Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1271: The Stretch Run

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo and Jacob deGrom (as usual), the perception of the Cubs vs. the reality of the Cubs, the dramatic, puzzling increase in infield shifting against Mike Trout, the checkered career of honest but pugnacious umpiring legend Tim Hurst, the future of two-way players, Joel Sherman’s column about […]

I've got more to say than you But I'm not sure what that proves Stamping out the same old flame It's not my fault, I'm not to blame Dancing around the same old flame Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha Hello and welcome to episode 1271 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello! supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fanverse. Hello. Over the weekend, Williams Estadio racked up five hits and eight at-bats, nine plate appearances. He also threw a walk. He did not strike out. He remains second in baseball in contact rate behind the obnoxious Breivik Valera, but first place. No one wants you at the top of that leaderboard. With a few times, please. Seriously. So Estadio, last I checked, has, I don't know what his streak is up to, but he had at least the longest active streak of plate appearances without a swing and miss, which was up to like 21, the point I saw the factoid.

Anyway, Astadio has the lowest strikeout rate in baseball out of the 522 players who have batted at least 50 times. He's ahead of other names. I don't know how to pronounce. Breivik Valera, I will point out, not anywhere close to the top of the list in terms of lowest strikeout rates, so his whiffs have come at the wrong time. Estadio just barely whiffs.

3.5% strikeouts this season. He's got, what is that, two strikeouts and three home runs? Two strikeouts and three home runs. Williams-Estadio. This is, should we even be doing this again like should we just wait until the season's over we probably shouldn't do an episode by episode astadio update but he is so watchable he's like memeable like on i think it was friday night he was in a game and he went three for four with a walk, which will forgive the walk, I guess,

in this case, because it was a good game. Otherwise, I don't want to see him taking pitches and having outcomes that are true. But still, he had two plays in that game where one was he ran in front of the plate, there was a dribbler, and he fielded the ball, threw it to third, got the out at third, and then tripped over the pitcher and face-planted. And his hair went flying because his helmet came off and he was catching at the time. And then there was another play where he applied a tag at the plate and just leaped and stretched out all of his five-foot whatever. And he managed to make this very acrobatic tag it was a pretty incredible play he does that seemingly all the time he's just like really watchable i guess because he hustles

really hard which you know not that most players don't but it's maybe more notable and obvious when he does because he doesn't look like he should be moving as quickly as he is, and yet he continues to do so. So he's been in a lot of highlights, just aside from contact rate, which is an esoteric statistic that only we care about. But between that and I think the last time I checked, he was the best hitter on the Twins, minimum 50 plate appearances or whatever. I mean, he's just genuinely good and exciting. As a catcher, three defensive runs saved. That ties in with guys like Martin Maldonado and Manny Pina. Also John Ryan Murphy.

So Williams Estadio, so far, so good. I guess we'll let it go for at least another two days until we talk about him again. Depends if he plays, because I understand Mitch Garver is now hurt or sick or something. Anyway, the twin starting catcher. Add a lineup, which means more playing time for Estadio, which means not only more money for him, hooray, but also greater opportunity for him to make an impression and stick around in the majors next year.

Yep. And speaking of things that we talk about at the beginning of every episode, Jacob deGrom did not win in his most recent start. He threw another quality start. He always does. But he didn't win, got another no decision. start he always does but he didn't win got another no decision and he is now up to 9.1 wins above replacement at baseball reference and still just eight wins so he now has a one win cushion even if he gets a win assuming he doesn't pitch at a sub replacement level in that win he will still have more war than wins and we're just two weeks away from the end of the season he's gonna do it

which is even more amazing because the Mets have actually been good in the second half they are 31 and 25 since the all-star break that is tied for the six most wins in the majors and Jacob de Grom has three of them yep even if Fangreffs he is at eight war and uh and he has a wins he's at 8.3 war including runs against per nine innings instead of the other war. Don't need to get into that. He gets a boost at baseball reference because baseball reference gives him credit for the fact that he's been pitching in front of the Mets defense,

which is bad. So that is definitely one of those things that he deserves some sort of credit for as well. So yeah, if you have not listened to the last several episodes of this podcast, you don't need to because we just went over them again. And we will continue to do so probably as long as the numbers remain interesting and in favor of our conversation. Yeah. Well, I think we are both lacking for inspiration here as podcasters, as writers. It's the end of a long season and we have discussed all the storylines and the pennant races here in the last couple of weeks are not super exciting for the most part.

The AL is pretty much over. There's just the seeding race between the A's and the Yankees at this point. And then in the NL, you do have races. You have the Cubs-Brewers race and you still have the NL West race, which is pretty wild even though the Diamondbacks have fallen back a bit. You still have Rockies, Dodgers, and that's interesting. But these are all things that we have discussed for months now. And it just feels like we need to wrap this up one way or another and move on to the playoffs when we can talk about all of these teams again in a new way, hopefully, probably not. all of these teams again in a new way, hopefully, probably not, which is why we keep talking about Williams-Estetio and Jacob deGrom every day. Not that I wouldn't want to talk about them under any circumstances, but are any of the remaining races of interest to you? I know it seems like Cubs fans are kind of just down on the Cubs all year long, and even now, even though they have been the best team in the National League and seem very likely to end up with the top seed and to win this division, I know it's been close. And

it seems almost like what the Cubs did in 2016 when they were on that historic pace and they didn't quite end up playing at a historic pace, but they were so good and they were just so far and away, clearly the best team in the league, it seemed like. And that was kind of the beginning of the real run. And so it seems like having impressed us so much that year and won the World Series and just been dominant since then, they've actually had races and they haven't run away with anything and they've had to fight the brewers down the stretch and so there seems to be the sense that the Cubs have underachieved or been disappointing in some way and they're not a juggernaut but they're as good as any team in the

National League and if this is the bad days for Cubs fans think of how much better things are than they were at almost every other point in Cubs history. Right. I wonder how much of this is just a consequence of lofty expectations, because of course, when they were rebuilding and then when they won the World Series, there was so much talk about the Cubs dynasty because they had such a young team. They looked good everywhere. And even now they look good and deep almost everywhere. I mean, we discovered David Bodie, although now that I look at him, his numbers have dropped off in a damn hurry. So let's just ignore that one for now. But if you look at how good the Cubs were when they first emerged and then when they won the World Series, there was a thought that they were going to be, we've talked about this so often, the Yankees are supposed to be

great forever and the Dodgers are supposed to be great forever. And a few years ago, the Rangers were supposed to be great for at least a long time and and for the Cubs I wonder there there are a few things going on one they are I think clearly the best or maybe second best team the in the National League depending on what you think of the Dodgers as constructed so the Cubs are very good and a legitimate World Series contender again but they they haven't matched up to what they were in the year that they won the world series and you you just get this sort of vague sense of disappointment you look like the jason hayward contract is not working out the udarvish contract has been bad tyler choward contract has been worse than not able to pitch brandon morrow is sidelined and and so in a sense it kind of

seems like the front office hasn't ended up making the best use of resources here. And so you think that when you consider the money that they've spent on players who weren't making a strong contribution, if that had been put toward other areas, if it had been spent better, or if the players just had better health and statistical injury luck, whatever, then this team could be so incredible. But because they have these zeros, these expensive zeros or almost non-entities, then it just kind of leaves you wondering

what more there could be. But I mean, at the end of the day, I get to come at this from a dispassionate perspective and I've been looking at the National League and the Cubs have been at the top of it like most of the season. And so I think, well, what is there to be upset about? That's sports.

So look at the big picture. Cubs fans, your team is still really good, even though so many things have not gone so well. Just be content. You should be used to having a race. Divisions are not supposed to be like the American League Central. Right. Yes, exactly. All right. I wanted to bring up a minor baseball mystery here, something I've been puzzling over. Last week, we talked about Citi Field and its apparent effect on batted ball speed and batting average on balls and play, and we were kind of puzzled about that one. You wrote about it. This is sort of in the same vein. So this is about Mike Trout, and it's about Mike Trout getting shifted. And I don't

know whether you've noticed this, but teams are shifting on Mike Trout a lot, and a lot more than they used to. So last year, Mike Trout faced an infield shift, just your standard overshift, three guys on one side of second base, on 9.9% of the pitches he saw. This year, he is up to 32.7% of the pitches he saw. This year, he is up to 32.7% of the pitches he saw. So basically, a third of the pitches he's seen, there's been an infield shift on. And that's a lot. The league as a whole is shifting more than last year, but not nearly enough to explain that. The rate of shifting against right-handed batters has almost doubled this year, but it's like five point something percent of pitches. So he is the 14th most frequently shifted right-handed batter,

which is odd, I think, because he doesn't seem to have the characteristics of someone you would count as an extreme shift guy. And so his shift rate is up by more than any other right-handed hitters relative to last year, except Reese Hoskins and Todd Frazier. Now, Reese Hoskins and Todd Frazier, those are guys you would tend to think of as shift candidates. They're not very fast. They pull a lot of their ground balls. You can see why they would get shifted. Mike Trout doesn't really seem to be that guy. So his pull rate on ground balls, so the percentage of his ground balls that are pulled, is right in the middle of righties. It's like 61st out of 120 right-handed batters this year with some minimum number of

batted balls. And so I've been trying to figure out what is it about Trout that has suddenly convinced all these teams to start shifting on him. And I talked to someone with the Angels and said, what do you think's going on here? And he said, yeah, we've been puzzling about this too. We've been kind of kicking around while we're watching games. don't really have that great an explanation. They seem to say that maybe teams are trying to provoke him to hit the ball the other way. Like, you know, you just, he's so good that you just want to get in his head or maybe have him try to go for a base hit instead of hitting an extra base hit, something like that. I talked to someone with another team, a rival team, that has shifted on Trout this year. And they said that Trout is like a pretty good shift candidate according to their numbers. And, you know, it's kind of hard to see why from afar, because again, he's not an extreme pull hitter when he hits the ball on the ground. Now, it's possible that Maybe he hits liners He pulls liners like low liners

A lot I didn't really look at that or It's possible that there's something with the speed Of his batted balls that make this Make sense but I'm still Not totally clear on why Mike Trout is one of the most Frequently shifted against right handed Hitters this year do you have any thoughts

I guess I wonder so there you and I have both historically looked at like pulled grounder rate, but it's not so much about pulled grounder rate as it is about opposite field grounder rate. Now, I know that sounds weird to a lot of listeners because you'd think, oh, pull and opposite, there's just the two halves. They would be the opposite of one another. At least at Fangraphs, there's splits for pull, center, and opposite. So there's the pull third, there's the middle third, and then there's the opposite third. When you shift a player, of course, you're not shifting everyone into the pull third area. You're really shifting to cover more of the

pull and center area. And so if you look at Mike Trout this year, and it's been true for most of his career, but this year he's pulling 56% of his grounders he's hitting 36 percent up the middle and nine percent the other way now that is among okay here's there's gonna be some numbers here among 117 right-handed batters who have hit at least 100 ground balls this year you got it great mike trout is 30th lowest opposite field grounder rate which is to say that he is not extreme in this regard. Like Mookie Betts, for example, hits just half as many ground balls to the opposite field, 4.2%. Obvious Isle Garcia has the lowest opposite field grounder rate at 3.6%. But Mike Trout doesn't hit grounders the other way very often.

So in that sense, maybe, and I don't know if this is true but maybe it's less about mike trout suddenly becoming a better shift candidate and more about teams slowly realizing well maybe we should just be shifting more of these guys in general it's more uncommon that you would have righties being shifted of course we've seen the pool shift but generally teams have shifted lefties because you know that much makes sense but maybe teams are thinking we're going to want to shift righties more often and you're going to target the best right-handed hitters before you target the worst one. So maybe that. Right. That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, because it's not as if the shift rate against right-handed hitters has kept pace with the shift rate against Trout. Like he is far outstripping the overall increase. against Trout. He is far outstripping the overall increase, but that is possible that maybe it's not that he is the number one best right-handed hitter shift candidate, but that he is the number one best right-handed hitter. And so if you're going to shift and you're going to try to talk your coaches into shifting or your infielders into shifting, it might be an easier sell when it's Mike Trout. It's like, oh, well, we got to do something against Mike Trout because he's amazing. So it's maybe a little harder to talk them into someone who might be just as good a shift candidate based on his batted ball profile, but just doesn't seem like the sort of hitter that you have to take extreme

measures against because he's just not that good so yeah maybe that is the best explanation i'm a little surprised at this point we haven't seen a team try to put a 10th man on the field just to see like if anyone would notice because like what would be what's the penalty what is the penalty actually if you put too many men on the field is it like a ball or a block or an outer it's usually one those things. There are only so many penalties that you can incur. So I'd have to check. But maybe it's worth a shot because Mike Trout, good chance that he's going to get a hit anyway. I will say that Mark Simon, I was talking to him at Baseball Info Solutions.

He was saying that according to their shift recommendation system, Trout doesn't show up as an ideal shift candidate. And he just doesn't quite have the pull rate that they look for, but that maybe, as you said, it's the very low opposite field grounder rate. So yeah, I'm guessing it's a combination of that and also of what we were saying about he's just such a high profile player that maybe it's easier to sell doing something against him. And I'll also note that it seems to be working. I mean, it's a small sample this year, but his weighted on base average with the shift on is 425, which with anyone else would be great. But with him, it is lower than his 462 with a standard infield alignment.

is lower than his 462 with a standard infield alignment. And if you look at grounders only, he has a 211 WOBA with the shift on versus 318 with a standard alignment. So he has had worse results when the shift is on this year. Yeah. But if I could stick with Trout here for a second, just because there's the fun old story of, of well whenever Mike Trout wants to get better at something he just gets better at it I will point out that uh according to stat cast math Mike Trout in 2016 was three runs below average in the field the outs above average statistic here Mike Trout in 2016 negative three Mike Trout in 2017 negative three Mike Trout in 2018 plus eight 16th best among outfielders in baseball so Mike Trout maybe maybe he's just a little more frustrated being shifted now it has not really hurt his offense overall he's been outstanding again best hitter in baseball but maybe he's just thinking like well

if they're gonna take hits away from me I gotta take hits away from them yeah no that would be fun if he gets shifted like all the time just to see how he responds to that because he does have a history of always responding to a weakness by making it a strength so if we always talk about why more players don't bunt or go the other way or adjust their approach in some way in response to the shift and in most cases it's because either they think it's not advantageous or there's an ego thing or just because it's hard but something something being hard has never stopped Mike Trout. So if he were at some point to decide that he wanted to beat the shift in some way, I don't doubt that he could do that better than anyone else could do that. I guess if you were a team and you were saying, well, we're going to shift Mike Trout, like what there's what's the downside?

Like everyone on your team, if you're a pitcher, you give up like a hit that goes through the shift the other way what are you going to think you're going to be like oh I would have got him out otherwise it's like no he's Mike Trout he's going to get you it's like there's really no downside on the field or even psychological so whatever like this just I would throw anything against the wall especially if you're some team out of the hunt which is two thirds of the teams in the American League right now. Just try anything. Maybe lob the ball sabermetrician to work for a major league team. At baseballspast.com, he does this newsletter that I've been subscribing to for years. It's a great mix of analysis and history a couple times a week. addition I wanted to bring up is about the umpire Tim Hurst, who was a pretty well-known, probably the most famous umpire in the game in the 1890s and early 1900s, and actually one of the most experienced umpires as well, and a very respected umpire. He was known to be honest and fair, but he was also known to be hot-headed and to have a temper. And umpires in those days used to get into fights. And so I wanted to share some of the career highlights and or lowlights of legendary umpire Tim Hurst. So in a way, his honesty and fairness got him into more

trouble because at that time, Craig writes, there was just less protection for umpires and it was like actually a dangerous job to do because if you made a call that went against the home team, you could get in trouble. Someone could beat you up or attack you after the game. It was an uncivilized sport compared to today. And so by being fair and by playing it down the middle and not giving the home team an edge, he got into extra trouble. But he was a boxing referee in his spare time. He was a sports promoter. He didn't necessarily need the umpiring job at all times in his career. And so he could kind of get away with things that other umpires couldn't get away with. So 1896, this was after a hiatus in which the National League said that he couldn't be an umpire anymore because he was a boxing ref at the same time. They let him back into the game in 1896. And I'm reading here, that year he got

into a legendary postgame fracas with three Pirates players, Hurst fought all three at once and came out on top with judicious punches to the jaw and kicks to the shins. He was a pretty big guy for the era too. Continuing, in 1897, Hurst had the dubious distinction of being the only umpire twice arrested for his actions on the field. So the first one was not his fault. Everyone was arrested in that game because there is a law, a local law against playing Sunday baseball, and they tried to play Sunday baseball. So he was arrested with all of the players and taken to jail. But on August 4th, it was his fault. So I'm reading now. named John Cardival who fell to the floor like an ox hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Only the intervention of a dozen policemen saved Hurst from an angry mob that charged the field.

He was carted away. He went to jail. A substitute umpire came in. The poor guy in the stands had a two-inch wound above his eye. Hurst was charged with assault and battery. He was found guilty and fined $100. So that was a problem because he was hated in Cincinnati after that. So for a long time, he could just never go back there. He would just umpire in other cities, but not in Cincinnati for a while. So fast forwarding to 1906, he was suspended five days for slugging manager Clark Griffith, whom Tim claimed had stepped intentionally on his feet after being ejected from the game. Now, Hurst was a lot bigger than Clark Griffith, and so people were kind of appalled that he had slugged him. But Griffith was also suspended for five games because it was generally believed that he

actually had trampled on Hurst's feet intentionally, so he had at least some cause there. But the incident that ended his career came in 1909. He was 44 years old at this time, but still had his temper, and this incident was known as the Spit brawl. So in the eighth inning of the game of August 3rd, Eddie Collins, the 22-year-old superstar of the Philadelphia Athletics, tried to advance on a fly ball and could not believe it when Tim Hurst called him out when it appeared the fielder had dropped the throw. Hurst ruled the fielder had held the ball long enough for the tag to be good. During the argument, Eddie uttered the magic word crook, and the incensed umpire spat in Collins' face. You could not call Tim Hurst a crook. He took his honesty seriously.

With the spittle colored by tobacco juice, Hurst's foul act was readily visible to the fans around the infield, and they were incensed by his disgusting treatment of their popular star. So they started throwing soda bottles and seat cushions. And again, he had to be escorted from the field by police. That was the end of his career. The spit brawl did him in. This was like, I guess, the opposite of the Roberto Alomar incident with John Hirschbeck, where Alomar spit on Hirschbeck. This was the umpire's fitting on the player. So this was Hirsch's career. This was what umpiring was like back then, at least when Hirsch was umpiring. And I will leave you with one more thing. This was a quote from Hirsch describing how rough the game was back in 1898.

So this was, I guess, umpiring a game, those legendary Orioles back then who were very tough. So Hurst said, went on and jumped into third baseman Jim Collins. First baseman Fred Tenney tried to hold McGraw by the belt, but he broke away, reached second, and kicked the ball out of Bobby Lowe's hands. Stenzel had swung his bat and hit catcher Wilbert Robinson on the hand, trying to keep him from throwing. Robinson tripped me and poked me in the back to keep me from seeing all the mischief, and Stenzel spiked my foot when asked how he had ruled on all the mayhem Hurst said I called it a foul ball sent the runners back and kicked Stenzel on the shin okay we talk so often about how you know people complain about how baseball used to be better and

then there's too many strikeouts and power hitting now and people are like oh return baseball to its glory days and we're like but these are the glory days. But actually, these are not the glory days. Those were the glory days. I have two follow-ups here. Here's just one sentence from Tim Hurst's Wikipedia page, which is short, but I like this sentence. Noted for his pugnacious and combative style, Hurst was suspended on several occasions for refusing to report player misconduct to his league office, insisting instead that he ought to be allowed to settle matters with the players personally,

often engaging them in fights after the game was over. There's also, now, by the way, this is an umpire who was named the Roll of Honor for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1926. But there's... Very respected umpire. Yeah, there's a, yeah, it says, it says he was a Hall of Fame umpire.

Bill Clem later called him, quote, the toughest umpire of them all. He was so tough that if a ballplayer did not like one of his decisions and challenged him on the field, the team would say, okay, we'll stop the game and go right under the stands and settle it now. He is regarded, a sentencier, he had a reputation for always being fair and in control of the situation, never being intimidated by a large crowd or vast sums of money. But one thing that has nothing to do with his umpiring career, but that is fascinating, Tim Hurst in 1898 managed the St. Louis Browns.

He was an umpire. Yes, that's right. And then he managed a baseball team. Now, they were terrible. They won 39 games out of a lot more than that. But Tim Hurst, we saw a wave of umpires being hired by major league teams with no experience. But can you imagine just like CB Buckner or Angel Hernandez becoming a manager? No, not really.

But that brings to mind another anecdote that speaks to his honesty. So in a testament to the respect for Hurst's honesty, twice during his 1898 season as a manager, there was a need for a substitute umpire, and the opposing managers agreed to let Hurst umpire the game. So he was managing in this game, one of the teams in the game, and the opposing manager, it was okay with having him umpire the game because his reputation was so above reproach and uh his team was so terrible that even with their own manager calling balls and strikes they still lost both of those games you know you know it's funny the uh the name of the st louis brown's second baseman in the year that uh that hearst managed them? Jack Crooks.

Oh, no. Probably started so many fights. Anyway, Tim Hurst. We'll never see his like again, which is probably a good thing, but still we can recognize. Unfortunately, we missed our opportunity to cold call him by about 80 years. Yeah, maybe 100, i think something close to

that yeah but uh yeah that's that was the ump show of 1890 something or 1900 something it was not just stare downs or ejections it was actual brawls and throwing things into the stands and assaulting people, which is not good, but kind of amusing in the way that a lot of very ugly things about the past seem sort of quaint in retrospect. Probably were not at the time. Not the sort of thing we would want to bring back into baseball today, but it's so archaic that from this great remove, it's somewhat amusing. How much time has to pass before, okay, look, Tim Hurst threw a glass mug, which didn't shatter.

It didn't shatter when he was throwing. How thick was this mug? Anyway, so some sort of just unbreakable glass mug was thrown in Hurst's direction. He picked up the mug, which I guess wasn't broken, hurled it into the stands, and hid it in his bystander in the forehead, which is funny now. So I laughed, and you brought it up because it's funny. But, you know, if this happened yesterday,

if Joe West hurled a Budweiser bottle through the netting or something, maybe went out to the bleachers and threw a bottle at a fan, it wouldn't be the kind of funny that we could call funny on a podcast that's broadcast to an audience. So the difference here is about a century, a little bit more. Everyone involved is extremely dead. How much time though, or should I say how little time has to pass before we can acknowledge that incident as funny and not feel like we are being insensitive. I guess if everyone is dead, that's a pretty good rule of thumb. Like no one around then is still around to be offended by our comments.

So that seems like a pretty decent way to judge it. If everyone is dead. Keep that though. Keep that. What if the glass mug had killed the person that it hit in the forehead? Still funny? Probably not still funny. Maybe you need 200 years for that to be funny. 200 years?

Okay. Yeah, that's a Revolutionary War kind of funny. Yeah, right. That's hilarious. Well, let me bring this back to the modern day then in fact in fact even better than that we've talked about present baseball we've talked about past baseball let's talk about future baseball oh all right jeff fletcher article from the orange county register this is from last week headline yeah another shohei otani angels looking for more

two-way players in minors i will just uh i'll, I'll read from Jeff Fletcher's lead right now. All credit goes to him, and I guess the Angels' decision makers. Whatever. The Angels are going to spend some time this fall seeing if they might have one or two more two-way players coming up in the minors. Outfielders Jared Walsh and Bo Way, that's, uh, hard to say as, uh, as two names. It's not Bo Way.

Bo Way have both been invited to the Angels' fall instructional league as pitchers, a nod to their success in limited appearances on the mound So I don't think when you say another Shohei Otani, what that means is we're looking for clicks. But what it also means is that the Angels are looking for some players who can fill multiple roles. And now we talked about this. It's not unprecedented because there have been Brooks Kieschnick and I guess in a sense Michael Lorenzen going the other way. But we had talked about a few months ago whether it would behoove teams to have players in their lineup or on their bench who could pitch and hit competently not just like mop up innings like we're seeing right now but guys who could actually do something guys who might

you know imagine if matt davidson got some pitching instruction he's out there throwing 94 95 miles per hour sometimes so it's interesting i don't think the angels are looking at these two guys as potential future core pieces but with so little potentially so little work like the the learning curve here is steep i think i'm using that right steep and that you could learn a lot quickly yeah that makes sense so you you could learn so much about pitching in just like a week or two and to go from there and still not disrupt your your development as a position player i i like this and i i don't know if the angels are the first team to take this step because we have a number of teams who are working on their own two-way players, but I would

like to see more of this because it's one thing to see position players pitching and whatever. It still has a little bit of novelty, but if they could actually do a decent job of it, then it becomes something that isn't just an inning sponge. It's like an actual useful two-way player. So it's good. I like it. Yeah, I like it too. Steep probably means that it's hard, right? It's hard to learn. I'm pretty sure. I think I learned from some other podcast like a month or two ago,

because I used to think that too. And what I think it is actually true, I don't know how to put this in the best words. I think a steep learning curve, if you picture it, it means that you gain knowledge quickly with very little passage of time over the x-axis, right? Whereas a shallow learning curve implies that it takes a long time to get to higher levels on the y-axis. So I'm pretty sure that the intuitive way to think of it is incorrect. Interesting. Yeah, the popular usage, I would say, is definitely the opposite. Anyway, I don't know what the original is, but I think that, yeah, I am in favor of this. I noted I wrote something last week about Otani, and I mentioned

how maybe he has opened the door for future players to do this sort of thing. And again, not that there are going to be more Shohei Otanis. I mean, even if there were a training program for Shohei Otanis, I'm not sure that we would see that many Shohei Otani's because he's just amazing and he's one of the best at both things, not just passable at one and pretty good at the other. So I don't think that we're going to see someone with his skill set come along. But sure, you might as well encourage people to pursue both options if they have that talent. I think if anything, we'll see guys who get drafted as potential two-way players, maybe they'll have a little bit of a longer leash and they'll get a little more time to make up their mind or see which one is best suited to them. You won't be forced to make a decision or commit to hitting or pitching quite as quickly because

at least there's precedent now there is one guy who has done it at a pretty high level so i think you just need one to be able to point to and say it's possible just to make it easier for the second person right in the same way that the opener has spread a little bit it didn't take much but it just took one team to come around the raise of course, starting Sergio Romo and Hunter Wood and Ryan Stanek and Diego Castillo and et cetera. And the Rays have used it so often they've gotten complete buy-in from their entire pitching staff credit to them and their managerial communication skills. But now the A's are sometimes using the opener

and Liam Hendricks and a few other teams have dabbled with using the opener as well. No one has adopted to the extent that the Rays have, but it's amazing what happens when one team is willing to go out on a limb because all of a sudden you can just point to that team as your entire justification, which is all to bring this back full circle and say that Williams has to do better have a major league job next season. Right. So I wanted to talk, I guess this is the nominal topic, although we probably won't spend as much time on it as we've spent on other things. But I wanted to respond to the article and the conversation about the article by Joel Sherman this past weekend, who wrote an article for The Post that was entitled, Statistical Revolution is Killing the Next Generation of MLB Fans. And this is maybe not what you would think it's about based on the title. It sounds like kind of a crotchety old man yelling at clouds thing about how stats are ruining the

game on the field. And it is not that. And Joel Sherman is not that. I think he's a good writer and reporter. And I do MLB Now with him now and then. And he's an engaging TV person too. And he is not someone who thinks that stats are dumb or bad or counterproductive. He acknowledges many times in the article that there are good reasons why certain stats have fallen by the wayside and other stats have been adopted because they're better and it makes sense for teams to pay attention to them. Now, his argument is not the argument that we've seen a lot, which is that the sabermetric revolution has changed the way the game has played in ways that have made it less entertaining or engaging. And we've talked about that discussion in the past as well. And I think there's some merit to

that angle. Again, for me, for us, for probably a lot of the listeners, I don't think it has hurt our enjoyment of the game and maybe has enhanced it in some ways, but I can buy that for other types of fans. It might just, you know, the velocity, the strikeouts, the pace, the long gaps between balls in play, the pitching changes, whatever characterizes modern optimal strategic baseball that maybe isn't the best from a spectator perspective. I'm sympathetic at least to that viewpoint. But Joel's argument in this column was that the actual stats themselves are not as engaging, that one of the things that is driving people away from baseball, if in fact people are being driven away from baseball, is just that there are no statistical milestones that anyone cares about, that the game is kind of divorced from history in some ways because we used to have wins and we used to have batting average and we used to have runs batted in and there one cares about a war or an ex-fip

in the same way and we're not really looking at players chasing certain historically special milestones so that's his argument here and others have responded to that argument both to agree with it and to disagree with it Joe Pesnanski wrote something about how strenuously he disagrees with this, but I thought we could talk about it briefly. And the first thing I'll mention is just that attendance is down. Part of the argument for this article is that fans are being driven away from baseball because attendance is down. We've heard that a lot this season, and it's true, but it's less true than it was when I looked or when we've talked about it in the past.

I just looked and attendance is down about 4.3% on a per game basis year over year, which is not good. But when everyone was wringing their hands about this early in the season, it was like 6%, 7%, right? And so that must mean if it's down to 4.3% now that since a lot of those articles about how baseball is dying because attendance is down, attendance must have tracked pretty closely with where it was last year, I would think, to get to the point where it is right now. where it was last year, I would think, to get to the point where it is right now. So attendance is down to 28,651 fans per game compared to 29,933 per game last year. Again, not good, but when you

factor in weather that's been bad this year, when you factor in some of the temporarily non-competitive teams, I think that could explain a lot of things and ratings are still strong. So anyway, we could quibble with the basic foundation of the argument that baseball is in trouble. But what do you think of the argument that today's stats that are in vogue that we talk about all the time on this podcast are in some way less engaging, more impenetrable to the casual fan, the mainstream fan than the stats of old. I mean, it's true. If you think about the most important statistic to me, to you, to a lot of us is war, whatever form of it, wins, wins, replacement, and whether that's for pitchers

or players, especially like you can't, because of the way that it works, you can't watch a game with Mike Trout and know what's happening with his war every inning. Just like we don't have defensive stats updated. And there's just so much that goes into it. So, in a sense, that much is true. One thing that I have thought about more recently, and now I know that no-hitters in perfect games are very rare. I know that no-hitters in perfect games are very rare, and I know that this season, at least early on, it seemed like we had this never-ending stream of no-hitter threats, of pitchers going through like seven, eight innings with a no-hitter intact, and then they would be snapped. But I do know, I feel like, and I don't think I'm wrong to say that no-hitters in perfect game attempts are just part of baseball lore. baseball lore it feels magical to be in attendance when you're watching one and the statistical revolution has sort of chipped away at what feels like the significance or appreciation of no hitters

i think perfect games are still pretty cool but no hitters feel like they've been attacked a little bit not on purpose but just as a consequence of understanding how little control over balls and play pitchers have and so you you have that and then you fold in that starting pitchers are just working less and less deep all the time and the teams are always thinking about the bigger picture and you are going to have fewer no-hitter attempts and perfect game attempts from this point forward which again it doesn't happen that often but that is something that will be lost now i feel like people become fans of a game because of the game itself whether it's because they played it or because they watched a lot of it and i don't think anybody ever became a baseball fan because they were just really

attracted to wins and rbi and right and run the score and stolen bases that doesn't make any sense and so i i think that when you are a fan of something you just find numbers you find measures or metrics that you care about to express your interest in it so i think that something will will step in how much do people how much have people honestly cared about the win statistic even like when you were a kid if you went to a baseball game would you come away being like well at least i got to see i don't know ron gidry get a win or something but that's not even a i'm not that old useful sentence i don't know why that was the name that came to mind Roger Clemens

like who but like I get you know like chases for I remember being in San Diego when Tony Gwynn was trying to bat 400 which is absurd I remember watching Itro like when Itro broke George Sissler's hits record I remember watching that from college and like giving

him a stupid lame standing ovation in my bedroom at like one in the morning because he got to 262. But, you know, that that's not going away. There are still like raw totals. Maybe wins don't matter. But like people still get RBI if somebody actually got the hack Wilson. That would be fun. That's awesome. Yeah.

I feel like it's it's an overstated argument. But I'm also I'm going to be completely honest with you. I saw the headline and then I thought, no, I'm not going to do it. Yeah. Well, I don't blame you, but I think, right, based on the headline, I think you would think that this is a different article than it actually is, but maybe we don't agree with it anymore than we would with that other kind of article. And I think you're right. I mean, for one thing, we're kind of in a sabermetric bubble, and that bubble is expanding, and there are more fans inside that bubble every year. But I think what's outside the bubble is still bigger, and people still care about milestones

and traditional stats. And we still make a big deal of those things when they happen. And, you know, Joe Pizanski in his post pointed that out, too, that when Derek Jeter got to 3,000 hits or Adrian Beltre got to 3,000 hits or Albert Pujols hit his 600th home run, it wasn't like no one noticed those things. It was a big story when that happened. And something like Jacob deGrom's win-loss record, which we just talked about, we're talking about that. Now, I guess we're talking about it in a different way. I mean, we're not saying he's bad because he doesn't have a lot of wins. We're saying he's great, and wins are bad because they don't capture Jacob deGrom's greatness. So it's a different kind of conversation, but those stats are still part of the conversation and if you grew up attached to those stats they are still there and they are just as easy to find

as they have ever been so maybe there's less of a fuss over something like GD Martinez going for the triple crown than there would have been decades ago it seems like probably that would have been a bigger story whereas now it almost seems like a bigger story to us. Again, skewed perspective that Mookie Betts is at 10 war now, according to baseball reference, although according to fan graphs, he is exactly tied with Mike Trout. So there's a nerdy race for you to follow down the stretch if you need a statistically based race. But yeah,

I think there are certain things that don't get as much attention as they once would have. But I think that you're completely right when you say that you grow to love and care about whatever stats are important when you grow to love the game. You don't come to the game because of a stat. You come to the game because of the game, and then you learn to love or pay attention to the stats. If anything, I think maybe you're more likely to come to the game based on the sabermetric stats than you are to come to the game based on wins and RPI, right? wins and rpi right i mean that i don't know that you would necessarily become a baseball fan in most cases because you read about sabermetrics and thought it was cool i'm sure that has happened but it seems like i don't know you're more likely to become a hardcore fan in some part because of those stats than you are because of something like runs betted. And I know that at least in my case,

I care about baseball more and pay attention to baseball more because it has this extra layer of statistical complexity than I would otherwise. I mean, I cared about baseball as a fan as a kid when I didn't know about this stuff, when this stuff didn't exist, but I don't know that I still would as much, if not for this extra way to enjoy and appreciate it.

And it opens up opportunities to learn critical thinking. I mean, I don't know how much I've learned about thinking processes or like economic principles just by understanding how baseball teams work these days, understanding moneyball, understanding like war per dollar, dollars per war, whatever. So there are so there there are so many chances now maybe again kind of like you said i don't know if someone's going to become a baseball fan because they hear about wins above replacement and decide i want to see what this is all about but you can just do so much more with it and you can in a way you can use baseball as a foundation for learning so many different fields

or at least getting some sort of like grasp on them whereas if you just learn batting average that doesn't tell you that just tells you basic division which is useful you gotta know basic division if you're ever going to split a bill but i mean you can there are sabermetric classes being taught at at colleges right now you you can use baseball as the foundation of like a lecture or a series of lectures in an economics class which is which is neat. And I'll say because I get the sense that you want to chime in on something. But one other thing I will note is that while I understand it can be confusing because in the old days, people were all talking about the same statistics, the same, I don't know, 5 or 10, 15 statistics.

And now there's more to choose from, which can be overwhelming. They're just look at a Fangraphs player page that goes on forever. There are so many numbers to choose from. But that allows you to have so many more conversations and arguments or debates, pleasant conversations about players that come at it from different sides. So if anything, you can talk about baseball for longer, which is really what the point of statistics is, is to fill the gaps between when baseball is being played. So you just think about it so much more and so much deeper. Yeah. And we've heard from a lot of listeners who have told us that their passion for baseball was rekindled or perhaps even kindled by the sort of stuff that we tend to focus on in this podcast. Some of the more sabermetric ways of appreciating the game that people kind of came back to it after a while

because they were attracted to that way of thinking about things. And I think with kids who are getting into baseball, I don't think it's an obstacle for them. I don't think that someone who is just being exposed to the game now is thinking, man, exit velocities or pitch velocities or spin rate or any of this is off-putting. I think, if anything, they are into that and embracing that. likely to become lifelong fans if the stats in Vogue were RBI and batting average as opposed to these, frankly, more interesting stats, I think, and in some ways just even more intuitive stats when it's stats that are essentially scouting information and it mirrors what you're seeing with your eyes. If it's just, hey, this guy hits the ball hard. I mean, that is cool. That is easy to sell, I think, in a way that a batting average, I don't know, I guess a batting average is too,

but it's pretty interesting that you can look up just how far every ball goes or this guy hits the ball super hard and Aaron Judge is a monster and he hits the ball 115 miles per hour. I mean, that seems like the sort of thing that would get people interested in the game and not drive them away unless they just have trouble kind of keeping up or don't like the way that the game is going. And it's not the game that they grew up with. And so they are turned off by that as who knows, maybe we will be by the way the game goes in 40 years from now. Who knows? by the way the game goes in 40 years from now. Who knows? Something I like, I think there's an opportunity. Now, you could use all the numbers that we have now to be really, really critical if you want to be.

You can just make fun of Chris Davis for months on end, which is cruel, but whatever, you do you. But I think what I like about it is it gives you so many different ways to say a player is really good. So for example, you could, JD Martinez doesn't do much of anything except hit, but he hits an F tonton, let's say.

And so he's valuable, but he's just like one of the five best hitters in baseball. So you can say, J.D. Martinez is amazing. I love watching him hit. You could say the other Chris Davis, the good one, the one for Oakland, he would say, I really like watching him hit. Feels like he changes the feel of the entire lineup and whatever but something you can also use the other numbers other constructs to to say to point out that actually this guy who seems like he might not be that good is actually really terrific and an example i always come back to when the mariners traded ken griffin junior to the reds the understanding was oh the mariners got screwed they had no leverage they didn't get anything back and even when the mariners were good and the mariners were very good when they had mike

cameron on their team from 2000 to 2003 there was was a lot of complaining that Mike Cameron had a low batting average and he struck out too much. Mike Cameron, between 2000 and 2003, was one of the best centerfielders in baseball. And now you could watch him. You'd see him make these incredible catches in centerfield and he hit the occasional home run. But when you look back, especially now, when you look at how valuable he was despite his low batting average, especially now when you look at how valuable he was despite his low batting average having that sort of information now can help you appreciate a player that maybe doesn't have the best superficial statistics but you can say this guy's really helping like what would kevin kiermaier be without war we wouldn't think much about him at all and so it just gives you more reasons to like

a player which is something i think baseball could really use. Everyone's looking for reasons, right? Yeah. And as Joe pointed out in his piece, RBI, batting average, wins, whatever, they were all just attempts to measure how good players were. And they were not particularly good attempts, but they were the best public attempts available. And that's why they were popular. That's why people talked about them. That's why they acquired this resonance in the national imagination is because for so long, they were the way to judge how good players are. And now they are no longer the best way to do that. But we have other ways.

And so I think we will see a tradition kind of accrue to these new stats over time too. see a tradition kind of accrue to these new stats over time too. And the nice thing is that we also have a lot of these stats going back decades and centuries too. So we can look up someone's war in Tim Hurst's time if we want to, and it's there. And maybe it's not calculated in exactly the same way or quite as precise as war would be today or will be 10 years from now. But we have it and it's on the same scale. And we can say that this guy was this good compared to his league. And this guy today is this good compared to his league. And I think there's some benefit to that too. I mean, we can look back and find some player we never heard of who was worth six wins in a season or something in 1913 and say, oh, wow, he was really good. And you don't necessarily have to know what ballpark he played in or what the offensive environment was to know whether he was actually good.

That's all done for you. It's right there in one number. one number. And even though it is intimidating that there are so many stats out there, I still think that just about any stat you could pick off a Fangrafts player page can be explained in 10 seconds or less. I mean, it's pretty rare to come across a stat that just takes a really long time to explain. The concept is usually simple. The calculations may be complex and so complex that we can't do them. But just to explain, here's the point of the stat, here's what it's measuring, here's what it means, that really isn't any harder to do with newfangled stats than it would be for the pitcher win, which frankly is kind of complicated if you didn't grow up knowing what

a pitcher win is. I mean, you have to pitch this number of innings and you have to be the pitcher of record and you have to leave with the lead or there can't be another pitcher who comes in before the lead. them to someone who was completely new to the sport, I'm not sure it would be that much easier than it would be to explain any other stat that has entered the vernacular recently. Right. The way that we write and analyze baseball in a lot of ways mirrors how we think the industry sees these baseball players. The way that we write about them is similar to the way that front offices would look at these players. And I understand that there's a difference. You can talk about predictive versus descriptive statistics. And this is just a place that we wound up. But no, I mean, the win rule, the save rule, these things are complicated.

Earned runs versus unearned runs, what counts as an error. These things are complicated. And just because they're familiar doesn't mean they're better. These things are complicated, and just because they're familiar doesn't mean they're better. But, no, basically, I think we started making the main points, and now we're just down to making the subtle ones. But, in effect, there are a lot of numbers, more numbers than ever, that is different. But I just can't – it's hard for me to imagine that someone who would be a baseball fan is now not a baseball fan because it was too statistically complicated. It's really easy to not pay attention to the advanced numbers if you don't want to,

and you can still watch a baseball game. Yeah. And I do kind of wonder whether as these stats are cemented and mainstream, I mean, for me, I think it was really exciting when I started getting into sabermetrics and reading some of the formative books in the genre because even then it still felt like oh this is the counterculture this is the thing that the people on the broadcast don't want you to hear this is kind of the secret way to understand baseball that no one else knows and there was this fun feeling of you know, I know better in some ways than the old school baseball people, the traditionalists. You know, I have this deeper understanding, this more subtle understanding of the sport than people have played the sport their whole lives in certain ways. And, you know, in a lot of ways that is kind of arrogant also and wrong in some ways too.

But the fact is that when a lot of us started paying attention to this stuff, it was still kind of a niche thing. And this was, you know, even before most teams were hiring people from the internet who wrote about this sort of stuff. And, you know, there was something of an us versus them mentality that I think made it more appealing to, you know, like a rebellious teenage type who is getting into this stuff and feeling like, oh, this is the true baseball that I am getting here. And so I wonder, since that's no longer the case, I mean, if you were coming to Sabermetrics today for the first time, you know, it's still different from what you'll hear on a lot of broadcasts or what you'll hear on talk radio, for instance. But because teams are all operating this

way, because players are being paid according to these stats, because it is the way that baseball functions, there isn't the same sense of, you know, we're understanding something that no one else understands. So I wonder if there's less appeal to it in a way, just because it is the dominant mode of thinking as opposed to, you know, the upstart way that is taking over. Yeah, I guess the counter, the partial counter to that would be, well, you're just not getting so much of the old stats exposed anymore. Broadcaster talking about the, you know, at least, I don't know, OPS or ERA instead of win-loss record.

You'll still see it in the little chyrons and whatnot, but it's just, you know, this is all still so new. Baseball, everything about baseball tends to move at a glacial pace aside from the shifting rate on Mike Trout. So you figure that we're still kind of learning what the conversation is going to be like, what these are going to look like in 10 years. But, you know, we're seeing exit velocity during games.

And actually, that's like exit velocity, pitch velocity. These are just things we take for granted now. And there's nothing that should be scary about exit velocity or pitch velocity. Exit velocity just sounds weird and new. But all it is is how fast you hit the ball, which is no different than how fast you throw the ball. So, you know, we don't know what numbers are going to look like in 10 years. We don't know how they're going to be discussed in years, how they'll be presented in 10 years.

We have no idea how much more complex they're going to be. But I know what you mean, that it's not some sort of counterculture avenue to understanding baseball and figuring out what Bud Seeley just doesn't want you to know. Right. It's this counterintuitive, like, open your mind, man. They've been selling you this misinformation about baseball your whole life. I have the real knowledge here for you. And yeah, that's not really how it works anymore. Yeah, not so much. But I think that for, I could be generalizing here, but for younger, bright minds, my sense is that young people are more increasingly open-minded

to greater complexity. It's just a part of the world that they're growing into becoming more complex by the day. So even though all this analytical stuff might scare away people who have been with the game for a long time, I get the sense that the young people, the next generation, and the next generation, the fans after that,

they're not going to be so easily put off by a little bit of math. All right. Baseball not being killed by advanced stats, but maybe we need umpires to start throwing mugs into the stand if we want to make things more exciting. You want me to throw out one last thing before we close?

Sure. I mentioned this to you before we were recording. I will just say it is now official for the first time since 2003, the American League will not win interleague play. They were the dominant league from 2004 through 2017. The American League, every single season, won more than half of the games against the National League. There are 300 games the leagues play against one another.

This season, there have been 289 interleague games played so far, only 11 left. The American League has won 139, and they've lost 150. If they win the final 11 games, they will finish at 500. Chances are they will not. The National League is going to win interleague play for the first time in a decade and a half. It feels like something right yeah well it feels like the end of a storyline that we could count on talking about every year so that's sad if we can no longer get our podcast episode or post about how the al is dominating the nl anymore but congratulations to the senior circuit for reasserting your superiority or at least equality.

Do we have any theories? Is there any big picture takeaway from the fact that this streak has been snapped or is about to be? I don't know. The Orioles suck. Yeah. I guess it is kind of. The Orioles are horrendous and the Royals are bad and there's just a more lopsided American League this year. I don't know whether it means anything, but it does seem significant anytime you have something that goes on that long and then it stops going on.

And I think the understanding is still that the NL is at a slight disadvantage maybe in interleague play because of the DH rule. So it's notable that it's overcome that. And I don't know, in the past, I think the theory was that the Yankees were kind of spurring all the other AL teams on to spend because they were just so far and above everyone else in payroll. And it was kind of raising all boats in a way in that league and maybe that's no longer as true i mean yankees are still really good but they are not outspending everyone it is the dodgers who've been the yankees essentially in the last few years so maybe there's more payroll equality between the leagues now maybe that has something to do with it let's uh let's try to put it this way so boston cleveland uh oakland houston and new york are going to likely to be the playoff

teams from the american league boston and interleague play this year 16 and 4 houston 13 and 7 oakland 12 and 8 cleveland 12 and 8 new york 11 and 9 all of those teams over 500 in interleague play the rest rest of the American League, not so much. The Royals, 4 and 11. The White Sox, 5 and 12. The Mariners, apparently 6 and 14. The Rays, 7 and 13. So, that's just what you would think. The American League is a bifurcated league. You've

got your good teams, and then you've got your not-so-good teams, and the good teams have dominated. They've controlled the National League again, so I guess the take-home here, if we were going to base it on this small sample of data, is that the best teams in the American League are still better than the National League, but the American League just has a whole lot of crap in it. Whether or not that's going to keep up, I don't know, because all those crap teams are trying to rebuild, but this is where we are now. Yeah. And maybe it's not just that the Yankees

were forcing everyone to spend more, but also maybe that they were forcing everyone to be smarter. I mean, a lot of the cutting edge sabermetric teams were AL teams. It was the A's and the Red Sox and the Indians and the Rays. And maybe there's a reason for that. I mean, just go back to the Moneyball movie and there's that famous scene where Billy Bean is at the table with all his scouts and, you know, what's the problem? We're losing Jason Giambi. He's going to go sign with the Yankees, and we're the team that can't compete with the Yankees and the big spending teams, so we have to do something different. So we're going to be the sabermetric team. So maybe, I mean, it seems like the more advanced analytical teams tended to be concentrated in the AL disproportionately early on in the sabermetric movement

with maybe some exceptions. But at this point, now that almost everyone has achieved progressive parity or everyone is far ahead of where they were two decades ago, I don't know that you could really say that there's a big gap between the leagues in analytical sophistication. So if there was an edge for the AL there, that has kind of been erased too. Right. No, I strongly agree with that. And so I guess my closing thought, I mentioned the American League has 11 interleague games left to play. If they win them all, they can at least salvage this finish at 500. Those 11 games for the American League and

interleague play will be played by the Tigers the white socks and the royals not the champions that the al would have chosen probably all right well we will wrap up there you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. You sign up, you pledge some small monthly amount, that amount goes to us, we can keep making podcasts. It's a nice system, thanks to your assistance. And thanks to the assistance of the following five listeners who have already pledged their support. Andy, Nathan Wamser, Matt Thompson, Simon Penchansky, and Dylan DeThomas. Thanks to all of you. And thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. By the way, I assume most of you know this,

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We will likely get to some questions later this week. We'll be back soon. Talk to you then. It's so hard for me now, but I'll make it somehow. Though I know I'll never be the same. Won't you ever change your ways It's so hard to make love pay When you're on the losing end

And I feel that way again