's an estimated winning percentage based on underlying performance they have a lower base runs winning percentage than the tampa bay rays who are under, not really that close to the playoff race. But if the Mariners beat the Angels, and again, no guarantee they're going to do that. But you look at the American League wildcard hunt. And so the Red Sox have the first spot.

That's given them or the Yankees. The Astros tactically have the second wildcard. The Angels are six games back. And then the A's are eight and a half. And everyone else is more than 10 games out of the wildcard. The Angels are six games back, and then the A's are eight and a half, and everyone else is more than 10 games out of the wildcard. I know I said it like a week ago, but it would really take some kind of monumental collapse for the Mariners to not make the playoffs, which is potentially a narrative in the works. So yes, you talk about a team that deserves a bunch of

luck. And essentially, from this point forward, they would require a lot of very unfortunately timed bad luck to miss. So stay tuned. Yeah, but even just getting this far, I had some help from Dan Hirsch of the Baseball Gauge in that article. And he has a simple playoff odds probability thing where he just takes into account the standings and the remaining schedule. And he found that this is the best position the Mariners have been this late in the season or really at any point in a season since 2003. So it's been 15 years since really at any point in the season, the Mariners had this good a chance to make the playoffs. So don't blow it Mariners because

I don't know when you'll be back if you don't do it this year what in there there's a lot that goes into this and part of it is just Shohei Otani not being available for the Angels plus most of their bullpen plus JC Ramirez plus Matt Shoemaker and etc and injuries are are bad but look at this team and if the Mariners are able to make the playoffs they'll do it with of course the the empty husk of felix hernandez and no available robinson cano i just can't we can well i'm sure we'll talk about this a lot more as the playoffs grow closer and and maybe we get there but it would at least be the first time that i've ever been able to write about the playoffs with an actual bias so i kind kind of look forward to that. Yeah. And Ichiro as a bench coach slash special assistant slash batting practice pitcher on top

of everything else. So you got a post today out of something that happened that we talked about on this podcast not long ago. You want to tell the people? I do. Yes. We were talking recently about a very much unenforced rule that is on the books, a rule that I think everyone knows from the time they're like seven years old and aware of baseball. The rule that if you can reach when you get hit by a pitch, but you have to make some sort of effort to get out of the way. At the very least, you cannot make an effort to get into the way. You can't do that. That's the shane victorino move that's the the chase outley move not supposed to do that so on tuesday against the braves

brandon nimmo was batting for the mets who at that point did not have a run i know that doesn't narrow things down but they didn't have a run nimmo was up in the sixth inning he worked a two and one count and then he was facing jesse biddle, who's in the majors, and Biddle threw a curveball that Brandon Nimmo took. He got out of the way, he turned his back, and he threw his elbow out a little bit, and he got hit in the elbow by the curveball. So the umpire is an umpire I had never heard of before. Had you heard of, I don't even know how it's pronounced, Stu Surewater? Sure, Surewater?

Sewerwater? It's probably not Sewerwater. Steve Surewater. Let's go with that. He signaled to Brandon Nimmo to come back, to come back to the batter's box, because according to the letter of the law, if you don't make an effort to get out of the way, or at least if you make an effort to get out of the way, and the ball is out of the strike zone, then it is just a ball. It is not a hit by pitch. You are not entitled to first base. This is the rule that everyone knows, but it is just a ball. It is not a hit by pitch. You are not entitled to first base. This is the rule that everyone knows, but it is almost never enforced. Sherwater enforced it. Nimmo came right back. Now, granted, on the very next pitch, he drew a walk and he went to first base anyway,

so whatever. He sprinted down the line because that's the thing that he does. Mickey Calloway came out to argue the call when Nimmo had to come back to the batter's box, because I don't think that you ever expect to see this. Now, this is not, as you can imagine, an easy thing to research, to find cases where players leaned into the pitch, and to find cases where they were called on it. Thankfully, you can Google, you can use the Twitter search to find when people talk about this. So I was able to find some cases. I can't really do it justice, but my favorite clip that I found was from, I think, 2016. Might have been 2015. I found a clip of Stephen Wright

pitching for the Red Sox against the Dodgers. The Red Sox were winning 9-0. It was like the eighth inning. Jock Peterson was up. And it is the most intentional batter getting in the way of a pitch that I've ever seen.

Jock Peterson is just standing there against a knuckleball, by the way, so it's not going to do anything. And he doesn't flinch. And then as the ball is arriving, he just kind of moves his knee just directly in the path of the ball. And that one was so deliberate that the umpire did call him on it. I found a clip where Josh Donaldson was brought back to the box. I found a clip where I don't remember who it was. Somebody else was brought back into the box. I found a clip where, I don't remember who it was,

somebody else was brought back into the box. So it does happen. There is some recent precedent, but not only is it hard to search for, but I could only find, like, I don't know, five cases in the video era, like were it accessible MLB TV, which is not very much,

considering these hit by pitches seempitches seem to happen all the time. So anyway, I don't really have a further point here. I had these grandiose ideas for the article, but I couldn't get it to go how I wanted. But I don't have a lot of strong opinions, okay? I know we talked about this because you expressed an opinion. You dared express an opinion. Yeah.

And then the ringer just kept on tweeting it out exposing you to further inflammatory tweets i don't have a lot of strong opinions but one of my strong baseball opinions is that batters should be called on their nonsense when they get in the way of a pitched ball i think umpires are afraid to do it because it is the path of least resistance to just let them go to first base usually the pitcher made a mistake oh by the way the mariners just beat the angels bottom of the ninth by one one run another clutch will either one or two i'm looking at in play runs bottom of the ninth home run eight to six it's a two run win for the mariners what do you know yeah they had the best winning percentage ever in one or two run games already so now it's even better

that's incredible unreal uh looks like oliver drake is apparently on the angels now anyway he's a reliever i will not be writing about so the mariners have now opened up a seven and a half game lead on the angels they're coming up i think it's 10 games in a row now against the yankees or the red sox so if if things are going to go poorly, this would be the opportunity. But anyway, way to go, Stu Surewater, for calling Brandon Nimmo on his deliberate elbow. I was very pleased to see it. I was very pleased to the podcast listener who brought it to our attention.

So thank you. And I look forward to seeing more of this. Condolences to Oliver Drake. As my colleague Michael Bauman pointed out, there is a character on Billions named Oliver Dake, which is very confusing when you're watching Angels games and Oliver Drake is pitching. not entirely gone practice of rubbing a bat with a bone that came from some sort of animal in order to harden the bat, in theory, at least. And Hank Aaron was in the booth in an ESPN Braves Mets broadcast this week, and listener Ashton brought to our attention in the Facebook group that he addressed the subject, but not

bat boning, but bottle boning. And he transcribed what Aaron said here. He said, the bats that I used, I used to take them home, carry them home with me, and I used to take a pop soda bottle, pop soda bottle, and rub it down for about 20 minutes. Just rub it hard to tighten the grains up in them. So Hank Aaron hit a lot of home runs in his day. He boned his bats with bottles, or he bottled his bats, I guess. Pop soda bottle? Yeah, pop soda.

Pick a side, Hank. I know, you can't have it both ways. You can't bone your bats with bottles and also call them pop and soda. Come on, take a stance. This is the Jeff Sullivan approach to speech here. He boned his bats with soda in order to give himself more pop. Right. Okay, what else?

Where can we go from there? Oh, I wanted to mention this, which was also brought to our attention by a listener who just goes by Crafty Lefty on Twitter, tweeted at the official Effectively Wild account at EWPod. I'm just going to send you a home run call here. And as you're listening to it, I will also play it for the listeners. I don't know whether you have heard this.

This comes from Padres Radio this year, a very recent call, I believe, from this week. Okay. And Michaelis deals his first pitch. A swung on. There's a drive to center field. This ball is well hit. Going back is FAM. To the track.

To the wall. It's gone. Launch angle. Exit velocity. Padres are on the board here. First pitch out of the hand of Michaelis. 1-0 San Diego. So that's a call of an Eric Cosmer Homer by Padres radio broadcaster Mark Grant.

And so this tweet was sent to us that his home run call is launch angle, exit velocity. I don't know whether it always is. I haven't got to confess I haven't listened to a whole lot of Padres radio this summer. So I don't know. Someone who has can let us know. But I don't know if that's the trademark Mark Grant home run call or whether this was just a one-time thing or whether it should be. But memorable at least.

I guess it is the perfect distillation of where we are now in 2018. There was exit velocity. There was launch angle. Yes, true of every batter, Paul. I mean, what's the equivalent if a batter strikes somebody out, like a dramatic strikeout? Spin rate. Spin rate, arm speed.

Vertical movement. Pitch framing. spin rate spin rate, arm speed vertical movement pitch framing these are things that are happening so it's accurate velocity along the y-axis this is nerd humor this is nerd humor but we could move on I don't know if you wanted to say more about

Mark Grant. I'll give you that opportunity now. I want to ask him how he came up with this home run call, if it actually is his permanent home run call. But we'll wait for people to tell us. And I want to talk to Stu Surewater about making that call on Brandon Nimmo. But I'm pretty sure that umpires aren't really allowed to talk when they're active. So also I have found out that it's very difficult to track down any sort of like media contact for the umpires union, which as I think about it, maybe not a coincidence. Maybe you want to just insulate these people

as much as is possible. Speaking of umpires talking, I assume you saw, I assume everyone has seen by now, this video that has surfaced this week on Twitter and now elsewhere from the 2016 game between the Dodgers and the Mets where Noah Syndergaard threw behind Chase Utley. He was retaliating for Utley's slide into Ruben Tejada in the 2015 NLCS and Syndergaard was ejected. Somehow the recording of the umpire's mic came to light,

and evidently it was just like secretly on YouTube or something, and it was found and put on Twitter. And so we get Cinderguard audio. We get Terry Collins screaming like a madman. We get umpire Tom Hallion explaining why he ejected Cinderguard. It's pretty insightful and obviously entertaining because we never really get to hear this sort of thing. I've always been intrigued by what umpires and managers are saying in these screaming matches because you hear great baseball stories about how they're all kind of just doing it for show and they're not genuinely all the time, and sometimes they're screaming ridiculous things at each other. So when I was still at BP with the help of Evan Brunel, I did a couple articles of lip-reading umpire manager arguments, and that was really

fun. And this time we don't have to lip-read because it was all caught on a mic and somehow released into the wild, and it's great. And if there were somehow a way for us to hear this all the time, and yet no one knows that they were being recorded, baseball would be the most popular pastime, I think, in the world, because I can't get enough of this. Yeah, pretty sure that's not going to happen. But I can't figure out why. What was this picked up by in the first place?

Who was wearing wire? I assume Hallie was. Like in playoff games, people are mic'd up, right? And you only ever hear the most anodyne things that they say. You just hear very short clips. But I assume the audio is there somewhere. So maybe it was just leaked by someone with the broadcast crew. Yeah, I've also always wondered what is exchanged. I wonder, Yeah, I've also always wondered what is exchanged. I wonder, you don't really get a good sense of how loud the crowd is on the field.

So it's quite, I've never been on the field with the crowd yelling. I've never been on the field, kind of, period. So I don't know if you need to be screaming so much. It did seem like, I've always wondered how you yell for like three minutes at a time. Because it seems like when I've thought that I might want to yell or when I have yelled, it's like a split second. Three words or more often two words. It's hard to sustain. It is hard to sustain. And so they were essentially having a conversation, but it was just at volume.

But I do wonder if you could have these. First of all, you'll never have these things uh accessed uh terry collins had a certain a certain naughty word that would has probably gotten him in a certain amount of trouble even though this is all supposed to be private but i wonder i wonder if umpires are recorded all the time so that maybe people back in the umpire's offices can listen to the arguments. I wonder if they are always being recorded and if this is just a leak or if this was a special circumstance. Because this was not the playoffs.

This was like the first series of the following regular season. True. Yeah, I don't know. I would assume that they are not usually and that this is just a special case. But I hope that they are, because if they are, then maybe somewhere there's a secret stockpile of these recordings that someday will come to light. And that would be wonderful. And I learned a new phrase, a new expression during this argument that I had never heard before. Tom Hallion uses the phrase, our ass is in the jackpot. before, Tom Hallion uses the phrase, our ass is in the jackpot. It is what it is, but that ain't going to happen. Our ass is in the jackpot. We don't do something there. I'm just telling you that.

No, no, Terry, listen, I'm telling you, our ass is in the jackpot now. Okay? Okay? I'm just telling you. Have you heard this? Are you familiar with this phrase? No, not even once. No, I've never heard this. In fact, our brilliant copy editor, Craig Gaines at The Ringer, had never heard this phrase. And if Craig hasn't heard it, then I would think it doesn't exist, except that it does exist. It's in the dictionary. And Sean, a listener in the Facebook group, pointed out that there's actually a line in No Country for Old Men that includes this phrase.

Keep going. don't stop. I don't want to get into some kind of a jackpot here, buddy. It's all right. Why don't I just set you down right here and we won't argue about it? Take me to another motel. Let's just call it square. Look, you're already in a jackpot and I'm trying to get you out of it. Take me to another motel.

So it is a thing, but I have never heard it. Obviously, it just means like our ass is on the line. I don't know how jackpot became part of that, but I thought maybe it was a regional thing, so I looked up where Tom Hallion is from,

and he's from New York. Not at all far from me, so I don't know where he picked this up, but I'd never heard it. What if, okay, and what if this is a stretch, but what if Tom Hallion is from certain circles in the New York area, certain, I don't know, hypothetically, mafioso circles, and what if Terry Collins was an informant who happened to be wearing a wire and the Mets arranged for him to get into a confrontation with Hallion on the field.

Now, there's two problems here. One, I don't think that you would trust Terry Collins and maybe get the information out of Tom Hallion that he's looking for as the informant. But secondly, also, maybe a baseball related argument is not the best time to change the subject to whatever sort of nefarious deeds Tom Hallion might have been involved in. But in any case, was it? Do we know? It must have been Hallion who was wearing the microphone. I think so. Yeah.

All right. So that kind of blows that. So maybe Hallion was the informant. Well, anyway. So the only other thing I wanted to mention, I made a note to mention it before we get to emails, but I don't really have that much to say about it, which is sort of sad. And it's sort of sad that we didn't bring it up because a couple of years ago, this would have been the biggest news imaginable. Now it's an afterthought. Miguel Cabrera is done for the season.

Ruptured biceps tendon, done for the year. biceps, tendon, done for the year. And this just, I mean, I guess it doesn't matter as much as it used to matter because Cabrera's not the caliber of player he was, and the Tigers are not the caliber of team that they were. So they weren't contending. He was hitting fairly well, like he was sort of having a bounce back, but not to his peak levels. And so there isn't really all that much to say about it, I guess, except that, you know, you can quote the facts and figures about five more years under team control and imagine this morphing into the tail end of the Pujols contract, that kind of thing. That's just sort of the depressing takeaway from this. But I'm sad that it doesn't matter that much anymore that mikhail capera

is done for the year yeah it's uh it's one of those it's a devastating blow not for anything that has to do with the playoff picture although the tigers last i checked are still ahead of the twins which is a little bit weird but it is an instance where you and i have both sort of graduated from our fandom maybe graduated isn't the right word nothing wrong with being a fan but we have transitioned to something that is other than team specific fandom and this is it's sad because we know that even from that from a national perspective this is sort of an afterthought because we have all just kind of assumed the tigers are down and they'll be down for a while and Miguel Cabrera is a player in decline but you know it's one thing to have well the Mariners are good now but let's say you know it's one thing to have well the

Mariners are good now but let's say last season it's one thing to have Felix Hernandez struggling but it would be quite another to have Felix Hernandez miss the entire season and Cabrera is a player of of great local significance to the Tigers and so even in a in a bad season it just hurts I imagine so much worse to not be able to watch him. He is probably the greatest pure hitter of his own generation. And it's so sad that we can just kind of gloss over it because from our perspective, what matters the most is just which teams are going to be good, which teams are going to be bad. And in a long-term perspective, I guess you could argue,

well, the Tigers now are going to get a better draft pick or whatever by having Cabrera out of the lineup. But, I mean, this is going to be 95 or 100 games where they don't get to watch him. And that sucks for the people who still tune into the Tigers on a regular basis just because they like Tigers baseball. They're going to get a lot of John Hicks. Yes, that's right. Yeah. In terms of name brand value, just going from one player to another, it doesn't fall much further than Miguel Cabrera to John Hicks. No offense to John Hicks, but... There was a few weeks ago, remember when Jordan Hicks threw a ball 105 miles per hour? Somebody tweeted at me, hey, I thought you'd want to know that Jay Hicks hit 105. And I saw that and I thought, wow,

he hit a ball 105. That's not bad for John Hicks. It wasn't at all what that tweet was about. John Hicks, I think, has hit a few balls 105, but he's no Miguel Guerrero. Yeah. I'm in the midst of writing a Jordan Hicks update because Jordan Hicks does strike people out now. There was no way that his not striking anyone out was going to last. We talked about that when he was throwing 105 and still had one of the lowest strikeout rates in baseball, which was sort of mystifying, but also not because he just was throwing lots of wild balls and his slider was just not under control. Now it is. He's throwing it harder. He's throwing it with better command. Now it is. He's throwing it harder. He's throwing it with better command. He's actually getting some whiffs now. And now Jordan Hicks is striking batters out at a rate that is kind of commensurate with how hard he throws. So one of the weirdest baseball things of this early season. Now not so weird anymore.

So what have you, what did you find? What has he changed? I know he's been unhittable in June. Yeah, I'm still in the process of digging into it and writing it up. But basically, he is throwing his slider harder now. He's changed the release point. He is actually throwing strikes with it sometimes instead of just throwing it wildly. So he just basically has said that he now has a feel for the slider and that is backed up by the stat so he's getting whiffs with that now and his overall strikeout rate is pretty impressive and now the controversy about him is is mike metheny running him into the ground and using him too much which it's mike metheny so probably well as long as bud norris is there to be the reliable closer that every team needs there's one thing that happened on on Monday that we haven't talked about yet.

Doesn't involve Major League Baseball, but I'm certain that you saw it. Florida Gators, Auburn Tigers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's not skunk in the outfield at all. But if there's anyone who by chance didn't see this, the Gators and Tigers were the fourth inning of some sort of important collegiate game. I don't know what the stakes were.

I don't watch college baseball. But in any case, tie was the fourth inning of some sort of important collegiate game. I don't know what the stakes were. I don't watch college baseball, but in any case, tie game, fourth inning. Blake Reese was the Gators runner on third base. Nick Horvath was the runner on first base. There were two outs, and Nick Horvath leading off, took off for second base, and then fell down.

Intentionally, he fell down. There's a left-handed pitcher on the mound who's looking at Nick Horvath, who falls down, and in that brief split second of time, Blake Reese had taken off from third base to steal home, and the fall seems to have distracted the pitcher just long enough to allow Blake Reese to slide home with the go-ahead run. Got to be aware of that curveball in the dirt.

You're the runner at third base, and right now, a bigger lead at first base. Going home, look out! Lippitt's going home, he stole it! Blake Reese stole home. Now, for reasons I can't wrap my head around, Nick Horvath was subsequently thrown out at third on the same play. I don't know why he got greedy. There wasn't going to be a runner on first behind him.

But in any case, this was definitely a play I hadn't seen before and so my question to you Ben Lindberg is do you think this play would work in the major leagues yeah I think it could work once I don't know if it could keep working but yeah I think so I hadn't seen it before so almost anything that you haven't seen before can work once I am am in agreement. It would work. I think it would work one time. And I expect that Travis Jankowski will be somehow involved when the Padres try to do it this season. All right.

Since we're on the subject of the Padres, Max says, what's up with Manny Margot? I have no idea. What is up? It's not very good. I guess that's the gist of the question. Let me take a closer look. Well, Margot, as I i recall came up through the minor leagues as a guy who did not have a lot of power and then in the second half of last season right

i believe he started to elevate the ball more he wound up with 13 home runs good for him my hunch i have not looked into this because i don't care my hunch i think there are like four pagers outfielders i'm more interested in than annie margot let's see definitely francia cordero somewhat fran mil reyes there's more who are there will myers i guess he hasn't played forever anyway so margot my hunch here is that margot was not actually a player who could benefit from elevating the ball more i think that he's just not a good enough hitter to do that. Now, as it happens this season, he's back to hitting ground balls. So whatever is happening with the swing, he has not hit the ball hard,

but he does not have a lot of power. He has roughly an average striker rate. He's done that. He did that last year. He has a below average walk rate. So if you are a hitter who is not very powerful, and if you are not very powerful and you aren't very patient then you are a relatively easy player to take advantage of so i think that the

takeaway here is that manny margot is just not likely to develop into a very good hitter but what underlines every single time that we ever talk about a guy who doesn't seem very good is max muncie and as long as max muncie can do whatever is happening with max muncie we can never really write anyone off but yeah manny margot probably not going to be the next max muncie but i mean honestly max muncie anyone could be the next max muncie max max muncie max mincemeat? Max muncie. All right. Next question comes from Reggie. A friend and I were discussing the Rays' use of relievers as starters and were brainstorming other wonky ideas teams could try out. After going through a number of outlandish things,

we settled on something that could stick. NL road teams starting their previous day's starter in the nine spot in the order. This strategy would only come into play in the rare occasion that the road team were to send nine hitters to the plate in the top of the first. Instead of being locked into John Lester, the current day's starting pitcher in the nine spot, why not start the previous day's starting pitcher, Jose Quintana, there? If the Cubs were to bat around in the top of the first, they could pinch hit Tommy La Stella with a chance to break the game wide open. round in the top of the first, they could pinch hit Tommy Lastella with a chance to break the game wide open. If they don't bat a round,

simply swap in Lester for Quintana and proceed with the rest of the game as normally planned. Brilliant. Is there any downside or rule that I'm missing? You want to break it to Reggie, Jeff? There is. There is a rule. Well, so here's the thing. I sent you a link to the

MLB has a glossary, and within that glossary, it's a substitution page and the the starting pitcher listed on the lineup given to the umpire has to face at least one batter unless that pitcher becomes injured or gets ejected so i guess if you wanted to you could stage an ejection with jose quintana you could just yeah i don't even know what he'd be doing i guess he could argue balls and strikes from the dugout or something during the top of the inning.

But anyway, pitcher has to face at least one batter. So you probably don't want the previous day starter to do that. So this is how you end up with the opener. Now, I will say people have asked this before on the internet. And so I have looked at the answers and people have cited rules.

I'm looking at the official rules for 2018. I can't actually find it in there. That is not to say that it's no longer a rule. I can't imagine why they would have taken that rule out. They might have just changed the wording for where it is in the book. Copy-paste error. Yeah. But it does.

After the latest CBA. The rule book does have the rule instituted in what was it 1980 where the starting designated hitter has to bat at least once to uh confound the earl weaver strategy right the earl weaver's phantom dh where he would put a pitcher in as the dh so yeah the the designated hitter who is in the starting lineup has to bat at least once unless the opposing team changes pitchers yeah so that is in here i found that but i can't actually find the rule that says the starting pitcher has to face at least one guy because it is on the glossary page i have to assume it is a rule and maybe the pdf uploaded online is not the actual official official rule book but i'm just saying if it happens to be not

there by accidental omission or maybe deliberate omission but probably accidental then you could say that to some enterprising manager the door is open to take advantage of a possible loophole yes okay all right i've got a couple basketball related questions here so i will start with this one. This is from Jonathan. In basketball, a team's head coach can get a technical foul for arguing with a ref, which has actual in-game implications as the other team gets to shoot free throws and keep the ball. How different would baseball be if penalties could be assessed on a team for managerial outbursts beyond just the manager getting ejected? For example, all runners would advance if the team is on defense,

or an extra out would be called if a team were hitting. Would this significantly alter the way managers behave? Would notoriously hot-headed managers find it harder to get jobs? So, would Terry Collins have been screaming at Tom Hallion if there had been more at stake than Terry Collins getting ejected? Well, I mean, it was what the second game of the season and it was like the first inning or something. So I actually don't think that that would have prevented anything at all. And you figured, let's see, managers often blow

up either when their team has been slumping for a long time or maybe the game is out of hand. This is not to say that they don't argue in close games, but it all depends on the severity of the penalty, right? So what are we proposing here? Balls and strikes or runners move up or like a run goes on the scoreboard? That seems too severe unless the manager kills someone. I would think probably balls and strikes. That's kind of always the default punishment in the rulebook, right? Can we go back?

Are you suggesting that if the manager killed a person, you would penalize the team with a run? I mean, yeah, that's serious. I guess it's like if you spear someone in hockey, you just go in the box for 10 minutes. Yeah. Except you kill somebody. Okay, so what we have learned is that Ben Lindbergh thinks an appropriate penalty for murder is a run to the visiting team. penalty for murder is a run to the visiting team. Now, so if the visiting,

if the manager were to kill Mike Trout, is killing Mike Trout in Game 7 of the World Series worth giving the Angels a run? Is Mike Trout worth a run in a game? He's not. No, probably not. Most likely. So if the penalty were one run,

I'm not here advocating murder on the field. However, given these rules that Ben has argued for clearly over the course of the past 30 minutes, it would make sense if the Angels were to make the World Series, which they will not, then if Dave Roberts were to murder Mike Trout in the first inning, Angels have to bring in their replacement, already a short bench. It would actually be worth it. It would be a worthwhile gamble for the Dodgers, which is not to—

I mean, does Dave Roberts—well, the whole judicial system is a different conversation. Yeah, that might come into play, too. All right, next basketball-related question. This is from Jerry and also many other people who drew our attention to a popular thread on NBA Reddit. It's a Steph Curry suggestion, and it goes like this. Picture this. The Warriors go out and get four incredibly strong bodies with really long arms. For the entire game on the offensive end, those four guys lock arms together and form a circle around Steph Curry so that none of the opponents can get to him. Sort of like how you

might protect a quarterback if you didn't know the rules of football. Steph barely needs much daylight to shoot, so as long as they leave around a foot of room around him, he can probably just bomb away freely every possession. Why don't the Warriors do this? Is Steve Kerr an idiot? So why can't four Warriors starters lock arms, form a ring around Steph Curry so he can take open shots. Jerry wants to know what we think the baseball equivalent of this strategy would be. And frankly, I was pretty stumped because baseball is not like basketball in many ways, in most ways. And you can't just give the ball to someone and you also can't form rings around people in a way that would be very effective. I think the best suggestion I've seen comes from a listener in our Facebook group. I'm not sure if it's a good suggestion, but it is the best I've seen.

This is from listener Ben Freeman, who says that the baseball equivalent would be two runners shielding a third runner, likely the winning run, from being tagged by blocking the defenders from reaching him on a triple steal attempt. This would have to come with no outs, and the runner the other two are protecting would still need some nifty juking skills, but now I want to see this. That's the best I can do. I can't even envision that sequence of events. No, so you just have three guys in a line,

and they can't pass each other, but they have to be surrounding each other. So Ben continues, the guy on first would have to make a move before anyone else, and if the catcher throws to first or second, the other two start to move. They have to stop the run from scoring, so either the second baseman or first, the other two start to move. They have to stop the run from scoring. So either the second baseman or first baseman has to throw to home. The other runners

are either at or close to third by then. Once they get there, the two outside runners block for the guy in the middle. It sounds very complicated. I think that maybe there's not a baseball equivalent. Yeah, if that's the best we can do, I don't think there is. I wish there were, but I just, I can't really think there isn't really any such thing as like double teaming or triple teaming or blocking for a player really, right? There's no equivalent. I mean, you can bring in a new pitcher to face a certain guy, but you can't use multiple pitchers at the same time. Although I think we've answered that question too. And I don't know what else you could do.

You can shift on a defender so you can move fielders to the place where you think the ball is going to be hit, but that's just not the same. There's no, no compensation you can make for that. So I'm stumped. Sorry, everyone. I mean, the most clever things that we've seen in 2018 are either like Javier Baez standing in front of a runner on second to block him seeing signs, which probably doesn't matter anyway, or a college baseball player falling down on purpose so that his teammate could score from third base.

So maybe there's just not a whole... So what was the resolution of that basketball thread? Can you do that? I don't know. There were thousands of comments, so I couldn't get to the bottom of it. But someone let us know. It seems like it might be plausible, potentially. Anyway, yeah, I don't know.

I think there's some room for innovation left in baseball, but maybe not that much room. We'll have to loop holes closed, including the starting pitchers in the lineup and then swapping them in strategy that we just discussed. Hypothetically, if you could just have four people lock their arms around Steph Curry, forget open shots. You could just walk him toward the net and score. Yes. At some point. I guess there's like charging or some sort of offensive ality. You're just pushing people out of the way.

But I don't know. Be menacing. Last basketball-related question from Leo. As you may know, both the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox are owned by the same man, Jerry Reinsdorf. As you also may know, LeBron James is currently holding the NBA hostage with his free agency. LeBron has always been eager to prove his superiority to Michael Jordan,

and what better way to show this than proving he's a better baseball player? My question is simple. What if LeBron James told Reinsdorf he would sign with the Bulls, but only if he batted leadoff and was the starting center fielder for the White Sox? Would Reinsdorf do it? Well, he's probably not that much worse than Adam Engel. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, Reinsdorf would definitely do it, right? I think he would. I mean, this might compromise LeBron's basketball abilities. And maybe sometimes you would have basketball and baseball games overlapping. I mean, there's a reason why we don't see this happening much post, what, Mark Hendrickson anymore, and he didn't even do it at the same time so yeah this would be difficult but also White Sox probably not going anywhere in 2019 so I think they could get away with it from an attendance standpoint I think it would be a boon to the White Sox and maybe Reinsdorf would care about that more than anything else so sure if this was the thing that got the bulls lebron and also became the biggest draw for the white socks next season i think reinstorf would be thrilled and let it not be

forgotten that right now in the minor leagues tim tebow it has an ops of 699 that's in double a now he's 30 years old but he's he's it for home runs he's been better than he was before and he's faced the best competition he's faced so uh lebron james does not have tim tebow's baseball playing background i guess but he is the greatest athlete that north america has probably definitely without question so yep white socks would do it considering because there's a in in basketball you have the maximum contracts right so you can't offer lebron james more so the bulls would need to find some sort of other incentive to get him to sign with them i know i have no idea if the bulls are good or bad or in between i know that they're in the worst conference but if the deal breaker or deal maker

were putting him on the white socks yeah i'll put all of his friends on the white socks who cares let him pitch sure yeah sure all right stat, did you already do your StatBlast? Yeah, it was DeGrom stuff. So it's your turn. Okay. All right. StatBlast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways.

Here's to daystep lost. So I've got a few here that are all inspired by listener emails. So we are continuing to answer listener emails here. This one is from Eric. So he says, a friend of mine posted on Twitter that in 2011, the Minnesota Twins had eight players make an appearance who never played MLB baseball again. That seemed like a lot, but I'm wondering

what is the most players to appear for a team in one season and never make another major league appearance again. So teams that had the most guys in their last major league season. So again, I got help from Dan Hirsch of the Baseball Gauge here. He sent me a list, and I think the results are sort of interesting. So first of all, Eric's friend was actually undercounting. The 2011 Twins had 10 players who made their last appearance in the majors that year, but that's not actually that notable. That does not put them very close to the top of the all-time list at all. On this list, you have a lot of 2017, which is not fair because a lot of the players who were on 2017 teams and haven't yet played this year will still play at some point.

So I got rid of those teams. I got rid of the 1945 teams because that was the end of the Second World War period, and lots of guys got pushed out when the starters returned from the service. So disqualified that. Also disqualified 1915 Federal League teams because that was the year that the Federal League folded and a lot of those guys never got a major league job again. So if we take out those three years, we have the 1946 Giants, 23 players in their final major league season. I will upload the spreadsheet so anyone can dig into this to their heart's content. The 1955 Kansas City Athletics were next with 22.

Those A's were basically a farm team for the Yankees. That was their first year as a franchise in that city. And then the 1910 St. Louis Browns at 20. 1916 Philadelphia Athletics at 20. 1944, again, war year. That's the Philadelphia team again at 20. 1944, again, war year. That's the Philadelphia team, again, 20. In recent history, we have to go to the next team on the list, number five. This can be the post-World War II, really, leader, and that is the 2006 Washington Nationals, who had 20 players at the end of their major

league rope. And I will just read off the names. This not very distinguished group of 2006 Nationals who never appeared in the majors again. Blasts from the past. Here we go. Alex Escobar, Beltran Perez, Bernie Castro, Brandon Harper, Brett Campbell, Damian Jackson, Felix Rodriguez, George Lombard, Henry Mateo, Joey Eichen, Kevin Grabowski, Luis Matos, Melvin Dorta, Mike Vento, Pedro Estacio, Ryan Dries, Santiago Ramirez, Travis Hughes, Wiki Gonzalez, and Zach Day. 20 mostly very undistinguished names of baseball players, and they never played in the majors again, mostly for good reason. And just scrolling down the list here, you get another

1912 team, yet another 1912 team, 1917, 1946, the next modern era team, 2015 Braves. I will read out the 2015 Braves who have not again appeared in the majors. We've got Andrew McIrahan, Danny Barawa, David Ardsma, former Effectively Wild guest, David Carpenter, Donny Veal, Eric Stultz, Auri Perez, Jake Brigham, Jason Frazier, Joey Tardoslovich, John Cornley, Juan Jaime, Manny Banuelos, Michael Cohn, Nick Massett, Nick Swisher, Pedro Siriaco, Ryan Kelly, and Sugar Ray Maramone. There you go. 2006 Nationals, 2015 Braves.

Basically, bad teams are on this list, which checks out. That was very difficult to listen to. Apologies to everyone, but there you go. I will put it online. I know that the Nationals were not an expansion team, which in a sense kind of makes it worse. But when you were so new to a city and you're trying to establish a new fan base, trying to get people interested in the product, you don't want to stock your roster with a bunch of players like the ones that you just read off who don't ever play again there are a variety of reasons for that so that was just it's you think of the nationals now and you just think of like the harper and the strasburg and the scherzer nationals the nationals have been around for the

last really good last five six seasons but holy hell there was an era of them that was just so forget like i think every single game was started by Levon Hernandez, every single one. And Ryan Zimmerman was the good player, and I think Ramon Ortiz was there too, but it was just the Levon Hernandez show for like five years. That's right. Well, that was what made Levon so great is that he could pitch every day, but it wasn't always what fans of his teams wanted. Next question in the StatBlast segment comes from Jared, who says, One thing I've been keeping track of is how few players have played for the Astros this season compared to the rest of the league.

Right now they have 29 players. This was when the email was sent. Whereas most of the league is around 38. To me, this is interesting since it shows how healthy they've been, effective their pitchers have been, and how little they've had to make pitching changes, especially in today's game. My question is, what has been the biggest difference in players used from the team with the least players used and the most players used in the same season? So yeah, generally a good thing, obviously, not to have to use a lot of players. And over time, the number of players used by the average team has increased. So I think 1914 was the first year when rosters were at 25 guys. In 1914,

the average team used 33 players. And last year, again, still 25-man rosters, the average team used 50 players, which is quite an increase. And most of it is in the bullpen, and most of it is Jerry DiPoto and the Mariners. If you're interested in the biggest differences in that period between the team with the most players used and the least players used, the top is 1915. Again, I'm going to throw that out because Federal League, and then you get 1912 1944 i don't want to do exactly the same thing we just did on the previous thing but uh you go to certain years in baseball history and things were disordered to say the least so in a recent season the biggest difference has been 2014 so in 2014 difference between most players used and least players used was 25. So the max was 64 and the minimum was 39.

The Rangers used 64 players. That was the year where every Ranger got hurt and then every Rangers replacement got hurt, right? I think that was that year. I believe so. Right after the Rangers seemed like they were going to be permanent. Yes, exactly. They used 64 players that year because of an incredible quantity of injuries. And then the Braves used only 39.

So that is the answer. I will spare you a long list of other teams. The last one here that I will give you is Michael. I was wondering about second generation MLB players, specifically whether there's a trend for the father or the son to be the better player. My suspicion is that it balances out. Like for every Bobby Bonds and Barry Bonds, there's a Tony Gwynn and Tony Gwynn Jr., but I wanted to make sure, and I thought it could be a fun Father's Day topic. Hopefully the dads come out on top. So yes, Father's Day is this weekend. This is the last email show before Father's Day.

So I got this data and actually the data that I answered the previous question with from Hans Van Sluyten of Baseball Reference this time. I have a list of every father-son pair in Major League history who both played in the major leagues. So there have been 243 pairings of fathers and sons who have both gotten some major league service time. If you just average the war produced by the fathers, you get 11.9. So the average MLB father produces 11.9 war. If you take the sons, only 6.3 war. But then I thought, well, maybe some of these sons are still active. They're still adding to their totals. So I removed all of the active sons and their fathers that I could find. So there's something like 22 active sons who had major league fathers.

So took those out. Didn't actually make a difference. In fact, it increased the gap. out didn't actually make a difference. In fact, it increased the gap. So if you remove those guys, the average father is at 12.1 war. The average son is at 6.2 war. So yes, congratulations, dads. Fathers of MLB players tend to be better than their sons. So the seed is strong, as they say on Game of Thrones, but not as strong. I don't know if that's surprising or not. You'd think that maybe the next generation is better than the original generation or has more advantages, right? Because they were raised with an MLB player as a father. You'd think that would be a leg up, and maybe it is in making the majors, but not necessarily in being better once you get there. Yeah, I think that there's actually a selection bias here, and maybe it would be more pronounced if you could see the sons who didn't make the major leagues because you are more likely

to have a team want someone in the bloodline if his dad was very very good and so you would probably expect the dads to have quite high wins above replacement and then you would have their their kids drafted and then those kids would disappoint because that's what they generally do maybe three percent of the time you get the kid that you want and 97% of the time you get the kid that you accept. And so I think that is, it's probably a selection bias factor here that explains virtually all of it. So I can put this online if people want to scroll through it, but you may be wondering about the biggest differentials between fathers and sons. The biggest gap between father war and son war is Eddie Collins, the Hall of Famer, and Eddie Collins Jr., the non-Hall of Famer at all. Eddie Collins produced 124 war. Eddie

Collins Jr., negative one war. That's a gap of 125 wins above replacement. That's pretty big. And then the next few guys, Pete Rose and Pete Rose Jr., Tim Raines and Tim Raines Jr., Buddy Bell and Mike Bell, Ed Walsh and Ed Walsh Jr., Tony Gwynn and Tony Gwynn, Yogi Berra, Dale Berra, George Sisler, Dave Sisler, Tony Perez, Eduardo Perez. And if you're wondering about the sons who were better than the fathers, top of the list, pretty predictable. Barry Bonds considerably better than Bobby Bonds, who was a borderline Hall of Fame player himself, but still a gap of 105 war between them because Barry Bonds is amazing. After that, it's Roberto Alomar better than Sandy Alomar. Buddy Bell better than Gus Bell, which is interesting because Buddy Bell was on the other list. Ken Griffey Jr., obviously better than Ken Griffey. Then you got Jason Kendall

and Fred Kendall, Dixie Walker and Dixie Walker, Roy Smalley and Roy Smalley, etc. So probably the players that you would expect to be at the top of those respective lists. Give them other names. Stop giving them the same names. They're different people. Yes, they are. All right. A couple more before we wrap this up. Daniel says, while listening to the fascinating interview with John Jaso, I had a thought. What value does a self-actualized personality have? Imagine a scenario where an entire team or an entire league had the personality of John Jaso. They have the same skills and attributes that they normally have, but now they have all the laid-back, laissez-faire personality that John Jaso has.

Here are some outcomes I can foresee. Little to no conflict between teammates. No bench-clearing brawls. Players would be better about communicating injuries. Smaller contracts, less money-hungry players, earlier retirements, better post-game interviews. Could the solution to baseball's young people problem be that there aren't enough JSO-like players in the league? Would a front office have any incentive to try to gather more personalities like his? More like, so you run into the problem of what is it like to have 25 of those at once you they're right that there

wouldn't be much conflict but maybe you wouldn't have i don't know he performed at such a high level and he was he was a good player i mean he caught at the major leagues he was a good hitter so clearly he wasn't held back by his own admitted limited passion relative to his teammates so he was still good so yeah i'm gonna go with with yes. Yes, this is one potential solution. Essentially more baseball players who clearly smoke marijuana. That's probably what you need to do. Now, you would potentially have players who are less interested in being in the spotlight. So maybe they're like easier to get along with.

Maybe they give better interviews, but maybe they don't really like want to be heavily marketed. Maybe they're not going to be easy to broadcast. So it wouldn't necessarily be the solution to getting the best players' names out there so that everyone knows them, so that they can show up on that ESPN list of the 100 most famous worldwide athletes, because these players just wouldn't be motivated by that fame. But you would at least have people get along a lot more. Yeah. I don't know whether that would make baseball more entertaining or watchable though, right? It would probably make clubhouses happier places, but you kind of want the hothead sociopaths type of player, right? You want the guy who's getting into brawls. If you want to get young people interested, it seems like probably fights are one way to do that, which is unfortunate.

But I think one of the reasons why we are so fascinated by John Jaso is that he really is sort of a singular personality in this space. And so we wanted to find out what makes him tick and how he got along with everyone else who is not like him. But if everyone's like him, I don't know that that would help ratings. That might hurt ratings. Maybe you need to be a little bipolar. You stock half the rosters with Jaycee Lake players and you stock half the rosters with just people who are super aggro.

And then I think what would be the most fun thing to observe is what happens when one of the teams wants to brawl against the other one. And it would always go in one direction, but then the really aggressive, hot-headed teams would go out there looking to fight and then the Jayce team would be like no no no it's cool you you go you do you do you you do whatever you want to you want to do so that like one bullpen would run in from the outfield

and just mill around with all of its teammates while the jso team is just like having a picnic near the dugout or something so i didn't even know what would what would insignificant fight in the first place because one of the teams wouldn't even want to get involved. All right. Ben says, are there more fans of the teams in the American League or teams in the National League? I don't have a great answer for this question, but as near as I could tell,

it is actually just about even, which I guess is not the most entertaining possible answer, but I think that's the case. I was just relying on a FiveThirtyEight article, a survey that Harry Enten did last year, which we talked about on this podcast about team popularity. There is another source of data that I found, which is Harris public policy polling that was, I think, asking about favorite teams by state or something like that. So there is a raw number of estimated fans per team in each state. Anyway, I tried to add those totals up and it came out to almost exactly the same. came out to almost exactly the same. So when we have the big DH versus pitcher hitting nationwide brawl, I think the sides will be fairly evenly matched.

Yeah, that is kind of boring, but I'm glad that you found that. Yeah, well, I wish I'd found something more interesting, but now we know. All right, and Amos says, despite being only 203 miles apart, the Yankees and Red Sox are now separated by five games not played, four of which are due to weather postponements. Fangraph's projections have the Yankees winning the division by one game, but give them a two and a half game edge in playoff odds. The difference presumably due to the difference in remaining strength of schedule. These numbers are probably slightly outdated because Amos sent this email a couple days ago. But he says, I suspect that playoff odds do not include a double header

adjustment. An article in the Hardball Times by Shane Tortolette from 2012 found a robust 27 points of winning percentage shortfall for the 30 days following a doubleheader. So Shane found that teams play 27 points of winning percentage worse than they typically do in the month after a doubleheader. And Amos continues, Perusal of the Yankees schedule identifies, in addition to the already played and split doubleheader against the Tigers last week, three upcoming doubleheaders resulting from the Yankees' missed games. Red Sox have had just two weather postponements, etc., etc.

With a 30-day window after each, the Yankees' doubleheaders basically cover the rest of the season. Even assuming no compounding effect for overlapping doubleheader hangovers, that 27-point adjustment drops the Yankees' expected rest-of-season winning percentage just below Boston's. In a race this close, should the effect of the postponed games make the Red Sox the very slight favorites to win the division, despite the Yankees better projections? So basically, Yankees have to play a bunch of doubleheaders or have fewer off days over the rest of the year, which is not something that the playoff odds would take into account. Yeah, immediately I'm skeptical of the real value

of the 27 points of winning percentage because I don't know why a 30-day window would be appropriate to look at. I can't remember anything that happened in my life five days ago, let alone 30 days ago. So I know that everybody needs regular rest and baseball can wear on you after a while. There's a reason they call it the grind,

but I think that the numbers found probably exaggerate the real effect. That being said, the numbers that we use almost, well, they don't take into consideration the number of games remaining. They just take into consideration the team's individual odds of winning each game. And so I do think that when you have to play more baseball, of course you are likely to be a little worse than your projections. So the fact that the Yankees have five more games to cram into the rest of the season than the Red Sox, it definitely does mean something that is not taken into consideration in the publicly forecast or publicly displayed numbers. is but it's kind of like having a team like the mariners penalized for all of their travel we've never really been able to isolate what that means but it's a factor there that you just have to consider in addition to the numbers that you're looking at right yeah there's some studies that

show that players do get a little bit worse as they play more and more days without a day off and so there's no reason not to think that there wouldn't be kind of a compounding effect there for a whole team that didn't have a day off so So it's not a dramatic effect, but if you're looking for a tiebreaker, which in this particular race you basically are because these teams are pretty evenly matched and you're looking for a reason to choose one team over another that is not necessarily supported by the stats that we have. Yeah, this seems like a decent thing that you could say that the Red Sox have a slight edge for this reason. All right. Alan says, I was playing MLB The Show today and I threw a complete game shutout with the pitcher having zero strikeouts. It was apparently Jared Eikhoff. I'm on scout's honor that I'm on the variable difficulty and I'm

on Hall of Fame plus difficulty for pitching. My question is, has there ever been an MLB pitcher who has thrown a complete game with no strikeouts? Has this occurred in the last 20 years with pitchers being better than ever? Is it just crazy BABIP luck, or is it based on a particular skill set? So I play index this up, and yes, it has happened plenty of times in baseball history, And yes, it has happened plenty of times in baseball history, hundreds of times in baseball history, but as you would expect, not so much recently. So the last time that a pitcher pitched a complete game shutout with zero strikeouts was 2014, July 1st. Rick Porcello did it against the A's when he was still with the Tigers. Before that, you have to go back to Derek Lowe in 2012, Scott Erickson in 2002, and then you're back into the 90s. And it's only happened seven times since the 80s. So it's obviously really rare in today's game, both because guys don't throw complete games and because if they do, they're not going to do it with zero strikeouts. So it has happened, but I don't know that we will

see it happen again unless all the trends that we're seeing in baseball somehow reverse themselves. What about just games, not complete games, but team games with no strikeouts? Time to dig. So I'm going to do a little bit of research here. Strikeouts less than or equal to zero. So let's just start with the 2010s. Okay, so I'm not going to set any other constraints. Just looking at straight up team games, looking at this current decade, zero strikeouts.

So let's find out who's done the most. The leader, well, three. Three team games in 2011. The Royals had three of the games. They won one of them. There are five teams tied with two. So far this season, have there been any? Well, I'll tell you, the answer is no.

Every single game so far this season has had at least one strikeout. That is not so surprising. But still, i don't know kind of relevant so looking at the previous decade do you have any guesses i don't know why you would i'm just buying time here so the team with the most the 2005 giants had six that's actually twice as many as the team in second place which was the 2003 giants but in 2005 Giants had six games where they had zero strikeouts, and they went 1-5 ERA of 6.88. So not very common. Yep. So it's really rare and getting rare. That's the takeaway here.

And let's see. As one final thing I was just reminded of, does not have to do with a listener question, but it does have to do with baseball events. On Wednesday, we had the every ejection is uh closely associated with a player leaving the game that is the definition of an ejection however chris sale i don't know if you saw this but chris sale against the orioles was ejected after leaving the game so chris sale was ejected after being pulled from the mound complaining about balls and strikes i am certain that is not the first time that has happened in fact it is the most cost-free time for chris sale to possibly be ejected. I think this happened to Madison Bumgarner

too. His first ever ejection I think was after he had been taken out of the game. Oh, you're right. Yeah, that did just happen. So pitchers, it turns out, know exactly when they were supposed to mouth off, and it is when they are done pitching for the day. So it's really, if you're looking for one

opportunity to have an umpire mic'd up, that's when you want to hear it, as soon as the pitcher is done pitching. All right, so we will end there. Before we leave the subject behind forever, I have two more listener submissions and suggestions for the baseball equivalent of the J.R. Smith play, a baseball brain fart along the lines of J.R. Smith's in game one of the NBA finals. First one comes from Jerry. He says, it may not be quite as good as some of the others, but if history had been different, I imagine it could have been in the same ballpark. In game one of the 2010 World Series,

the Rangers had runners on first and third with one out. Nelson Cruz hit a grounder that Tim Lincecum stopped and trapped Michael Young between third and home. Instead of trying to get him in a rundown, he just ran Young back to the bag at third. However, there was no Rangers runner trying to get to third, so this just loaded the bases with one out for Ian Kinsler. Luckily for the Giants, Kinsler then grounded into a double play. However, if the Rangers had gotten more runs in this inning, I imagine that play could have been viewed very differently, which is quite true. I remember the Winsicum play. And then the next one from Kanan is a hypothetical. He says, I think the baseball equivalent of the J.R. Smith gaffe would be a runner on third in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth, thinking there are two outs instead of the actual one out, and breaking

for home on contact on a potential sacrifice fly. It works as a J.R. Smith parallel because, one, if he doesn't make the blunder, it doesn't guarantee his team wins. The runner might still get thrown out. The Cavs might still not have scored. Two, it doesn't end the blunder, it doesn't guarantee his team wins. The runner might still get thrown out. The Cavs might still not have scored. Two, it doesn't end the game. It just extends it. And three, the shot of the on-deck batter and the dugout screaming at the runner to go back to third would mirror LeBron's hilarious reaction to JR as the latter dribbles toward half court.

Good suggestion. And now we can leave poor JR alone. While I'm at it, a couple responses to the DH pitcher hitting debate wanted to get to. I feel like these are probably targeted at me. Dr. Dave says, I was a little surprised that nobody seems to be making the argument in favor of pitcher hitting that I would find most compelling, namely that there's enough difference in hitting skill among various pitchers that it isn't really fair to take that away from the better ones as part of their value package. That would be similar, but not exactly analogous, to not wanting to let robo-umps take away framing as a way that some catchers can add

extra value relative to their peers. I think Jeff's analogy to base running is pretty good. It's a thing where there isn't a huge difference among teams in the total package they get, but there is a big difference between the best and worst individuals. Is that worth preserving? I don't feel strongly about it, but as I said, I'm surprised that nobody is making that kind of argument, rather than arguing from aesthetics or threats to revenue or moral superiority. That is a fair point, Dave, and I think I would care more about that if even a few pitchers were legitimately good hitters, but even the best active guys like Greinke and Bumgarner are roughly Jeff Mathis level hitters on a career basis, and Mathis is one of the worst hitters of

all time. So Bumgarner, Greinke and Wainwright have added about four career wins above replacement to their offense, which isn't nothing, but compared to their pitching value, it just isn't enough to excite me. So I'm kind of okay with doing away with that. And then one more from Jeff in San Francisco.

My question is simple. Who is a better hitter, Madison Bumgarner or the current version of Chris Davis, which will have a better season a better hitter, Madison Bumgarner or the current version of Chris Davis? Which will have a better season as a hitter in 2018? Which would have a better season if both had a full season's worth of at-bats? I would point out again that Bumgarner has a lower career OPS than Jeff Mathis, but granted, Bumgarner's been a lot better than that since 2014,

even if it's only in about 300 plate appearances. Under normal circumstances, I'd definitely take Davis over Bumgarner for the rest of this season, even now, even given that there's a bar somewhere in Baltimore offering shots every time Chris Davis gets a hit, and it is not putting that bar out of business. The thing is, though, that if Bumgarner got to hit every day, he'd have more potential for improvement, so I might take him in that case, except that I know that when Jeff wrote about Baumgartner's batting a few years ago, he was an extreme high ball hitter. He just looked for really high pitches and then swung as hard as he could, which worked pretty well by pitcher hitting standards. But if he were hitting every day and he tried to make that approach work, I'm not sure that it would. So he might have some exploitable flaws that opposing pitchers just haven't found

because they haven't had to. I think those weaknesses would probably be exposed. So I don't know what's going on with Chris Davis right now, but based on the body of work, I'm going to take Davis over Bumgarner. Maybe I'm just showing my pro-DH and anti-pitcher hitting bias. All right, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have recently pledged their support include Rusty Richardson, Chris Clarkin, John Papaberides, Connor Skipper, and David Whitcomb. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group

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