Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1273: Baseball, But Louder

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the response to their previous episode, whether improvements in catching or improvements in umpiring have done more to reduce the variation in framing performance among teams, a Mike Trout snub, Breyvic Valera‘s contact rate, and the latest revelations about Addison Russell’s alleged domestic abuse, then answer listener emails […]

The ones you love, where are they now? The ones you love, where are they now? And I'm hoping that I'll still hear them loud Hello and welcome to episode 1273 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. Hi, Ben. So we got a lot of response to our episode from yesterday, I would say. There was a lot of listener discussion in the Facebook group.

I think most people seemed to enjoy hearing what Michael Schwimmer had to say about Big League Advance, even though they, like us, weren't entirely sure what to make of much of it. But I can tell you that based on what I heard and probably what you heard, there are a lot of people in baseball who are not big fans of Big League Advance and are skeptical, to say the least, about the claims, which is part of the reason that we wanted to have him on to discuss those claims himself. And you can decide what you think of him. And some people decided that they think it's a great business model, and other people decided they think it's all snake oil. So I guess we'll see one day.

I mean, I guess what we, we don't, we are not in position to have that much specific information. We can't speak to the models to project minor league careers. And we can't speak to the models to project injury risk because we just don't have the information. We somewhat have to take Michael Schroemer at his word. And then we just kind of evaluate from this point forward. It would be very neat. It would be if if he is onto something and we don't know we know there are people who believe that he is not onto something but for uh the the initial parts of a potentially successful company for him so we don't know but what we do know in general and we talked about this in the little the postscript is that at the fundamental level, this company and Michael Schwimmer could and should be filling a void that does exist.

Minor leaguers do not make money, the bulk of them, those who didn't get a large signing bonus. And it is beyond absurd that this is a void that has to be filled in the first place. There's no real excuse for for baseball allowing it to get to this point but it has it has created room for for good actors and i suppose potentially bad actors to fill the void until or unless something is done and so this is this isn't the first we've heard of a of a company that's trying to fill a void like this you remember the uh the fan text stories that uh that popped up and i well i think maybe the most well-known player i think was andrew haney who signed a

a deal with fan text to like sell some percent of his shares in a market that traded at fan texas discretion or volition that the whole thing never made a ton of sense to me because I didn't know what the value was to the average person to say, I got 10 shares of Andrew Haney today. What do I do with that? Yeah. It was other guys, too. It was Colin McHugh and Michael Franco, Jonathan Scope, and some others, too. I assume they are still paying out. I don't know. I haven't heard a whole lot about Phanteks lately, but I assume so. Yeah. So I don't remember if there was anything

before Phanteks. I know that Dave Cameron had written a few ideas of proposals of ways to allow players to essentially have some sort of buy insurance in themselves and their careers so that they could get some money. Anyway, this could all be taken care of with swift and relatively inexpective action on the part of those in charge of baseball teams. But that hasn't happened. It's unlikely to happen around the corner. And so until then, I think that we have little choice but to root for a company like Big League Advance because at least in theory, at least on paper, they are directing money toward minor league players, the players who need it the most. All right. So we are going to answer some emails today. A couple things before we do.

I wrote something today at The Ringer on a subject that you have talked about before, which is framing and the apparent compression of framing value. Basically, to recap, framing came into the public eye in a very mainstream way in 2011 with Mike Fast's article for Baseball Perspectives, although there had been some public and private research prior to that point. And you could see that really as soon as people started figuring out that framing was important suddenly the gaps between teams and between the best and worst framers really started to shrink and as i was writing about this i came across the usual answers for this which i think makes sense which is basically that guys who really can't frame, who have no aptitude for receiving strikes,

they are not going to get playing time at catcher anymore. They will be in the minors. They will move to another position. They will not be back there the way that Ryan Domet used to be, just hemorrhaging runs at an incredible rate. And the other possible factor is that guys have gotten better at framing and teams are obviously emphasizing this. They're making a great effort to improve minor leaguers and major leaguers alike, and there are ways that you could do that. Clearly, it's a more teachable skill than many baseball skills. It's not perfectly teachable. like nothing, but obviously it's more doable than teaching someone who's slow to run fast or teaching someone who has a weak arm to throw hard. So those are the two general factors.

And I talked to Tyler Flowers and I talked to the Phillies catching coach because Jorge Alfaro has made a major improvement in framing this year. And I talked about the way that they've done it and Flowers was always good but he's gotten much better and he's done it through data and just kind of modeling himself on other good framers looking at his stats looking at video right after the game to see what calls he's getting or not getting and he was talking about how one of the things he started doing was dropping down to one knee because he's a big guy. So it helps him get a lower target there and kind of come up on the ball when it's low in the strike zone. And he was saying suddenly it seems like everyone else is doing that in part maybe because people are actually watching Tyler Flowers and other guys who do that. And Rory Alfaro is a guy who has done that more and more this year.

And, of course, those guys have gone head to head a lot this year. Anyway, that's really nothing new. New guys I was talking about, new quotes, but old trend, even though it has, I think, gotten even more extreme now. Right now, the difference between the best and worst framing teams is about half of what it was in 2008, according to baseball prospectus stats. So the thing I was wondering about and the thing that I don't have a satisfying answer for is how much of this is umpiring because I'll just throw

one stat out there. So on pitches inside the rulebook strike zone back in 2008, the first year for which we have full pitch FX data, the called strike rate when hitters took those pitches in the rulebook zone was about 74%. This year, it's about 87%. That is a very big difference. So when there's a pitch in the rulebook strike zone, hitters take it is much more likely to be called a strike than it was 10 years ago. Now, is that framing? Maybe. Maybe it's partly framing. Maybe it's catchers who are better now at making strikes look like strikes. But it could also have something to do with umpiring because we know that the shape of the strike zone has changed and umpires are getting graded based on pitch effects and stat cast now. So they have something to judge themselves against

and they have something at stake, and it seems like on the whole, umpires have gotten much closer to calling the rulebook strike zone. Now, does that to you suggest that there would be less opportunity for framing value? In other words, if all the umpires are calling just the rulebook zone more often, then does that mean that you just wouldn't be able to be that much further above the average or below the average anymore, because the umpires just aren't going to give you the pitches that they might have given you 10 years ago? Does that make sense to you? Well, I guess you could, in theory, be much further below the average, but yeah. I guess you could, yeah.

could in theory be much further below the average but yeah i guess it could yeah i hmm so the what we what we know what we have easily observed is that the strike zone has dropped over the course of the decade or so and it's maybe stabilized a little bit in recent years but there have been more strikes called around the knees and around the hollow of the knees and that's where a lot of framing has taken place that's where guys like jose molina were specialists and so i guess the question which is just repeating what you just said is that has the strike zone dropped because of umpires or has it dropped because of catchers receiving those pitches better now it's easier for me to come up with a theory of of why it's been catcher driven maybe not entirely but but for the most part because it's hard for me to know how umpires could learn techniques that would make them

significantly better at calling those pitches strikes but it's easier for me to understand how catchers could do something different like for example dropping down to it to one knee or just lowering your your target and so in that sense i would think it's more likely that the umpires are following the catchers but i will admit that this is a perspective on it that i hadn't considered before yeah it's really tough to untangle and i i agree like there's no real reason why umpires should suddenly be better at judging pitch locations but it's possible that they just care more about matching the rulebook zone because they're getting printouts after the game or at least they can if they want to i think maybe they just do anyway

and so if their performance is being reviewed and things like you know maybe bonuses or raises or assignments to post-season games or world series games or all-star games etc come down in some degree to how well you line up with pitch fx, which is sort of a silly system, really, because it's like we can't have robot umpires, but now we're creating the human umpires based on the robot umpires. I know it does make some sort of sense because that system is after the fact that you can look and see how accurate you were. It's not as easy as just doing it in real time. That is a greater technical challenge. But if we have a thought experiment, I mean, compare it to say, we get the question a lot about, well, does defense matter

less now because there are more strikeouts? And I think our answer is that, well, there are more strikeouts, but there really aren't that many fewer balls in play, really, when you think about it compared to before there are fewer. But in theory, I mean, say the strikeout rate goes even higher and there are fewer balls in play. If there are fewer opportunities to field, then in theory, the best and worst fielders shouldn't be separated by as much value, right? Because there just wouldn't be as many chances for the bad fielders to be bad and the good fielders to be good. So you would expect that there would be a smaller range or a smaller spread there. And to me, I wonder whether the same principle applies to framing, where you just have umpires who are

calling this more rigid zone and are less likely to be swayed in any direction. And so maybe it's just getting rarer for you to be able to fool an umpire by as much as you once could. And maybe that could be partly responsible for the fact that the best framers do not seem as valuable as they were a decade ago. Yeah, I guess one somewhat critical difference between the two examples is that if you have fewer balls in play, then there is literally not an opportunity for the defense to make a play, whereas I don't think that there's been a market decline in pitches that are not swung at.

And so even if the umpires are the ones making the decision, maybe they're making the decisions independent of what the catcher is doing, that is still, at least in theory, an opportunity to frame or not frame very well. still, at least in theory, an opportunity to frame or not frame very well. Yeah. So, and I guess if you want to take it to the end, then ultimately, whether it's catcher driven or whether it's umpire driven, one way or another, the framing impact has been somewhat or considerably mitigated just because there is now less of a difference. And I enjoy the thought experiment aspect of it, of trying to figure out who's driving this the most.

But at the end of the day, unless there's some threat that things are going to go back. And by the way, I don't know how much longer we can get away with using Ryan Domet as an example. I don't know how many people even remember who Ryan Domet was as a catcher. He was just so bad. It's unbelievable like he had a season where literally without even like extrapolating or anything according to bp he cost his team i think 56 runs from framing it's ridiculous it's he and and jose molina if you look at jose molina at baseball prospectus he's worth something like 17 wins above replacement player.

And if you add up the number of runs that came from framing, it's like 20 wins. So it's like he was like three wins below replacement level in every other area, but he was so incredibly good. He was like 202 runs above average as a framer that he just looks like a pretty good player just from that and domit is the opposite negative 167 runs in only 10 seasons of mostly part-time catching i mean that's i don't think it wasn't recognized at the time like framing was not an unknown thing people have talked about framing going back ages, but because it wasn't quantified, it was kind of easy to ignore and think, oh yeah, maybe it's a small difference here and there.

But no, it's a major difference because it comes into play on a high percentage of pitches. And Domet, you know, I'd love to go back in time and see like were the Pirates and his other teams working with him on this and he just wasn't able to improve or did they just figure he's a pretty good hitter. We'll just leave him alone. Doesn't matter. I mean, in retrospect, it's just incredible that anyone was playing him.

But of course, it's easy to say that now. I guess it would be ironic if his teams were trying to make him better except that they they made a bad presentation yeah so just to try not a good one to try to get give this additional i guess old-timey frame of reference i don't know if you've checked miguel and duhar is terrible at defense he's a he's good at hitting but he's terrible at the other part uh and according to as a third baseman according to defensive run saved and duhar has been 23 runs below average according to ultimate zone rating he's been 16 runs below average these numbers are very bad and so right now there's a bit of a miguel and duhar matt chapman situation that's reminiscent of i guess ryan domit jose molina if you want but now keep those and duhar numbers in

mind because there's something there's a season that happened that a lot of people have probably forgotten. Ryan Braun at one point was a third baseman. In 2007, Ryan Braun came up as a third baseman for the Brewers. And here's what he did as the third baseman in far fewer innings than Andujar has played. Ryan Braun, according to Defensive Run Saved, was 32 runs worse than average. And according to Ultimate Zone Rating, he was 29 runs worse than average in according to ultimate zone writing he was 29 runs worse than average in 945 innings he played i don't know what that is like 112 games two-thirds of one season and ryan braun was domity as a third baseman he made 26 errors in two-thirds of a season now ryan braun

obviously has gone on to have a very successful career. He's going to end up as, I don't know, maybe like a Brewers Hall of Fame player, presumably not an overall Hall of Fame player, but he was outstanding. He was an MVP candidate, an excellent player, but the Brewers could not play him at third base. Now, that's more than a decade ago at this point, so no one really remembers it, and Newhart is maybe the closest thing we have to that in the modern day, but still, Ryan Braun, terrible defense. Ryan Domet, terrible pitch framing.

I'm going to probably have to update my Nefi Perez references because people aren't going to get those anymore. Getting old is hard, man. Yeah. All right. Well, we should get to some emails, I suppose. Did you have anything that you wanted to talk about before we do? I'm pretty sure FCD had a good game the other day, but we can probably just sit on that one for another few days. Yeah. Also, I noticed that Debbie Trout tweeted a thinking face emoji.

That is Mike Trout's mother. She tweeted a thinking face emoji at MLB Network's Twitter account because on MLB Network, they had a graphic on this tweet where they said, pick one. And they had three thinking face emoji of their own. And then they had the notable AL MVP candidates and the notable NL MVP candidates, five of each. And there was no Mike Trout to be found on the notable AL MVP candidates. Five guys, JD Martinez, Mookie Betts, Chris Davis, Alex Bregman, and Jose Ramirez, all excellent players and worthy MVP candidates, I suppose. But you can't not have Mike Trout in that mix. I mean, he is not going to win the award because we've seen it before when he's been the best player in baseball and hasn't made the playoffs and hasn't won the award.

I assume that's going to happen again. in baseball and hasn't made the playoffs and hasn't won the award. I assume that's going to happen again, but he remains the best player in baseball and probably the most valuable in terms of Winslow replacement. So I share your thinking face emoji, Debbie, and I would maybe raise you to a frowny face. Oakland's Chris Davis, not even Oakland's Matt Chapman. Yeah, no. Chris Davis. Not even Oakland's Matt Chapman. Yeah, no. Chris Davis. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, I have further discouraging news. The contact rate gap between Williams-Estadio and Breivik-Valera has expanded to 3.2 percentage points. I don't know what Breivik-Valera is doing. He might just be motivated by Estadio to hit everything that he possibly can. Breivik-Valera, who is not interesting, has made contact with 96% of his

swings. That's 24 out of 25 swings. Williams Estadio still in second place. His plate appearances are up to 65. Estadio, second place contact rate, 92.8%. That's good. He's above Joe Panik. He's above Michael Brantley. He's above everyone who isn't Bravik Valera. Estadio, of course, is still running the lowest strikeout rate in baseball at 3.1%. Yeah, this is not your story, Breivik Valera. Maybe you'll have your day in the sun, but this is the year of Williams Estadio. Just step up there and whiff a few times and let him have the spotlight. Let me do Valera a favor here. Let's just see what he's up to.

Maybe he's having a season that we should... Nope. Nope. All right. Not going to talk about Breivik Valera. He's slugging 232 with an isolated power of zero. Breivik Valera, knock it off. Swing and miss. This isn't working for you. I think after the season is over, we should do an episode where we just talk about all the things that we never talked about during the season, because there

are stories. I mean, amidst our talking about Shohei Otani and Jacob deGrom and William Testadillo every day, there are stories that we have neglected. And probably every fan base has something it's been paying attention to this year that just hasn't really come across our radar. So maybe we will solicit suggestions and we'll just do an episode where we get to every story we have snubbed. But that will come later in the year. every story we have snubbed, but that will come later in the year. So I also just wanted to mention, I think by the time most people have heard this, they probably will have seen this story, but Addison Russell's ex-wife, Melissa, posted a long post on her site detailing allegations of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of Russell, and it paints a very terrible picture of Russell. This sort of surfaced last year when she had an Instagram post that I

think was deleted about how he had cheated on her, and then a friend of hers posted about how he had also been physically abusive, and there was an investigation at the time and I don't know what the resolution of it was. She chose not to participate in that investigation back then. Since then, they have gotten divorced. They got divorced last August, I believe, and now she has put this out there and it is obviously something that I think MLB and the Cubs should take seriously and look into again. If she is willing to talk to investigators now, maybe they can reopen that case. In any case, the Cubs have the ability to suspend him, I assume. And it's hard to read this and not think that they will, except that we've seen teams do the thing that benefits them, even if it's not quote-unquote the right thing many times. I will say that it would be

nice if it didn't matter how the player was playing when it came to these stories, but the fact that Addison Russell has seemingly stagnated as a player and has gotten worse as a hitter when everyone was expecting him to break out as a hitter when everyone was expecting him to break out as a hitter, in a way makes it more likely that something will happen just because of the way baseball works. A team that has a star player is going to be more willing to overlook that player's sins generally. These allegations are pretty serious and pretty disturbing. Marcus Semien, now that I check, has officially passed Addison Russell in career wins above replacement.

So from Oakland's perspective, that kind of worked out. Now, I guess with a situation like this, I haven't yet seen the story. This would have come up, I guess, shortly before we started recording, to my knowledge. Of course, I did know that this had surfaced a little bit last year with Russell. And I guess if there's any sort of hope here, that there's the hope that in the aftermath of the Astros trading for Roberto Rosuna, maybe, hopefully, it allowed other teams to steal themselves to act stronger because maybe they saw what the backlash was to the Astros and whether that would reflect making decisions for the right reasons or not i would hope that the team other teams the league

saw the astros make just an indefensible trade for every reason except whatever takes place on the field and i think well that's that's as bad as it can get but we we need to we need to be better actors around situations like this we don't want to be lumped in with a team like the astros we want to consider that there is more than just what happens on the field and that there are a lot of human lives involved and that these things have to be taken. Let's face it. At this specific moment in America, this is a critical time to take allegations like this extremely seriously. We're not going to delve into the political aspects of what's going on right now in the nation. But I'm going to read the story.

of what's going on right now in the nation. But I'm going to read the story. But like you, I would imagine that if the Cubs have decided that there is any merit to this at all, and honestly, even if it's up in the air, I would think that there is very legitimate cause to at least suspend Russell indefinitely until you can get to or at least approach the bottom of what the story actually is, because it seems to be a very credible and repeated allegation. All right.

Let us move on to emails. And I've got a couple here that are linked in a way. So this one is from Jared. He says, on September 19th, Neil Walker hit his 10th home run for the Yankees, which brings 11 Yankees having 10 homers this season. Luke Voigt has seven but won't be getting as many at-bats for the rest of the season, so that number probably won't change. Well, is 11 players on one team with 10-plus homers a record? That is the question.

And no, it is not a record. It would be tied for the record. But Luke Voigt now has 11 home runs. And so that is a record. The Yankees now have 12 players with at least 10 home runs, which is pretty incredible. I mean, the Yankees, I think, just set a franchise record for home runs. I don't know what the current status of their breaking the all-time record is. I guess not great, probably, right? But they were projected to. It seemed likely that

they would, but then Aaron Judge got hurt and some other things happened. But they are a home run hitting machine, and now they have 12 guys who've hit at least 10. And that's impressive and yet also less impressive because of the era in which they did it and the ballpark in which they did it. Those are kind of the ideal conditions to do something like this. But man, speaking of stories that are kind of worth talking about that we haven't really talked about, Luke Voigt. What in the world? Luke Voigt has a 173 WRC plus in 109 plate appearances with the Yankees since he was traded to them from the Cardinals side. Don't know what they were expecting out of Luke Voigt, but it was definitely not a Shane Spencerian performance where he now has 10 homers with them and 11 on the season, but 10 homers with the Yankees in 97 at-bats.

Here are, sorting this year's list of the top WRC Plus numbers for hitters, just a minimum of 100 play appearances. Top 10, here are names that I don't even know what you would think before the season. Now, Shohei Otani is one of them, and that's a surprise, but it's also a wonderful surprise. We knew that there was the potential for that other names in this top 10 include luke voight ryan o'hearn tyler white and max muncy what the f kind of season are we watching max muncy is something that we should probably be talking about in every single podcast by the way because in case you've forgotten because he came out of nowhere. 449 played appearances this season. 158 WRC+. He's got 33 home runs.

He's kind of like a part-time player. Pinch hits a lot, but he's been unbelievably good. Anyway, so Luke Voigt, Ryan O'Hearn, Tyler. Ryan O'Hearn is going to be featured in the upcoming stat last year. But yeah, Luke Voigt. We knew, I think a lot of people knew that he could hit. He showed potential when he was hitting with the Cardinals. It's, I guess, a little funny that Luke Voigt has come out of nowhere to take the place of Greg Bird

because there was just so much hope around Greg Bird. But now, if you're looking at Luke Voigt, I don't know how he don't just move forward with this. Of course, he's not likely to continue to be, you know, perfect. But I can't see any downside to sticking with. He's in his second year of major league service, so he could belong to the Yankees for a very, very long time. And in the same genre of question about a possibly record-breaking performance that is very influenced by its era, Colin says,

I heard on the radio that assuming Mike Clevenger obtains four strikeouts before the end of the season, Cleveland will have four pitchers with 200 plus strikeouts, which has only happened thrice before. Is this true? If so, fun fact, it seems like a fun fact. So the actual fact is that Cleveland has currently three pitchers with 200-plus strikeouts. That's Bauer, Carrasco, and Kluber, and that has only happened thrice before. 2013 Tigers, and then the 69 Astros and the 67 Twins all have three guys with 200-plus strikeouts. So the Indians, if Clevenger gets those strikeouts,

they will be the first team ever to have four pitchers with 200-plus strikeouts, which is be the first team ever to have four pitchers with 200 plus strikeouts, which is, again, sort of a fun fact and impressive in its way, but also clearly a product of the strikeout rate in baseball today. And if you look at the top of the list, there are those two teams from the 60s that I mentioned. But other than that, the teams with three or two guys with at least 200 plus strikeouts, they're almost all from the past decade, which is just, I mean, that's how it works. Now, you would think that maybe the fact that starters are throwing fewer innings would keep individual strikeout performances down, but it seems like the

increase in strikeout rate has outpaced the decrease in workload. Right. I was looking at the Tampa Bay Rays in the opener on Thursday, and I was looking at teams with the most played appearances as pitchers the third or fourth time through the order, which of course, as many people know, is something that teams are increasingly trying to avoid. And the Indians are far and away in first place. They've had the most played appearances the third and fourth time through the order. And the reason is because their pitchers are good. And also, let's not understate the fact that their division is terrible.

It's still on pace to be the worst division of all time. So the Indians have lucked into a very easy schedule. But they have not had to think about removing their pitchers early because they have been so good and overwhelming, which when you have pitchers who are as good as, let's say, Corey Kluber, Trevor Barrow, Carlos Carrasco, even Mike Levenger, you don't need to worry about the third time through the order so much. And to go back just to help you, all-time record home runs in a season is, of course, 264 set by the 1997 Seattle Mariners. The Yankees this year are at 247, so they're 17 home runs short,

and they have another 10 games to play. So it is within the realm of possibility because 17 home runs over 10 games works out to, what is that as a pace? That is a pace of 275 home runs in a season, which would be a record, but is not unbelievably high. So the Yankees still a legitimate shot to set the home run record by a little bit. All right. Question from Carter. I have a question that's been bugging me for a while, and I guess you guys are the authority on baseball hypotheticals, so I hope you can provide some insight. If all the sounds in baseball got twice as loud gradually over the course of a season,

would anyone notice? I think I would only include sounds that are part of the action, like the crack of the bat or the ball hitting the catcher's mitt. My favorite part of this question is that this has been bugging him for a while. He's just consumed by the question of if everything in baseball got twice as loud, would anyone notice? Okay, so it's like a video game, right, where you can play with the volume bars. You can be like, I want the crowd to be louder, but the PA got it to be quieter. Would anyone notice?

So there's a lot of sounds in baseball, I guess. Now, is this just stuff on a field, or does it include the crowd? It sounds like he's saying just the sounds that the players produce. Okay. So you've got presumably some grunts. You've got curse words. You've got crack at the bat. You've got balls hitting gloves, whether that's the catcher or people in the field.

You've got, I don't know, players colliding. That's a bad one. There's, I don't really know how many other sounds there are now i guess yeah this would actually make it uh more important for players to cover their mouths when they're having mound meetings because they would be ever more audible to their opponents so you'd have to kind of smother yourself maybe the players would be like why am i yelling all of the time umpire strike calls maybe i don't know oh yeah but yeah if you were If you were watching on TV, you might notice, but you wouldn't think anything of it because you'd think, oh, it's just the production. Maybe they're just making the sound louder.

So you'd have to be at the ballpark probably to think anything is happening, but it's also happening so gradually. That's the thing. Yeah, that's what makes it difficult, right? Yeah, that's what makes it difficult, right? There's the, what the just noticeable difference is like the threshold where you can perceive a change in volume and magnitude of something. And obviously going from half as much to twice as much, that would clear that threshold. But just 160 second of that difference, you know, just day by day, game by game, it goes up a tiny, probably imperceptible amount. So if you were watching every game in person, I don't know that you would notice. Now, if you went to a game in April and you came back and went to a game in

September, maybe you'd notice, or if you hadn't watched on the broadcast, although again, as you're saying, you'd probably think that they just changed the mic situation on the broadcast. But, I mean, the loudest sound is the crack of the bat, right? And that can already be pretty loud. And if that were twice as loud, that would be, I mean, it already sounds like a rifle shot sometimes. And if that were twice as loud, that might be approaching the level where it could like do hearing damage. I don't know, depending on how close to the action you're sitting. So it seems like you would notice that, but would you notice it on any given day?

Or would you just think at the end of the season, gee, that was pretty loud. I'm not used to things being that loud. I don't know. I mean, fans are already so easily fooled by fly balls at art home runs that if you made the bat crack louder, you'd have fans even more fooled by regular fly ass because presumably it's just the sound. It's not the ball going any further. So I think it would get to the point where fans would be like, huh, seems loud. But I don't think it would get to the point where fans would be like, something is happening that does not have an answer. They would just be like, huh, my perception of this has changed. Maybe my hearing has gotten better. But it wouldn't be anything. It wouldn't put you over the edge to actually start talking about it with other people, I don't think. Yeah, right. All right. Well, I can see why this has been bugging you for a while, Carter. I don't know if we helped, but we hope you can be at peace.

Should we just give them an answer so that we can help them relax? Just to give them some peace of mind, yeah. I'll say they will notice. Yes, I will say that they would notice at least the crack of the bat sound. Yeah, it would not not be noticed. Okay, all right. Stat blast? Yeah, sure.

Let's just do a quick little easy one. They'll take a data dataset sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTPLOST. He's today's still past Do you know who Ryan O'Hearn is?

Because I didn't. Well, I do because you tweeted about him. But before that, probably not. Okay, that's a good giveaway. Ryan O'Hearn is a player on the Royals, which already you're inclined to think he's terrible, and that's a good thing to think. But Ryan O'Hearn has batted 145 times

as a rookie this season, and he has slugged to think. But Ryan O'Hearn is batted 145 times as a rookie this season, and he is slugged 632. That's a very good slugging percentage. If you look at the current leaderboard of everybody with at least 100 plate appearances, Ryan O'Hearn is in first place out of everyone, just ahead of one Luke Voigt, who has come up on this podcast. They're tied with 11 home runs. Ryan O'Hearn slugging 632.

JD Martinez at 629. I was curious about Ryan O'Hearn a little bit. Another fun fact about Ryan O'Hearn slinging 632. J.D. Martinez at 629. I was curious about Ryan O'Hearn a little bit. Another fun fact about Ryan O'Hearn that's maybe not so fun. Ryan O'Hearn is a left-handed hitter. Maybe you're thinking of Brian LaHare here, but Ryan O'Hearn against righties has batted 348. Against lefties, he is two for 33 with zero doubles, zero triples. Though I guess he does have, to his credit, two home runs. But big platoon split here for Ryan O'Hearn. If you look at the all-time historical record for rookies, because this is O'Hearn's first year,

rookies with at least 100 plate appearances, if you sort by slugging percentage, O'Hearn comes out. He's currently in 11th place. He's one slot behind, oh, Ryan Braun. That's a fun little coincidence. Ryan Braun slugged 634 as a rookie. Now, if you look at the top of this list, there are some good names and there are some worst ones. There is

Matt Olsen, there's Willie McCovey, there's Gary Sanchez who I know he's getting booed, but he's also better than that. But this is a list that's also topped by Mike Jacobs, who in 2005 slugged 710 as a rookie for the Mets. And Mike Jacobs after that went on to be not very good.

Mikey Matuk is on this list. Randy Ruiz is on this list. So not necessarily a list of the greatest ever players. There's one guy named Lip, L-I-P. That's Lip Pike. Lip Pike, who in 1871 was a rookie for, I don't even know what team this is, so let's find out together.

The Troy Haymakers. And they were managed by Lip Pike. Wait a second. What's going on here? What's really going on? I guess so. Lip Pike. We probably can't cold call him since it's 1871.

Lip Pike shared a roster with a player named Dickie Flowers, another guy named Clipper Flynn, and they had two pitchers. Anyway, let's stop talking about Lip Pike. They had a Cuban on the team. Look at that. Steve. Okay, back to Reinhardt. This is about Reinhardt.

So I was curious about Reinhardt. You always go into the stat cast stuff if you end up trying to research a player. One of the really interesting things about Reinhardt is that this year in AAA as a hitter, he was bad. He slugged 391 in AAA as a first baseman. He was like falling off of prospect lists and he's come up and he's been absolutely dominant. So I thought I would be able to pull more information here. But it turns out this year there are actually only seven players who have batted at least 100 times in both the majors and the minors. They are Ryan O'Hearn, Cedric Mullins, Jeff McNeil, Yandy Diaz, Brandon Lau,

Jose Fernandez, and Taylor Ward. Now, if you look at those players, unsurprisingly, most of them have hit worse in the major leagues than in AAA because the major leagues are harder. Yandy Diaz has slugged basically the same. Yandy Diaz has increased his slugging percentage relative to the minors this year by one point. He's gone from.388 to.389. Way to go, Yanni Diaz.

Ryan O'Hearn has increased his slugging percentage 241 points. Inexplicable. So I don't know how to explain that right now. But the last thing I will point out is that Ryan O'Hearn ranks pretty well, unsurprisingly, if you look at average exit velocity. He's at 92.2 miles per hour off the bat. That's good. He also hits the ball in the air.

That explains why he has so many home runs and extra base hits. One of the other interesting things about Ryan O'Hearn is that he has not actually hit his peak exit velocity. He's not been that good. This is something I like to look at. But it's 108.3 miles per hour is the hardest ball that Ryan O'Hearn has hit this year in the major leagues. He has a relatively small sample, but still, it's something to look at. And so a toy I like to look at sometimes that is probably not very good, but I still like it, is to divide average exit velocity by peak exit velocity to kind of get a sense of like swing and batted ball contact efficiency, if that makes sense to people. So I did that. I just did a little division and Ryan O'Hearn is in first place. He has, I'll just term it, I guess, batted ball efficiency. This is a bad idea,

but I'm doing it and I'm branding. Ryan O'Hearn is at 85%, 85%, I guess, exit velocity conversion on average. And now the name right behind him is Daniel Descalso, and the name right behind him is Andrew Knapp, so I can't promise that this is a statistic worth a damn. But there's also like Joe Maurer, Ryan Zimmerman, David Dull, Justin Turner, DJ LeMayhew at the top of this list. Ryan O'Hearn is at the top of it himself. And the player in last place is Charlie Tilson.

Okay, who cares? And maybe more interestingly, Gary Sanchez is third from the bottom in a far bigger sample. Gary Sanchez has averaged 90.1 miles per hour off the bat, but he's topped out at 121 miles per hour. Wow. Good for Gary Sanchez, but yeah, inefficient contact. So good for Ron O'Hearn, bad for Gary Sanchez. I know Sanchez was getting booed the other day when he made bad contact. And I would say this is just moving into Gary Sanchez now, but his is a swing that I don't think it looks like the kind of swing you necessarily teach.

He always looks like he's kind of flying open. It looks like he's a guy who wouldn't make perfect contact all the time, but obviously it's worked for him really well in the past. Do you buy right now? The only thing that's really different about Gary Sanchez's statistics is that that his his batting average and balls in play is like dreadful i think it's 199 last i checked yeah historically it's been much better than that do you buy the slump at all or do you figure this is just a short-term blip well we talked about this before his most recent injury and neither of us bought it so i mostly still don't buy it. I haven't watched every game or done any deep-level analysis

to try to go beyond the BABIP, but in general I think he's still a very good hitter and will be one again. Yeah, that sounds fair. So while we're on the subject of interesting royals, who are maybe sort of mystifying too, there was a Bill James tweet this week, and that can be a scary sentence because Bill James, we probably owe this podcast existence to Bill James, but his tweeting is interesting at times. thing this week. He said, Adalberto Mondesi is not eligible for the Rookie of the Year award, but seems like obviously the best new player of the year. Now, he clarified in a subsequent tweet that he meant the best new AL player of the year because someone was asking him about Acuna and

Soto. And Bill James said, I just meant the AL. Soto and Acuna are on the same level. So same level. He's equating Mondesi and Soto and Acuna. And he's saying that Mondesi is more impressive than any AL player. He then makes a gentleman's wager in these tweet replies here where he bets that Mondesi will have a higher career war than Shohei Otani. Anyway, the point is he likes Adalberto Mondesi. And if you haven't paid attention to Mondesi lately, he is worth paying attention to. He was, of course, a top prospect for three or four years in a row some years ago, and then wasn't one for a while. And he got a couple cups of coffee or a little longer than cups of coffee in the past two seasons. Didn't hit at all.

But this year, in exactly 250 plate appearances, he has hit.290,.316,.496. That is a.119 OPS+, or I suppose a.118 WRC+. And he has hit 11 homers, and he has stolen 26 bases. So he's shown power, he's shown speed, he's played mostly shortstop and a little bit of second, and has graded out well there according to the defensive metrics for whatever that's worth. So on the surface, does seem like an impressive player and had the prospect pedigree before, maybe is a bit of a post-hype sleeper type. The thing that gives you pause is the strikeoutigree before, maybe is a bit of a post-hype sleeper type. The thing that gives you pause is the strikeout-to-walk ratio,

or the walk-to-strikeout ratio, which among all hitters, there are 303 hitters with at least 250 plate appearances this year, and his is the worst walk-to-strikeout ratio of anyone except Dee Gordon. Don't really want to be in the Dee Gordon conversation in that area. Alberto Mondesi now has on the season 66 strikeouts and only eight walks, and that's not great. And this is an era when what constitutes a good walk-to-strikeout ratio is different from what it used to be. And there are guys who succeed without having great walk-to-strikeout ratios.

We've talked about what Javi Baez has done this season. But that is still extreme because if you have that kind of walk-to-strikeout ratio, you have to have a very high batting average on Paulson play to make that work, to keep your average up enough to keep your on-base percentage up. And he's basically at a league average on-base percentage with a 360 BABIP right now. And great, fast guy, and maybe he'd have a higher BABIP than normal, but it seems like a very difficult line to sustain. And yet also middle infielder who can field and has some power and speed. There's something there. I mean, if you... So when I look at Alberto Montesi, I'm glad the Royals have something to hang their head on.

And he does, obviously, he's hitting for some power and he's stealing bases like a madman. So there's very encouraging things. His stat cast sprint speed is like one of the top 10 fastest players in baseball. So that's encouraging. His approach is much improved from what it was before, but I can't look at him and not think about Tim Anderson, who's kind of the same type of player for the White Sox, who's a starting shortstop, who's fine, but he doesn't walk.

He strikes out plenty, and he's been a below-average hitter. He contributes value on the bases. He contributes value in the field, but he's just not really that good yet. Plenty of room to grow, for sure, but Alberto Modese has made contact with two-thirds of his swings. A contact rate of 67%. Obviously, it's worked fine for him so far. But that's like Giancarlo Stanton level contact.

And this is not a guy who has Giancarlo Stanton level power. If I sort, if I just look at players who have batted 200 times this year, just 200 times. And I sort in increasing order of walk rate, starting from the bottom, D. Gordon being at the bottom, followed by Victor Reyes, Salvador Perez. The only players who have been above average or above average hitters are Mondesi so far, who's struck out 26% of the time.

There's Corey Dickerson, but he's only struck out 15% of the time. There's Adam Jones. He's only struck out 15% of the time. There's Adam Jones. He's only struck out 15% of the time. Oledmus Diaz, Miguel, and Duhar, Yuli Gurriel. These players have only struck out 11% to 16% of the time. The only real comp here, I guess, as of right now is like Lourdes Gurriel, who plays for the Blue Jays, and he's got a WRC plus of 101 while striking out 22% of the time. But I don't know, this feels like Modesty

is a player who's exciting because he's so fast and he can hit the ball hard. But his approach just does not scream sustainable, good baseball player to me. So the idea that he is the best new player in the American League, I can't buy that at all. He's been a worse hitter than Shohei Otani. He's been one of the best pitchers in baseball. So I don't know what we're doing here. at all. He's been a worse hitter than Shohei Otani. He's been one of the best pitchers in baseball, so I don't know what we're doing here. Right, yeah. And he just turned 23, and maybe he can get better then again. So did Shohei Otani, I guess, or what is he, 24 now? So yeah, I mean, I don't want to say that he will always be this type of hitter, but currently is not a profile that gives you a whole lot of confidence. But at least he will be an exciting player for a while.

I guess we can say that seems likely. So that's nice. So just as a statistical check, Mondesi contact rate 67.4%. Giancarlo Stanton, 67.3%. This is just me saying that allowed to give, allow everyone out there listening to give me a pat on the back.

So thank you. Thank you for your credit. Mondesi is also tied with Jake Marisnyk contact rate. That's the kind of comp you could make when you spend a lot of time looking at leaderboards and fan crash pages all right let's get a couple questions in here before you have a chat to get to all right this one is from colby when listening to episode 1268 i know i'm behind that's fine you're allowed to be, what, three episodes behind. You talked briefly about preventative measures for pitchers to avoid Tommy John surgery. My question is probably more of a futuristic one and not regarding prevention but recovery.

But as more and more people are cryogenically frozen after death, well, let's take a turn, and the tech becomes more sophisticated. take a turn and the tech becomes more sophisticated. Is there a chance that in the future, when a pitcher undergoes Tommy John surgery, could we see them cryogenically frozen during the healing time to mitigate losing an entire year of productivity? Would this lengthen careers? Would players be receptive to it? How would contract payouts work for a frozen guy? Would there be a backlash the first time a cryogenically frozen player was cut? Do I watch too much sci-fi? The last one is probably a yes, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. My favorite aspect of this question is that in this scenario, we have figured out routine cryogenic freezing and reanimation, but we still have not solved Tommy John's surgery. That is a future timeline that i don't totally understand you don't get to bring up cryogenic

freezing and then ask like six questions after the fact i think that's not so hold on you have a player who's hurt but then he's cryogenically frozen until can he heal though how does he can't heal while he's frozen right right this Right. We still have the same problem. I mean, right. I mean, I'm all for cryogenic freezing. If we can figure that out, I think that'd be great, and I'll be the first one to sign up. But I'm not sure that this timeline makes a whole lot of sense because, A, there's the problem with Tommy John surgery. with Tommy John surgery. We still haven't figured out a ligament, but we have figured out how to essentially kill people basically and bring them back to life. Then there's the other problem that,

yeah, while they are frozen, presumably there's not going to be a whole lot of healing going on, right? So that seems like a problem. Now, maybe we could talk about some sort of suspended animation here where you're not literally frozen, but you're just asleep, kind of in a coma of sorts where you're not actually aging. I guess that is plausible. and very long recovery times, and you also had technology that allowed you to put someone to sleep and basically preserve them in suspended animation for that time. Would anyone do that? I guess if you were young and single and weren't going to be missing your family or couldn't convince them to go into suspended animation with you, I guess someone would be interested in that, and I don't see what the rule against it would be. You said you would be the first person to sign up? You said you would be the first person to

sign up? Well, I can't be the first because there have been many people who've already done it, but I would do it. Sure. What do you got to lose? You want to see what we're like in the future? I don't even like the planet now. what we're like in the future? I don't even like the planet now. I am curious about the future, and I'm hopeful that it will be better,

and also it seems better than being dead, although not everyone would agree about that. Oh, my God, I can't wait. This is too complicated of a question for me to even be able to address on the fly. What would the response be to a pitcher who comes back from being cryogenically frozen so what hold on the the advantage is what's the advantage that you you just don't age you don't lose that year of your career while you're recuperating that's it that's it yeah

i i think the react the react so okay presumably this would debut in some other environment. Like, this pitcher would not be the first person to ever be successfully reanimated. Because if he were, and then he just came back to pitch and he's like, well, I did it, so I wouldn't age a year. Then people would think, first of all, this person is insane. But also they would regard him as some sort of undead wizard. Like, you can't, now maybe that improves his like deception right when he's on the mound because hitters are like there's no way he's alive yeah and then he's like oh and he throws 96 with his newly healed regular ligament i guess but you let's say he's the kind of play

he'd have to report to spring training early because his teammates would have a lot of questions and this would this would have the potential to create some rifts in the clubhouse especially with maybe the more spiritual players who were like, I can't abide this. Yeah, he'd have to report early just to thaw out also, just so that he would warm up by opening day. By the way, to go back real quick, I should address, for some reason when I was looking at the leaderboard, I missed maybe the most obvious comparison here to Adalberto Montesi would be Javier Baez, who's having a breakout season.

He makes a low amount of contact. He's a very fast very fast dynamic defensive player javier baez by himself is kind of an exception to the rules that we think we understand about baseball also javier baez i'm pretty sure it hits the ball harder than modesty does which is kind of his his main skill but sure i guess there's some chance that modesty is channeling another exception in the national league because bias does not walk he strikes out plenty but he's had a very good season. Also, though, this is the first year that Bias has done this, and we'll see if it keeps up. Yeah.

All right. Last question. Alex says, fans love to imagine scenarios where they're the ones calling the shots in the front office, whether it's dreaming up trades, wondering why their team signed free agent X over free agent Y, rallying for a hot-hitting minor leaguers call-up, et cetera. My question is this. What do you think would happen if you placed your average, well-informed fan in the driver's seat?

You'd probably need to give them a few years to see how things unfold, and it'd probably be easier to judge if they were at the helm of a middling team, still a few clear moves away from contention. Question goes on a bit, but concludes, so what do you think? Is he or she run out of town before the end of the first year? Is there enough that goes on behind the scenes that we could never really judge? Or could things move smoothly enough if our fan-turned GM just stayed out of the way? Well, thankfully, I think we have a current example of this.

And within a few weeks, he would start to demean the free press. Yeah, that's probably true. But then I guess you would also have the people, at least within his front office, would rally around him and defend him at all costs. So one thing you might find, this is – so is this person given absolute power or is he just thrust into the GM or president of baseball operations role? It sounds like, well, just GM, I guess, which with some teams means a lot of power and other teams means not so much power. Right. means not so much power. Right. This person might find that when he or she assumes the role that that individual has less absolute power than you'd think, the person would be like, oh,

there's ownership meddling that I wasn't aware of. There are these budget concerns, or there are these power dynamics in the front office. There are these assistant GMs and special assistants to the GM, and the other baseball ops people, and they all have their own input. They all have their own responsibilities, so I can do less. But at the end of the day, if you're the GM of a team, or I guess the president of baseball operations of a team, you do kind of have the power to just make a move of your own volition, I guess. You could just call up another GM and be like, we're doing this.

Now, I don't know what happens. Let's say you're the GM and you get absolutely furious. You take over the Yankees. You get furious at Gary Sanchez, and you're like i want to trade gary sanchez for i don't know jeff mathis because i want defensive competency on my team so you call up the dummy backs and you say i'll trade you gary sanchez for jeff math and before you finish saying math as they're like deal and so then you do that but then then what what is the process of making that official who fills out the paperwork?

Well, we kind of talked with Adam Fisher about that a bit, but I guess you would delegate that to someone in your front office and there's the system that you can enter those transactions in. I mean, the last part of the question was, could things move smoothly enough if our fan turned GM just stayed out of the way? enough if our fan-turned-GM just stayed out of the way. And yes, I think so. I mean, if the person just collects paychecks and sits in the office, then yeah, I think generally teams have enough infrastructure and smart people around who are used to having some authority that it could keep functioning pretty smoothly. But what percentage of fan-turned-GMs would just say, I will stay out of the way? I mean, the whole point of being a fan-turned-GM is just say, I will stay out of the way. I mean, the whole point of being a fan-turned GM is, hey, I get to run a baseball team now. So it almost defeats the purpose if you're just going to sit there and let the people do the things that they were doing before you got there. How quickly, if an average fan took over, I don't know, the Dodgers,

average fan, average baseball fan, not average podcast listener, average baseball fan, low bar, how quickly could and would that fan end up destroying the Dodgers? How many years would it take? Like if you didn't know that this is just a person. Now let's say the Dodgers say, oh, we have a new president of baseball ops. And they say a name and you don't know anything about his background. How long would it take before you're like, oh, they hired a moron and they're screwed? Yeah. I mean, I think you can tear apart a team much more quickly than you can build up a team.

So all you have to do is make a series of terrible signings and trades. I mean, in a year, you could definitely go from like best organization to terrible organization, I think. And the question is, would you actually be allowed to do that? Or would you be stopped at some point? But why would the person have been hired in the first place unless the owner were someone who just were incompetent also, and were just letting anyone run the team. So I don't know what confluence of circumstances you would need to actually make this happen. But if it were like a person masquerading as a legitimate GM and a qualified GM and somehow did that and pulled it off and then showed up and was actually just a fan with no qualifications,

I think that would be sussed out pretty quickly. Yeah, I guess it's important to understand that when a new GM or president of baseball ops comes in, that person typically will hire a new staff. They don't inherit the staff that exists with the previous regime. And so those tend to be, you know, loyalists, people you know, people who look up to you don't know these people and they don't regard you as a peer or a colleague or an equal baseball intellect, then I wonder if we – I don't – I can't think of a time when there's been like a baseball front office coup. It's probably happened to a certain extent. But this would open the door to such activity because people would be like, all of our jobs are at stake if you fail. And so we can't allow this to happen.

Yeah. All right. Well, you have a chat to get to. So we will't allow this to happen. Yeah. All right. Well, you have a chat to get to, so we will end there. So as you've no doubt heard since Jeff and I recorded, Addison Russell has been placed on administrative leave while MLB continues its investigation, which apparently never officially closed, but now will really resume in earnest. One would think that this will be a prelude to a suspension, but we will see. Obviously, this is new information, and they do appear to be responding to this information. Also, since we talked earlier,

the Rangers fired Jeff Bannister as their manager. That might be the first time we have mentioned the name Jeff Bannister this season, so that gives you some sense of how little the Rangers have been on our radar. Maybe we will touch on that next week. Also wanted to give a quick shout out to the Angels' Francisco Arcia, who on Thursday became the first player ever to catch and pitch and hit a home run in the same game. I would say that is a fun fact. He did it for the Angels, who have not used many position player pitchers. In fact, he was the first one since, I believe, 1993 when he pitched in August. But on Thursday, he pitched two innings in relief and also caught and also hit a home run. That is quite a day.

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early next week. This is the This hotel is a beauty Even the house sticks Been fired And the sky Keep crashing down Knocked me off This cloud When I fell

To the ground To the ground I was just thinking out loud.