Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1356: Keep Your Eye on the Bat

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about Sam’s cabin sojourn, how well Major League has held up, an exciting development in strategic bat tosses, a big day for Willians Astudillo, the difficulty of drawing conclusions about baseball early in the season, the early-season home-run rate, the paradox of sports radio, Sam’s Jose Ramirez […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1356 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and I am joined by both of my co-hosts today. Meg Rowley is back again from Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And Sam Miller of ESPN is returned from his cabin weekend. Hello Sam. Hello Ben. How are you? Well, I got to ask about the cabin weekend. How did it go? Well, to be honest, it was a lot of pressure. I felt a lot of pressure.

Once I got there, I had your voice in the back of my head and I felt like I should be, I don't know, getting more out of it. Yeah. Sorry, I ruined it. It really is a lot of, there really are a lot of things happening at one time. And I started to feel guilt that I would flip from one game to the other. But then if I'd stayed on one game, I would have felt guilt for not flipping over to the other. I know. Watching baseball is ruined by producing baseball content to some extent. Oh, well, it's just the most, I mean, it really is the most inefficient way to collect

information about the sport is to sit there watching three hours of it, waiting for something interesting to happen. Yeah. Need an aggregator. Need someone to tell us what happened. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, need an aggregator to tell us what happened. Yeah, exactly.

So you just sat there, I guess other than Friday during the daytime when there was no baseball. So you just kind of sat there and watched and flipped from game to game. And that was your whole day for the most part. Yeah, it was. Yeah. And on Friday, I watched Major League for the first time. Oh, yeah. 30th anniversary coming up.

Yeah. And I've been tasked with writing about it, which meant I should see it. And, you know, it's part of my 80s gap is Major League. Wow. You missed Major League entirely? Yeah. I've seen Major League 3, Back to the Miners. Oh, well, okay. It doesn't, I mean, it's a tough hang in 2019.

They all are. Yeah, they all are. It's not the best. No. Well, I mean, the amount of, I mean, the amount of like plays on, I mean, the amount of Native American references, irreverent Native American references, really just hammers

home how bizarre it is that there's a team called the Indians at all. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's weird. I think that's weird to me. Yeah. Yeah. I guess there are probably multiple aspects of that movie that haven't aged the best, but I might rewatch it this week too because it's been a while for me.

But does some of the humor hold up at least? Because in my mind, it's still pretty good because I liked it when I saw it the first time. When's the last time you saw it, Meg? Gosh, it's probably been at least five years. At least five years. It wasn't uproarious or anything. It's not a laugh a minute kind of a movie. It's much more of a plucky underdogs kind of a movie where it's a comedy in tone more than like how we expect comedy post Simpsons to feel.

I feel like I came to that movie at the wrong time because, well, I guess at the right time insofar as some of the like worst parts of the humor were lost on me because I was too young when i watched it but it is a very you're right to say like it's it's a tonally funny movie and i was also maybe too young to appreciate that so i was like this should have been better this is about baseball it's one of my favorite things i didn't like it as much as i thought i would so i've never had strong affection for it yeah major league three They really perfected the formula by the third time around. I liked it.

I will just say that I did like it. Yeah, I have fond memories of it for the most part. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, all right. So you watch Major League and you watch regular baseball, and that was the cabin. So was the experience enhanced at all by the enforced isolation? Would you do cabin ball again yeah sure i definitely would i also had a extremely weak internet uh signal and so that

was really nice to have only one screen that i was watching to have that enforced more than anything else i had no cell phone service and uh yeah just how you like it. Yeah, exactly. So it was good. Well, there's something that I meant to talk about with you last week. It was going to lead the show, and then I guess we both forgot about it. I don't know, but it is possibly the highlight of your season, and it happened already. In fact, it happened in spring training. A ball hit the bat in front of the plate. This is something that you have been watching for a while now since you first wrote about this phenomenon, and it actually happened. So if some listeners haven't read your article about throwing the bat in front of the plate, bring them up to

speed and tell us what happened here. Yeah, hang on. Oh, I didn't get to see it. All right. I was trying to watch a background video for this discussion. But I wanted to write an article a couple years ago about I think it started as wanting to write an article about how funny it is that baseball has litter in it, that it's the only sport where you throw away your trash in the middle of the field. And then everybody just plays around it. Which is to say that you finish swinging, you drop the bat and it just sits there. I mean, other sports sometimes have equipment get loose or lay there for a minute, but hardly by design,

whereas baseball has a trash problem, right? And so I started to pay attention to what happens to the trash. And that led to an article that is one of my favorites about whether where you drop the bat is strategy and particularly whether batters are intentionally, whether some very, very small minority of players are intentionally dropping their bat in front of home plate so that in the event of a throw home, it could be in the path of the ball.

And I wrote a long article about that with interviews. And not everybody was happy to read that article. There were a lot of people that thought that that article didn't need to be on ESPN. And, you know, quick digression. One of the things that I probably watched uh i don't remember exactly but about maybe a hundred or so bat leavings bat droppings hard to know what to call it yeah and i actually i saw watched a lot more than that because i watched dozens where the the batter left the bat in front of the the plate which is the the not the default, right? And in only one of those instances did the umpire go out

and kick the bat out of the way. So we know that the umpire can do that. We sort of have a mental image of the umpire clearing the bat away if there's going to be a play at the plate or something like that. But as a person who watched many plays at the plate,

many bats thrown in front of the plate, only once did the bat disappear, right? Presumably because the umpire tossed it away. So when the article comes out, I remember getting a reply saying that it was the dumbest article ever because the umpire always goes out and gets the bat out of the way. And that was the experience of writing that article, basically, in a nutshell. And I said in the article that the umpire can but usually almost always doesn't throw the bat i'm sure that person read the whole article before making that comment so i i really liked that article but even i questioned whether it was worth the effort and then this week and so but

then i started seeing lots of really good bats uh being left in lots of really good spots and the throw never hits the ball it's uh the bat it's practically impossible for that to happen too started seeing lots of really good bats uh being left in lots of really good spots and the throw never hits the ball it's uh the bat it's practically impossible for that to happen too talking about an extremely unlikely event you know having this bat drop pay off but uh it seems like it's low effort and it could work and i found i think i found two uh references in history to a bat hitting uh being in the way of the throw. And I wanted to see one for myself, and I did. Dansby Swanson had a chopper in the infield and tossed his bat right in front of the plate.

And the pitcher charged the grounder through the ball home, and it skipped off the bat and got away from the catcher. And everybody got to keep running around the bases, which is exactly how you would design it it's exactly why you would drop the bat there if you could um i mean it was in spring training though well congratulations i know this is big for you it was you said the highlight of everything you said the highlight of my season and it it genuinely is probably the highlight of my season but it might be the highlight of the last five seasons it might be like like if you if i found out that mark reynolds actually is blind then

this would be about like that if they really put a pit in the field if they really did put a pit yeah if if rob manfred's slate of recommendations involved a pit uh something. But I mean, no, this one, I really, I was proud of the article. And then to have a lot of people tell me I should be ashamed of the article, it knocks you a little bit for a loop. And so it was great. It was a validation. Well, I hope you looked up the guy who tweeted at you and you said, well, there we are.

It happened. I think you should have been confident before then, because a big part of an umpire's job is removing trash, right? They have a special little broom to dust off the plate. They have a whole implement for that. They have a tool that they carry with them on, I guess, their belt somewhere. It has to exist on their belt. It can't be in a pocket, probably. So you would think that if they were determined to like clear

debris they'd be like oh this is part of my job and it's way less like i don't know belittling than having to get out that tiny little broom it's really yeah it's really hard to get out there in time and throw the bat out of the way if there's going to be a play at the plate especially because a well-tossed bat like the the king of the bat is uh oh make remind me who's the guillermo heredia yeah from the mariners last year but now he's not on the mariners he's on the race now yeah he has this incredible bat uh drop where he yes he sort of he recoils and actually flings the bat out like about maybe 8 to 12 feet in front of the plate So it is both perfect placement right in front of the plate for a throw from the outfield to potentially block a throw from the outfield. But also there's

no way an umpire could get out there, nor could a catcher get out there. Did you get the sense from the interviews that you did for that article that it is intentional usually or occasionally, rarely? Did Dansby Swanson say anything about his bat placement in this game? Well, one of the reasons that I was proud of this article is that when I was doing the interviews, some, a lot of people I asked looked at me like, like it was the craziest thing I'd ever asked them about. Like they, they, the, the most ballplayers have never thought about this, have not considered it, do not consider it a thing thing but i did find a few who said oh yeah

totally a thing i do that other guys do that that is a hundred percent a real thing and it felt like i had weaseled into this gap of knowledge that even ball players had not come to a consistent understanding on and so it felt like i was advancing um even ball player knowledge and i uh i talked to uh one i forget who i don't remember who doesn't matter and he said that it was a great idea and he was gonna try to remember to do it from that point on and it wasn't dansby swanson but you never know so i was just trying to watch another dansby swanson video a minute ago to see if he is a regular if that is just his, because like Mike Trout, for instance, drops the bat on the plate. And he's one of the only people I know who drops it right on the plate,

square on the plate. There's no real recoil and he doesn't toss the bat aside like most players do. And I don't think he's intentionally putting it on the plate. There doesn't seem to be any advantage there because then the catcher definitely is just going to kick it out of the way you kind of have your own your own signature where your swing takes you and like i don't know that heredia does it i i suspect heredia doesn't do it on purpose but maybe he does and i don't know what dansby swanson's signature is so i was gonna look but in the meantime we're talking all right well i'll link the play so everyone can see what this looks like it actually exists and uh i'm happy for you. I hope the rest of the season isn't too much of a letdown. It could happen again. Oh, it could definitely. It could take off.

Something to keep watching for. This could be a thing. Right. The new opener. Yes. Right. So we are going to just talk for a while, just banter about baseball and maybe answer some emails. It's hard to know what to do at this time of year. It's hard to know what to write about at this time of year and how to talk about baseball because there is suddenly so much baseball. But we're hesitant to take any meaning from any of it also.

So could do like takeaways from the opening weekend or confirmation bias candidates or what have we learned about every team and of course we know that the answer is very little but uh if you've learned anything about baseball while you were in your cabin please enlighten us i'm on the spot here yeah can i uh non-answer that sure all right uh i can go yeah i can go so i don't know that we can say anything about this ben i know that your your research into the spring training numbers suggested that like the home run rate is pretty normal compared to last year it's pretty on pace but it sure does seem like everybody is hitting a bunch of home runs. Doesn't it seem like everyone's hitting a bunch of home runs?

It struck me while I was watching this weekend, watching everyone hit a bunch of home runs, that it was kind of like an effectively wild question. If the commissioner could turn up the juice in the ball but not know by quite how much, how different would baseball be and it might be it might be this different because like uh you know tim beckham hit two home runs off chris sale that seems strange uh bryce harper hitting home run seems normal but there's just been there's just been a lot of home runs there have been many i i counted i think i came up with

including today's action 134 home runs through the first four days of the season that seems like a lot seems like a lot of home runs that's uh 134 out of like uh 452 games is that right so that is ish yeah so that's like two and a half per game. So like one and a quarter per side. And so what's- And so then when you put it that way, you're like, well, that seems pretty normal. I don't know. I'm going to check.

Well, and I looked at how many there have been through the first four days of last year, which is like not a super scientific comparison to make, but it was like 109. So it's not a crazy increase. Well, the thing about home runs too is that while so you would expect home runs and and you guys mentioned this on friday but you would expect home runs to be to be down on the first few days of the year because weather is bad and that's traditionally been the story but the flip side is that pitchers have pitched and also good right good starters have started but on the flip side, pitchers, they're getting the hang of things.

They're getting their feet wet, as it is. They're not all the way up to full velocity in some cases. And so maybe what we should actually expect is that home runs would be up if the weather were nice. And the weather was really nice, wasn't it? Wasn't it really nice weather pretty much everywhere? It did seem pretty okay. Yeah, I was watching the Indians game, and it was like 33 degrees or something. Yeah, people looked cold.

It was sunny and cold. But yeah, it was pretty nice generally in most places, I think. There was a rain delay somewhere, right? Not too bad. No snow that I saw. That's different from last year. So yeah, I mean, I guess. I don't know. I think,

Meg, you and I were wondering whether that was a record, the 47 homers, I think it was on opening day. And it was, it was a record. The previous record was 46, which was from 1999. And I don't know if we can conclude too much. I know that right now, like the strikeout rate is up to 23.4% and batting average is down to 232. But again, it is very, very early and we haven't seen fifth starters pitch yet. And as Sam said, the hitters are ahead of the pitchers early in the season, which is what some research by Max Markey at Baseball Perspectives showed. So I don't know what can conclude much, but I mean, there were lots of homers last year too. Not quite as many homers as the year before, but still lots of homers in a historic sense.

Yeah. And if we take out the Dodgers homers from that total, then the number goes way down. And if you add all the Giants in, then the number doesn't go anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I keep stumbling across little stories and headlines that make me think like, oh yeah, I thought that guy was going to be good and he had a good game. So I sure was right about that guy. But it's always just one game and who knows what to make of any of that. In some senses, it's easier to talk about baseball like over the winter

when nothing is happening and then later in the season when enough things have happened that we can trust them all. Whereas now it's all just a bunch of first impressions and first impressions are fun. And if you're watching like Chris Paddock or someone and you think Chris Paddock is good and then Chris Paddock is really good, then you think, okay, we were right about Chris Paddock is good and then Chris Paddock is really good then you think okay we were right about Chris Paddock being good but that's about as far as it goes I would point out that we always say in the off season like this is the wrong time to talk about baseball because there's nothing going on and then we wait a month into the season before we feel very confident talking about baseball it's the two weeks after the season ends is the sweet spot

that's when I like to write all of my articles. That is the real best time to write about baseball. Nothing's going to change. You're not going to have to update the stats two days later. And yet you have a nice robust sample. And that's the good times. I think it's pretty rational that we would kind of overreact a little bit to or at least maybe not overreact, but at least react a little bit to the first few days. And I know that it's also very easy to be misled, that there's some real cognitive biases at work here and all of that. But I was having this discussion with somebody on the morning before the games began on Thursday.

And you don't expect players to change from June 30th to July 1st, right? It's not like July 1st comes along and we're like, all right, let's see what this guy is going to be this month. You just sort of expect there's going to be basic continuity from one day to the next, because that's more or less how baseball is. And you've got your fluctuations and your hot streaks and your injuries and all of those sorts of things. But for the most part, there's not any real significant change from the time you go to bed on the 30th of June to the time you wake up on the 1st of July, or the 14th of June to the 15th of June or anything like that.

But from September 30th to now is six months. That's a long time. Like it's, it's, as we know, you know, with baseball players, they're still fairly steady. Most of them find their, their, their level more or less, but six months is a long time to physically change, to change your approach, to change your workouts, to somehow reset yourself. And it feels pretty natural that we would say like you know we're we're all dario right we all turned away for six months we didn't get to see the ball players hitting and you want to see if they're good like that feels fairly normal to me yeah no it's it's natural i mean on the one hand the the Orioles beat the Yankees in a series. And so that is, it's weird. That reminds you the Orioles have a winning record and Yankees do not. So everything is meaningless. But on the other hand, I mean, on an individual level, now that we have all these tools to measure player performance on a more granular level, you can see that someone hit a ball really hard, like harder than he ever hit a ball before, or someone threw a ball really hard, harder than he ever threw a ball

before. And those are new things that are worth paying attention to. And then, you know, like I saw Jason Stark point out that the exit speed on Bryce Harper's two homers so far, they were both 113 point something miles per hour, and he only hit one ball all of last year with an exit speed that high. So does that mean he's better now? Does that mean he just randomly happened to have his two hardest hit balls in the first few games of the season? Does it mean the Braves bullpen is really bad?

Does it mean stat cast is screwed up, which sometimes happens early in the season? Hard to say. I'm sorry we don't have Jeffff sullivan around to monitor all of those things for us and condense them into articles do you have any conclude do you have anything that you sort of guiltily have have become convinced of even though you know you shouldn't like like some you made reference ben to well i thought he was going to be good and he's playing good and so huzzah but like do you have anything that's secretly you've developed a hot take based on three days but you you wouldn't want to say it out loud because i i do well you go first i don't know if i do i i i am going to say it but i am not

going to stand behind it i don't want i want people to realize that this is me admitting something about myself not trying to convince them of anything okay yeah all right this is my we agree this is my it's my confession i think jose ramirez may not be good anymore oh my you saw him try to get some of those bunts down against the shift well it's a it's been a gradual process of me, you know, because so Jose Ramirez was incredible in 2017. But like for the most part, you hadn't really heard of him before 2016. Like he wasn't a guy that you were paying that close of attention to. He comes up, he's pretty good. And then like immediately he's insanely good.

And then he's insanely good. And at that point, I was convinced. And there was no doubt in my mind that Jose Ramirez is like one of the five best players in the game. And then he had the, you know, the bad months in August and September. And I sort of, God, maybe I started to think, ah, I did it again. I bought high. And then he went 0 for the postseason, which is only 11 at-bats against fantastic pitching, but still that's zero hits.

Then he had a not good spring training, which doesn't even count. Why would he try to have a good spring training? Then he's, I think, 1 for 11 or something like that now. Someone convinced me. Otherwise, I'm not trying to convince you. It's a bad opinion. But I've, I it really did look like he was uncomfortable. Now, I don't know how often he will face that sort of thing, but he was trying to bunt, and Marwin Gonzalez was roving all over the place. So sometimes he was in the outfield, and sometimes he was just playing really deep infield. And Ramirez was trying to get a bunt down because no one was really at

third base and if he just could have gotten it down past the pitcher it would have been an easy single and he just couldn't do it and he tried a couple times and it looked really awkward and there was another Indian who was also trying to do that and it looked just as awkward and the broadcasters were making a big deal out of how awkward it looked and it was funny because it was like this was the sort of thing that we talked about years ago when the shift really started and and when we did it with the stompers and people who had never seen it before it kind of got in their heads and now the four-man outfield is this new manifestation of it and seems to be getting in guys heads and it really is odd that teams just don't practice this more. I mean, I know that you have the standard few

bunts to lead off your round of batting practice, but no one takes that all that seriously. You're not really bunting for a hit. You're not repeating it over and over again. And if you're going to do this in games, and if you're going to see these shifts all the time, which apparently you are now, this in games and if you're gonna see these shifts all the time which apparently you are now then really you should uh either commit to it or don't do it at all one of those things just don't get caught in the middle where you're kind of trying it but half-heartedly and and clearly without any expertise i do wonder how much of it is him still being kind of dinged up though yeah yeah there's that too right like he's probably still a little hurt maybe a little hurt yeah i mean cleveland's lineup is uh not so great right now i mean i know it was very cold in minnesota it was cold in the the

pirates games too i think it was in the 30s but their lineup when you have like ramirez maybe not at full strength and then you don't have lindor you don't have kipnis it's uh it doesn't look so good and there's the chance that you know if those guys don't have Kipnis, it doesn't look so good. And there's the chance that, you know, if those guys don't come back at full strength, then maybe they rue their winter and not having really signed anyone of consequence. And maybe they can't just co-spy with what they have, but maybe they can. Maybe. But also Brad Miller got at bats today. Yeah. And then he was pinch hit for by Luplo. You're like, oh, that seems like a that seems like a not winning a division lineup. Yeah.

Not a lot of depth there. They could use a Williams Estadio, who was, of course, wonderful on Sunday. He got his first star of the season. He was catching. He went two for two with two doubles and a hit by pitch and he also made a fun play backing up the first baseman and getting a wild throw and then getting the the 2-3 put out which was pretty fun and uh yeah as Aaron Gleeman tweeted he now has the highest career batting average in history minimum 100 plate appearances so that's fun he's just

every time you plug him in there he just seems to do something i don't know what it is but he is always i mean we're primed to want to watch him but he never really disappoints i tweeted about this i'm gonna do that terrible thing where i talk about it we did it but uh so i apologize but i i was curious when he was having his lovely day like every MLB team has their team store online, and they typically have like a featured player section. And I was like, who are the featured players on the Twins? Because I was hoping for some hot Astadio merch.

I was ready to buy a jersey. Can I tell you who the list of featured players is? Oh, my goodness. Can we guess? Can Ben and I do a draft? Oh, can you please guess? All right. All right. All right. So Ben, we're going to do, we're going to, we're going to swap picks and first person to guess someone who isn't on there loses.

Okay. Okay. How many are there? Seven. All right. There are seven. All right. Well, first. I will, I will say this in the interest of fairness. They are not all active players for the Twins. How many are active major leaguers? Six of the seven. Six of the seven.

But it sounds like from your phrasing, and I'm not asking you to confirm this. This is now up to me and Ben to do what we can. But from your phrasing. I take it back. Five of the seven. Okay. From your phrasing, it sounded like maybe some of the five are active players, but not active twins. But don't confirm that.

Okay. Okay. So I guess what? Going first is probably a disadvantage. Probably, right? Yeah. So I'll go first. Okay. No, no. I'm just taking my time. uh no no i'm just taking my time i'm gonna go with eddie rosario no what nope get out of here twins nelson cruz nelson cruz is on the list, yes. You don't have to guess, Ben. This is not the spelling bee. The list includes Byron Buxton, Phil Hughes, Max Kepler, Joe Maurer, Miguel Sano, Irvin Santana, and Nelson Cruz.

Irvin Santana. Yeah. Phil Hughes. Phil Hughes. Goodness. So get on it, twins. Maybe they're sold out of Ascidio shirts. Maybe that so get on it twins maybe that's why oh maybe that's why i thought i would love it if that were the reason oh man phil hughes is is my same age phil hughes's birthday is the day after mine oh no oh i would have guessed he was older wow i would have too this is like when i found out jay br younger than I am. It was devastating for like 24 hours.

Jay Bruce is younger than Phil Hughes? Yes. Yes, he is. It's a real thing in the world. We're all learning together. Wow. So anyway, we need some weird Estudio merch. Speaking of overreacting to the first few days, I don't know

if you guys have ever noticed this. I spent a long time listening to sports talk radio in the car, sports call-in radio in the car today, and they were talking about the Giants. And the dynamic was that every caller was convinced that Michael Reed

and Connor Joe, who, if you're not paying attention, those are late pickups that Farhan got to play the corner outfield, even though they basically have a combined like 12 seconds of major league service time, good minor league stats, but nobody had ever heard of them. And they struggled. They were their combined 0 for 15 thus far. And so this was just one caller after another just burying the guys. Just the most like savage anti-rookie.

We need to get some professional hitters in there. Why isn't Austin Slater playing kind of calls, right? And that's normal. You expect Sports Talk Radio to be a little bit overly gloomy and a little bit quick to jump on the new guys and so on but the other half of every call of the same callers the same calls were people saying that the giants pitching this weekend was so good that this team all they need to do is get a couple of corner outfielders and they're going to push the Dodgers.

And they are so over-optimistic about the Giants as a team and so overly pessimistic about these two players on the Giants as a team. And they're able to reconcile those two parts of their personalities in a way that I don't think I ever could. Yeah, and that's probably normal, right? Because every fan base is probably over optimistic about its team but also hates someone on the team maybe for a good reason sometimes but usually probably not i don't know that there's that great a correlation between like players who are deserving of scorn and players who are actually objects of it. Do you think there is anybody in Minnesota who hates Astadio?

Who's like, they got to get him off the field. He just, he can't, he can't do it at this level. I've seen like, I've seen tweets when everyone else is celebrating him, then someone else will be like, oh, he's, he's not that good or something. But like, that's just kind of backlash to the hype, maybe, kind of thing. I don't even know to what extent Twins fans are aware of the hype. If they're not online, I guess it's probably seeped into offline media as well at this point.

I was surprised by how much the broadcast talked about it today. They're like, fan favorite, Estadio. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know. There's always someone that is disliked by certain sections of the fan base for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. Like, well, Brandon Belt, right? Sticking with the Giants, right? Don't Giants fans, a lot of them, dislike Brandon Belt for weird reasons?

They do. Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do. But the thing about Brandon Bell is that half the time you feel really smart for having stuck with him, and then half the time you feel really smart for having given up on him, and he's just constantly going back and forth. And so you never are sure if you're right or not. It's like, yeah, it's basically like Chris Davis' batting average before he gets to 73 or whatever it is the first time he could possibly be batting 247. It's like floating around and you can't possibly be on it.

Anyway, the point is that Brandon Belt can be really frustrating to watch. Sometimes I think that maybe I want to call into Sports Talk Radio. Have you guys ever called into Sports Talk Radio? No. I have one time. I think just one time. Yeah, I called in from I was at a boring job, summer job. Maybe it was a winter job.

And I called into Max Kellerman's ESPN radio show. I think it was, I was talking about something about like run differential and like Pythag record or something for some team that wasn't doing that well. And he was pretty receptive to that because before he was first take Max Kellerman, he was kind of a, kind of a advanced stat guy, at least by talk radio standards. So I think that was the only time I did it. How old were you? I must have been like 20 or so. Yeah. I, at one point, wrote out a script of what I was going to say.

But I don't remember if I called in or if I tried to call in but didn't get through or if I just didn't try to call I don't remember the outcome of that I know I planned to but I was thinking of doing that this year of just calling in to stations and just like all the stations like all around the country just calling into sports talk and if I'm ever I think if i'm ever asked uh i mean when i'm asked again to be on a radio station i think i want to go and call in like 20 minutes before would you identify yourself like honestly no just incognito just yeah would you alter your voice no you'd be recognized probably yeah Yeah, it could be dangerous. Podcast listener in your local market.

Yeah, keep an ear out. What would you say? I mean, you know, I'd say what I believe about baseball. Jose Ramirez sucks. Stuff like that. You'd fit right in. Yeah. Do you want to answer? There's a very opening day-ishish early season-ish question that we got

that if we're going to answer we should probably answer now and you said you had an answer to it so maybe we should do that i mean you're talking about me i said i had an answer yeah well i mean perfect ops question yeah i did not know that i was going to be uh so i didn't i didn't fill out the response enough but sure i'll answer it okay i'll answer it and it'll be unsatisfying because i haven't done any of the background work but maybe what you maybe then you guys can pivot to something else and i can do the real quick follow-up stuff that might make it more interesting but sure okay well we'll call this a stat blast 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 Deistaplast. The question was, Luke Voigt had a home run, and then he had a walk and another walk and a hit by pitch. So he finished the day with an OPS, a perfect OPS of 5,000. And this question was, has that ever happened before? that ever happened before and the second question was has it ever happened before with somebody homering in the first at bat so that it started at a perfect 5 000 rather than 1 000 and then maintained and furthermore what happened next how long did they keep it going yeah and so i uh i set as a minimum that you need to have four plate appearances for it to count. And I looked up players who had home runs equaling at bats and at least four plate appearances in the team's first game of the season,

which would equate to a 5,000 OPS unless you had a sacrifice fly, which you will then be excluded. I will eliminate you by hand. And the answer is that Luke Voight is the third player to do this there are two others who had sacrifice flies albert pool holes had a sacrifice fly so that is not a 5000 ops right because the sacrifice fly goes against your on base percentage though not your slugging percentage so he would have been at 4800 i guess at the end of the day and danny tart, same thing.

But Luke Voigt did it before him. Madison Bumgarner did it, which is a true story. This was two years ago. I guess I said, did I say a minimum of four? Yes. I meant a minimum of three. Okay. Yeah, because Madison Bumgarner had two homers in a walk

against the Arizona Diamondbacks on opening day two years ago. So three people have ever done it, and one of them was a pitcher. But to be fair, he only batted three times for a reason. The reason is that he's a pitcher. Most people would have probably a harder time keeping it going for four. Anyway, and the last one is Earl Webb, who got a shout out on this podcast not long ago as the all-time doubles record holder. podcast not long ago as the all-time doubles record holder and in 1927 he became the first and for 80 more years only player to ever have a ops of 5 000 at the end of opening day and he also homered in the first at bat and so just like luke voight he managed madisonumgarner did not. Bumgarner walked in the first at-bat. This was, by the way,

Webb's first opening day. His first start, in fact, this was Webb's first start as a major leaguer. He had played four games the previous year. No, not even the previous year. Four games in 1925, batted four times in those four games. He was a pinch hitter. And then he did not play at all in 1926. And then he got his first major league start ever at the age of 29 on opening day and did that, which is pretty good. Yeah. And then five years later, he had 67 doubles. And otherwise, he has a completely uninteresting career. All right.

has a completely uninteresting career. All right. Well, I have a couple other statplasty type early season questions I can answer if you want to do any additional research. Can I say one more thing about that weird Madison Bumgarner game? Yeah. I was checking to make sure that my memory of this was correct, and it appears to maybe have been accurate, which is that didn't Zach Reinke also hit a home run in that game? You can look it up. Just to answer one quick question, though, neither one of those two did anything the next at bat in the next game. They both only could keep this 5,000 going through the end of the game. Zach Reinke did not homer in that game.

Wow, what a weird. Yo, here's what you're thinking of. More unlikely, Jeff Mathis had three hits. I had a weird misremembrance, although I do seem to recall that that game was the game where we realized that we were maybe measuring, pitching stuff from a different distance. That's right.

Well, that was a weird digression. Please, Ben, tell us about stats that are actually real as opposed to my strange memory. It's Jeff Mathis' birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Jeff Mathis. He actually hit a home run on his birthday. Happy birthday, Jeff. So this question is from one of our Patreon supporters, Evan Rufino.

Your question, by the way, that you just answered was from Brad. Thank you, Brad. So this one is, what is the highest number of MLB games played in one day? This has been rattling around my head for a while. In our context, I think it would be 17 or 18. All 30 teams play one game, and then there are a couple of make-up games. Was this number exceeded sometime in the past when the doubleheader was more common? Was there ever a doublehead header day in the 1960s

where all 20 teams played two games for instance so i have an answer here courtesy of dan hirsch of baseball reference you have any guesses either of you want to guess the the highest number of games on a day uh yeah i mean i do want to guess I am not pledging to have any real system for figuring this out. The interesting part of the guess is what year you would go with because obviously you want a year with more teams, but you also want a year with doubleheaders. So you kind of have to find the balance there. I'm going...

I'm going to go... I'm going to say it was in the... I'm going to say it was in the, I'm going to say it was in like 1996 and it was, there were 19 games. Okay. That's very close to what my guess was going to be. I'll go with 18 games in 97. Like a real.

One dollar. One dollar. Real is right jerk the answer is 21 games what there were 21 games on september 7th 1970 wow so yeah that so there were 12 teams in in each league then and uh there were nine double headers on that that day. Nine? Nine doubleheaders. That is a lot of baseball. And yeah, that's the most. Fun or not fun? Would that be fun or not fun if it happened today?

Would we be into it? I think it's the sort of thing that I would think that I would be into and then I would get into it and I'd be like, oh, this was a terrible mistake. And now I have to, you know, make goofy jokes about this on Twitter for the next 27 hours. Yeah, so all the top games, there are several days with 20 and they're all from the early 70s or the 60s. So that was kind of the sweet spot. There were enough teams to make it happen, but there were still a lot of double headers played.

spot there were enough teams to make it happen but there were still a lot of double headers played and even if you go down to 19 it's uh it's all 60s and 70s if you want recent times i guess the the most under the current number of teams is 18 so there were 18 in 2004 may 1st there were 18 actually on september 30th 2015 which was not long ago at all. But that's where we've maxed out with the current structure of the league. So thanks to Dan for that answer. I have two more. So this is from Andrew who says inspired by the Dodgers game on Saturday, I think it was, or maybe it was Friday. He said when Kenley Jensen came into today's Dodgers game pitching to Russell Martin, I looked up if they had ever played with each other before

back when Martin was previously with the Dodgers in 2010. And it turns out that Martin caught a single inning of Kenley Jansen's in Kenley's second appearance in the majors on July 25th, 2010. That got me wondering what the longest time is between two appearances for the same battery. Eight years and eight months feels like a pretty long gap, but it seems like some pairing has probably had a longer gap than this one. Is this gap or the one between Kershaw and Martin Games that started August 1st, 2010, and will presumably end soon anywhere near a record?

I have no idea how to look this up up or even if it can be looked up. And it can, again, by Dan Hirsch, who is basically the official stat person of this podcast. So this one's kind of tough because there's missing play-by-play accounts before 1974. So we can't be totally confident in the numbers before then because there could just be some missing data here if you include those years then the longest appears to be the pitcher jumbo brown and the catcher gabby hartnett 16 years between 1925 and 1941 but if you want to go for years that we do have data the longest would be Rick Reed the pitcher and Tom Prince the catcher 1988 was the first time and

2001 was the last time So a 13 year gap that is Actually tied for the second Longest span for any Year so I think if we want to Declare an official winner that would be at 13 Years Rick Reed Tom Prince And possibly Jumbo Brown and Gabby Hartnett.

I like the catcher-pitcher pairing after a really long time because it's probably a completely different pitcher at that point, and catchers probably evolved in a lot of ways too. I wonder if there's some nostalgia that goes on in that kind of pairing. I'm disappointed that Kenley Jansen didn't catch Russell Martin. Yeah, that's right, because Russell Martin pitched pretty well, too. And Kenley Jansen used to catch pretty well. Yes, he did.

Yeah, that'd be more fun. And Martin just looks so happy. He just looks so happy. Yeah, yeah, one, two, three inning. Yeah, it was great. He looked so thrilled at the end of it. I was just happy for him. Yeah, what was that?

That was like the first time that a position player pitcher had closed out a win in a really long time. A very long time. I'm trying to remember now. I saw the Elias tweet about it. I think it had been since like maybe the 60s or something. It had been a very, very long time. And I think it had been like the first 1-2- three ninth inning since the 20s or something like that, too. So, yeah.

So Grant Brisby wrote a piece about the unwritten rules of pitching in a in a blowout that you're winning. And and I mean, I think it's with good reason that Russell Martin is the first in a very long time. It does sort of look like you're kind of taunting. You're kind of gloating like we don't even need to use a real pitcher. We can beat you with literally Russell Martin. And it also made sense that this would be the game. They did it after the 13 inning game early in the season and so on and so forth. But you could just as easily see it going the other way, right?

Where it would look like you're running up the score if you keep throwing good pitchers out with 15. It's weird how we decide these things almost almost arbitrarily. Well, I remember writing a thing last year about sort of pitchers and blowouts on either side. And there's something kind of weirdly mean about being the pitcher that a winning team brings in to to close out a blowout. It's like we don't care about how your day at work goes. I mean, we care a little, like you don't want that person to sort of not have good stuff and tilt the scales back in the direction of like having to get a real reliever up in the bullpen. And then everyone feels nervous and you have to like, you know, scramble a little bit, but you're basically

saying like, there is a, an acceptable amount of failure failure here and it is a pretty wide band compared to what it might be under normal pitching circumstances and that must feel kind of lousy right to be like i don't care how your day goes we pretend to care how strangers days go we don't actually care but we pretend to like we feel societal pressure to care about strangers except if you're a manager of a major league baseball team. And then you're like, well, you're my, you know, sixth best guy. You haven't thrown in a little while. So get out there, see if you can get some outs, you know, sort of mean. So Russell Martin got to be happy.

I think this is better. Yeah. Yeah. When we used to play slow pitch softball, it was, uh, it was always the massive lead was when you'd get to pitch for the first time. Right. Like, like you'd, you'd, you'd be, you'd be, you'd wanted to pitch all year was when you'd get to pitch for the first time right like like you'd you'd be you'd be you'd wanted to pitch all year but you'd never done it and it was the manager would say like if we're up by if we're up by x not if you're down by x right we talked years ago

before everyone started using position player pitchers as much as they do today we talked about i think how they should use them more and how like win probability wise it would make sense to use them a lot more and i think russell carlton may have written about this at some point and obviously they have started to use them way more and i think that rule that was enacted about when you can and can't use them was kind of a preemptive measure to stop them from being used even more than they were last year, which is already a record because it's what? You can't use them now if it's fewer than six runs is the margin, I think. Did that go into effect this year or is that next year?

I forget. Next. Yeah. Next. And I think it's seven or more. I think it's fewer than seven. I thought it was fewer than six, but I don't know. Yeah, it's probably fewer than six. I don't it was fewer than six, but I don't know.

Yeah, it's probably fewer than six. I don't know. Meg confirmed it, and I don't know why I jumped in. I knew I was outvoted. Well, there are probably a lot of times when, like, win expectancy-wise, it would probably make sense, like, four runs or, you know, five runs or something. Like, once you fall behind that number of runs and it's the eighth or ninth inning, you're almost certainly not going to come back, so might as well.

So it seemed like they just kind of wanted to stop the creep of position player pitching before it was just in every other game. Yeah, six. Okay. Yeah. I think everyone who looked into it said that it actually doesn't eliminate all that many position player pitching appearances because they're generally used pretty rationally. No, it wouldn't have eliminated many from the previous year. Yeah, we still get to enjoy things.

So it seemed like it was more about stopping the increase than rolling it back, really. Oh, so just quickly, I have my last stat blast to get to. This was also inspired by a listener email. This was from Patreon supporter Anthony Sheff and also Patreon supporter Sean Cusack, who asked the same question, essentially. Anthony wrote, What is the largest number of pitches to start off a game

without a ball in play? You Darvish just threw 57 pitches before any ball was put in play. Four strikeouts, a caught stealing, and six walks. So on Saturday, you Darvish just threw 57 pitches before any ball was put in play. Four strikeouts, a caught stealing, and six walks. So on Saturday, Yu Darvish threw 57 pitches before he allowed a single on the 58th pitch. I got an answer on this one from Lucas Apostolaris and Rob McEwen at Baseball Prospectus, so thank you to them. This was actually the second most pitches ever thrown by one team before the first ball in play allowed. So the most pitches ever thrown before a team allowed the first ball and play allowed. So the most pitches ever thrown before a team allowed its first ball and play of the game. Carlos Martinez

threw 61 pitches before allowing a ball and play on pitch number 62 on April 15th, 2017. That was just a wild game. Martinez walked eight guys. He struck out 11. He faced 12 batters before anyone put the ball in play. Mike Matheny said, I don't think I've ever seen anything like that, which is true. He had not because it hadn't happened at least since 1988. That's how far back this data goes. Joe Girardi, who was managing the Yankees who were playing the Cardinals that day, said one of the stranger lines that I've seen. That was definitely a weird one. And the only other games like this over 50 we had Randy Johnson on April 26 2002 against the Marlins he threw 55 pitches before the first ball in play he went walk strikeout looking walk two cut

stealings strikeout swinging strikeout swinging walk strikeout swinging strikeout swinging strikeout swinging and then finally a ground out and the only other game with more than 50 Trevor Bauer April 9th 2015 against the Astros. He threw 53 pitches before his first ball and play allowed. And obviously that was, and obviously that was a lousy start for you, Darvish. It looked really ugly, but you kind of have to be a good pitcher almost to be at the top of this list. Like you have to be wild that day, but you probably also have to have swing and miss stuff. Cause if you were just walking guys nonstop, you would probably just be pulled from the game.

So it shows that you do still have stuff. You just can't control it. And a lot of these games obviously come from recent high strikeout years other than Randy Johnson, who was basically like a 2019 run environment when he was pitching 20 years ago. So that is the answer. You Darvish, almost unprecedented, but not quite.

What else happened? Anything else happen in baseball that we care about? Can I, can I, this is a really, so Kyle Freeland pitched. And so I was thinking this while I watched Kyle Freeland pitch, which is, so Kyle Freeland is projected to be like a three win player or so, depending on your projection system. And Vladimir Groh Jr. is projected to be like a four-win player or so, depending on your projection system. And Vladimir Groh Jr. is projected to be like a four or five-win player, depending on your projection system. And I'm always a little scared of trusting myself on contract details. But near as I can tell,

Kyle Freeland has options. He could be sent down to the minors if they wanted to. He would have no way of disputing that. And Kyle Freeland started the 2017 season on the Rockies active roster, which means he has exactly 2.0000 years of service time, which means that all of the incentives that the Blue Jays have for keeping Vlad Guerrero in the minors are exactly the same for the Rockies. They could also keep him in the minors for 10 days or whatever it is and keep him for an extra year of free agency. And they could plausibly argue that he's just as flawed as Vladimir Guerrero since projection systems like him actually less than Vladimir Guerrero. And of course, that would be the stupidest thing in the world. That would never exist. It's like ridiculous.

It is like a total like Jonathan Swift kind of idea to even suggest it. But I wanted to ask you guys, I assume that the Rockies would not get away with it, right? If they decided that they wanted to do it, if they decided that they were just as dedicated to using the rules of the collective bargaining agreement in order to get themselves an extra year of service time from one of their superstar players, because it's totally allowed and you can't stop them, what would stop them? And why do you think that nobody talks about it besides what I said? I guess the question is, how do the Blue Jays get away with it when the Rockies would obviously not get away with it? What's the difference there?

Well, there's like a grievance process, right? If you think there's some manipulation going on, then the Players Association can lodge a complaint, essentially. I don't know whether that goes to... They can, but those don't win. They don't seem to. Because everybody is very... Pretty much, it seems like even agents are very hesitant to say that somebody other than the club should be making decisions

about who's on the field. That is the red line. You have to give the manager and the front office the right to decide who the player on the field is going to be. And that it's sort of sticky to say we should ask an arbiter to decide that. Right. And maybe they I mean, that's obviously grievances do get filed and maybe sometimes they win. But it is definitely uphill.

And I mean, nobody expects Guerrero to win his grievance, even though it's obvious, right? Yeah, John Perotto just wrote something about, remember the grievance that the MLBPA lodged against the four teams last year at opening day that they hadn't spent enough and the union complained. And evidently those four cases have not been heard yet by the arbitrator. It's 13 months of the four teams that they lodged the grievance against ended up having winning records last year, which maybe would make it even harder to support that sort of thing. So I can't really recall it working so well. Isn't this kind of, I mean, when the Rockies sent down John Gray last year,

I think some people speculated that maybe there was a service time motivation. Obviously, he was not pitching well in terms of results but was pitching well in terms of peripherals so i don't know whether that was part of the calculus or not yeah and marcelo zuna won from a few years ago he was an established guy but at least both gray and azuna had they there was sort of the fig leaf of they had they were playing poorly at the time. Like you could say they need to get sorted out, and everybody saw through it, and there was a lot of anger about that.

But you could imagine it. I feel like the main difference is that if I were to make a very generous defense of the club's position, it's that you don't want to, you don't want to send your star back down after he comes up. And so you really want to make sure that when he comes up, it's going to be for good because there's a lot, as much friction as there is about them not calling up Guerrero, they might consider there more friction in sending him back down.

If things don't work out well. Like they can ride this out and it'll mostly be forgotten, they figure, whereas it might get long and ugly if they end up sending him down later. And so they might just think that you have to be, I don't know, closer to 100% on your decision, or at least they can present that decision that way. Whereas with Freeland, you know, Freeland's an established major leaguer, it would be like there's not any, there is no single explanation that you could possibly offer other than, you know, we're trying to cost him money, right?

Right. I think that it's different when you have, because the excuse they have, flimsy though it is, is that there are developmental reasons for sending someone down. So like, I don't know if you wanted to make a case following like Mike Zanino's terrible 2015 that he should have been brought up in September or whatever, you would look at it and be like, but no, he shouldn't have because he was pretty bad at baseball and he needed to go get cooked a little longer. You can't make that argument here. And so I think that the range of acceptable excuses, even though we know that those excuses are just that, starts to diminish in a way that would make it, it would just look so, it would be so transparently bad. And we want there to be a touch of artifice when large corporations behave badly, perhaps. Remember when they sent Chris Bryant down to work on his defense and he played seven games at third base?

Yeah. And then he came up and played five positions in the majors that year as a plus five defender. And like whatever happened to that grievance? Yeah. He filed a grievance. I don't think we, I don't know that we ever know,

knew what came of that. And it went on for years too. So some people do defend the Guerrero decision because they want their team to have Vladimir Guerrero for longer. And they figure the rules are the rules and this is good for their team, right? Do you, so some people have that position. Do you think that that, row for longer and they figure the rules are the rules and this is good for their team right do you

so some people have that position do you think that that those people would also support sending down kyle freeland no i think that people think about it differently when when a guy becomes one of your guys right when he's an established member of the roster who is a contributor i think that fans come to think of those people differently than they do someone like guerrero or chris bryan or whoever right where it's like there's still some uncertainty you're justifying getting that extra year by some probability that prospects flame out and don't work and you're not used to watching them every day and so you don't feel the absence, right? It's not keen in the same way. Like that feeling isn't the same as it is when

you're like anticipating the arrival of someone, but you're not missing them in the same way, right? You're not missing that bat in the lineup. So I don't think that they could, although, you know, I find it very silly that people who root for teams who could just extend players in free agency as a means of keeping them around longer are then seemingly so supportive of service time manipulation. So I don't know. Yeah. Freeland's coming off a fourth place finish in Cy Young voting. Yeah. Right.

But he's not actually as good as Vlad Garo Jr. probably. And he's probably not as good as his 2018, but he's not actually as good as vlad guerrero jr probably and he's probably not as good as his 2018 but he's one of their guys oh he's really really really good i mean he's awesome there's no doubt about it vlad guerrero is also probably yeah really really really really good yeah yeah right and yet we all i don't know there's a lot of it seems like along the way in this system there's a lot of people pretending they don't know the thing that they know. Maybe it has partly to do with the team's competitive situation, right? Could that be part of it? I mean, the Rockies are a team that was just in the playoffs, and so they kind of need wins, or at least their fans are probably convinced that they need wins more so than the Blue Jays fans, for instance, are this year if they're not in denial.

So that could be part of it, too. It's more imperative that the Rockies not lose those wins that they would get by sending down Kyle Freeland. But don't you want a reason to watch, though? If your team's going to be bad, don't you especially appreciate a Vlad Guerrero Jr.? Aren't you like oh thank god now i have a reason to tune in well and for freeland i guess now it's now it's what a 15 day do you have to stay down for 15 days yeah it's 15 so that makes it a little harder when it was 10 they could have basically skipped one start and gotten an entire year of of his free agency push

back which is wild the whole system is wild. Yeah. Like nine days, 10 days, whatever it is, you can push back a whole year of free agency. I don't know, guys. But what about the Marlins and Brian Anderson? You think they could get away with that? Yes, I do. I don't think anyone would notice. Exactly.

People are like, Brian Anderson, is that a made-up person? Are the Marlins a made-up team? He's hitting 083 through three games. What's up? So before we go, there was a question we got from a listener that I know that the two of you both wanted to answer, and you're both here today, which hopefully will continue to be the case from time to time.

But hey, we're here. No time like the present. This question is from Matt, who said, If MLB decided to institute an automated strike zone and didn't tell anyone, how long would it take for people to notice? Assuming some sort of system that only the home plate ump would be notified of the call, who would notice first? How long would it take before players stopped their constant arguing of balls and strikes? I think it would be right away.

I think that we would notice almost immediately, like within a couple of innings, because presumably you would still have a human person back there. When I have envisioned robot ops, I have envisioned like the maid from the Jetsons, which is not what it would actually look like because there's still got to be someone back there, you know, calling close plays at the plate and whatnot, using that little broom. close plays at the plate and whatnot using that little broom so presumably they would have an earpiece to say like hey that's a ball or a strike and there would invariably be a technology delay of some kind because the tech isn't perfect and that's just how technology works and so there would be a long pause there would probably be a couple of long pauses and then keen observers would be like hey what's up with that long pause and then we would figure it out i think it would take like a game maybe two and maybe not all of one game okay but

what if what if it worked what if it was an android ump and so it looked it was or a humanoid which one is it which one am i going for here that looks like a human is a robot so you you it will be it will be a convincing human replica so data is behind the plate is what you're saying yeah and it works there's no obvious uh glitch or it doesn't just fail to produce a call well in that case i think it would take i still don't think it would take very long because there would be i think there would be a weird precision introduced that we are not accustomed to and people would start to say hey like it's it's strange that this guy is striking out a lot more that guy is walking much more than he used to and i don't think it would take very

long i really don't now though you're at least talking multiple days if you're talking about a guy yeah i're noticing it in a player's stats, that would be... Yeah, I think that takes a week, at least a week. I think a key question here is whether this strike zone is perfectly consistent or perfectly accurate. If it's perfectly consistent with, say, the league average strike zone as it is currently called boy i mean that's a lot longer if it if it actually had the little the little bumps on the edges where calls actually get called you go a long time whereas if it were rule book then yes you i think if it were rule book you'd notice by the end of the first day yeah doesn't take long to confirm that this is not

happening i can i can confirm with a lot of confidence that this has not happened this season because I've seen quite a few calls that unless the robot ump were way miscalibrated, they would not have been called the way that they were called. I've seen a few that were just kind of like right down the middle that were balls and probably would end up in Jeff's worst call of the month or whatever if he were around to do those so I'm sure that this is not happening but if it were happening one thing I'm curious about is whether people would actually complain less about calls I guess they would just because you'd have a few you wouldn't have those really glaring ones, but you'd still have like calls on the edges that went against your team. And I wonder whether people would complain just as much and feel very silly when they found out. I think that people would be awful still. I think that fans in the ballpark would continue to be the worst and like boo strangers.

Because you can't even tell anyway. Right. Exactly. They can't tell now. And they are rowdy and say, oh, it's terrible. And it's like you can't even tell anyway. We like to complain about stuff as fans, and I think that umpires generally read as police officers more often than judges to people, and so I think that they feel very comfortable being kind of rowdy about it. ump who calls the strike zone exactly as the 50th percentile umpire and not the fit that as the who calls every pitch that is 50 likely to be called a strike by the rest of the league's umpires a strike and every pitch that's likely to be called a ball a ball and uh he just goes around the league doing his normal routine uh coaches first base second base third base and then he gets his behind

the home plate i i think he could do one game a day, actually. He could be behind home plate one game a day, and we see if we like it. I think I'd like it. I'd tune in for the... But we know which one it is. You know. I've now shifted to this is my proposition.

I want that ump to call check swings, like have a very... Man a the check swing calling this early in the year yeah i saw a really terrible one i've seen a bunch felt it's felt it's felt worse i don't know if it is worse but it has felt worse than usual yeah there's always so much outrage when they don't ask the base ump. It's like, you got to at least ask, right? Yeah, you got to ask. And then somehow they don't ask sometimes. I don't know why they don't ask. Do they think that they're so certain that they can see it, that they don't need to ask? Or do they not like to show that they need help? Does it undermine your authority? I don't know. I don't't know men are famous for asking for directions so it's very surprising that umps would be bad at this right yeah yeah gotta gotta

figure out something for those check swings because it's so inconsistent right all right anyone else have any yeah should we go to bed anyone else we should go we should it's time for sleeping probably or as people are waking up time for them to focus on their actual day jobs maybe yeah i guess so all right so we'll uh talk about some more baseball next time that's what we usually do but i'm glad we could all get together we'll do this from time to time it's fun talk to you both later in the week bye ben bye meg bye okay that will do it for today by the way williams estadio also had a sack fly. Didn't mean to shortchange him. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Matthew Brungard, Matt Shirley, Jacob Wernick, Eric Schick, and Patrick Mensch. Thanks to all of you. editing assistance. Please pre-order my book if you're interested in reading it. It's called The MVP Machine. We're about two months away from you having it in your hands if you order it early. We may have another bonus episode this week, TBD, but one way or another, I'll be back to talk to you sometime very soon. Remember there's always tomorrow

So what if we have to part We'll be together again