Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1268: Replay, Reviewed

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo, Jeff’s ideal afterlife, Mike Trout‘s future and what an extension for Trout might look like, the Tyler Flowers extension, Michael Kopech‘s impending Tommy John surgery and the UCL scourge, how being Tampa Bay’s “bulk guy” is affecting Ryan Yarbrough‘s WAR, Mallex Smith vs. Giancarlo Stanton, a […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1268 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, Uh, Thursday's all so sad We want to get to. It's hard at this time of year to come up with non-guest topics that can take up an entire episode. It just kind of feels like we've discussed all of the season storylines like several times. And now we just kind of have to fast forward to the end of the season and then we can talk about the playoffs, which is fun. But right now we're kind of in no man's land. Yeah, no, that's pretty much. So why don't we start things off? Let's start with a fan favorite and a personal favorite, your favorite. Let's set an embarrassingly low minimum of 30 plate appearances. That's 30 plate appearances. I know where this is going. So we've got 593 players this year who have batted at least 30 times. Now, the player in question has batted 38 times, so we're setting a lower minimum even for him.

But Williams Astadillo, 38 plate appearances, WRC plus of 142, ties him with, I don't know, Eugenio Suarez, one point ahead of Nelson Cruz. So Williams Astadillo homered twice. He homered in back-to-back games. He was playing the Royals, so he's basically still at AAA. But he had a walk-off home run on Sunday. He got a hanging pitch from, I forget if it was Jason Hamill or Ian Kennedy,

because they're almost equivalently bad to me. Pretty sure it was Hamill. Kennedy's in the rotation. But Astadio is batting.297. He's got an on-base of.316. He's slugging.595. He's got a walk rate of 0% and a strikeout rate of 5.3%. He has made contact with 92, I believe, 92% of his swings. I'll just do a quick little sort here.

Here are the highest contact rates in baseball. Tyler Chatwood, for some reason, is number one. That's weird. Breivik Valera is number two. Luis Guillorme, never had to say that out loud is number three and then there's williams estadio a little bit ahead of joe panic so estadio since coming up he's he's caught a few games he has not lost time to chris jimenez yet behind the plate for the twins and estadio been really good yeah no i he i mean he's kind of been a podcast mascot

he was a curiosity when he came up we've been fascinated by him for a while, but I don't know that we thought he was good. We thought that he deserved a shot, I think, but I don't know that we thought he was like a genuinely good player. good player. I mean, I don't want to overstate things, but given that he's played just about every position and he clearly has really raised his power output this year, he seems like he could be a pretty useful utility player at the very least for the foreseeable future. I mean, I don't know whether there's any resistance to playing him at catcher. It took them a while to start doing that, and now he's doing that. And it seems like he's proven himself like he can handle these positions and he can handle the bat so i've been kind of conflicted about his homers because i want him to be a no true outcomes guy and he's now a one true outcome guy but i can live with that as long as he doesn't strike out or walk if he homers a lot and enough to keep himself in the majors i think that that's good. So, I mean, he's definitely like you'd have to think pending what he does in the next

couple of weeks that he would enter next year as like a pretty appealing opening day bench guy, right? I mean, how many people can do what he does? Almost no one. No, no, you're right. And to be able to play so many positions, he can be the Twins third catcher. He can be the Twins backup first baseman, second baseman, I guess. Short stop, who cares?

Third baseman, he can play in backups. No, he can play the corner outfield. He's already played center field. Wasn't his debut in center field? He's not going to be a pinch runner, probably. But on the other hand, we'll have a little banter about what's going on in the AAA Pacific Coast League. We can talk about that in a few minutes. But something else I noticed here, I just sorted the contact rate list in the AAA Pacific Coast League. We can talk about that in a few minutes. But something else I noticed here,

I just, I sorted the contact rate list in the other direction. And so this is something I didn't realize. Okay, looking at the, looking at the, I don't know, 22 lowest contact rates for hitters this year. 22 lowest contact rates. 20 of them, unsurprisingly, pitchers. Noah Sindergaard has made contact with 39% of his swings.ler o'neill is 15th worst cardinals outfielder for mariners prospect 56 percent

contact second lowest contact rate in all of baseball a guy i like but he has not done anything to earn more playing time jabari blush this year with the angels again he's only batted 38 times he's made contact with 45 percent of his swings jabari he's a position player and he's only batted 38 times he's made contact with 45 of his swings jimari he's a position player and he's worse than everyone except noah cinder guard and then kyle freeland shows up in third to worst but jimari blush making contact with less than half of his swings he has made contact less than half as often as williams astadio and also astadio out slugging jabari blush so there's just something to that bat to ball skill element that i don't know i would i think i might have mentioned this before my version of heaven is uh is a place where you go and you get instantaneous answers to any question

that you ever want to ask and in my version of heaven was probably the first nine questions i would ask would have to do with williams astadio getting a long major league career at like every position. Because I want to know how he would be as a catcher and a center fielder, maybe as a pitcher, whatever. I'm getting these answers, so I might as well ask the questions. I just want to know how Estadio would do. And I wish that there were more of him. And I know he's got like a sibling who's in professional baseball. It's not the same.

I want Estadio to play every day at like every position and i want to know how he does because i i'm just so glad he's doing something with his limited playing time because every little thing that he does just opens the door a little further you don't think it would be boring to have all the answers instantly after the initial orgy of answers that you've wondered about for years and years you don't think there's something to not knowing and wondering and trying to find out also in my version of heaven after like a day and a half i just die and i don't have any consciousness or anything i just i just black out okay well that's pretty close to death so i want it yeah right i can promise you that you will probably get at it at some point so that's's something to look forward to, I guess.

It's going to be better at podcasting now that you reminded me. Yeah, enhance our performance for the rest of this episode. So speaking of Angels outfielders, should we just transition to Trout right now? Because we did want to talk about Trout at some point. Now, I and Michael Bauman and John Roggele did a whole episode about Shohei Otani last week, and Shohei Otani is almost worth another episode since then because he just keeps hitting and doing incredible things. And he is now, I believe, the fifth best hitter in baseball, minimum 250 plate appearances on a per plate appearance basis, so that's incredible. But a lot of people have used the Otani injury as a springboard to discuss Trout and what its implications for Trout are, and we did not touch on that, so I figured we could now. I believe Ken Rosenthal has written a couple of articles

about this and saying that essentially the Angels don't want to trade Trout. They said that in the aftermath of the Otani injury. Billy Epler said, we're not trading Trout. And if they want to keep him, he's got two years left on his deal. And Ken wrote an article advocating that they explore an extension that they try to lock him up if they're so set on keeping him. And then he has an update saying that the Angels are considering that or are planning to talk to Trout about an extension just to feel him out and see where he stands on that. So I guess we can talk about, well, for one thing, why Mike Trout would have any interest in extending his tenure with the Angels given how it's gone. It's going to be a short conversation. Yeah. Can you construct a competent team around me? Could we make the playoffs maybe? Yeah, I don't know why he would want to stay there really

unless he likes the allure of just being a one-team guy and spending his whole career in one place or maybe he likes the area or the organization. I don't know. There are reasons why he might want to stay there, but it seems like there are more compelling reasons why he would not want to stay there in that you'd want to go maybe to a market where, well, I was going to say a market where you

get more attention or endorsements or something, but that seems to be the opposite of what he wants. So maybe that's a plus for Anaheim, but you'd want to go somewhere where you can win. And they have failed to win with Mike Trout, which is really one of the more glaring failures, failed to win with Mike Trout, which is really one of the more glaring failures, I think, in sports over the last several years. And there's also no weather there, and there are no Philadelphia Eagles there, and those are things that Trout likes. So it seems like there are a lot of reasons for him to want to go elsewhere. I don't know. Let's just say that you're going to have that conversation. How do we even figure out what the terms would be? Because the terms for the extension that he's currently playing under were very team-friendly,

it seemed like. He did not hold out for every last dollar. He seemed to just want to get the guaranteed windfall. And he is very rich. He could have been richer, but he took what they offered and what they negotiated. And as far as we know, he's happy with it. So maybe he's not a guy who wants to maximize his earning potential. But if he were, what kind of contract would you have to offer? So first of all, one of the things I like when you talk about a situation like this, you talk about like, okay, Mike Trout, what does he like?

He likes the Eagles and he likes weather. And when you think about like what would appeal to a player about a city it's we always talk about them like these children like well he really likes rocks so he wants to play somewhere where there's rocks like you know mike trout's got a family he has like an established community a network of people he knows and in the area like you know there's probably things that appeal to him more like yeah maybe maybe mike hampton also so no no you're totally right but you know like maybe maybe mike hampton really did like the schools in denver or whatever was the reason for signing with colorado now also the money so with mike jack now i i think it is only natural to figure that there

would be something pulling him toward the east coast just because that's where his family is and he seems like he's really closely knit with his parents and his friends who live back in new jersey but one of the only arguments it's so rare to have a player like this who then signs re-signs with the team he's already been with before he hits free agency and now i can tell you that one of the exceptions to this rule would be felix hernandez who has signed multiple extensions with the mariners but that is one of those things that no one's ever really been able to explain, like why he felt so loyal to re-sign with a team that was bad. But it does happen. It has happened.

It's happened twice with Felix Hernandez, who is of a similar profile to Trent, obviously not quite as good as Mike Trent, but you have this homegrown product who's playing far away from home but stays with the organization and has stayed with the organization long enough for the entire fan base to turn against him and hate him now for being overpaid so that's one of the downsides of how these things go mike trap was not a pitcher so it likely wouldn't go like that i think one of the reasons his first contract his first extension with the angels was so team friendly is because there's just not a precedent for someone so good and then yeah signing in this era it just doesn't happen so when he signed for

like 33.25 million per year his free agency years that is way too low for what he is but there's just there wasn't a model yet for that kind of money and there's still not really a model for what mike trout deserves in this market you can talk about maybe the alex rodriguez contract but even that's going back so far but who who is a player that you can think of who is re-signed with a team at his peak i mean we've got like clayton kershaw signed a long contract with the dodgers back in 2014 that came with opt-outs joey vato signed a 12-year contract with the Reds in 2014. I don't remember how old he was then, but he wasn't Trout prime years. And Albert Pujols was getting older. Miguel Cabrera was getting older.

Alex Rodriguez went to a different team. I don't know why I mentioned Pujols because he did not sign with the same team he was with. So, what, there's Derek Jeter, but then he was with the Yankees. So that's different. Joe Maurer, I i guess could count but the point is not a lot buster posey is a would be a good example but again he's a catcher so there's just all these it's rare for this to happen i it's really hard for me to understand why mike trout would bypass free agency when he would literally be the best free agent ever, presumably?

Well, yeah, I guess so. He's basically the best player ever up to this point. So almost by default, he would have to be. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, Ken in his article, so he said just kind of throwing it out there, eight years at 40 million per season. I don't know whether that sounds high or low to you. It's just an opening offer or not even a serious one, but I don't know. Does that sound in the right ballpark or does that just not? I mean, the thing about Trout is that he's just so dependable, at least up to this point point even though he has had a couple injuries that have derailed his pursuits of like all-time war records he's still just worth like eight nine ten wins every single year and that doesn't necessarily continue indefinitely but it's not like he's

up and down he's both the best and the most consistent and dependable player. And that is worth a fortune. So I don't know if, I mean, eight years and $40 million per, that's a fortune. But I don't know if that's enough of a fortune. Right. It doesn't feel like it. He's currently on track to hit free agency in advance of his age 29 season. So I don't know why Mike Trout, if he were any other player with any other agent, I don't know why he would sign for it.

Eight years at that point, he's been all-time player. He would probably want to sign a contract that carries him for the rest of his career. Now, I would imagine usually these extension conversations don't really come to fruition until the spring anyway. That's when we seem to see long-term extensions come to pass and become official. But I would think that if you were mike

trout or whoever it is that represents mike trout lsw baseball never heard of that okay whoever represents him is going to want to wait to see what like bryce harper gets and what man machado gets as free agents this winter because the the the issue that you have with the best players in baseball is that by how they perform they are worth so much money per year. But teams, because of the luxury tax threshold, teams can't really give someone like $60 million a year because it just eats up too much of the available payroll space. And so teams need to find ways to add other value. And this is why we've seen so many opt-out clauses lately is because opt-out clauses are worth something to the player even though they don't cost a team direct money so there's going to be especially with Harper I think because of the whole Boris connection I think that there's going to be some

sort of really creative kind of contract that he signs for I don't know if that means there's like an opt-out after every single season or what but it will be interesting to see how Mike Trout and his agent would would follow that because I don't know maybe Trout's just a simple guy and he doesn't want any opt-outs. He just likes years and money and that's it. He just doesn't want to have to think about it. I don't know. He's obviously not the same as Bryce Harper. But I think in more ways than one, someone like Harper is going to have a precedent-setting contract.

And then after that, I doubt that we'll be able to talk about a trout extension in such simple terms as what Rosenthal proposed. Yeah, right. That does make sense just to see how this winter plays out. I mean, if it's another disastrous winter and no one signs for anything, then I guess it weakens a player's negotiating position or makes him more inclined to sign an extension. to sign an extension. But because there are young superstar types in the market this year, more so than there were last year, I think maybe we will see that even if the market as a whole is slow, I think those guys will still get paid. So that might change the elite players thinking. I mean, like I was talking to Tyler Flowers the other day for the book that I'm working on, and he just signed an extension with the Braves. And I asked him whether that was a difficult decision for him because he has become a dramatically improved player.

He's really good. Over the last few years, he's been the best framer in baseball. I believe he is still this year, even in not as much playing time as other catchers have gotten, leading them all in framing runs. And he's also become a better hitter too over the past few years. And yet he signed an is from the area and he was drafted by the Braves. So he has a lot of loyalty to the organization and to that area and his family's there. And so it was just better for him. I mean, we were just talking about how there are other considerations. It's not just money. And in his case, there are very important considerations.

He has kids and they're in school there and they have friends and all of that. So that's part of it. But he did also mention the free agent market and looking at other guys, especially post-30 guys, just kind of waiting around for calls that never came. Or, well, in some cases the calls came and they hung up and then they wish they had taken them later, I guess. But it seems like that is something that is on the non-superstars mind very much these days. And so, you know, because he knows that teams value his framing skill, and he's heard that other teams have even used him as an example of like, here's what you should do.

Here's how you should catch a pitch. Here's how it works for him. Try to emulate that. So it would be interesting to see if he could get paid for that skill, but he wasn't willing to risk it and also just had reasons to say where he is. Right. Yeah. And now, of course, when you're dealing with Tyler Flowers versus Mike Trout, then you're just going to have different conversations about what free agency is like. But if you are, I think it only makes sense that you would be a little bit nervous about what free agency has to offer in the future. When he is a free agent, it will be still before the

next CBA. So that's a factor. But, you know, as always, it's hard to tell what Trout will be interested in. He clearly doesn't seem like he's just out there for some sort of money grab. I should amend to something I said previously. Alex Rodriguez was exceptionally good when he was a free agent. Alex Rodriguez was coming off a 10-win year, and he was entering his age 25 season. So Alex Rodriguez, best free agent ever. Probably won't have a better free agent. I don't know. It seems unlikely. But Mike Trout, best free agent in like 15, almost 20 years. It will be almost exactly 20 years since A-Rod hit free agency, if and when Trout hits free agency. So it's hard to see, it's hard to imagine that he would accept an extension from the Angels unless the Angels offered him.

I don't even know what they would have to offer him because he would, in theory, he'd only accept an extension from the Angels if they offered him a market-based, a market-rate contract. But we don't even know what a market- rate contract would be until he hits the market so there's that so it's uh it's hard to envision but if you want to talk about how the angels seem screwed because they have no pitching and shohei otani will not be able to pitch in 2019 how good did the a's look coming into this season i don't know like obviously the angels aren't as good as the astros but i i do admire the principle of saying we will not and cannot rebuild while we have mike trout yeah i don't know what the the real motivation is there maybe they just don't want to rebuild because they think it'll make it less likely that trout

would want to sign an extension and then it And then ultimately it's all just business concerns, but it's better this way. Baseball would not be better with teams like the Angels trading players like Mike Trout. Yeah, I agree. And I guess we'll have to get used to the trade rumors and it's not the first time, but there will be more articles about how they should trade Trout or will they trade Trout, and I think it's unlikely that that will happen, certainly until next winter when he has one year left. If it looks like the Angels are probably not going to contend that year, then maybe they consider it, but it just seems unlikely that it will happen this winter, and he's just such a great player that it's tough to get that kind of talent back in return and it's tough to sell that to a fan base and i don't know it's

it's probably not going to happen but it's the kind of thing where unless he is traded or he signs extension it's just always going to be a topic of conversation yeah and i remember this from having written about the mariners having felix and andes as a bad team i know exactly what this feels like when you're a fan it's obnoxious it's aggravating and you just tend to get really defensive about it and say well no we have mike trout no one else can have mike trout i think that's how the angels feel it's probably part rational part irrational but it's uh i think this is one of those instances where it's it's good to have a little irrational defensiveness even if you do work for the team because you just yeah that i mean i

don't want to oversimplify things but you really just don't want to be the guy who traded mike full stop all right so let's move on to some even more depressing news michael kopech since we last spoke has received a recommendation that he have to Tommy John surgery, and it appears that he will. And that's a bummer for the White Sox and their rebuild, but also a bummer for baseball fans because we were pretty excited about Kopech. found out how to throw strikes all of a sudden and was really good and maybe wasn't throwing 104 as advertised a couple years ago but was very effective and had really improved his control and now all of a sudden he has Tommy John surgery and it just kind of came out of nowhere like it wasn't one of these things like Otani where you're hearing about elbow issues for months it was just you know one day he was pitching and one day he wasn't. And he said it wasn't really a specific pitch that he felt something snap.

It was just like a little bit of discomfort and he didn't really think much of it. But I guess they got a precautionary exam and it showed that he will have to have Tommy John surgery. will have to have Tommy John surgery. So there's been a lot of hand-wringing about Tommy John surgery in the past few days just because Kopec and Otani kind of coincided here. And I asked John when we had him on last week what the larger trend is, because it can be easy to lose sight of that when you are mourning the temporary loss of one particular pitcher. And he said, and Jay Jaffe has an article up at Fangraphs now showing the actual data, that if anything, we're past peak Tommy John or we're not currently at peak Tommy John. Just eyeballing the graph that Jay has in his post here, it looks like we've had the fewest Tommy John surgeries this year, at least so far, that we've had in any year since

2011, it looks like, both for all professionals and for MLB pitchers only, and pretty close to some previous years. But it's definitely not worse than the last few years, and it appears to be slightly better. And as Jay said, it's cold comfort because we're still going to lose Kopech and seems like Otani, even though he has not formally made that decision yet. But I think as bad as the problem is and as seemingly unsolvable as it is, at least so far, it's not getting worse, which I guess is kind of a victory, even though pitchers are throwing harder and harder all the time. It's kind of like the degree to which we moan about Tommy John surgery depends on who has recently had Tommy John surgery. Like a few years ago when there was just a stack of young, impressive pitchers who were having Tommy John surgery all at once, then it

looked terrible, and this is destroying baseball. And it actually was worse at that time than it is now. And now Kopec gets it, and Otani seemingly will have to get it. And so we're all kind of, you know, back to talking about Tommy John surgery, where it seemed like we just hadn't really been talking about it much for the previous year or so. So it's still bad. It's not worse than it was, but it was really bad before. So it's, as Jay said, cold comfort. It's hard to imagine that this trend is going to get better anytime soon, like meaningfully better, just as teams prioritize velocity and throwing all the time, et cetera.

And I think you're absolutely right that this is one of those areas where when you have anecdotal evidence, like if, if one high profile or really exciting pitcher needs Tommy John surgery, then it just becomes the conversation because there's always enough Tommy John surgery going around that there's more than one case you can point to. And you can just say like, as, as Jeff Passan tweeted out last week after the news, this is the worst thing about baseball is the UCL tears. There are plenty of things like baseball is a slow sport and September roster expansion is ridiculous. But when you have really, really promising young pitchers getting hurt and having this happen and going away for 15, 18 months, that sucks. Because baseball is better for having the really exciting young players

able to perform good pitching i know i'm i'm a self-described pitching dork but good pitching is really fun i find it more appealing than good hitting or good defense i think it's just so much fun to watch pitchers throw things that move in they move really fast and they move in these incredible directions with sharp break and when that's taken away and then you replace Otani with someone on the Angels depth chart or you replace Kopech with someone on the White Sox depth chart, it gets worse. Those players aren't as good. I don't mean to denigrate the players down to the depth chart, but let's face it. You're not as fun to watch.

It's worse for the sport it's hardly a like that we we can talk about how there's not a demonstrated correlation between velocity and and tommy john surgery i don't have all the evidence in front of me i know that there's evidence pointing in both directions but i i think that if you look at a case like kopeck could let's i think we can just say it's not a surprise when you throw so hard like you there is a limit to how much your body can tolerate it only makes sense that there would be so it's not a shock but it's worth remembering the the white socks are a team that called up michael kopeck did not call up eloy jimenez and this is why this is exactly what the calculus is they're both ready for the major leagues they're both top prospects really really

good young players but when you're thinking about that extra year of service time, you can just count on the position player to be healthy and good six, seven years down the road, more than you can a pitcher. This is exactly why the White Sox did what they did. This is why other teams will call up pitchers before their position players, just because the position players are more reliable. And this is one of, right here, just like we were talking about last week. This is why a free agency age limit or threshold would have to be different for position players and pitchers because pitchers just have it so much worse.

It's a horrible thing to do to pitch. Don't pitch. Yeah. No, I don't want to be doom and gloom, but it just seems like there is not really a solution for this problem like other than a change in how teams i don't know prioritize pitching styles like if teams decide well injuries are bad hard throwers get injured more so let's find guys who are you know maybe slightly less good but they're durable and they'll pitch forever maybe that will lead to a change. And maybe there will be a swing where teams start to appreciate command guys who don't throw quite as hard, but are just more dependable.

Not that, like, soft tossers never get the surgery. I mean, even today a soft tosser is, like, throwing 92 or something. So it's like, you know, everyone's kind of throwing hard, but there's just no, I mean, the UCL is just not a strong part of the body. It just didn't evolve to support this sort of stress. And some guys just, maybe it's partly mechanical. Certainly some mechanics place more stress on it than others, but they all stress it more than it was really designed or evolved to be stressed. So I don't know what can be improved. Like maybe the surgery can be shortened in some way. Maybe, you know, if there were a way to preemptively strengthen the UCL by like going in

and doing a less serious surgery to add some sort of artificial support to that part of your body so that it would not break like maybe that's the future but otherwise i just don't know like humans don't evolve on a scale where suddenly the ucl is going to get stronger overnight and as long as pitchers are still throwing really hard it seems like we're just sort of stuck with this. So that sucks. Right. Do you think that it would be possible? Do you think that there's any way to see? We don't have it yet, but do you think that there's any way to see

which pitchers are putting more stress on their elbows? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know the science, but I know that biomechanical analyses that labs do and various technology does at least purports to be able to measure the pounds per inch that you're placing on that joint. So I think it's possible. I don't know that every team and every pitcher does that sort of exam, but I think it's possible.

Now, the missing element there whenever you have that sort of measurement is you can say, okay, X pitcher generates Y amount of force on his UCL. And then the one thing we don't know and can never know is the tolerance that that ligament can withstand. Everyone seems to be different. Now, one option that you could do if you're the Angels, you could murder Shohei otani and take out his ucl and stress test it and then you could be like well now we know this is how much forces ucl could withstand and we just need to reanimate his person so right that seems to be the greatest problem i don't know it's presumably not possible to figure out what a ucl can tolerate within a person. But I wonder, you're not a doctor, I'm not a doctor,

so let's talk about doctor things. Do you think that there would be a, the UCL is only one ligament in a body full of ligaments and tendons and whatnot. And do you think that if you removed some amount of ligament from somewhere else in the body, you could test the strength of that and then have an idea what

the UCL could tolerate? Maybe, I suppose. But then, so if you do that and you find out that this person's UCL is strong or weak or, I mean, I don't know that you can adjust a pitcher's delivery in every case in such a way that he can still throw the way that makes him good at throwing. And you can probably do something to minimize the strain, but unless you're just going to say, well, don't throw as hard, which I guess you could do, but it's going to be hard to convince a pitcher to do that in a market where you're valued for throwing hard. So I don't know, even if you had that information, it seems like it would be at least sometimes hard to do anything about it.

Something I should have looked up and didn't yet could, but we'll see if you know off the top of your head. Have you seen studies on whether Tommy John surgery is more common for starters or relievers? I don't think I have, no. Well, then what we're going to do here is a little editing magic to make it look like I have remembered this on the fly. Yeah, because that is something that people will say that, you know, if he's injury prone as a starter, then put him in the bullpen and it'll be less strain. And when people ask me that, I always say, well, I don't actually know if it is less strain. Well, I don't actually know if it is less strain. Maybe it is, but you're throwing maybe even harder in short bursts as a reliever,

and you're throwing more often with less recovery time. So who's to say it's even safer? Well, I looked up an old article. This is like five years old, but I can read you one sentence. Baseball has shown us that this, referring to relief pitching, is not a safer rule with the percentage of relievers needing the surgery very similar to the rate for starters despite early successes by Isringhausen and John Smoltz. So what I thought was my genius idea was that actually bullpenning is good, but actually bullpenning might not make a difference. So, you know, the same argument. You'd think the guys who were throwing less often would get less hurt, but also you're throwing harder.

We all know how relief pitching works so what you need what you need is pitchers who move to the bullpen and then don't throw harder so i don't know that's presumably not really doable so i'm gonna guess that the throwing harder going max effort all the time is really just counteracts the benefit of throwing less often so i guess in that way the modern era of baseball is not helping pitchers to stay healthy now of course we do know the company big league advance has been in the news lately michael schwimmer as uh is the the face of the company and this is the company that had a lawsuit filed by francisco mejia that was then dropped by francisco mejia publicly

apologizing to the company for bringing a lawsuit against them. Anyway, Big League Advance, according to a recent Sports Illustrated article by Jack Dickey, I believe, claims that it can identify pitchers who are likely to get hurt. So that sounds like that's not true. However, the idea of it is definitely what almost all teams are trying to work on. Because whenever anybody asks what's the next threshold, the next frontier for baseball analysis, it is injury. It's been injuries for like 10 years and it continues. Which is interesting because what else from 10 years ago that you said

that's the next frontier has there been seemingly no progress on? A lot of the former frontiers are now pretty settled and they have sheriffs and trains and running through them and they're not really the frontier anymore and injuries i mean we wouldn't necessarily know if a team had figured out injuries to a greater extent than any other like unless they said so which would not be in their best interest unless they just wanted to be magnanimous and actually help other players who are on other teams out. But if they didn't say that, then we would just have to wait long enough to see that they had not had any injuries over a certain

sample, and then you could start to ask questions. But that could even just be a luck and randomness thing. So yeah, you will still hear everyone say, well, look at the number of injury days per season and the number of millions or billions of dollars that are earned by players who are not playing. Obviously, if someone could figure that out, it would be just industry changing. And that is why it's so hard to believe that big league advance would have cracked this problem here and no one else with any other team has. So that's a stretch. Sheriffs and trains.

Do you think all frontiers operate like it's 1847? I guess. Yeah, I guess so. All frontiers in my head are the old west. Yeah, this gets into a conversation. I feel like we've had it before, but a conversation. If some team did, quote unquote, crack the code of injuries, or even more realistically, given how science works, if some team was like 20% better than other teams at identifying injury risk or something,

then you get into the conversation of should that team be obligated morally or by rule to share that information with other teams and i i don't have an easy answer that it's it's easier for me to say of course everyone should know because injuries i don't like thinking about injuries as like a competitive advantage i don't i think it just kind of feels squishy you know because you want it to be about talent and and the the players that can accumulate, not the players you can keep on the field. But I understand that teams would look at that differently, especially if you're, I don't know, let's just use a team. Call them like the Houston Astros who decide, you know what? We don't care if other pitchers get hurt.

As long as ours don't, we'll win five world series and then baby will share our information as soon as our friend office desires to retire and take a train to the next frontier and just live out their days looking at the sunset so yeah now i guess the good news is we're probably not anywhere close to a day where we have to have that conversation for real because i don't think anyone is particularly close to cracking the code everyone gets hurt but i don't know i uh i guess i i don't look at injury days very often as a form of analysis. So I don't know. Maybe some teams are actually doing a lot better than others. since their founding, and we were talking about some player development things. And he was talking about how the Royals in the 70s had pioneered eye tests and applying eye tests to players and had come up with a device that you could test like an amateur player and see if he had good eyesight or good depth perception and that that was a competitive advantage for them. And he was saying that, you know,

other teams were basically begging the Royals to tell them about this test and how they could do it and how they could use the device that the Royals were using. And eventually the Royals owner, Ewing Kaufman, as Art Stewart remembered it, just kind of gave it to everyone. But that's an example where that's a little different because it's not like figuring out how to help players see better or to avoid eye problems it's just detecting it and i guess ruling those players out or bumping them down your draft board as a result

but that was an example of a technique or a technology that one team had that everyone else wanted and i guess just kind of guilted the first team into sharing with them so it would be interesting if that happened injury wise i don't know whether there would just be a moral obligation that the team would succumb to but in practice probably you just wouldn't be able to keep the secret for all that long right i mean it's hard to keep secrets in baseball, especially a secret that important and a secret that probably involves players and a number of people on the staff who would maybe leave and go to other teams and take that knowledge with them. It's really hard to protect that sort of knowledge.

Right. Yeah, I agree because people change the teams that they work for and then they will want to bring that information over. I want to write, in a few months I'd like to write about how this works with players and like when teams are trying to teach players to follow a certain system or maybe teams are coming up with analytical advice for players in the minor leagues or the major leagues for ways for them to improve and maybe the teams have highlighted certain areas based on certain analyses that those teams run but if you think that you have a competitive analysis in your play your analytical player development how much of that information do

you want to share with a player when you know that players can change teams and then to take it with them and i think that's a an interesting conversation that teams are probably trying having to have more often now but anyway i, I don't have any answers yet. I haven't talked to anyone about it for any meaningful length of time, but it is something to think about that any team can only really keep any sort of competitive advantage

for a fleeting amount of time. There's just so much shifting around between employers. Yeah. So a couple other things I wanted to mention. You brought up bullpenning. We've talked about the opener enough this year, but there's one byproduct of the opener that we have not really discussed. And that is the effect on war that someone who is involved in the opener is either the opener or the bulk guy, whether you get a boost or some guys get hurt by that. We were

talking about whether there'd be an impact on players' salaries and arbitration. And I was saying that, well, Ryan Yarbrough, who's been, as the Rays call it, the bulk guy who comes in after the opener, he's, I think, 14 and 5 now. So he's winning lots of games and getting lots of decisions. So it hasn't hurt him in that sense. But as Josh Morgan, who writes for D-R's Bay, pointed out last week, he is actually getting dinged war-wise, fancrafts war-wise, I assume both wars-wise, I haven't checked, but there are two different replacement levels for pitchers. There's a starter replacement level and a reliever replacement level, and so if you pitch in relief, you get compared to other relievers, and if you pitch as a starter, you get compared to other relievers. And if you pitch

as a starter, you get compared to other starters. And that's only fair because relievers get to come in and just go all out and they don't have to face guys second or third time through the order. And it's an easier job in certain ways. But Yarbrough is technically a reliever because he has, except for six games this year, he has come in in relief in every one of those games. But he has basically a starter's workload. He's the bulk guy, and he typically pitches about as much as a starter would. So he has the replacement level of a reliever, which is higher, and so it's a higher bar for him to clear, but he has the workload of a reliever which is higher and so it's a higher bar for him to clear but he has the workload of a

starter and so as josh showed this is probably costing him a win above replacement or something like that because of this and so now there's some discussion of how to adjust war in order to help pitchers like this or be fair to pitchers like this there's some conversation going on at tom tango's site about how to handle this do you just decide well you faced this number of hitters so you were a reliever in this case or a starter in this case or do you do it in a less binary way and just scale it in some way so that maybe you have like a certain bar that you have to clear but then after that it's like for each hitter that you face you get like an intermediate replacement level that's somewhere between the starter one and the reliever one so the bright

minds of sabermetrics are currently figuring this out but if you're ryan yarbrough that is an actual cost i don't know whether arbitration even cares about war at this point, but maybe give less of a crap about war. It's only 2018. Ask me again in 2043. So that is not present. Yarbrough will point to his ERA and his wins and losses. I mean, Yarbrough I don't think is even close to arbitration yet. But anyway, it is a worthwhile argument in just one of several ways in which the Rays are trying to sort of break the models that we use.

I just looked up teams with relief appearances of at least three innings. So the team with the fewest such relief appearances, Cleveland Indians, they had three. The Astros have four. The Rockies have five. The median is, I guess it would be 12.5. And second place, the Royals have 20. That's 20 relief appearances of at least three innings and

in first place the tampa bay rays have 63 63 relief appearances of at least three innings that's a lot that's more than three times as many as the team in second place so on the one hand this is not urgent because there's only one team really doing this and even though i know like the a's have used a few openers and some other teams have used an opener from time to time. This is really the Rays only doing this. So it's not super important because for now it is isolated to one team. But that also means that this is unlikely to go away. The Rays have had a really successful pitching staff this year. The Rays are 14 games over 500.

They just swept the Orioles. They're on the verge of bypassing the Mariners and being the team in second place in the impossible AL wildcard hunt. So this is going to go around. So the Rays are, in a sense, giving us a chance, or us. I'm not the one who's figuring out this math. I will never figure out this math. But the Rays are an ongoing experiment to allow people smarter than me and you, like Tom Tango, to figure this out before it gets worse. Yeah, I think every team, if it's not already experimenting with the opener, is having that conversation because someone with the front office or ownership or whatever is going to be like, well, this team is doing it and they seem to be doing pretty well, so why aren't we

doing it or should we doing it? I was talking to someone from the Phillies just the other day who said they're having meetings about whether they should use the opener it's probably a meeting that's happening everywhere if it hasn't happened already but before we leave the race i just wanted to recognize the fun fact that you tweeted that malik smith and john carlos stanton have the same wrc plus 124 you cannot imagine two more different hitters, really, and yet they have been equally productive. It's like your old article about Juan Pierre versus Adam Dunn, right? Yes, right.

That was you a long time ago, a Grantland piece. Yeah. Just all kinds of fun, except that John Carlos Tanton has also been good. He's like a surprisingly good defensive outfielder given his, I don't know, bulk, his towering mass. And yeah, it's just fun. Malik Smith is out there batting like 375 or something. And he's caught up to John Carlos Stanton.

So do you have anything else? So I wanted to mention a couple things that happened this weekend. One, well, let's do a listener email about this, although this is not a listener email episode, but there was a lot of rain this weekend in Washington, and the Cubs and the Nats were trying to play each other and not playing each other for large stretches of the weekend. So Friday's game was postponed, and the Cubs were upset about it because the start of the game was delayed for a long time. Then they started playing again. Then play was stopped again. And then after a very long wait, the game was finally postponed after the point at which

it had stopped raining. So no one was really happy about what happened there. And then Saturday, they played a doubleheader because of that Friday rainout. And they had to start late because of that. And also because of a ceremony honoring Jason Wirth. Very important. Got to get that in. And then Sunday's game was also canceled. So now there's going to be a makeup on Thursday. So Adam asks, the Cubs haven't had a scheduled off day since August 20th and just lost their scheduled off day for Thursday, September 13th. Worse for them, they are now set to fly to Washington for one game in the middle of a

six-game homestand, besides reducing their home runs per homestand by at least 1.8. Good callback, Adam. This is unneeded fatigue and travel for a team in a tight pennant race. Suppose the Cubs win two or three from Milwaukee and have a three-game lead as of Wednesday night. So Adams basically asking, Enjoy a start, Taylor Davis. See if you can get your second career base hit, Terrence Gore. So Adam's basically asking, would it make sense for a team at the end of the season with a run of no off days to do sort of a spring training split squad game and just send like your B team, it's expanded rosters. You have a bunch of scrubs hanging around. Just send them and don't even really send the good players just let them rest so the cubs have 34 players on their active roster right now i believe

it's 15 position players and 19 pitchers so i think that automatically you you you might as well play the game with a now realistically what i assume the cubs are going to do is send everyone because i don't think that there's a precedent for teams just sending like a split squad during the regular season now maybe they'll keep their their next starting pitcher if their next two three starting pitchers there's really no reason to send them and teams do do that sometimes but i would think that what they would be justified in doing is just playing with a regular 25-man roster, maybe even less than that because, again, of the starters. And you don't throw the game away.

You just reduce your odds of winning the game because you're at some sort of structural disadvantage, and maybe you keep some of your best players who might be wearing down. So, you know, maybe you keep Javier Baez around. Maybe you keep, I don't know, you keep Kyle Schorbe around. You keep Wilson Contreras around. I don't need to go off and just name all the the best cubs but you know you could you could send an infield that's basically like well we're gonna send victor caratini and we're gonna send david bode and tommy lastella and aslan russell and ben zobrist or whatever that can that can be

your infield and you can have an outfield of like Terrence Gore you're starting and Ian Happ is going to be in there too and I guess I don't know Albert Elmore you can just send a group of position players while not exhausting everyone it's one of the little benefits I guess of September roster expansion I think I think the Cubs would be justified in doing that I think the Cubs would even be hailed as progressive for doing that but then you know some number of people would freak out for the same reason people used to freak out on players for taking paternity leave for three days now thankfully i think we haven't had that conversation for a while but you know in the pennant race it would make some fans upset but

the cubs shouldn't really care what the fans have to say if they deduce that all this sudden travel is going to be a problem which i can't imagine it would make players feel better. Yeah, well, we talked on a recent episode about the fact that there is a real fatigue penalty that individual players incur. So you wouldn't want a team to go into the playoffs with that penalty applied. So I don't know if they do have a day off before the playoffs would start, most likely. And I don't know maybe just one or two days is all it takes to get people back to their baseline but it is the end of the season and everyone's a bit banged up and tired and if they don't need those wins I don't know

if they're close enough where they could just say we don't need this one maybe they kind of need to keep playing because the Brewers are pushing them, and it depends how they do in the next few days. I mean, they have a two-game lead as we speak, so you don't really want to take any chances with that kind of lead, I think. Now, if it's up to like five games by Thursday or something, maybe you feel a little more comfortable. You leave some guys at home, but it's an unfortunate situation that they're in now. And I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about is another team that probably most people don't feel a lot of sympathy for, but had something go against them, which is the Astros

and the Red Sox played a series this weekend. It was kind of a matchup between the two best teams in baseball, and the Astros took two out of three, but could have swept. They ended up getting walked off on Sunday, and they were bitter about this loss because there was a contentious replay call where Jose Altuve slid into home. He, at least according to some angles and screenshots, appeared to be safe, and there was a challenge, and the call on the field was out, and it was upheld after almost a four-minute review. And so Josh Reddick, for one, is tweeting a screenshot of Altuve kind of appearing to be safe, probably, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction about this because the Astros have had another couple contentious replay calls earlier this year,

and one of them they felt like the call was wrong even after the review, and they're just dissatisfied with the whole process and the lack of explanation. Now, I don't know that you can always tell from a screenshot. Screenshots can be a bit deceptive. Even in this one that's making the rounds of Altuve with his hand on the plate, it does appear that his fingers are on the plate. And it kind of appears that the glove is not touching his shoulder, but I don't know.

I guess it comes down to whether you think the strings on the end of the glove are part of the glove. I guess they are, right? The strings apply. So I don't know if he's getting touched by a string of Sandy Leone's glove. Maybe that counts, but it's kind of hard to tell. And anyway, I've seen on a few occasions, it does seem like the replay umps in New York blew the call and MLB will acknowledge that the call was blown after the fact and say, yeah, that was wrong. And it's hard to understand how you can have all of these angles and ample time to look at them and still get a call wrong. So that's very frustrating. And I think whenever this happens, people will use it as evidence that replay is

terrible and should be rolled back and is hurting the game and i tend to disagree with that take but what do you think of this play in specific or replay as a whole uh well the replay what's what's most mystifying about this one in particular is it's not i've been to the the video room where the umpires are all looking at the replays i assume you've also been to the video room at some point to see the headquarters for where replay happens when they send it back to New York. I've looked through the door. I have not been in there. Well, I've been in there.

Let me tell you. It looks exactly like it does through the door. There's a lot of monitors and people in there. There's not even an excuse for people being preoccupied because this was the only game going on. When this happened, all attention would have been on this game. now maybe that means they were understaffed i don't know it's also hard for me to understand how you can get end up with a missed call it i mean this this is replay 101 how does a call get made wrong when you have it's replay in theory it's 100% accurate anyway i don't i haven't decided where i come down on the strings as part of the glove

argument because i don't know if there's anywhere in the equipment rule book of that length of strings permissible but obviously there's the opportunity for someone to just be like i'm gonna have like this leather weave that just goes like five feet it's just like a whip on the end of your glove yeah exactly you could uh you can tag somebody out from four feet away and leave like a whip mark on their cheek if you wanted to. I don't know. That's getting a little ahead. But it only makes sense that the strings would be part of the glove because they're not part of anything else.

And I don't know a good argument for why they wouldn't be. Like, I don't know. If you tag somebody's shoelace, would that player be out? Yeah, sure. I guess. I guess. I assume because it's not like this is a matter of like body contact because if you tag somebody's hip with your glove, there's no skin touching skin and the rule is not skin must be applied. So I don't really,

I can't think of a good reason why the strings wouldn't be part of the glove, but I can see why they would want to clarify that immediately and have, I don't know, one inch maximum string length or something. Because there's an opportunity here for someone to just go insane and have very, very, very long glove strings for a situation like this. Yeah. So anyway, I think that it's frustrating i mean no one likes watching replay reviews it's boring it's dead time in the middle of a game and once in a while

it will be wrong even after a review and of course there are those borderline judgment call kind of things where technically someone looks out but really that's not the way baseball has been played forever. We've talked about those tag plays where someone just is carried off the base just by an inch because of the way he slid or something. And I think people are sick of that sort of stuff, and I get that. I don't like any of those things. But I still think that replay is a net benefit to baseball, and I think it hasn't done as much damage as it has in, say, football, for instance, where it seems like something as fundamental as what a catch is is just constantly being called into question and never being answered satisfactorily. I don't think it's been as big a problem in baseball.

it's good to get the calls right. I think for the most part, I mean, we could complain about a call like this, but pre-replay, there were so many more wrong calls to complain about. And I think that on the whole, it's good. And I think people think it's gone too far and you should just maybe have it on certain calls and not on others, but it's hard to do that because everyone is going to see the replays at home and it's just always going to be frustrating if you know that a call was wrong and you can't correct it. And I like being able to correct calls. I mean, there's an argument that maybe baseball is less entertaining, even if it's more accurate, just because of all the waiting for the correct call, but I don't buy it. I don't know. I think that I like the satisfaction of knowing that almost all the time you're going to get the call right much more often than you have before,

and you're not going to be in a situation where there's some important game and some important play, and everyone watching knows that the call was wrong, but the people on the field can't correct the call. That was bad for baseball, I think. So, okay. So it's worth remembering, I think, two things. One, for as much as it is painful to watch instant replay reviews, it's not really exciting, especially when it's at a critical moment of the game. This year, according to Baseball Savant, there have been, for when instant replay reviews have been called for, there have been 269 plays not overturned,

but there have been 244 plays that were overturned. The call in the field, 244 plays have been overturned. That's 244 calls that have been reversed based on conclusive instant replay evidence. That's more than eight per team already. So you can just look right there. That is a difference that's that's being made that's important so beyond that i think it's also worth remembering it feels like instant replay has been around for a long time instant replay review was expanded before the 2014 season i believe it was and given that this is major league baseball things move very slowly i think it's important to understand that this is still sort of a learning period it's still a transition period into having expanded replay baseball is

still trying to figure out all the ways that it works all the ways it doesn't work how it could be improved new rules it might need to to implement like for example how to slide into a base how to call those those plays where a batter quickly comes off the bag i'm reminded i think of like we're still as humanity, we're still like learning the consequences of the internet and smartphones, even though it feels like we've had it for all our lives. The internet is only realistically, it's been in most or many households for, I don't know, 20, 25 years and smartphones we've only had for, I don't know, what, 10 years. And there's still so much to learn about what happens to us as people,

as a society, as communities by having this constant access and reduced levels of attention and engagement and what happens to our brains, what happens to our behavior. So if you're baseball, I think even though it feels like it's been years because it has been years, we're still learning so much about how instant replay could be improved and what now becomes evident, what things happen when you slow things down and

have really high resolution images so for example the whole argument about glove strings tagging players well you never would have seen that really in full speed and so maybe we need to do something about that players popping off bags when they slide maybe we need to do something about that and we all wish baseball would move quicker but i think in 20 years we're going to look back back and see an instant replay system that is much better than what we have right now. I don't know exactly what it'll look like. But this is, I think, undeniably positive progress. It's just frustrating sometimes. It's not going to be frustrating 0% of the time. It's too new. Yeah. And I think even this system has been improved already. I mean, there was that play that was causing so much consternation about what a catch is and what isn't a catch, right, a few years ago,

like the first year of replay, and they changed that so that you weren't constantly getting things, not ruled catches that were clearly catches. And I think the average time, Meg Rowley wrote something for Fangraphs this year about how the average time of a replay review has come down. So even though there are some long ones on the whole, there is less waiting around for the verdict. So I think it has gotten better and will continue to get better. And I just think it's better for baseball than it is bad. Agreed. So I have, I think, just three

quick things to talk about before we close you you good three quick things sure okay so quickly when i was when we were talking about mike trout earlier i looked up all the times has been intentionally walked this year and then i i was curious about the lowest leverage situations in which mike trout has been intentionally walked which then made me wonder about the lowest leverage situations in which anyone this year has been intentionally walked so i can tell you there's a there have been 10 cases this year where a player has been intentionally walked with a leverage index of 0.00 that's the lowest possible leverage index now many of these games have been relatively close so i'm just going to pick my favorite on august 16th first game of a double

header pitcher for the phillies mark leiter batter for the the Mets, Kevin Ploiecki. And Kevin Ploiecki was intentionally walked with a runner on second, two outs in the top of the fifth inning, in a game that the Mets were winning 15-4. So that's the worst, most pointless intentional walk of the season. Mark Leiter intentionally walked Kevin Ploiecki while his team was behind by 11 runs, a game the Phillies would eventually lose by 20 runs. I believe this was the Scott Kingery and Roman Quinn game confirmed. So Mark Leiter intentionally walked the Mets

catcher so that he could face Corio's Walt, and then he retired pitcher Corio's Walt to end the top of the fifth inning. That's a waste of an intentional walk. Anyway, something else I wanted to mention. The Oakland Athletics are very good. They've won a lot of games their bullpen right now has a combined win probability added of 13.06 i think i'll be writing about this after the podcast 13.06 which doesn't mean anything by itself however at vangrass we have this information going back to 1974 that's 45 years of baseball the highest bullpen wpa of all time the 2012 baltimore orioles 13.52 the a's almost certainly are going to end up with the most highest bullpen wpa of all time the 2012 baltimore orioles 13.52 the a's almost certainly are going to end up with the most valuable bullpen in known win probability added

history so this is why the a's have been so good yeah that is a point number two anything to say about the oakland bullpen no other than i wouldn't have expected that really coming into the season it's uh i mean they've made upgrades as the season has gone on, but they've also had some guys that maybe were underrated at earlier points. And I don't know, they have used Mero Petit. So I guess that's all you need. Yep. In 2015, that is only four seasons ago, the A's bullpen finished with a win probability additive negative 8.26,

tied for the eighth worst mark in recorded history okay moving on we mentioned a few weeks ago that john gant pitcher for the cardinals had hit a home run shortly after that he hit another home run what first jumped out to me because i'm an idiot about john gant hitting a home run is that he hit it off geo gonzalez who has weirdly been one of the best pitchers pitching against pitchers over his career. He's been just really good. I don't know why that is, what it is about Gio Gonzalez, but John Gant hit a home run off Gio Gonzalez, which is really uncommon. What I didn't appreciate and haven't appreciated is that John Gant,

he has batted 44 times as a major league player. He's batted 44 times. He has reached base twice. Both hits, both home runs. John Gant opened his career with 35 plate appearances where he batted.000 with an on-base percentage of.000

and an OPS of.000. John Gant broke that streak with a home run. Then he hit another one. That's awesome. The most important thing. I would like to close with this. Bottom of the 10th. Bases loaded.

Two outs. This is a game in the uh the pcl playoffs the memphis redbirds did you hear about this by chance i don't know why you would have it's minor league baseball the memphis redbirds were playing against the oklahoma city dodgers in the pcl playoffs this was i guess a makeup of a game but in the top of the 10th inning the dodgers pulled ahead three to one and going into the top of the 10th inning, the Dodgers pulled ahead 3-1. And going into the bottom of the 10th, the Redbirds rallied. They put together a rally. I'm not going to go into all the detail of what happened. But the game winning, the walk-off hit, the Redbirds won on a walk-off hit. And they were able to advance to the PCL Championship Series. But the walk-off hit was delivered by relief pitcher Giovanni Gallegos,

who had one career at bat as a professional before coming up and hitting a walk-off single off sometime major league pitcher Edward Paredes. Edward Paredes came in with 2-1. He intentionally walked real player Max Schrock, Carson's sisterly favorite, with runners on first and second, I should say, Edward Paredes came in, intentionally walked Max Schrock, got ahead of Giovanni Gallegos 0-2, and then allowed a walk-off single that scored Alex Mejia,

and the Redbirds moved on to the championship. Giovanni Gallegos, for his career as a player, as a hitter, one plate appearance, one at bat, zero hits. Ristigata's first ever professional hit to walk off and move on to the championship. I thought that was outstanding. Only the 10th inning of the team ran out of pinch hitters. Wow. Good for him.

That's exciting. Yeah. All right. And I will end on the note that apparently there is a hurricane coming to DC that may be there Thursday, Hurricane Florence. So looks like the weather issues are not out of the way. So that's, I guess, even more of a reason not to send your starters if they were considering that. Do you think this is one of those situations with the National?

The Cubs might argue, why don't we play the game where we are? The Nationals, I mean, the Nationals are basically out of the hunt. They'd say, oh, we don't care. But the Brewers would most certainly care. So, yeah, something to watch. We'll talk about this on the next podcast, perhaps. Yeah, all right. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

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