Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1363: The Return of Real or Not Real

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about baseball equivalents of Tiger Woods winning the Masters, follow up on two topics from the previous week (Willians Astudillo’s disputed whiff and Don Zimmer���s bases-loaded suicide hit and run) and, in a time-honored tradition, discuss whether selected league-wide stats from the first few weeks of the season are […]

Nothing is real, open your heart All that you feel is coded, imprisoned In pixels and algorithms Nothing is real, the wind isn't blowing The sun isn't blowing, the sun doesn't shine Songs are just subroutines, values a sign Hello and welcome to episode 1363 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam.

Hey, Ben. Don't know if you watched Tiger this weekend. I did watch Tiger, and as I did, I was thinking about baseball equivalents or what a baseball equivalent would be. We got a question to that effect from listener Scott, who also asked us what the MLB equivalent

would be. I don't know whether he means in the past or in the present or the future, but I was trying to come up with some scenario with a player now that would mirror what Tiger accomplished and couldn't really come up with a perfect analog. I don't know if anything occurs to you, but it seemed to me like it might have to involve Albert Pujols. Like if Albert Pujols returned to peak form suddenly, or he won a home run title in 2019, that would be sort of similar because there's no one in baseball really who had the level of dominance and success that Tiger did in golf, except for Trout. And Trout obviously is not at the point where he can come back from anything, but Pujols,

And Trout obviously is not at the point where he can come back from anything. But Pujols, I think, is the closest in that he was that dominant, one of the greatest of all time type forces when he was younger. And that was years ago and many surgeries and injuries ago. And so if he were suddenly to return to form, he's been kind of like a sad story. And so if he came back, that would be sort of similar. Does anything else occur to you? Well, I mean, you're right that there is no equivalent to Tiger in the first place in the sport right now. I mean, you know, how many people are like the world is not going to stop and celebrate if Albert Pujols wins the Triple Crown. Baseball fans would be excited.

But like, I mean, it's not going to be like that. I mean, this was the front page of The New York Times, for goodness sake. I was watching it. You were watching it yeah so i mean really you'd you'd really almost it would it pretty much would have to be like a scenario involving babe ruth or willie mays uh at some point in baseball's history i think to to get to that level and obviously neither one happened so i i did not even bother thinking about a hypothetical because uh there's no starting point from which you could then craft a hypothetical, in my opinion. I did, however, think a little bit about what the closest thing in real life is. What the, I mean, you know, what is the closest thing to the, the question that, one of the questions we were asked about this showed the 538 chart that uh tracked tiger woods world ranking by week and it's basically as

you would expect a extremely steep climb to number one and then like 15 years or whatever at number one and then an extremely sharp drop for a while and then suddenly he's back and there's not again you could come up with an equivalent of that because there's obviously a number one baseball player at any given time but in real life there there hasn't been that situation so i thought that probably the best uh comp for that chart and it's a terrible it's not even close but the best best that I could come up with was Scott Casimir, who was a, you know, top, I don't know, 30 player in the world, maybe 30 pitcher in the world for a fair run. And then like left. I mean, yeah, I've never seen a worse pitcher than him at the end. And then he was gone for a couple of years.

And then, I don't know, four years or whatever passed. And suddenly he's a he's a years And then I don't know Four years or whatever passed and suddenly He's a Top 60 pitcher again So that would be While I was thinking this Chris Davis Homered Yeah so that would be A pretty good comeback I mean he was never

At that level obviously No one was at Tiger's level but Maybe like Lincecum if lincecum's comeback had succeeded or if it didn't succeed now maybe yeah that's actually that's a really solid one yeah i mean he was a sports illustrated cover dude he won back-to-back cy young's he might have been the i mean when he was at his peak was he the biggest star pitcher in the world at that point for those couple years i mean arguably the best arguably the most uh kind of recognizable at the time yeah and he then did get very bad

and disappeared for he's been gone for five years basically and uh he's only 34 yeah something like that and so you came up with a much better, yeah, that's hard in baseball. The aging curve is a little bit different. It's almost like the Verlander thing. I mean, not nearly as... I thought about that. Yeah, not as extreme. He wasn't bad for long. He wasn't as bad even, but he did have some injuries and it looked like he was headed downhill and he lost velocity and then suddenly he became as good as he ever was again. So that's something. But yeah, you'd almost, I mean, you'd need like Derek Jeter to un-retire and be a MVP or something like that. It's tough. But it's also because Tiger was great for four days. I mean, I know he's been very good for months now.

He's been good enough to be the top ranked golfer in the world or close to it. So it's not just that he did this for one tournament, but everyone really paid attention for this one tournament. And I don't know if there's a baseball equivalent to that other than maybe like, you're scuffling through a season

and then you have an incredible World Series. Like maybe if like Carlos Beltran in his last year had one more great World Series, something like that. But it's not quite the same. No, that's why we're all golf fans instead of baseball fans. Why we never turn the game off. That's why I call golf ball, simply ball. Yeah. Tiger Woods is a great ball player. Uh-huh.

I was trying to think because like Ichiro comes to mind just because, I mean, I feel like we like Ichiro more than we like Tiger. Like Tiger's kind of, he's beloved, but like he's more beloved for being great than he is for being himself. I feel like. Sort of. I mean, I don't know if i understand things correctly though like pretty much every golfer who's active right now grew up sure yeah

everyone was inspired by him yeah and like half of the guys who were on the tour like maybe wouldn't even be golfing if it weren't for him and uh you know radically changed the game in a way that i think yeah i mean it would be like it would be like i think that maybe what it would be like is if in 2015 prince had released an album that went like seven platinum and was the biggest album in the world for like seven months and had like six number one singles uh-huh yeah maybe Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Okay. I mean, not that Prince was ever, I mean, Prince didn't have to have a press conference apologizing to his mom or whatever that was,

but maybe something like that. Like there are very few, there are very few cultural icons or any icons the way that Tiger is a golf icon. So, yeah. Well, but we were all rooting for like, it's not the same saying that about everyone, but we were all hoping that Ichiro would have an amazing series in Japan, and then he would somehow catch on for the regular season. And if Ichiro at 45 or whatever he is had been good again, and found peak Ichiro form. Maybe that's a baseball equivalent. Okay. I think I've got it then. Biggest album in the world in 2020, Chinese Democracy. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty... Like if it had never come out

and it came out finally in 2020. Yeah. Okay. It's not bad. All right. Well, we did our topical banter about Tiger Woods that didn't have much to do with baseball, but I made it have something to do with baseball. You wanted to follow up on a few things that we talked about last week. Yeah. So first of all, Williams Astadio and the question of whether he is, whether, just to recap, he swung and missed at a pitch pitch apparently claimed that he had foul tipped it and ben made the case that because astadio rarely whiffs at pitches if he claims that he foul tipped it uh it is more likely that he's telling the truth simply because of the unlikelihood of the alternative which is a swing and a miss and i've thought a lot about whether that that makes sense and and here's what I'm gonna I I

don't I don't have an answer and I'm not I'm not gonna be argumentative I think that you might be right you might be wrong but I'm gonna give you another way of thinking about this so okay so I have a really good newspaper delivery man like really good like on it like some not some mornings I actually go out at 5 30 and I catch the thing right they're that good I'm not even kidding either it's a thrill to catch a newspaper newspaper everybody should do it my parents have a very poor newspaper delivery man and probably maybe a couple times a month they have to call the newspaper and get another one sent out because theirs never shows up and mine probably out of uh i get i only get weekdays so out of, I only get weekdays, so out of 260 days a year, I probably get it 258 days, right? It's a good newspaper, man.

And so at 5.29 in the morning, if you had to bet on who was more likely to get a newspaper that day, you'd bet on me, right? Sure. My parents often don't get it. I almost always do. right sure my parents often don't get it i almost always do this is i mean i don't have a newspaper delivered so i have no basis for a comparison but like i received the thing that i ordered doesn't sound that extraordinary or commendable is it like actually getting the newspaper is is like that's a great job but the newspaper person i mean i admire i admire the regularity. It's very early in the morning. They've got a...

The way that newspaper distribution works these days is that usually there's one printing plant for a number of newspapers. And so the delivery man will have to handle subscriptions for lots of different newspapers. So the same van that delivers mine also delivers the LA Times, Four Doors Down and the Wall Street Journal, four doors down and the wall street journal one block up and the press telegram and and so on and so forth then you

know that's you've got you've got your subscriptions that lapse after a month and they've got to keep all those straight i mean they've got to figure out everybody on the block it's not like this is this this isn't the free throwaway that that every house on the block gets. So I don't know. I mean, people don't get their papers. That's a common thing. Yeah, a lot of ways to mess up, it sounds like. All right. Anyway, so I'm more likely to get the newspaper.

So 5, 540 a.m., neither one of us has a newspaper, but you still would bet on me getting it, right? And 550, you'd still would on on me getting it right and uh 550 you'd still would bet on me getting it but what if it's like 710 then who's more likely to get a newspaper that day well if your newspaper delivery person is punctual in addition to dependable then maybe you're less likely that's exactly right and parents' newspaper delivery is neither reliable nor punctual. So they often don't get their newspaper, but they really often get it late. And so they will sometimes get a newspaper at 9.10. Whereas if I don't have mine by 5.50,

I pretty much know that that's one of the two days a year that it's not coming. Mine does not show up late. They're too good for that. And so if you think about it, it is much more likely that my parents won't get a newspaper. But there's really three categories here. You've got your on-time delivery, you've got your no delivery whatsoever, and you've got your late delivery. And the question is, is a late delivery more like an on time or more like a missed? And it's kind of more, maybe it's more like a missed. And so the same delivery van that is likely to not deliver you on is also likely to deliver it late. And so if you think about the analogy, pretty, pretty obviously, Astadio is much more likely when he swings the bat to put the ball in play to hit it to hit it well to hit it fair and well that's what makes him so special and

he's much less likely to swing and miss and so that would be the the never getting the newspaper but what is a foul is a foul more like a ball put in play or is it more like a swing and miss and i don't really know the answer to that but i do know that astadio's foul ball rate is basically league average so when he swings he is much more likely than the normal hitter to put the ball in play and he's much less likely than normal hitter to swing and miss entirely, but he's about average on foul balls, which suggests that there's sort of a continuum going on there. And if foul tips are on the far end of that continuum, near swinging strikes, swing and misses, then it might suggest that Astadillo,

in addition to being unlikely to swing and miss, is also unlikely to almost swing and miss, which is what a foul tip is, right? And so I don't have his foul tip rate. I don't know how the math works out, but foul tips for Astadio might be considerably more rare than they are for the typical hitter. And so you can't say for sure that he is likely to foul tip. That is plausible. I like that way of looking at it. I don't know if I find it more persuasive than mine, but it's given me pause at least. I will tell you what the listeners thought. So we had 160 responses, 160 people thought it was

their time. Ben, I'm going to take this personally. And so I'm taking the headphones out, okay? And I'm going to count to 20. You tell everybody and I'm going to be gone personally and so i'm taking the headphones out okay and i'm going to count to 20 you tell everybody and i'm going to be gone all right and then if i'm if i'm if it takes if it only takes you six to do it then vamp okay what if it's i don't want to know i don't want to know if if i get i'm not the only way to win is not to play ben and i'm not playing okay so goodbye. Okay, so the answer is that 70.6% of you thought that Williams Estadio did not make contact with the ball. 29.4% thought he did. So large majority thought he didn't make contact. However, I'm still talking. You still going?

Go away. Yeah. Oh, you're okay. I'll go. Okay. So the second question was, does the identity of this batter make it more likely that contact occurred? And the most common response was yes, slightly more likely. That was 46.9%. Then yes, much more likely, 26.2% and 26.9% said no. So 73.1% of

people said that it's more likely he made contact because it's Estadio, but 70.6% of people said he still didn't make contact. Sam, you back? Yeah, here I am. Okay. All right. All right. If I ever find out that you did a poll on how to pronounce reprise, I quit again. Okay?

I quit again. Okay. That is the end of this podcast for me okay was it reprise or was it uh primer wasn't it oh it wasn't primer primer yeah it was yeah you're right it was primer yeah did we did we do i think we might have done a reprise though later on forget it undecided about that one anyway all right let's talk about don zimmer okay the stat blast last week. Do you play the theme now?

I don't think we have to play it again. All right. So the stat blast last week was finding the time that Don Zimmer did a hit and run or sent the runners with the bases loaded and one out on a full count. Two people, thank you very much to Jeff and Joseph. Two people actually found references to this in newspaper articles, which are probably delivered in a timely manner, in 1988. So Jeff, longtime listener Jeff, sent us a Courier News article, which is probably an AP article, but anyway, on this happening. And

Manny Trio seemed to be not that impressed with Zimmer's move. But here we go. The game was tied 1-1 in the 12th inning when the Cubs loaded the bases with no outs. They would not score. Relief pitcher Roger McDowell put himself into the jam, allowing a single to Vance Law, a double to Damon Berryhill, and intentionally passing Shawan Dunstan. After striking out pinch hitter Jody Davis, this is like we have stumbled into an impromptu episode of Remember Some Guys. These are like some real guys

mcdowell was replaced by randy myers trio took three straight pitches for balls and was then told to take the next two pitches both were strikes to his surprise myers i skipped a paragraph to his surprise myers got more than he expected zimmer gave the hit and run sign and on a full count myers blew a fastball past a swinging trio. Law, running on the pitch with everyone else, was easily trapped in a rundown and was tagged out at home by Myers. 251 if you're scoring. Quote, nobody missed any signs, Zimmer said, noting that the play was not a botched suicide squeeze. We did everything we wanted except hit the ball.

I really felt Manny would get a piece of the ball. Zimmer in his ninth year managing in the majors said he had tried that play four other times. Quote, I was four for four coming into tonight, he said. I used it twice during a pennant raise, which again raises the question of what four for four means. I mean, if a guy homered, you wouldn't know how to count that. But give him credit.

He thinks he did this five times and four of them it worked. But this does answer an important question. I mean if a guy homered I don't you wouldn't know how to count that but give him credit he thinks he did this five times and four of them it worked but this does answer an important question a lot of people said you you got to be kidding me the guy was running from third where the batter was swinging that that is like that he could die and I said well of course the runner on third probably wasn't running he was probably just sort of hanging out but he would be an easy out when the guy who was on second reached third. But in fact, no, the guy on third was actually running, which surprised me. I don't really think that that makes any sense.

Here's the second one. This is from Joseph, who has an article about Zim's whims. And this is a long article about how unconventional, brilliant Don Zimmer is. And it proceeds to list a whole bunch of examples of weird things he tried failing. But one of them is a paragraph. During a game with the Mets earlier this season, Manny Trio was at bat for the Cubs with the bases full and fewer than two out. What strategy did Zimmer use? Suicide squeeze?

Nope. Suicide hit and run. So that's the term for it. Suicide hit and run. Okay. All the term for it, suicide hit and run. Okay. All right. So thanks to both of those researchers. Yeah.

All right. So Ben, let's move to the topic today. We're going to do something that I've made you do before, and this is a game that we usually play around this time of year where I look at all the league-wide stats, basically, all the league-wide rates per game, and I find things that are much higher or much lower than they've ever been before, and you tell me if it's real. You like this game. I don't know if I like this game. You hate it. You hate this game. I like looking at things that are different and trying to figure out why they're different.

But I'd never know whether we do this too early or what our success rate is. You got to do it early enough to have things. Yeah. Which, I mean, that kind of gives away the game that I said that. But sometimes I think sometimes they turn out to be real things and sometimes they turn out not to be. And sometimes we look at them and we both decide that they're not real things. So I basically have three. I am fairly well informed on these things because I wrote about these three things.

It'll be running on Tuesday. So I can, any questions you have, I can answer for you. And I've thought through some of them. But I mean, there's some big ones, of course, which we're not going to be talking about, but which are kind of like the constant stories of the game right now. One of which is that home runs are once again up on pace for an all-time high, which is unusual for April especially. And Rob Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has been

once again, finding persuasive evidence that the ball is a factor. The ball is once again, partly to blame. And so that's, I mean, that is probably going to be the dominant story of baseball this year, or one of the two or three dominant stories. And then strikeouts once again, are way up, not just way up from you know 1972 or whatever but way up from last year they have jumped from 8.48 per nine to 8.87 per nine i don't remember i think i don't remember what we found april strikeouts portend uh if they if they tend to come back or not but a jump of 0.4 i mean strikeout rates have gone up what every year for like the last like 15 or something like that yeah 12 13 and and and beyond and yeah so anyway uh

but this would be the biggest jump which is kind of crazy when you think about it not just that it's a big jump but that we have reached this point and we still have big jumps in us yeah like it it suggests that like next year could be a bigger jump like we might be fibonacci-ing this like it might be it we might have 42 strikeouts per nine in like six years yeah it's really i don't know if you're going to talk about walks at all but walk i am okay well maybe we don't have to spoil that, but three true outcomes are just way, way, way up because all of these individual components of it are up. And so three true outcome rate right now, walks plus strikeouts plus homers, the percentage of those outcomes overall played appearances, 35.9% right now, which is an enormous jump from last year, which of course was an all-time high, but that was at 33.8 percent. So it's more than two percentage points higher right now, which is really extreme because we had seen increases, I think, for each of the past

four seasons, but it wasn't as big. 2015 to 2016 was pretty big. That was like 30.7% to 32.3. But then it went from 32.3 to 33.5. It went from 33.5 to 33.8 last year, which was just a tiny increase because the home runs came back. But now, I mean, the home runs are up and strikeouts are up and walks are up and everything's up and this would be a huge increase yeah it's the i mean i've uh i've said this before i don't know if i've said it here but i mean almost anything that you write about at this point in baseball at least on the field in the way that the game is played almost everything eventually is just about strikeouts or home runs like that they're all they're they're all strikeout or home run stories that we're telling through the lens of sacrifice bunts or through the lens of shifts or through the lens of injuries or through the lens of you know youth or through the lens of whatever that's what we're talking about here strikeouts and home runs and everything we talk

about going forward in this episode is kind of going to be about strikeouts and home runs. Yeah, it's true. The last chapter of my book, which is about player development, is largely about strikeouts and home runs. Yeah. So everything, all roads lead back there. Exactly. So, all right. So I got three for you here today. Three that are a little bit more specific than strikeouts and home runs. First one, Ben, we are on track for an all-time low of triples. Yeah. So you can ask me anything you want, or maybe you've already written about this. I have not.

I looked at the baseball reference page today that has all of the rates per game, and I noticed that triples were down. Triples are kind of at a low ebb lately, right? I mean, maybe it's not like historic like a lot of other things are, but triples are generally on the wane. Is that right? That's my impression. Well, it kind of is. The triples have kind of gone through like three or four phases throughout history, and each of those phases has kind of taken a few decades. And so you kind of have these like 30 year blocks of triples rates. And the rate that we've been in

since really the like late 80s is about one every five games. And for the few decades before that, it was about one every four games. And for the few decades before that one every three, and for the few decades before that one every two three. And for the few decades before that, one every two. But we've been at one every five pretty much since 1986. And then starting about six years ago, it started to wobble. And so suddenly in 2013, there was an all-time low of 0.16 per game, which is about one in six games. And that was a pretty big drop from the year before relative to these things. And then it kind of came back up and it was back up almost on the cusp of one in five until the last two years when it dropped down to the 2013 levels.

down to the 2013 levels. So this year it's at 0.14. So that would be that the all-time low is 0.16 a game. It's now at 0.14 a game, which is a drop of about 12.5% from the all-time low. But yes, this would now make three of the all-time four low years coming in the last three years. Uh-huh. And that makes sense for a few reasons, right? Because A, you have ballparks becoming a little more standardized compared to the past. And so maybe there are fewer parks where there's room to rattle around and unpredictable caroms and that sort of thing. So that could be part of it. Also, just balls in play are more scarce.

So singles are down and triples are down too and then maybe you have teams making smarter base running decisions i maybe you have guys i think rob means may have written about this yeah at bp yeah so the idea that maybe you just don't risk the out when you're on second with a double you're technically in scoring position, although that requires a single, which singles are increasingly rare these days. So you may have some incentive to get to third. On the other hand, if someone strikes out, that's not going to get you in from third anyway.

So I think all of that kind of points toward fewer triples. And I don't know, maybe like better defensive positioning. Maybe you're not catching every ball, but you're getting closer to the point where it's hard to have time to run three bases. Yeah. So you mentioned the balls in play factor, which I thought would be significant. The fact that there are fewer balls in play, strikeouts and home runs, right? And what I was somewhat surprised by, though, is that until this year, really, the triples rate did not go down at all per ball in play. As a percentage of hits. As a percentage of ball in play.

Yeah. So takeaway strikeouts, takeaway home runs, and any ball that lands in the field is a ball in play for this. that lands in the field is a ball in play for this. And the triples rate has been incredibly steady for at least this entire century. I think that in fact, every year except one, it was 0.7%. So there's some rounding, of course, sometimes it's maybe 0.67. And sometimes it's 0.73. And that's not an insignificant difference but 0.7 percent of balls in play go for triples every year except for 2013 the year that it suddenly dropped and then and then it came back up um from there and so uh this is the this would be the all-time low

for triples per ball in play and so the lack of the the the strikeouts and home runs have been driving the drop up to now, right? Up to now, triples have been sort of going down, trending down, and it seems to be almost entirely about fewer balls being put in play until this year. This year, it's a real drop. The other thing is if you look at triples per double, also very steady, not quite as steady, but fairly steady. And that hasn't really dropped since 2000 either. And so that's been very steady since then. So again, I thought I was convinced by Rob Main's piece, which I'll talk about Rob Main's piece in a minute. But the idea that teams just

don't, players just don't want to get to third as much anymore because of, as Rob explains, run expectancy tables are much more of a factor in decision-making now. But also, like you say, it's not that big a deal to get to third base with strikeout pitchers on the mound, and it's perfectly fine to be at second with home run hitters at the plate. And so the risk-reward shifts. And so I thought that it was going to be mostly about that. But up until this point, it hasn't been that at all. The amount of triples per doubles has been very steady. And then this year it plummeted. So it went from basically 10 triples for every 100 doubles, sometimes 11, usually 10 to this year, just

slightly over eight. And so a lot of people this year, finally, maybe Rob Maines, and by the way, Rob's piece is not about triples exclusively. It incorporates triples, but it also goes into the fact that going from first to third is down, has been trending down.

Sacrifice bunts to third have been trending down and steals of third base have been trending down even relative to steals of second so they're uh i think rob titled it the second base stop sign and but i feel like you know in a way triples has actually been that's been an illusion for triples until now so what would have changed this year if this were real? The only thing I can think, I mean, there are more teams that are getting more aggressive all the time about outfield positioning. And there are times when I could imagine that creating triples that wouldn't have happened otherwise because I don't know if you're – well, on the other hand, I mean, if you're playing a four-man outfield, then it's going to be tough to allow triples, right? And that's getting more common. It's still pretty rare, and it only happens with certain hitters. But maybe there are times, I don't know whether five-man infields are more common than they used to be, but if you just have a whole side of the field open, if you're

not necessarily doing a four-man outfield, but you're just doing a very aggressive outfield shift where you have a guy played to one side or the other and he happens to fluke one the other way, then that can turn into a triple that wouldn't have been one otherwise. But on the other hand, if teams are getting better about positioning their players, then you'd end up with fewer times where you have someone running a really long way to get a ball. And so that might just allow less time to run the bases. So that would be my theory off the top of my head. Yeah. The other possibility is strikeouts and home runs,

which have, of course, been going up, but they're back up and they're up higher. And maybe the fact that there are even more bananas now has pushed this into um you know kind of decision making territory for for runners and base so that's one possibility another which seems a little slight for this but two of the traditionally most triples friendly parks have been in houston and in arizona and houston got of Towles Hill a couple years ago, and triples there halved, maybe even more than halved. So triples now are actually quite rare in Houston. So that's,

that was one rich source of triples that has gone away. And another one is Arizona, which replaced their dry, dusty turf grass with, with, with synthetic turf this year to make the ball kind of play better. And so that is, again, it sort of sounds silly to say, well, it's two ballparks. But for what it's worth, there's only been one triple in Houston this year, and there have been no triples in Arizona, which has been the, other than I than i think course field the number one triples park in baseball over the last many years and for that matter there have been very few triples hit in well i probably don't even want to say this i because i'm not i've not done the i i forget what my research found and i didn't find it all that convincing in the first place but i will just say that two of the other parks where there have been a lot of triples were San Francisco and Detroit.

And the Giants and Tigers have both been, their offenses have been very poor thus far this year, just because that happens sometimes for a couple of weeks. And they were both low on triples. But actually that's not even true anymore. That was true when I looked, but it's not true now. Forget I said it. I told you. I refuted it before I even said it. All right, so we've got the strikeouts and home runs part. We've got the Arizona-Houston part.

And I'm going to—the last thing is that you should really ask me, well, Sam, how many triples are we really talking about here? Yeah, this is less than three weeks of baseball. So how many triples are we actually talking about? It's one a day. It's one a day across baseball. So we're basically talking about 15-ish triples. And that's always the key question to ask when we play this game.

So, I mean, that's just how triples are. That's how a lot of these changes are. The new records often are one every few days across the league. Triples are not that common to begin with. Exactly. They're very rare events as it is. By the way, always an important question as well is, is it affected by April? I looked at April triples rates and the answer is no. Okay. Well, if we're betting on whether this is real or not, I will bet that we will set another all-time low in triples rate. But I would also bet that it will come a little bit back towards where it was last year compared to now.

Yeah. That's usually what you bet. Yeah. That's usually, that's your go-to bet. Somewhere between where it was and where it is it's a it's a solid one i first started looking at these things about a week ago and uh and every morning i check i check them all and i started with a list of like 20 and uh each day another one kind of gets blown up or moves closer to not that extraordinary status. And for what it's worth,

triples has stayed perfectly still. So, yeah. All right. So the second one is, you mentioned it, but I'm going to expand it. It's not just walks per game. There are a lot more walks this year,

a lot more walks this year than there were last year, from about 3.2 per game last year to about 3.5 this year. And if you go back a couple of years earlier, the 3.2 was already a big jump from 2016 when I think it was about three and it was under three for a few years. So now we're up to three and a half per game, which is a lot. But I'm going to throw in that we're on pace to have the highest rate of hit batsmen since 1900 and the highest rate of wild pitches since 1900. And so we now have the big three of wildness

all on pace to either be modern records or in the case of the walks, walks have been high in the past. So the 20th century or the 21st century record um and uh so yeah what do you think of that huh well that i i definitely buy that because that's been a recent trend too right we we've seen hit by pitches we're at an all-time high already i i think right and i believe wild pitches were or were close to it too yeah so they they uh so kind of hit by pitches they last year was an all-time high but only by uh it went from 0.39 was the previous high to 0.4 and so now it's

up to 0.43 so it was 100th of a hit by pitch per game ahead of the all time record last year. It's now jumped 300th of a hit by pitch per game. But the other thing is that that 0.39 came from 20 years ago. And really since 2008, they have not been up. They actually declined quite a bit in the, at the end of last decade and then stayed fairly low. And then they have been, they inched up in 17 and then jumped up in 18. And now they jumped up again in 19. So you are right. Uh, you were, you were accurate about it being a record, but it is not one of those things like strikeout rate that has been going steadily up for either five years or 50 years, which I kind of in my head I thought that it was, but it wasn't. And then wild pitches were actually very steady since about the mid-1980s.

And then they had a spike in 2013. And then they kind of held that level until like a little bit last year and now this year so uh it's it hasn't been going up for very long either and it's it's also for what it's worth not that far up over the rate so it is uh right now it's 100th of a wild pitch per game which is probably i mean you know let's be honest ben it's Now that I say that, it's probably like two. Yeah. Two wild pitches. Well, there are also more pitches being thrown per game. Yes.

Thank you. Yes, you're right. So that's part of it too. So as a rate of pitches or percentage of pitches, it's probably not up at all. But that is a separate trend that one could write about. I wrote about that last May? No, last April. I wrote about how pitches per plate appearance is increasing, and that is also true this year, I believe.

So anyway. Yeah, there are 3.95 pitches per plate appearance right now, which is a big jump from last year, which was a record, but that tends to fall back a little as the season goes on. Wildness is an April stat. And so for what it's worth, Wildness generally, all three of those peak in April and come back a little bit as they go. So that's notable. Well, it's funny. While we were speaking, I saw a tweet from Joe Sheehan who just said, Ron Culpa, the umpire just got drilled by a fastball. Small sample noted, but are we seeing more of these this year? I've seen at least three. So he is postulating here that maybe umpire hit by pitches are also up, but we can't check that. But that's also plausible

because I think that there are a lot of things that are potentially contributing to this that make me think it's real. So, A, you've got people throwing harder, and I believe people are throwing harder so far this year. Is that true? There was a FanCrafts article about that this week. I know we had a plateau last year that you and also Jeff wrote about, but Ben Clemens just wrote that fastballs are faster than ever. I assume that the data packs that up. I haven't had a chance to read it, but there's that. There is probably more important than that. There's the fact that people are

throwing fewer fastballs, which sounds paradoxical that there'd be faster fastballs, but people would be throwing them less, but that is the case. It's primarily sinkers that people are not throwing anymore and they're throwing sliders and breaking balls instead. And obviously those are harder to corral if you're a catcher and they hit people. So that is part of it. You've also got bigger staffs. You've got catchers working with pitchers they haven't worked with a lot before. Maybe that leads to more cross-ups. You've got maybe more paranoia about sign stealing that could lead to more cross-ups. I know that MLB put some measures in place to try to curb the sign stealing via video at least, but maybe there's still some concern about that. And then you've got such an emphasis on framing that potentially catchers are focusing on getting calls on the edges and perhaps they're a little less responsive to pitches in the dirt, for instance. Maybe they're less likely to block those pitches potentially. So put all those things

together and yeah, I think you are probably more likely to get more hit by pitches and more well pitches. Yeah. It's also, um, you, you're, you're right about there being fewer fastballs. Uh, there's also more inside pitches this year than there were last year and considerably more inside pitches this year than there were in, say, 2010. So that is also a factor. And also, this is a bit more speculative, but the fact that pitchers, that starting pitchers, know that they only need to get into the fifth or sixth, it gives them kind of more freedom to pick to pick around the edges to know that they

have more pitches in their arm than they probably actually need for their assignment that day lets them kind of toy with the strike zone in a way that would probably lead to more walks more hit by pitches more wild pitches yep and you've just especially with the ball flying the way it is you have maybe some hesitation to throw in the strike zone yeah so you're staying away from the power zones and you're trying to get guys to chase and that's not great for spectators probably because you know when you get to o2 you're just gonna have a couple waste pitches probably but yeah i think all of this leads me to believe that whatever increase we've seen so far is real do you remember a few years ago when there was that little trend of of smart teams or of kind of well of hitters

swinging earlier in counts and saying well started it right there and the thinking was like yeah i mean we had been raised to think you worked the count to try to get the pitcher out of the game but it doesn't make any sense to try to get the pitcher out of the game if there's so many good relievers and and so so yeah just go up there and try to hunt for the best pitch you can hit early in the count and it's almost like pitchers went oh yeah it isn't really there is no reason for me to try to stay in this game uh so i'm not going to give them a pitch early in the count i'm going to use all six that the count allows me to try to get this guy out because why why why bother otherwise so all right so i'll just uh ask you

this way walks are a big jump from last year and the highest since 2000. Do you think that that is true, will be true? But WUCCs are partly an April thing, you're telling me? They are, yeah. So normally you would say probably about, I would say 5% or 6% you would cut from April. And WUCCs kind of have been going up. They weren't up last year relative to 2017, but they were up pretty significantly that year relative to the previous year and that year relative to the previous year. So it's kind of been going up, but not reliably. It went up with the juice ball.

Yeah, right. And so if the juice ball is back or the aerodynamic ball or whatever you want to call it, then you would kind of expect it to be up again. And it seems that way. So yeah, I buy it. All right. Hit by pitches. Will we see an all-time record? Yes. And wild pitches are just barely ahead of last year's rate. I don't know. I'll say they stay there. All right. Last one is relievers this year are mad. Yeah. Did you know that? Well, no, I thought you were going to say that relievers were more are bad. Did you know that? Well, no. I thought you were going to say that relievers were more common, which I think is true. That's always true. They're bad.

So, Ben, okay, so since 19— I went back to—I have many spreadsheets for this, but what I can tell you is that since 1988, which I think of as the year that modern baseball began, but also that modern bullpens really began. And so since 1988, relievers have been collectively better than starters every year. They have a lower OPS allowed every year, and they have a lower ERA every year. And that fluctuates a bit from year to year, but it never really gets close. There was one year in all that time from 1988 to 2017, you'll know why I skipped 2018 in a minute,

to 2017, there was one year where the ERA for relievers was even within 5% of starters. That was 97% of the starters ERA. Every other year, it's been bigger than that. And I think it's usually about 8%. So relievers pitch much better than starters for reasons that are fairly obvious and intuitive and that we've been over. This year, relievers ERA is 3% higher than starters. 3% too. So it's not just kind of close. It's higher by a fair amount.

So it's not just kind of close. It's higher by a fair amount. Last year, the reliever ZRA was 3% lower than starters, which was already a big anomalous outcome. But that's there. So you have that as a very recent thing. This year, it's gone haywire. Starters OPS allowed is lower than relievers OPS allowed. Very, very, very close, but basically the

same. But that also is extremely unusual. So you can ask me any follow-up questions you want. Huh. Well, it makes sense to me that the gap would be shrinking because the gap between the jobs is shrinking, right? You have starters who are not going as deep into games. They're not facing the order for the third time as often. And so they can just air it out. And they have, I mean, starters are just looking more like relievers in terms of their usage patterns. And then on the other side of the equation,

you also have relievers maybe looking a little more like starters. At least you have fewer one-batter outings and sub-one-inning outings as a percentage of all outings. You have some guys who are being pushed for multiple innings at a time. So it makes sense to me that the gap would have closed. it makes sense to me that the gap would have closed. I can't really think of a reason why it would have completely reversed itself unless there were just like a difference in the type of pitchers that teams were turning into starters versus relievers. Like if they just decided all of a sudden that, I don't know, you can just use certain guys as starters who in the past, maybe you would have put in the bullpen because they couldn't go seven innings a start, but maybe they can go five innings a start. Then maybe plausibly the talent level of the typical reliever would be decreasing and teams would just be saying, we'll start him. He can handle that.

he can handle that. That's the only thing I can really think of for, because relievers still on the whole have the advantage. They have shorter outings and they don't have to face guys two or three times and they can throw as hard as they want to throw. So I don't really know why this would be real. Yeah. Well, I'll just, I'm going to give away my conclusion before i start talking i think that last year was real i can't think of a good reason why this year would be different than last year and just to get the april factor out of the way april is a slight generally has historically been a slightly worse month for relievers relative to starters but not that much worse so not enough to explain things and there have been because april not enough to explain things. And there have been, because April is shorter than a whole year, there have been a couple of Aprils in the past where

this, what we're seeing right now, happened and it washed out entirely the rest of the year. And we're not even through April. So small sample is a justified position here. But I wrote a piece in 2017, at the very end of 2017, wondering why it was that starters weren't better. Starters at that point had been, their job had basically been getting easier and easier. They were not facing the third time through the order nearly as much, and they were being given permission to air it out and throw 88 pitches and not worry about pitches 110 through 140 so there was no need to pace there was never fatigue and there was never that sort of familiarity and yet up to that point there was absolutely no indication that starters were closing the gap on relievers. And then last year they did.

So that all makes sense to me that starters would be getting better. The other thing is that there are more relievers. There are more relievers every year. And the relievers that come in are presumably the new worst in the cohort. And they drag the numbers down. This year there are about as many pitchers who have appeared and about as many relief appearances ever so slightly more as last year which is a lot more than there were the year before and the years before that and so if you think about those guys as kind of being lower quality and making everything collectively a little bit worse, then it makes sense that

both starters would be getting better and that now relievers collectively would be getting worse. Even if the top 200 relievers are exactly as good as the top 200 have ever been. And to be honest, they're probably a lot better. The bottom 10 has now become the bottom 90. And so that all makes sense to me, but I cannot think of any plausible reason that it would have changed since last year. I just don't see a very different style of play this year compared to last year. So I'm going with regress to last year, which was itself notable. I think so too. And I wonder whether maybe the rules that will go into effect next season to try to minimize the roster churn, maybe that will change things a little bit, swing things back toward the relievers

because you'll have fewer back of the bullpen guys who are rotating from AAA and just kind of interchangeably being plugged into big league bullpens. So if those are the worst guys in the bullpen at any given time, typically, then maybe you'll see fewer of those guys and more innings going to better relievers. On the other hand, you would think, or I would think, that teams would be getting better at building relievers even faster than they would be at building better starters because it just seems to me like teams are getting so good now at perfecting or optimizing

say one pitch for instance maybe you can't take a guy from nothing from the scrap heap to someone who can go through a lineup three times and has three average or above pitches. But you can more often, I would think, make a guy throw one really good pitch. And then if he throws one really good pitch and one get-me-over pitch, then that's enough for you to be a reliever. Maybe it's not enough for you to be a devastating reliever, but I think that technological edge and the improvement in player development and particularly pitcher development would lead me to think that you could really just fine-tune relievers in a way that would be more effective than fine-tuning starters, although both are happening. But that would be my only

thought for why things would swing toward relievers because everything else just seems to be swinging toward starters because starters are resembling relievers more and more every year yeah another reason that you could see it swinging toward relievers is that the less that you demand of starters the less incentive there is for a team to turn a good reliever into a starter to try to make him a starter. So you might just simply have a better class of pitcher being funneled into relief work since the kind of ratio of value has been shrinking. But, you know, apparently not. That's true. That's kind of the opposite of what I theorized earlier, that maybe you would be more likely to convert the very good relievers to starters because now the difference between those roles is smaller. And so you could convince yourself that more guys could conceivably excel in both roles. But I don't know which is more likely.

Yeah. So that's all I got for discussion. Those are the ones I looked into. And I know that we said a lot of numbers and maybe we glossed over some arguments. And so, of course, please, everybody, feel free to go read everything. But Ben, I have two other just real quick ones that I want to just run by you real quick. And these will be like kind of less informed discussions.

And they might not even be real. But one of them I thought, I just thought was kind of interesting, which is that the platoon advantage for pitchers is at an all-time high. And that's, of course, like all these things that's been going up pretty, you know, for a long time. But this is a pretty big jump.

And last year it actually went down from 2017 and from 2016 and from 2015. So it had dipped. And now it's up not only higher than last year, but higher than it's ever been. Which I only bring up because it's kind of cute to think that there's this last hurrah of like super specialization before they kill the loogie. And I wonder what that, I don't know. I'm kind of curious to see what that number will be next year if it'll change or not but for now we're uh we're closing in on on 50 50 we're closing in on can you believe that we are now the pitcher has the platoon

advantage now 49 of the time that's wild man like when i was growing up, it was 60-40. It was pretty reliably 60-40 every year for my whole childhood. And then now it's up to 50-50. 50-50. You turn on a game and you're just as likely to see the batter have the platoon advantage as the pitcher and vice versa. Yeah, that's kind of incredible. All right. as the pitcher and vice versa. Yeah, that's kind of incredible. All right, and the other is that old pitchers,

at the moment, old pitchers are like gone. Like there's hardly any old pitchers. I tweeted the other day that like the most mind-blowing thing that happened to me this year was when I saw that Jay Happ was the second oldest pitcher in baseball, the second oldest starter. And then CeCe Sabathia started the next day. And so now Happ is only the third, but still Jay Happ. Yeah. He's barely 36 and he's the third oldest starting pitcher in baseball. So at the moment there have been only a hundred innings thrown by pitchers 36 and older. If you're going to roughly multiply that out, you get 1,000 because we're about 10% of the way through the season. And 1,000 innings from 36 and

older is very little. So last year was the lowest since, I'm still scrolling. Last year was the lowest since 1972 and it was 1,100 innings. Before that was 1,700, before that was 1,500. And then you have a long run of like 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. There's a year in 2005, there were 5,000 innings thrown by pitchers 36 and over. And this year there might be a thousand and there might not be a thousand that's the crazy thing like you could very easily see it being like seven or eight hundred if you look at the names on here like it's it's like it's like Happ and Verlander and Fernando Rodney at this point are like the only sure things to be in a you know on a team in four months yeah it's a tough time to be an old baseball player it's there just aren't that many of them around or there certainly aren't that But of course, young pitchers have access to those just as much as old pitchers do.

And they have fresher arms so they can take advantage of them. And of course, you can maybe use technology and data to help an older pitcher adjust to his diminished stuff and figure out what works and what he can change. And you'd think maybe that could lead to a second wind of sorts. And maybe it has for some guys like Verlander, but Verlander still has excellent stuff.

So maybe Sabathia is an example of that. But still, all of those advantages are also available to younger guys who have intact arms and throw harder. And so there isn't really a experiential edge. I guess that the experiential edge is smaller than it's ever been because in the past you could get by on wiliness and know-how and at times you could make certain adjustments that a younger guy might not know to make, and that could extend your career a little bit. But now, when you have teams applying these player development advances and players themselves getting interested in them from really early ages, I wonder, I think that

has probably led to just a change in the aging curve, or it could, just because you're not gaining as much from experience because it's not as much reliant on trial and error anymore. You're learning things when you first come up that in the past that might've taken a player 10 years to learn just by banging his head against the wall. Now that's not the case. So I think that favors youth. I think that favors youth. Yeah. By the way, pitchers 36 and over ERA this decade, 4.00, which is about average, which you would expect. If you're not about average, they'll get rid of you no matter what age you are.

So it's about 4.0 this year, 36 and up ERA, 6.23. Oof. Oof. Not good. No. Yeah. And of course, you wrote an article last year about young hitters and how they're better than ever. And that usually comes at a cost to the older hitters too.

So, yeah, it's rare for guys to hang around and be good at these ages. And of course, maybe there are fewer PEDs around that were preserving careers at a certain point. But it's all related. And I noticed also that sacrifice punts are down again, yet again. I think this is the eighth consecutive season. Yeah, they're gone. They're just about gone. Yeah, this year sacrifice punts are half as common as they were in 2012

and a lot less than half as common as they were in 2011. So that is changing really fast. Yeah. There was also, I was, uh, German Marquez had the first complete game of the year yesterday as I'm recording this, it was yesterday. And, uh, up to that point, there had not been any. And through this point in the year, even last year, there had been five. And so complete games,

and I was going to, and before that, I was going to maybe write about how complete games and sacrifice bunts have just become zero. They've reached like nothing, but then that, and sacrifice bunts have actually been trending up a little bit

over the last few days, so then I scrapped that. But yeah, they're basically done. I mean, it's like you got pitchers and basically your sacrifice bunts these days are all either pitchers or a guy trying to bunt against the shift and getting thrown out with a runner on base

and they're like, oh, I'll give him a sacrifice. Yeah. Have you seen a pitch out this season? Can you recall seeing a pitch out? No. It's so rare to see a pitch out. Yeah, you're right. They're just almost gone. I wrote about that a few years ago for me. Well, maybe we both did. I think I did. I wrote about the pitch outs. Well, the probably pointless pitch out. You headlined it. Oh, did I? Well, maybe I wrote about it again or maybe I'm just conflating. I don't know. But yeah, no one throws pitch outs anymore. It's just not worth it because A, people aren't trying to steal as much, so you're less likely to guess right. But as you showed in that article, guys didn't really guess right anyway.

And there's, I think, more of an appreciation for the value of a strike relative to a ball. And it just doesn't make any sense. So yeah, I don't know. I haven't seen a pitch out. I don't think I've seen a pitch out. No, they didn't mention it. Tweet at us if you see a pitch out. No, don't. Tweet at us. Yeah, please do. No, tweet at Grant. Okay, sure. All right. We done? Yeah. By the way, one of the innings thrown by 36 and up pitchers is Russell Martin. Oh, yeah.

Right. And that was a good one. Good inning. It was the best. He's helping him a lot. So, Wainwright's been pretty good this year. And Pat Neshek is 36 or older. And Sabathia was good in his one start.

And then you've got Verlander. And that's it. Everybody else has been bad. Yep. All right. All right. Okay. You're having a good 36 or older season so far i'd say thanks yeah thank you ben okay all right all right bye yeah that will do it for today thanks for listening you know i meant to mention a rod when we were talking about tiger woods comps a rod is about six months older than tiger so i guess the real comp would be if A-Rod came

back today and was good. But he did have that comeback season in 2015, which was after suspensions, after injuries, he was 39 years old, he'd gotten divorced, and there'd been allegations of infidelity. Just as in Tiger's case, Tiger was linked to a shady PED doctor, although obviously no PED use has been documented the way it was with A-Rod, doesn't quite fit clearly, and A-Rod was not well-liked and had kind of a checkered past, although as in Tiger's case, there was sort of a narrative about personal epiphanies and loosening up and being one's real self, some image rehabilitation that was going on, learning from mistakes in the past, but in the sense that he had been supremely talented,

learning from mistakes in the past, but in the sense that he had been supremely talented, and he came back after three down years or injury-plagued years and then missing 2014 entirely to hit 33 homers in 2015 and look like his old self at times. That's kind of close. So I wanted to mention that. And speaking of comebacks, both Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw were back in action on Monday. That was nice to see. And Kershaw was quite good, going seven innings against the Reds. He allowed two runs, no walks, six strikeouts, only 84 pitches. Pretty impressive, although the stuff was not really back. His fastball average, 90 miles per hour, topped out at 91.2. He threw many more sliders than fastball says has been his recent pattern. So, you know, not peak Kershaw or anything. But it showed that he can continue to be effective when he's on the mound. So that was heartening. You can support the podcast on

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