Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1295: The 120-Percent Podcast

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jose Altuve and other players claiming to give (much) more than 100 percent and Joe Mauer‘s retirement and Hall of Fame case, then answer listener emails about Shohei Ohtani’s future role, whether Mike Trout could go contact-for-contact with Willians Astudillo, a baseball romance novel, winning a World Series […]

Yeah, own this beat You can call me the king or the ruler Fell in love, they scared of whining We're getting 20% cooler We had a great day out Calling my name like Ferris Bueller It's gonna wrap this up We're getting 20% cooler

We're getting 20% cooler We're getting 20% cooler We're getting sweepstakes cooler We're getting sweepstakes cooler We're getting sweepstakes cooler Hello and welcome to episode 1295 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 Fadeback. Hello. Hello. Jose Altuve had surgery, and so you are familiar with athletes saying, I'm going to give 105%, I'm going to give 110%. Quote from Jose Altuve is that right now he's, quote, not doing a lot.

In the early stages of his recovery process, though, quote, again, the only thing they told me, the doctors, the only thing they told me is we're going to be 120% for the first day of spring training. And that's what really matters. When you're going to 110%, you've already broken through the barrier, right? So you can go up to 120. But what if Jose Altuve said we're going to come back at 170%? Is that more ridiculous?

Does it not matter? Is this a Scott Boris sort of exaggeration? I wonder. I wonder where the ceiling is because I bet we could find a higher one than 120. I bet someone's just like doubled it at some point and said 200%. You might as well. It's just inflation of effort, right? I wonder, do you think that the doctors actually said that?

Do you think that was their clinical opinion? Would you trust a medical opinion that's expressed to you in impossible terms? No, I don't think I would. But I hope he's probably 120%, right? Of the Altuve who was hobbling around in October, probably he's 120% of that guy, just not of his usual self. Hold on. Who's Ricky Davis? Okay.

So this is a New York Times article from 1981. Ricky Davis, pro soccer's top North American in 1979. Okay, that's who Ricky Davis is. Okay. You know, it's ironic, Davis said, but that injury to my foot last year that kept me out for seven weeks helped me come away with one good thing. It gave me a chance to step away and look at what was happening to me from the viewpoint of a third person it convinced me that i had to give 130 this year if i wanted to play for the cosmos regularly again interesting 30 all right yeah i knew the bar would be higher someone will send us an even higher example because once you're over 100 you might as well just keep going i mean it's all meaningless so

the higher the number is the more effort it looks like you're putting in. Hey, 130, that's great. Wait, wait. We got a New York Post. Kevin Kernan, October 3rd, 2008. All right, let me scroll to where I want to be. This is Francisco Rodriguez asked if he could wind up as the Mets closer Rodriguez smiled and said,

you never know. We're going to look at all our options and we'll see. Well, that's a useless quote. I love the fans there, he said of New York. It reminds me of a winter ball. They are passionate. If you don't have success, they boo, and that's the way it should be. That only makes me want to work harder and be successful.

If I get booed, I'm going to give 140% to make it right. That's the way I am. New record. Wow. A 140 effort plus that is impressive all right wait keep googling please by all means i want all right are we going to go with here are we going to go with carlton aaron are we going to go with uh alex d menar i don't know we've got a lot of 150s this This is a round number. Yeah, right. Increments of 50.

One spot as he, well, okay, this is some sort of Australian tennis article. Russia's, look, tennis player, Alex Diminar, let's say. When I'm down on the court, I want to leave 150% out there, and today was no different. We also have, oh, here's a page two article. This is convenient. Page two article by Jeff Marin used to be giving more, topped out somewhere around the 110% mark. But over the past few decades,

many players and coaches have finally come clean. 110% is simply not enough. Not nearly enough. Sarah Pack forward on Madonna University's women's soccer team. the hell i hope people see me giving 160 out there and that inspires them to do the same detroit free press should we just skip a few because i can go higher mariners outfielder kevin mitchell seattle plans january 10th 1992 we already know this is a lie. Wait a second. Hold on. Okay.

Here's back to back. Mariners outfielder Kevin Mitchell. I just want to get out there and give 180% to help the Mariners win. But wait. From 1989, May 22nd, Giants outfielder Kevin Mitchell. All I wanted to do was give 180% in every game. Kevin Mitchell was two 180%. We move on.

Indians outfielder, Glenn Allen Hill on his transition to right field, Cleveland to plane dealer, April 24th, 1993. Me and Thomas Howard are busting our butts. We're giving 190% effort. But wait,

Philly's infielder, Placido Polanco and the injured David Bell. I just hope David comes back at 200% Yeah, I googled 200% There's a lot of 200% out there Not necessarily in baseball But I found soccer Joaquin says Malaga will give 200%

In the Champions League quarterfinal clash Against Dortmund We've got a runner here Track and field star Who's going to give 200% of everything she has in London. I think my favorite is the 190. 190? It's so specific. Why 190? That sounds so precisely calculated.

You might as well just go to 200 at that point. I don't know. I wonder whether anyone—do you think anyone's given non-inc increments of 10? No, you're being unreasonable. Yeah. It's like a ballplayer actually weighing something other than a five or a zero or something. Wait. One of those numbers. Yeah. He said to me, it was okay to lose. I'm used to him saying, go out there and give 110%. Normal. And it's good to have that attitude. Maybe for other guys, they can go out there and give 110%, normal, and it's good to have that attitude. Maybe for other guys, they can go out there and say failure is not an option, and they have to give 210%. I've been doing that for a while, but it just didn't feel right or click with me. Someone named Hall told the Bleacher Report in an exclusive interview, 210%.

All right, I get it. Last thing, last thing last thing keep going okay i have to open up the uh the page two article because this one just makes me laugh and it's sad this goes back to the 200 i'm not going up anymore the final quote in this article cubs catcher henry blanco on mark prior his stuff is always there but you just wondered if the elbow would be 100 healthy he showed He showed he was 200% healthy. June 27, 2005. I'm going to look up when Mark Pryor made his last appearance because if it was shortly after, well, that was what?

June 27, 2005? Well, thankfully for him, Mark Pryor did finish out the season, and he made every start. And then the next year, he started nine games, and that was the end of his career, age 25. Do you think that his elbow broke because he was hitting 300% or 210? That seems like it would be a risk factor, right? Yeah, I think we know what happened to Mark Breyer's elbow.

He was trying too hard. What do you have? Well, if we go to the world of show jumping and Eurosport.com 2017, Belgium's Gregory Wathelet, I don't know. As Wathelet explained later, it doesn't suffice to give 100% to win here in Aachen. One has to give 500%. So, oh, we go to soccer. We've got Alex Vidal. He's going to give 1,000%.

It's probably a lot of 1,000%, right? So I like the two 10s and the one 90s. They sound like they actually calculated it. the 190s they sound like they actually calculated it this is a uh this is uh an article from the ny i times dalton bears hold annual football camp the community should come out here in droves to support these kids fox said but you know who are my favorite players the little guys they're so excited about wearing helmets and pads that they're willing to give 195%. There it is. All right. Well, please Google this at home.

Send us your best examples of either high ones or weird ones and let us know and we'll collect them or something. But anyway, it's the off season. Someone said to us last week that we were using up guests quickly and that we should save some of these guests for episodes where we didn't have any ideas. And I said, who's to say that we have ideas now? That's kind of the, that's the problem. So there is really not much news in baseball now. There's impending news. There always is. But nothing really has happened,

except, I suppose, for Joe Maurer retiring, which happened after we spoke last week. And just briefly, we've talked about Maurer in the past. We may have even answered Hall of Fame questions about Maurer in the past. I know neither of us is really all that interested in the Hall of Fame conversation, but we end up defaulting to it anyway when a good player retires. And I think there's something when a player like Maurer retires after not having been his best self for several years where it's hard to remember just how good he was. And it's even harder to remember by five years after he retires when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot. And by that point, it will have been a decade or something since Joe Maurer was at his peak. But Joe Maurer was obviously amazing when he was in his prime.

And that was about a decade long, which for a catcher, like it sort of seems like Maurer had a short career, but not really. He played for 15 years. He caught for a decade. Obviously, he had to stop good, very strong candidate for the Hall of Fame. I think Jaws would say that certainly, but to have been a catcher and to have hit for such high averages and put up such high on-base percentages, there's just almost no analog. There's very few equivalent catchers who have hit like Maurer did for that period of time. Yeah, I think Jay Jaffe is going to have an article about Maurer pretty soon on Fangroves, be it today, tomorrow.

In fact, it might already be up. I don't know. It's early for me. But Maurer was a catcher through 2013. And to that point, like you said, he was just an exceptional hitter. His final year as a catcher, he had a 143 WRC+. He would just run OBPs over 400 with some frequency. And of course, there was a one year where he just hit the crap out of the ball.

And I don't really know how much precedent there is for that. Joe Mara kind of had his Brady Anderson season where he slugged 587 in 2009. And in no other season did he come within even 100 points of that, which is just incredible. It was really weird because he didn't hit more fly balls that year or anything like we don't have stat cast data for that season obviously but his like hard hit rate wasn't higher than usual and his fly ball rate wasn't higher than usual what was higher was his home runs per fly ball rate and i bet if you went back and watched all his homers from that year there would be a

bunch of wall scrapers because he must have had some fortunate placement of those fly balls which is it's fine it's just it seems like because he had that one outlier year where he hit for power and he was the MVP it sort of seemed like he was a disappointment offensively after that but he was just so good at getting on base that even though he wasn't a power hitter other than that one year he was still immensely productive yeah i think it's fascinating that you can look him out and in that year he had 28 home runs and again he didn't come within even 50 of that in any other year his other career high was 13 home runs and i guess i said brady anderson but the real comp here is Jacoby Ellsbury, who, of course, slugged 552 in 2011 and in no other season slugged higher than 426.

But the difference between Maurer and Ellsbury is that Maurer outside of that season was still very good. And Ellsbury is different, where he topped out at 32 home runs and his other high was 16. If you want to sort of eyeball another worse comp, but of course, there's the Adrian Beltre season in 2004, where he sucked 629. And he never came all that close to doing that again. But Beltre had a better second half of his career. So Mowart and the Hall of Fame is something I will look, I mean, I guess we've already talked about it on multiple occasions, and we're sort of talking about it around the point now. And I'll leave the semi-official word to Jay Jaffe and then the official official word to the voters in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years, whenever they get around to doing that. But Joe Maurer, absolutely spectacular. And even toward the end, he sort of, his career has ended in a way that reminds me of John Olerud, I guess, just in that it was walks and singles and a lot of contact, just

not striking out much, but just no power at all. And it is a testament to Joe Maurer's ability that he was able to run a career OPP close to 400 despite hitting for so little power. He wound up with, I believe, a below average career isolated power of 132 i don't have the average mark in front of me but still now we're very disciplined great spray hitter just classic beautiful swing couldn't miss him and i miss his uh i miss his video game commercials from like 15 years ago yes it's almost like the most memorable thing about his career to me is like well played Maurer, a tagline from an MLB the show commercial, but I didn't watch as many twins games as a lot of twins fans did. But another thing that stands

out about him to me is that obviously in his latter years as a first baseman, he didn't really hit like a first baseman. He, I guess he hit like a Doug Minkiewicz twins first baseman, but he didn't have the power as you were saying, but he was a really good defensive first baseman too. So he wasn't just a statue who stood out there because he couldn't catch. He was really contributing in the field too. And his career, like trajectory wise, almost reminds me of Jason Kendall's career because they both played 15 years and Kendall, of course, caught until the end. And I guess Maurer was kind of like Kendall if he were giving 150%. He was like his career was about that. But like Kendall's really good too. Like he's a 40

war guy, which you don't really remember, I guess, unless you were watching him in those early Pirates years when he was also really good. Not Maurer good, but really good. And that really made up for the last several years of his career when he really didn't hit at all and was just kind of in there for his defense catcher. But that just goes to show, like, if you are a decent defensive catcher and you get innings back there, you don't have to be an amazing hitter to rack up a ton of value just because the bar is so low. So if you're Joe Maurer, who would be a good hitter at any position, and you're catching lots of games throughout your 20s, that's really going to rack up the war. Joe Maurer, his career started in 2004, so we can capture his entire career.

Rack up the war. Joe Maurer, his career started in 2004, so we can capture his entire career. His career rate of pop-ups per fly ball, getting obscure here, but career rate of pop-ups per fly ball. This is, of course, where Joey Votto is a superstar. Also, Joey Votto is a superstar in the rest of baseball. But Joe Maurer, 2.1% of his fly balls were registered as pop-ups or infield flies, according to Baseball Info Solutions. And over the past 17 years, as far back as we have this data, there are 146 players who have batted at least 5,000 times, giving you a lot of numbers.

But the point here is that Joe Maurer ranks fourth, fourth lowest pop-up rate among everyone behind Joey Votto in first, Ryan Howard in second, Howie Kendrick in third, and then Joe Maurer followed by Shinsu Chu. Joe Maurer, I will point out, apparently had 27 bunt hits in his career. Ryan Howard, zero. Ryan Howard, who complained about the shift, who many people wrote, the shift ruined Ryan Howard's career.

Zero bunt hits. Not even one. Joe Maurer, 27. Catcher. Jay Jaffe's post just went up six minutes ago. And the headline says, retiring Maurer and Utley, both worthy of Cooperstown. So there you go. Perfect.

It's the verdict. Yeah. Okay. Did we talk about Chase Utley too? Yeah. Maybe another time. Yeah. He's been retired effectively for a while.

Yeah, we've known for a while that he was retiring. I think we probably did talk about him earlier this year. So emails? I guess if I say no, what are we going to do? So yeah, we better do emails. Okay. All right. Simon in Portland, who sent us an email instead of just yelling it really loud so you would hear him, says,

On the subject of Shohei Otani, should there be some discussion of deploying him in a different manner once he's fully recovered from Tommy John surgery? deploying him in a different manner once he's fully recovered from Tommy John surgery. The Steamer projections were recently released on Fangraphs, and I was somewhat surprised to see Otani projected to be something like the 12th best hitter in baseball next year. Steamer likes him to slash 272-353-512 with 31 homers. That's basically his line from this year, with a few more chances. Anyway, it got me thinking that if that's really the type of offensive player Otani would be with regular at-bats, might he be better deployed as an everyday hitter and

shutdown reliever? I'm imagining some sort of Freddie Freeman slash Josh Hader hybrid. Is this a viable strategy to both protect the health of his arm and get the most value out of his bat? And there's some more to this question, but I'm going to end it with what do you guys think? Well, I will say it said Seymour hasn't projected to slug 5-12. Is that right? Yeah. Seymour now projects him to slug 5-13.

So Shohei Otani improving by the minute. So I think we've talked about something somewhat similar to this before, and I think the answer is no. And I think that would be because so he's already projected to be an everyday hitter next season I believe I don't think that's going to change but if you also have him slotted in as a reliever then you are going to have to take him out of his batting appearances late in the game because he has to go warm up those would be higher leverage appearances and I think that would just end up being too much of a burden.

You would be taking away many of his most important at-bats, and you would be introducing a lot more unpredictability to his schedule, which, for all I know, could have a deleterious effect on his hitting. I don't know what Ben thinks, but that is what I think right now. Yeah. Well, I was reading in David Loral's Fangraph's Sunday Notes column, he was talking to Stephen Brault, former podcast guest, and he asked him this very question, or at least how you would use someone like this ideally, and Brault was a two-way player because he says you're going to get fewer at-bats, you're going to get fewer outings because you're pitching every seven days instead of every five. Basically, you're getting less from each side, and Otani can really swing it. If you can't play one of your best hitters three days a week because he needs to pitch, that's not something you want, which I've heard from other people that's not an uncommon opinion that now that we know Otani is as good at hitting as he is, that they should just want him hitting every day.

And if he's hitting every day, then presumably they could have him in a corner outfield spot or first base or something to get some defensive value too. So, I mean, there's an argument that if he's really that good at hitting, that you just want him hitting all the time. if he's really that good at hitting, that you just want him hitting all the time. I think if he's still going to be a two-way player, I think probably having the predictability of having him be a starting pitcher makes it easier. Not easy, but easier. And in theory would allow him to rack up even more value. So I think probably sticking with starter makes sense. But I don't know. If he has an amazing season next year and is one of the best hitters in baseball, I do wonder whether they will actually let him go back to pitching. But presumably he'll still want to, so they'll have to appease him.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Just the more that I think about it, the more upset I am that we're not going to see him pitch next season. But we are at least going to presumably see him bat 600 times, which is one of the reasons I will point out uh one of the reasons that right now and i know steamer it's early there's an entire off season to go but steamer currently projects the angels to be an 85 win team next season which i think the same thing happened last year and then that is not what happened but the angels last season were not that bad and they had a lot of things go against them so anyway early dark horse for wild card slot the anaheim angels los angeles angels i

forgot what we're calling them los angeles angels another thing brault said to david is two-way players might actually make more sense if you had multiple guys on the team who can do it then you could cycle them through and have it not be as taxing say you had eight otanis eight guys who were both hitters and pitchers. In a sense, you'd have a bigger team than anybody else. Sounds like Steven Brault has been listening to the podcast. We definitely talked about cloning Otani at some point or cloning other guys. So, yeah, if you could get eight Otanis, I agree that that would be good.

All right. Question from, this is from ryan deal patreon supporter he says the fukuoka softbank hawks just won another japan series with 25 year old catcher takuya kai winning series mvp kai had a 143 200 143 slash line for the series and was pinch hit for in the decisive game, but set an NPB record by throwing out all six Hiroshima carp that attempted to steal a base. A quick analysis of past World Series MVP winners shows that every hitter to win has had strong offensive numbers. What sort of defensive performance do you think would be necessary for such a bad hitter to be the World Series MVP?

I guess we know, right? What Takuya Kai did. I don't know if that would fly here, but that's one way to do it. The only other thing I can think of is that if you had like a couple home run robberies and they really changed the outcome of the series, I can see that getting you an MVP because bringing back a home run is almost like hitting one right i think that you could in theory have the world series end with alex bregman's bases loaded catch against the or i'm sorry andrew benatendi's bases loaded catch against alex bregman and that would seal it because that was going to flip the entire game if benatendi misses that play then the astros win put that in game seven of a world series and voila you have the MVP because by championship probability added that would be the championship saving catch so that would be enough and then you have the guy bat I don't know 100 over the course

of the series maybe drive in a run or two you can't have a completely empty batting line but by the way you mentioned uh you mentioned Steven Brault I think you and I both kind of stopped paying attention to his hitting when he struck out for the first time on June 12th. Is that correct? I know. I didn't look again. So beginning on June 12th when Stephen Brault had his first career strikeout, he batted nine times from then on through the end of the year,

and he had five strikeouts. Stephen Brault, I think he let it get to his head, and he became whiffed. He broke the strikeout seal. That's it. That's very sad. Oh, okay. All right. Question from Clark Bundy, Patreon supporter.

It's the offseason, my favorite time of year to listen to Effectively Wild when you dive deep into completely ridiculous hypotheticals. Do we not do that the rest of the year? So here's my first one. Do we not do that the rest of the year? So here's my first one. Suppose Major League Baseball takes note of the incredible popularity of Williams-Estadillo and decides to emphasize balls in play over the three true outcomes. Thus, the following rule changes are made. Strikeouts count for two outs to encourage batters to put the ball in play.

Five balls for a walk to discourage taking pitches. Balls hit over the fence in the air are no longer home runs, but simply ground rule doubles to discourage swinging for the fences. One defender is removed from the game, so more balls in play become hits. In this world, would Williams' Astadillo be the best hitter in the game? He would get more hits with one fewer defender, but wouldn't be penalized by the bigger strikeout penalties, harder to get walks, and smaller home run bonus. And then the second question is, or would a better player like Mike Trout be able to retool his swing to put the ball in play more, cut out those strikeouts, and overtake Astadillo? And that's kind of an interesting

question that I think we have gotten from another listener recently who wanted to know that if someone else, if a really incredible hitter just dedicated himself to hitting like Williams Estadio, would he be able to do it? Would Trout be able to have an Estadio-like contact rate if he just sacrificed everything else that makes him better than Estadio? And this reminds me of a question from Evan who says, imagine that inspired by Williams Estadio, Mike Trout's only goal for a season is to have the highest contact rate he can what would his contact rate be and how many wins would he be worth assume some reasonable minimum number of swings so he can't just make contact

once and take every pitch for the rest of the season so that's I think maybe the more interesting question to me I mean, in that hypothetical scenario, Williams Estadio would be really good. But can a player like Trout, someone who is a better hitter than Estadio, could he potentially be a contact king like Estadio if he sacrificed everything that currently makes him better? Yeah, right.

Okay, so the first question is, if baseball were completely different, then would Williams Estadio be the best hitter in the game and the answer is yeah sure probably he'd be really really good because it wouldn't be baseball anymore so yeah the second question there's probably a way to analytically get to the answer here because you could isolate situations where maybe mike trout or other great players would just have to try to make contact more than anything else i don't know if whether that's there's a runner on third and less than two outs or the bases are loaded and it's a tie game or something like that. You could

you could look for situations that prioritize contact the most and then see if those players strike out less. If in in this kind of scenario, what was the walk disincentive? Fight balls for a walk to discourage taking pitches. Okay, so in this scenario, one of the one of the things that you see when there are, if there's a runner on third and less than two outs, for example, you would think, okay, all the hitters are trying to make contact, but then, of course, all the pitchers are trying to avoid contact even more than usual. So what you would see in this situation is you would see even fewer fastballs.

You'd see pitchers going for the strikeout. You'd never see someone say, I'm pitching to contact ever again. like the royals would be even worse at pitching than they are right now i don't know how that's even possible but we're talking about a different baseball so are we going to talk about strikeout rate or contact rate for mike trout what do you what's better for you i guess we can go with contact rate all right so his contact rate now is what somewhere between 75 and 80 i think that's where it's been for a little while. I think it might be even close to 80% now. I'm not looking at it with my eye.

So if Trout now is at around 80%, kind of a little above league average probably, contact rate. So if, hmm, I think that he could get up to 90%. I'll put Mike Trout at 90% contact under this weird hypothetical where the game is different. And if all he ever wanted to do was just put the bat on the ball, he could probably get up even higher than that. But I don't even know how he would rewire himself to prioritize contact over everything else because he's been programmed. Right. Yeah. Well, I think we've talked about this at some point in the past. If he doesn't care about being bad, then I'm sure he could have an Estadio-like

contact rate, right? If you're not trying to hit the ball hard, all you care about is just making some kind of contact. You can basically just do some sort of swinging bunt style thing every single time and you'd never hit a home run but you could make a lot of contact i think there might be some guys who couldn't even then just because their bat to ball skills aren't good enough but i think mike trouts would be so i think he could i don't know that he could be as good as astadio if he were really just trying to do that. I mean, that's the thing that makes Astadio so unique is that he is able to seemingly be a pretty productive hitter despite making so much contact and even added power this year and didn't really hurt his contact rate

somehow while doing that. So he's such an outlier. I don't know that he is actually trying to do this. It doesn't sound like when you read about him that he has just devoted his entire life to making contact. It just sort of sounds like he is this way. This was kind of his natural style of play. And I don't know that it could be that easily mimicked by someone who was actually trying to remain a productive hitter. So let's see. Mike Trout in his career, runner on third, less than two outs. He has a strikeout rate of 16.3%, which is lower than his career strikeout rate. Now he's only batted, okay, he's only batted 15 times with nobody out and the bases loaded.

times with nobody out and the bases loaded so okay 15 plate appearances only one strikeout with the bases loaded and one out another contact situation he's batted 29 times and he struck out four times okay so that's still low but you know these these are unusual circumstances if you look at uh second and third and nobody out he struck out three out of 15 times so i'm going to say that mike drought is perfect but i don't know where to uh where where else to look in these splits yeah all right step last uh sure yeah step last they'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us

in amazing ways. Here's to Deist-a-plast. Malik Smith was in the news, still is in the news. Well, he's in the stat blast, I'll tell you that much. So putting Malik Smith back in the headlines. So this is nothing that's too complicated. But I was curious, looking at the difference between expected weighted on base average and actual weighted on base average, this is something that's easily available if you look for individual seasons so you can go to baseball savant and based on stat

cast you can see how well a player would be expected to do based on how hard he hit the ball and the angle at which he hit the ball and you can see how the player actually did so it's easy to see that for one season but if you've ever used baseball savant you know that it can be very annoying to try to look at multiple seasons at once it just doesn't seem to want to load which is fine that's their prerogative and it's not something that you need to look at very often but i was i was curious we have four years they have four years i have access to four years of this stat cast information so i uh i decided to put everything together 2015 through 2018 and there are i set a minimum here of uh there are 287 players who over the past four years have batted at least 1000 times that seems like a good amount

of times to have batted do you agree yes great okay so if you if you look at like actual performance then the best hitter over the past four years has been you've heard this name before mike trout it's mike trout he leads in woba by quite a bit second best hitter joey vato third best hitter over the past four years has been you've heard this name before mike trout it's mike trout he leads in woba by quite a bit second best hitter joey vato third best hitter jd martinez this isn't interesting the worst hitter has been lcd's escort you knew that he's terrible so if you look at uh expected weight on base average then the best hitter has been david ortiz followed by miguel cabrera then mike trout then joey vato then aaron judge and the worst hitters have been billy hamilton byronxton, Dee Gordon, Delano DeShields, and Orlando Garcia. So, Orlando Garcia, I should say.

So, looking at the difference between actual weight on a base average and expected weight on a base average, again, now, this is looking over four years of time, minimum 1,000 plate appearances. The player who has been the biggest underachiever, this is a weight on a base minus expected weight on a base, Miguel Cabrera, is at 51 points below where you would expect, and that is probably in part because he is very slow. In fact, if you look at the bottom five here, tell me, well, let's just keep going. Stop me when you hear the name of a speedster, would you? So I'm just going to read up this list miguel cabrera kendrys morales alex

avila victor martinez albert pujols mitch morland joe mauer david ortiz logan morrison brandon moss still waiting ryan zimmerman seth smith no idea how fast seth smith is but i could guess nicholas castellanos jason worth alex gordon yeah i'll give him a little bit of front speed i'll stop at alex gordon whatever so he's 21 points below. But anyway, the real target of this is looking in the other direction, looking at the players who have most overperformed their expected WNB. what the explanation would be there. Maybe he's lucky. Maybe he's just super fast out of the box. But the player with the biggest difference between weight on a base and expected weight on a base

is Malik Smith. He has outperformed by 53 points. And the player in second place, current now Malik Smith teammate, D. Gordon, who has outperformed his expected weight on a base by 51 points. No one else is within 10 points uh third place is actually scooter jeanette i don't know what to make of that but buyer beware on scooter jeanette i guess he's a bit of an overachiever but malik smith and d gordon there is an obvious

correlation here between speed and how you do relative to expected weighted on base that's something that i think they're working on factoring in because obviously if you were out of the box quicker then you are going to be able to get more hits or you will stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples and triples and inside the park home run sometimes so of course speed is a factor here but it is interesting that now the mariners have the two biggest overachievers in the statistic malik smith has batted less than half as often as d gordon over the span of time but if the the Mariners were buying Dee Gordon, thinking that he would overachieve by the same amount,

just like before, this past season, he only overachieved his expected Woba by 22 points. And as a consequence, he was not very good. No. This year, Dee Gordon had a 255 expected weighted on base. His four-year mark is 254. So basically the same hitter, except that this year his actual Woba was 28 points lower than his four-year Woba. So the Mariners now have Dee Gordon and Malik Smith.

For all I know, they're going to trade Dee Gordon. For all I know, they're going to trade Malik Smith. Again, he's lasted more than 77 minutes, so he's already had a longer stay. Maybe he's opened up Seattle area Craigslist to look for an apartment. But that's where we are, Malik Smith. And you could you could look at this and say well of course malik smith is way up there he's one of the fastest players in baseball but you know byron buxton is also one of the fastest players in baseball and he's only

overachieved by 36 points to line out of shields 41 points i don't know who else is fast there's some fast players up here malik smith likely to keep overachieving but if he doesn't overachieve by the same amount consistently then he's likely to not be that special of a hitter so still too young this is all in its infancy we don't know exactly what malik smith is but you could there's a reason to believe here that the rates hold high yeah he ranked 14th out of 549 hitters in sprint speed this year so he's very fast and he's got to stay fast because obviously he's not hitting the ball all that hard all right question from gianna subject line what is this so she says i was reading a book today is this a rash i was reading a book today and i saw a paragraph in it and I just had to send it to you guys.

Can you please explain what I just read? Now, I do have some background informationore, which also came out in 2015, four months earlier. So Katie Evans is really cranking out the Man Whore installments. I'll read you the Amazon description of this book. It says, the unexpected love story that began in Man Whore continues heating up the pages in Manwhore Plus One by New York Times bestselling author Katie Evans. I don't know whether it was Manwhore or Manwhore Plus One that was bestselling or something else entirely. But it continues. Billionaire playboy?

Check. Ruthless businessman? Check. Absolutely sinful? Check. Malcolm Saint was an assignment. a story, a beautiful, difficult man I was supposed to uncover for a racy expose. I intended to reveal him, his secrets, his lifestyle, not let him reveal me. But my head was overtaken by my heart, and suddenly nothing

could stop me from falling. I fell for him, and I fell hard. Malcolm Saint is absolute sin and I've become a hopeless sinner. Now that the assignment is over, Saint wants something from me, something unexpected, and I want this wicked playboy's heart. But how can I prove to the man who trusts no one that I'm worthy of becoming his plus one? So now that I have set the stage, here is a baseball paragraph from manwhore plus one. He kisses me softly, but briefly, then he snaps out of it and turns back to watch the player on home base. The ball is hurtling through the air.

And with a smack, I realized the batter made contact and the ball is heading somewhere out in midfield. Malcolm is ecstatic. The whole stadium is screaming. If the Cubs get two men in, they'll win the game. One hit, the crowds stand.

Malcolm stands. I stand. A roar outside, and suddenly I'm crushed in his arms and flung in the air so hard my breath leaves me. Malcolm, I cry. He catches me, kisses me, squeezes me, and twirls me around, grinning down at me. And when he sets me down, his eyes go from fiery celebration to something stormy and uncontrollable. So it's in Wrigley Field.

Yes. The Cubs home base hitter knocks a hit to midfield and the crowds, all the crowds go to their feet. I think what troubles me the most here, because, you know, this could just be like a book that's translated several times through Google Translate until it ends up here. I don't think it is. Where are they in Wrigley Field such that there's room for him to spin a person and throw her into the air? It's a tight squeeze in that ballpark. Pretty good attendance.

Yeah. You go to one of those old European cathedrals and all the doors are like three and a half feet tall, right? Wrigley was built in that mold where the average human was four and a half feet tall. And the seats are in accordance with that. So there's not, there wouldn't be any room unless it's like a surprisingly sparse crowd,

which seems unlikely. Has this person seen a baseball game yeah the the home base and the midfield and the crowds standing argues that possibly not the upsetting thing is that we never find out what happens i asked gianna what did the cubs win does does do the guy score? Doesn't say. I guess she is just so taken by Malcolm and his uncontrollable eyes that she never gets to find out who wins, which seems pretty rude, really. Everyone is standing to see this play, and we've got runners rounding third, and it's very exciting, and then suddenly Malcolm grabs her and twirls her around. What if she's watching the game? This seems like a bad time for this sort of move. He flung her in the air and he twirled her around? Yeah.

It's like a gymnastics routine in the stands at Wrigley. And his full name, by the way, it's not just Malcolm Saint. It's Malcolm Kyle Preston Logan Saint. What? Bestseller? Well, bestselling author. Not sure whether this was the bestseller, but maybe. Well, if you had to guess, I think it's strongly implied that the Cubs win the game.

That's why Malcolm is celebrating. Probably. You don't have time to fling and twirl and have stormy eyes in the process of like the ball being caught, right? Yeah. Now, of course, it would be the worst if there is a play at the plate. The second runner is out and the game goes to extra innings and then everyone. But how do you interpret midfield? Where is midfield?

Where is the ball hit? I guess probably it's like a single to center. That's what I'm thinking. Like in front of the center fielder? Yeah, probably. So the Cubs need to get two men in to win so i i guess it's like the bottom of the ninth or extra innings and they're they're down by one or something so i wish i knew what happened it's a several book series so i'm not sure whether gianna has read all of them and knows whether it's ever

addressed whether they ever attend another Cubs game. But maybe baseball consultant to romance novelists is another side gig we could pick up. We've offered our services to TV and movie people who want to get things right, commercial makers. But romance novels could be a market that needs some baseball expertise. Do you think if we were hired as baseball consultants, do you think we could sell people on the idea that Williams-Estadio was actually the biggest star in the game? Probably, yeah. It's fiction to begin with, so sure.

Okay. Question from Mark. What with the talk of fixing the game and the understanding that an analytically efficient game, three true outcomes, etc., is a less entertaining game, I'm wondering if there's a hypothetical improvement to pitcher batting that fixes some of that. Obviously

an improvement in pitcher batting would not be an overnight adjustment, but let's say that from the lowest level of Little League on up through college and the minor leagues, pitchers are required to spend more time on hitting. More time on hitting would obviously mean less time on pitching and therefore a decrease in pitcher quality, probably. My question, in a hypothetical world where pitchers are better hitters,

how good would they need to be at hitting or bad at pitching before the excitement of baseball bounces back a bit? I'm not saying they're suddenly worth batting in the middle of the lineup or anything, but definitely of much higher quality than they are currently. Does adjusting the performance of pitchers solve some of the problems with the game? People love pitchers hitting, some people, because it's such a novelty, but what if it weren't? What if they were no worse hitters than a bottom-of-the-order position player normally is? And I've got to say that no, I don't think so. Even if we've talked about whether it's even

viable, whether pitchers could be good hitters if they devoted themselves to it. Not that they necessarily should, but even if they did, I think there is a pretty low ceiling for most pitcher hitters. And the thing is that even if they were competent, even if they could hit like a regular bad hitter, it just wouldn't help all that much it just there aren't enough at bats going to pitchers right now that it would make that much of a difference and i guess you might see more at bats going to pitchers under these circumstances but still not

that many and where are you likely to see the biggest drop in pitcher quality if you're working on your pitching less so maybe you're spending less time on your secondary pitches but you're probably going to be more wild which means more walks which means less fun baseball walks are good but no one likes watching them it's not an interesting part of the game it's kind of like a delay more than anything else so i think you would also have pitchers getting hurt more often it just i mean you would make pitchers worse through one way or another, but it doesn't seem like the way that I would recommend doing it. Yeah. For some numbers, for context, the NL strikeout rate this year was 22.6%. The AL strikeout rate this year with the DH, obviously in most games, was 21.9%. That is what the NL strikeout rate was last year in 2017. It was also

21.9%. So basically, the AL in 2018 looked like the NL in 2017 when it comes to strikeouts. So that's basically the difference. You would turn back the clock one year, I guess. And even this year, in the worst hitting year ever for pitchers, the difference in the NL strikeout rate with and without pitchers included, if you just drop pitchers entirely, was one percentage point. So if suddenly pitchers hit like regular bad hitters or you just got rid of pitcher hitting entirely, it would just make a tiny difference that you wouldn't really even notice. And if nothing else changed, I think it would only arrest this increase in strikeouts for about a year. So, you know, you would get, I guess, a break in the whatever it is, 12 consecutive

seasons or something now with a strikeout rate increase. It would probably actually go backward for one year, but I think that's about it unless as mark says we factor in pitchers getting noticeably worse at pitching as well yeah and i think that they would but like maybe the first point that you made is that the pitchers can only get so good because these are just players who weren't selected for their hitting and so you have very few people who are like michael lorenzo nor even zach ranky you just have people who are bad they're going to be bad at it and if you were at the major league level, like take, I don't know, like a fit guy at your gym

and then ask him to start being able to hit. Now, I guess that's maybe not the best example because pitchers have some hitting experience before, whether it's high school or wherever they were, but they're just not going to be very good. So maybe they'll be better at making contact. Maybe they'll be a little better at identifying pitches out of the zone but yeah there's so there's so little room for them to

grow that they would still just be quite bad you'd be looking at a bunch of lcds's escobar and that doesn't really help anyone yeah all right bobby says which player is more likely to get inducted into the hall of fame a player who gets 60 war in one season and then his career ends, or a player who gets exactly one war every year for 60 seasons? We've talked about some variant of this question before, and what interests me about this, I think, is the idea of 60 war in one season. That made me wonder what you think the theoretical maximum for a player is in one year. I mean, we've seen the actual maximum is what? They're guys with close to 20, right?

If it's like if you go back to 19th century pitchers who were pitching almost every inning for their teams, I think they're guys in the high teens at least. But modern age, we're talking about you know 12 maybe is is kind of where you can get if you're the best but what do you think the theoretical max because there's a limit to how much playing time you could get and i mean i guess you could say well if you if you hit a home run in 600 plate appearances or something like that could you get to to 60 war if you do something like that so you're asking like what is if you were a absolutely perfect hitter yeah what could you do perfect hitter yeah i mean i guess you could be a two-way player too but forget about

that if you if you play 162 games and and you just hit a home run every time can we figure out what your war would be oh man okay okay hold on hold on i think i think i might have some idea how to do this so home run every time home run every time that's what we're going with okay yeah okay so i'm going to we know what that would be in in weighted on base average yeah so that would be a wobah of 2.031 for at least the year 2018 so let's try that so two i'm just going to do some math on the podcast everyone's favorite post stat blast math so i can remember how to do this you take the uh the players wobba then you subtract the league average wobba which this year was 315

and then you divide that by a constant which this year you don't need to know what that was and then we're doing this let's say 700 plate appearances sure okay so then you're multiplying the result by 700 plate appearances and then i will finally so where i am right now is 980 runs uh and then i will divide that by this year's constant of 9.714 runs per win and then that would yield a player worth 101 wins at the plate uh then you say you know maybe andrelton simmons level defense and shortstop and so then you add a few more wins so theoretical maximum would be somewhere around like 100 well i guess the theoretical because you could also be a perfect defender right and the perfect base runner so then you're probably pushing it up to like 110

wins which means if you want 60 wins you could you could be a lot worse than this maybe we're talking like a home run every other time that you come up to the plate yeah easy but if you think about it like 700 okay 700 plate appearances divided by 162 so you're batting 4.32 times a game and if you're hitting a home run every time yeah you're going to be worth 100 plus wins above replacement because you're if the average home run is worth about two runs then i mean you're contributing somewhere between like seven and nine runs a game by yourself so yeah that's great i guess that makes sense i mean if you're a hundred wins above replacement level replacement levels, if you have a team of replacement players, it's like, what, 48 wins?

So if you have one guy who's 100, you're getting basically up into just the team is winning every game territory. But that is reasonable, I guess, if the guy is hitting 4.2 homers per game and the team is averaging eight runs or whatever just from those homers. That does seem like a team that would not be defeated ever or very rarely. So let's say that the guy hits a home run once a game, right? So now we're going to... No, you know what?

I'm not going to do that math right now because it's a little more complicated than I want to do on the podcast, but you'd be worse And you'd probably be about one-fourth as good as the number that I just said So you're still looking at, you know, 25 wins Yeah, all right, so 60 war It's totally plausible

So who's more likely to, I guess just Who's more likely to be legendary in general? Is it someone who has an extremely high but short peak or someone who lasts forever and is kind of a compiler, I guess, if you want to call him that? I mean, it's one thing to say extremely high peak, but it's quite another to say, like, basically you're a god, right? Yes, right, yeah. So that season— Someone who plays 60 years and is worth one win a year, that's kind of godlike, too. I mean, 60 years to an

extent but you know you figure let's say the guy debuts when he's 20 so he's oh man okay so that that individual do we have anything that we can do here is not really a comparison because the closest one of the closest marks we have is like what omar vizquel yeah like played forever on omar vizquel's baseball reference page right now yeah so he got like like 45 ish wins over 24 years so you know he was more like a two-win player but for less than half that time right i think that you would have legends about the one-year player that lasts forever whereas the second player would be regarded very highly because what kind of senior citizen is able to be a better player than El Cidiz Escobar

on a consistent basis when he's eight? What kind of spring training competition? You got some hot shot 21-year-old rookie who's like, I'm going to take this guy's job. You have this 80-year-old who's just like busting triples. It's like Rafael Palmeiro in Rafael Palmeiro Jr. He must be giving a really high percentage to still be that good at that age. Okay.

So people would love, they would be in love with the old guy whose career would presumably only come to an end because of death. But the former player. Think of Bartolo Colon. This is Bartolo cologne in 35 years said he's still playing yeah but i mean let's let's assume this uh the 60 year player probably doesn't share a physique with bartolo cologne which i am convinced is most of the reason that people love him so look obviously we're dealing with two extremes here but the uh the player who who was god for a season would be completely unforgettable.

And the latter player would also be unforgettable, but for a different reason, because the first player would be regarded as some sort of divine being. And the latter player, you just get an article every year about this guy's crazy diet. Yeah, well, put it this way. You definitely have artifacts of each of these guys in the Hall of Fame. There would be an exhibit devoted to each of these guys. I think there would be a display case with the 60-year career guys, his first baseball card and his last baseball card or something. Guys, if you look at Phil Necro's baseball card or someone like that, they kind of look like they had been playing for 60 years by the time they retired, but this guy really did it. So I don't know if either of them is all that likely to be inducted. I, I guess the second guy is the second guy just would have

been around so long. He would have been a part of everyone's entire life following baseball that maybe they would just put him in because like he's just been the constant he is you can't have the hall of fame without the guy who played in baseball this entire time on the other hand this other guy would be i don't know what his story is like is he 60 war in one season and then he just hangs around as a decent player for a while? Or does he just disappear and walk back into the cornfield or something like some sort of legend and he's never seen again? Or does he have a career-ending injury because he was giving 700% in the season and that's why he had 60 war? I don't know. You know what it would be?

He wouldn't be interested. He'd be like, this isn't hard for me. Yeah, he conquered baseball i guess so yeah well if he just opts to walk away then i bet he doesn't get into the hall because there is a 10-year eligibility limit and maybe they would waive that for for some people and accomplishments but if you just voluntarily walk away after one year i don't think they do so in that case the 60-year guy has a better chance. So what if the player comes up and hits a home run every other at-bat, and then in the playoffs, he bats like 170 and his team gets swept, and then he leaves baseball? Is he just regarded as someone who is unclutched for the rest of days? Yeah, the ultimate unclutch guy. Choker. Yeah. He left because he couldn't get a job in free agency.

Donald says, thinking about rules changes that could create incentives for differing styles of play, I started thinking about the size of the bases. When people talk about changing the size of the diamond, there's resistance. 90 feet is a nice round number. Follows baseball's multiples of three pattern and is ingrained in all of our heads. But getting from one base to the next isn't really 90 feet, it's the 87 and a half feet from the edge of one base to the edge of the other. Or what is a base two and a half feet wide? So I guess that's right.

So nearly doubling the size of the base from sides of 15 inches to 21 inches would reduce the distance between bags by just over 1%, not enough to radicalize the game, but enough that it would increase BABIP, stolen base success rates, successful takings of extra bags, all leading to a more dynamic game. It would also help protect first basemen from getting spiked when the spiking is accidental. Anyway, it would change the aesthetics, but would be less objectionable to traditionalists, I think, as I think 15 inches is less ingrained than 90 feet so giant bases supersize the bases okay so right now it's presumably i guess i don't know this for sure but presumably it's 90 feet to the edge of first base right from home there's no way it's

87 and a half or whatever 89 feet to the edge it wouldn't be measured at the center yeah so okay so but we're making the bases bigger now and therefore making them closer also yes because you can you're getting a longer lead effectively just because the base is bigger so you are closer to second base when you take your regular lead hold on okay hold on this is this is dumb but bear with me here it's 90 feet to every base and therefore it's presumably 90 feet from home from the edge of from home to the edge of first base i think but then yeah is it also then 90 feet from the edge of first base to the edge of second it must be 90 feet probably to the foul line right oh this is embarrassing embarrassing. This is like elementary baseball.

Is it? I don't know. How often do we think about this? Obviously never. But like if it is 90 feet to every single base, then that's regardless of the size of the bases.

So basically we're just going to assume that the bases get bigger and therefore also stretch into the baselines. Yeah, right. I'm going to say that it's it's 90 feet but it's effectively less than 90 feet currently as uh the questioner is saying here because the base is extending along the base path to second base so you are closer to second when

you're touching the edge of the base so yeah i think that is the case so so in this case you're just making the base bigger so that you can stand a little bit farther from the line and toward second base. And it would be subtle. Like, I don't think we would notice really. I mean, if you were looking at it, you might notice, but it wouldn't overturn the traditionalists' conception of baseball as much, I think, to have the base just be bigger, probably, as opposed to just having the baseline be longer to get to the edge of the base. Anyway, it would, yeah, I guess it would change things very slightly, right? I'm not even sure it would be that slight. So I don't have, I'm sure StatGaz people have the information of like when the ball gets to first versus when the runner gets first. And it would be interesting to see how many bang bang plays there are because we probably exaggerate how many there are it feels like they happen all the time but i think they're less frequent than you think but stolen bases absolutely you steals are they come down to fractions of a second every single time for the most part and so

if you if you could if the difference in a typical stolen base whether it's caught or or successful is about a tenth of a second then if you start inching into that if you effectively start giving the runner almost an extra tenth of a second or something like that then you are increasing stolen base attempts because they're going to be more successful now you're going to have more failures because you're going to have more players trying to steal therefore they're going to be less successful but you're going to have the best runners are going to be successful far more often than they already are so you are increasing base running values quite substantially someone like malik smith would be a great acquisition it's possible that we don't know something about the cba negotiations and that they're going to make the bases bigger

the mayors are onto something here so you would have fast players would be more useful they would hit better on grand balls and they would steal more they would be able to run the bases better so i don't know what kind of differences we're talking about we could be talking about like doubling the most valuable base runners in the league in terms of their base running value which would be pretty substantial yeah well it might be more exciting i think it would have the effect that donald is speculating that it would have so yeah all right last one ed says i noticed that the dodgers led the league in team ERA this year, despite not having any pitchers who qualified for the ERA title. Kershaw came painfully close, literally, with 161 and a third innings pitched. Has this ever happened before? I would be surprised if it had. And no, it has not ever happened before. And having an entire team not have a single pitcher who qualified for the ERA title has not happened that many times. It has happened 21 times in AL or NL history. And as you might imagine, those times are concentrated in extremely recent seasons so of the 21 times it has ever happened 10 of those times have been in the last two years so it happened five times in 2017 and it happened five times in 2018

it happened two times in 2016 and that was the first year in which it had ever happened more than once so obviously a trend here, not a big surprise. But no, no previous team has ever led the league in ERA while also not having a pitcher qualify for the ERA title. So that is still somewhat weird. And the Dodgers have been weird with their pitching staff for a while now. There was the year, what was it, two years ago, three years ago, where they used the most starters of any team, I think, or very close to it.

I remember writing about that because it was very odd for a team to be as good as the Dodgers were at pitching despite using so many starters because usually when you use so many starters, you're doing that because your starters stink and you're replacing them or a bunch of guys got hurt and you're replacing them with guys who aren't as good. So Dodgers have had a strangely constructed pitching staff for a while now.

And this is another example of that. Yep. And I just saw in the news that their legend Ryu is most likely going to accept the Dodgers qualifying offer. So Ryu would go back. And so we've got that. Good for me and my contract draft I know but it's early yet yes yeah and this is this is one of those stats that's a sign of the times and I wonder if there's ever going to be any sort of momentum at all to lower the qualifications because we're seeing fewer and

fewer qualified pitchers and I think fewer and fewer qualified hitters as well although to a lesser extent and I don't know if it matters to anyone that the pitchers are not qualified because the average baseball fan doesn't even know what that means. But when you only have, I don't know, 20 or 30 pitchers who are qualified each year, then it starts to mean less and less. Yeah. It's useful to keep it the same just so that we can tell how much things have changed. Like what we're saying right now, we can say, well, this hadn't happened before, and now it's happening all the time. In that sense, I like keeping it consistent so you can see the arc of evolution there.

But on the other hand, if you actually want to use it for leaderboards and ranking guys within a season, it is no longer very useful for that. I think Sam wrote an article about that a few years ago. I guess what you could do maybe is just lower the qualifying retroactively for all years. I mean, you can't do that in the sense of awards and ERA titles and everything, things that were handed out in the moment. But if you wanted to just make a new baseline, you could just have it be, I don't know, half an inning per team game or something. And then you could just have more guys qualify today and also in previous eras, and it wouldn't be quite so lopsided.

So I guess that's one thing you could do. So speaking of awards, and I guess we're going to be talking about innings and performance pretty soon. Because what's the awards schedule this year? I'm trying to find it on this terrible website. This week, I think. Yeah, it is this week. MVP stuff is Thursday. I think Cy Young's Wednesday, maybe.

Okay, where is schedule? Okay, so Rookie of the Year is today. Then Manager of the Year, whatever. That's Tuesday. Cy Young Wednesday. MVP Thursday. is today then manager of the year whatever that's uh that's tuesday cy young wednesday mvp thursday and so we're gonna have to delay our wednesday podcast of thursday but i was a cy young voter so i guess i could talk about that on thursday once those results are out and uh yeah no that's that's that's all i have and it's i'm glad that we're not podcasting on tuesday because manager of the year, who cares? Right. Yeah.

But this ERA qualifying thing obviously is something that has come up when talking about award races this year because Chris Sale didn't qualify. And he's not one of the three finalists, right, or the three top vote getters, which obviously is related to him not pitching that many innings. Of course, he was hurt. But I did want to mention that I said this is a recent phenomenon, and it mostly is. It has happened 20 times since 1995. So 1995 was sort of when the modern era of having no qualified pitchers began. So there was one team in 95, one team in 96, one team in 97, skipped over 99, then you go to 98, then it skipped over a few years after that. But basically, 95 was when it really started. But before that, there is one team in baseball history before 1995 that had no qualified pitchers, the 1957 Kansas City Athletics. Almost 40 years before any other team did it the 1957 A's did it they were led in innings

by effectively a wild legend Ned Garver who I think had some arm trouble and he only pitched 145 and a third innings that year but that team was super weird and uh not good it was 59 And 94 but there's a whole Hardball times article by Steve trader about the 1957 Kansas City athletics And that is the title of the article is The 1957 Kansas City Athletics and it's about how weird They were on offense and also

As a collection of pitchers Because their offense They led the league in home runs By a lot they had league in home runs By a lot They had 166 home runs And they had a big lead And yet they were dead last In the league in runs scored

Which is hard to do Obviously and it's not like they were in Coors Field or something strange Like they just had a Team batting average of 244 Which was very low for the time. They had 364 walks, which was extremely low. One of the lowest totals in modern major league history.

They had a 294 on base percentage. That is not good. So that's how you lead the league in homers and also score the fewest runs. And then the pitching staff was also extremely strange. Lowest complete game total in major league history up to that point they were just a bunch of starters and relievers like almost uh i guess looked like staffs are looking more and more like now steve writes no pitcher among the 13 who worked in more than 10 games for the A's that season Worked exclusively as a starter or a reliever

So guys were just going back and forth And this was the period of time when the A's were like an unofficial farm team for the Yankees, basically And that's part of this, that they were owned by Arnold Johnson And he was a business partner of Del Webb, who co-owned the Yankees And so the A's just kind of traded good players to the Yankees when they wanted them which is something that is not ideal

if you are a fan of a team Closer, alleged closer Tom Morgan had 61 walks and 32 strikeouts, Mickey McDermott had 50 walks and 29 strikeouts, Rip Coleman 25 walks, 15 strikeouts. This team finished last in the league in strikeouts.

These old ratios are just absolutely repulsive. I know. It's incredible when you look at it. This was what the league was like at the time, more or less. But it's amazing when you look back at many earlier periods of baseball and the average strikeout to walk ratio in the league is like one. It's like it's just one to one. It's so stark and different from today. It was like, you know, just putting the ball in play, managing contact, I guess, was a bigger proportion of pitcher skills than missing bats because very few pitchers did.

I don't have anything to add to the 1957 Kansas City Athletics. Okay. Then I have nothing to add to this episode, so we will end it here. Well, Shohei Otani and Ronald Acuna won the Rookie of the Year awards. I think those are awards that we will look back on in many years and say, that was a fun rookie crop. Acuna got 27 out of the 30 first place votes. Otani got 25 out of the 30 AL first place votes. I think those were the right choices. You know, you look back at the last regular DH to win the AL Rookie of the Year award, it was Bob Hamlin in 1994. Second place that year, Manny Ramirez. So yeah, you know, maybe history doesn't look back that kindly on choosing Bob Hamlin over Manny Ramirez. But you know what? Bob Hamlin had a better year.

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