Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1370: Hot to Trout

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Hall of Famers Mike Trout just surpassed in WAR (featuring a story about Goose Goslin and Joe Cronin) and Trout’s recent improvements in plate discipline, then answer listener emails about Cody Bellinger’s extreme hot streak, whether most baseball fans notice the rising strikeout rate, a Statcast conspiracy […]

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and I noticed that you wrote about Mike Trout. I have not yet read your article, but this is much like just retweeting an article that you haven't read because you know it's going to be good. I am bringing this up to banter about without knowing what you wrote. It's just an automatic, so tell me about your Mike Trout article. Well, this is less about Mike Trout than it's about, like, say, Goose Gosling. This is an article about the Hall of Famers that Mike Trout passed this month. He passed in career war, I should say. We all know he has passed Hall of Famers before, and that has introduced us to a whole new genre of Mike Trout fun fact.

But he's still passing Hall of Famers. I think Jay Jaffe wrote last year that he had passed the median centerfield Hall of Famer already, or the average for Hall of Fame centerfielders already. Yeah, that sounds right. And, you know, it used to be that you could say, oh, well, he's passed, you know, at some point you could have said any number between one and whatever it is now, but you'd be like, oh, well, he's passed 17 Hall of Famers. I actually remember the first time he passed a Hall of Famer. I believe I tweeted it shortly after, but it was like, it was like Bruce Suter.

Right. And it was only in, it was only in in warp it was only in one of the three and so then it's he started passing position player hall of famers but but it'd be like the the veterans committee guys who who weren't very good and then it'd be like you know the lower tier guys who you know are are famous and well known but have kind of been held up as like uh yeah can you believe that you know uh like jim rice for instance or tony perez are are in the hall of fame they're famous and they're good but they're also kind of the lower threshold but now you can you can genuinely be like he's passed like he passed ernie banks yeah or goose gosling and so

so this got me thinking there's something about saying Mike Trout has passed some Hall of Famer that you say it because you want to be like, you know, check out Mike Trout. But in the way that it used to be like he passed Orlando Cepeda, it was kind of like, oh, yeah, Orlando Cepeda. Wow, he was lower than I thought. Now it's not that. And so you have to kind of make sure that people understand how good Goose Gosling was. And so it's a long way of saying that the idea of this month's piece, and maybe other months, we'll see if people like this one. The hope is that we'll do this every month, is that this will be basically a Mike Trout

fun fact article that will be told through the fun facts of other Hall of Famers, if that makes sense. And so, so for instance, he passed this month, he passed Willie McCovey, who's like a great Hall of Famer, like nobody disputes Willie McCovey's place in the Hall of Fame. And so I tried to put how good Willie McCovey was in perspective and how good all seven of the Hall of Famers he passed. All seven, I think, are legit. Well, I mean, at this point, they all are. We're talking about 67 war careers. Some of them I was more familiar with than others. Craig Biggio, for instance, I'm much more familiar with than Joe Cronin.

Wow. Took Biggio so long to get to that point. He was around forever. Kind of, but it actually took him not that long to get to that point. I bet he just stuck around anyway. Yeah. So it was a chance to make the case for all these Hall of Famers and then make the case for Mike Trout as being genuinely better than them. I mean, he passed Duke Schneider this month. That's wild.

All right. Do you have a favorite fun fact that you found? I'm going to say that I don't have a favorite fun fact. I'm going to tell you my favorite story that got in here. So this month he passed McCovey, Biggio, Andre Dawson, Joe Cronin, Goose Gosling, Duke Schneider, and Pee Wee Reese. So Goose Goslin, this is a story from his excellent saber biography, was sort of a weird guy, very colorful, lots of good stories about him. And one of the stories is that one day he saw a high school

track team practicing nearby. And so he approached them. He went to the shot putters and he picked up, I'm quoting now, picked up a 16-pound weight. 16 pounds, Ben. That is, what is that? Like a gallon and a half of milk? Yeah, it is. yeah it is okay picked up a 16 pound weight and proceeded to toss it like a baseball for the next 30 minutes the next morning his right arm was so strained that he couldn't comb his hair

the arm was swollen and discolored as the season opened his collarbone was out of placement he tried lots of things to try to fix it uh which saber bio goes into uh but nothing worked so uh so this season he had a very bad arm he was he didn't always have a bad arm but that season he had a terrible arm and teams ran on him a lot all right right. So that's a good story, right? Yeah. So then I'm going through this, and then I write about Pee Wee Reese, and then I write about Craig Biggio, and then I write about Duke Schneider, and then I get to Joe Cronin, who Joe Cronin was on Pittsburgh. He was in Pittsburgh, and he was behind a bunch of really good infielders. He was a young kid who, if I remember this right, had been discovered playing on his church baseball team as like a 19-year-old. And then he got signed out of his church baseball team, if I remember that right, and was in the minors, but they had really good infielders ahead of him veterans

and he wasn't getting a start and so then washington went out and acquired him the washington senators and the reason they needed to sign him was that their primary or trade forum was that their primary shortstop that year was exhausted and now i'm quoting Cronin's Saber bio, quote, their shortstop, quote, began to lose weight rapidly in the summer heat. Oh, no. Do you know why he lost weight rapidly in the summer heat, Ben? Was he throwing around milk cartons? I don't know.

No, it's because he had to run out every time a ball went to left field and take Goose Gosling's short throw. So he was the guy that year who had to sprint out to left field and save Goslin the throw basically. And it was so exhausting to him that he got worn down. So the Washington Senators had to trade for a new shortstop who had like a second win. That was Joe Cronin. Cronin got playing time and started to rope and he became a Hall of Famer. So it was costly in the short term, but I guess very beneficial in the long term. Extremely. I think that Goose Gosling deserves like a quarter of Cronin's war.

Yes. That is a good story. All right. Well, cool. I guess we can do this every month Then if you're going to be doing it every month Also just pass it around It won't get rewritten This won't get written if nobody Likes it so Tell people that you liked it and make them Read it it probably honestly it probably will

Get written even if nobody likes it I was going to say I liked it Yeah okay so David Adler Wrote something for MLB.com this week about Trout. And I've kind of been dancing around this and thinking about writing this article. And maybe I will at some point. But it was basically just about Trout's plate discipline improvements and changes. And if you haven't seen Trout's stats lately, he has walked 29 times and struck out 14 times. That is pretty incredible.

In 2017, he did just barely walk more than he struck out, and last year he was about even. But now he is more than doubling so far his strikeouts with his walks, and he is not chasing. He is not missing. He just seems to have become this perfect censor of the strike zone. And David's article that I saw, the headline was, here's how Trout has gotten even better. I don't think David said that in his piece. He was describing how he's different, but didn't actually come out and say that he's better. better and that's kind of the question and maybe why i've held off on writing this article is that i don't know that you can say conclusively that he is better because you know to date he has hit worse slightly going by wrc plus than he did last year and then he did even the year before and he's just kind of stayed at the same level i guess war wise at this point or we're pretty close to it assuming he he has a full season,

which he has not lately, then he could surpass. Well, and same level, but I would just note that early in the season, defensive metrics are always a little bit, you know, like you're careful with them, but Trout's on pace to have like a plus 50 defensive run saved, as is, by the way, Cody Bellinger. And so a couple of the top wars right now look like they're being floated a bit by early defense i'll talk about bellinger a little bit later but yeah the the thing about trad i mean i guess you could dig into it deeper if you want and he has the the highest expected weighted on base average of his career thus far. He has the highest rate of barrels thus far. He's hitting the ball hard and well, so maybe that augers improvement that will show up in the

regular stats. But my question is just, if all you knew was the plate discipline change, would that be enough for you to say that, yes, he's better now, even if you didn't have any stat cast stuff about exit speed or angle, just knowing that he right now, I think, has the third lowest chase rate or maybe second lowest chase rate in the majors. And yet he also has a higher contact rate than Williams' Estadillo, which sounds impressive, except that Trout has one of the lowest chase rates and Asadio has one of the highest chase rates, and yet Asadio still makes contact all the time. But knowing that Trout just never swings at balls anymore and does still swing at pitches in the strike zone and never misses them, is that enough to say that, yeah, he has evolved and improved again? So are you saying that I don't have access to all the other stuff or that I have looked at all the other stuff

and seen that nothing else changed? Well, I'd say you don't have access to the other stuff. Well, sure. I mean, of course. That sounds like a really positive indicator for offense. But you do know his regular stats, I'm saying. You know his regular stats, you just don't know his like stat cast expected stats yeah i would say look i would say that there's a the the process from stepping into

the batter's box to the end of your plate appearance involves you know there's different stages there's how good a pitch the pitcher throws you what the pitcher decides to throw you where it is whether you swing at it, I guess first whether it's in the strike zone, and then depending on that, whether or not you swing at it, and then how well you hit it, what type of ball you hit, and then how well you run after you've hit it. And some of those are, and whether it lands once it has been hit, and some of those are entirely out of your control or almost entirely

out of your control. Whether the pitcher throws you a quality pitch is almost entirely out of your control. And some of them are in, you know, almost entirely in your control. And so like looking at anybody's stats, particularly in, in smaller samples, uh, you lean more heavily on the ones that, that have, uh uh that show batter intent and that show batter control the batter's control over his process you know that nearly anything can happen in 100 plate appearances because of those forces that are outside of his control um but uh but you know how often he's swinging at balls uh is almost entirely in his control or, you know, more than most things and would seem to be a really good indication of actual hitting talent or hitting performance.

So I would say without a doubt, I mean, definitely that's a, it is a major jump that Trout has shown thus far. Now, I sat down a couple of days ago thinking maybe it's time to write about this and decided it was not time to write about this and decided it was not time to write about it because it's not as though Trout wasn't already incredibly disciplined he was I think fourth in oh swing rate last year thing I I've written and maybe you have also written just like the same article essentially because he has taken the sleep before and now he has taken it again which is also impressive but in some way it's a repeat

of what he's already done yeah and he already had great contact rates in the zone and he still does and and so it is true that he's gone from like a 19% o-swing rate to like a 10% o-swing rate but you know at this point in the season that's you know, like a very small handful of chases, like, I don't know, maybe six, six chases that he hasn't done. And who knows, maybe the pitches are just the maybe the pitches out of the zone are slightly easier to take, or maybe he's in hitters counts more often so that he can he can, you know, focus more intently on a specific location and he doesn't get fooled. I mean, there's different reasons why that could regress to his already exceptional. And like, that is a fundamental reason he is a great, that might be at this point, I think that might be like why he is a great hitter more than, more than anything else. I think that it used to be that he was, you know, a BABIP god. And now I think he's a strike zone control god in a way. Yeah, which I think bodes well. But it's not new.

Yeah. Right. I think that bodes well for his long-term outlook and for his aging curve. Because not to say that plate discipline can't erode as you age too because your vision gets worse or maybe you start cheating on fastballs or something you have to decide whether you want to swing earlier and so you're not as good at telling what's a ball and what's a strike so that's true but I think that probably is more resistant to aging than say speed or contact ability even and so if he's just like the best person at telling what's a ball and what's a strike then i think that could keep him going for a really long time even after some of the other skills start to drop off so i think that's a good sign good omen for your which hall of famers

did mike trout pass this month series yeah yeah i think if i recall correctly from my aging article last year i think that strike zone plate discipline seems to peak in the early 30s, if I'm remembering right. Uh-huh, right. So later than most things, but just like how, you know, golfers putting is still affected by aging, even though it doesn't require strength, plate discipline for hitters does too. Yep. The only thing that's not affected by aging is podcasting and writing, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. Oh, yeah. There's so many good podcasts by 85-year-olds these days.

It's like really dominated by the old media. Well, when we're up to episode 100,000 or whatever, we'll be so practiced. We'll be good at it. Today's 85 year olds just They didn't start young but But we did so all right So let's answer some emails And I guess I'll

Just take a question about Bellinger since We were just talking about him so This is a question from Mike our Patreon supporter we also Received this question from Michael our non Patreon supporter But We also received this question from Michael, our non-Patreon supporter, but I will read Mike. So Mike says, this was a few days ago, as Cody Bellinger approaches the truly ridiculous,

there's a reasonable chance that he accumulates three wins of a replacement in a single month. His line is literally Bonzian. When was the last time a player was worth three war in a single calendar month? How would we run that kind of inquiry? According to the StatCast player page, Bellinger is the 95th percentile or better in every measurement, not even Trout or 2018 Betts or 2019 Yelich are so extreme in every category.

He still has more walks than strikeouts, too. It has been amazing to watch, and it seems like it is a historic month's performance. So this is kind of a tough one to answer. You can't really answer it with stats that are out there on the internet, and war is not really designed to be a day-to-day, even month-to-month stat. So you kind of have to cobble this together, and I asked David Appelman of Fangraphs to do this for me. I just asked him to send me the highest wars in a calendar month, and this only goes back to 2002. But Bellinger does stack up very well.

So as of May 1st, Bellinger has a 2.99663 Fangraphs war To go off to many more Decimal places than are significant And that is actually The third highest Calendar month war On record so there are some Caveats to that but basically Yeah okay so three war

Three Fangraphs war Is the third highest calendar Month in Fangraphs history. Yes, since 2002. Since 2002, which is when what, UZR? Right. Began. Okay. And we're only talking Bellinger April.

So this is not Bellinger through April, but Bellinger in April. No, this is counting. This is like, you know, how splits are usually done, which is also worth pointing out here that the season started early this year. So Bellinger had a little more time. But yeah, this is like, you know, September, October lumped together and March, April lumped together. So the highest war is Lance Berkman, May of 2008. And he was worth 3.12 war. So, you know, just barely more than bellinger is at right now and then

second highest war is can i guess well too late yeah is it randy win yeah hey wow yeah good job yeah i'm sure that would have been on the tip of your tongue anyway randy win it wouldn't but but the randy win you know how everybody has uh everybody has their favorite example of any major leaguer can do anything over the course of 300 plate appearances? I would not have guessed Randy Wynn. I was going to guess Mike Napoli's, I think, September from a few years ago when he was in Texas. But Randy Wynn's August-September with the Giants is my go-to for that. Yeah, this was Randy Wynn, 2005, September, September, October, I guess. And that was like 3.02 war.

So essentially the same as Bellinger. And then after that, it gets a little more predictable. It's Barry Bonds, August 2002, who is just a tiny bit behind Bellinger. And then Barry Bonds, April 2004. And then Mike Trout, July 2012. That is the peak Trout month thus far. That was the month I wrote about. That's the month I followed him.

That's with an all-star break in the middle of it. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Right. And then A-Rod, let's see, August 2003. So, you know, mostly great players, even though it is possible to be great for a month if you're not that great. But yeah, Bellinger is at three war, essentially. And the other thing is, so you have to have the caveat that A, defensive stats are unreliable in small samples, but also the way that this is calculated is like prorated defense.

Just like it's like his full season defensive rate just divided by the number of months or games in that month or whatever because i guess you just can't really break down the the stats like on a game by game here's what this guy was worth war wise on defense or at least not easily and so bellinger's war will change because right now, as you mentioned, he's at like, what, 11 or 12 or something rate of UZR per 150 games, something like that, better than he's been before. And so presumably that will fall. And so that will like retroactively lower his April war this year. And I think there's like a final UZR update of the month coming tonight too. So that's kind of wonky. But if we trust the offense, we could just look at the offensive

runs alone. And Bellinger is at 26.3 offensive runs right now. And even just that would be the fourth highest offensive month, according to that stat, after the berkman one and the top two bonds ones so that's pretty impressive and yeah of course this has been a longer period because uh he started the season started early and but he also he missed a couple games right like he was he was hurt he had something he tweaked something or got hit by a pitch, right? And he missed a few games. So it wasn't like he started every game. And this is a cumulative stat. But still, it's a really impressive month.

I mean, no surprise to anyone who has just seen the traditional stats. But yeah, it's up there in the discussion of best months that we can calculate with this kind of accuracy. Fantastic. Yeah. And like Trout, he seems to have perhaps evolved too when it comes to plate discipline or walking more, or at least not striking out more, although it's not quite as notable as Trout's evolution there. So yeah, really impressive. All right. Real quick, Bellinger had 4.2 war as a rookie and then 4.2 war in his second year, which are the same numbers, and he is not going to have 4.2 war as a rookie and then 4.2 war in his second year um which are the

same numbers and he is not going to have 4.2 war this year but that reminds me that i uh the other day i looked up players who've had at least uh 20 home runs in each of their first three seasons in the majors which bellinger will join that group in about a week and a half. Yeah. I mean that seriously. Yeah. But there's only like 30 players in history that have ever done that. And so that sounds like a pretty good list to be on.

And one of them is Nomar Mazzara. And I went, wow, Nomar Mazzara. And then I looked and he had 20 home runs exactly all three years. And so this is not a Chris Davis batting. Obviously, this is no 247 chase, but I am low key rooting for Nomar Mazzara to end up with exactly 20 home runs. And I think he's currently on pace to have 27. So just throwing that out there for when I mentioned at some point in the season, when I offhandedly throw out a unexplained Nomar Mazzara reference, that's what that'll be.

Well, your article from 2017 about how we might be watching the beginning of Bellinger breaking the all-time home run record. Got to retweet that. Yeah, looking good these days. I'm going to retweet it. Here we go. Okay. All right. Question from Joe K. in Herndon, Virginia.

I was reading an article recently about how readily people normalize gradual increases related to climate change. Long story short, basically after one year of unusually warm weather, people generally accept it as the new normal, even as it continues to increase. Presumably this is not the case if you're like underwater now and you weren't underwater before, but just in terms of average temperature. So Joe continues, obviously, this led me to a more important question. Do you think everyday baseball fans, the ones who aren't pouring over fangraphs or baseball Twitter, either know or care about rising three true outcome stats? I can pretty easily imagine that if all I did was watch games, I might have some vague idea, but not enough to really care. I this is isn't this tricky though because this

is the kind of the opposite it's not that people adjust and that's the new normal and they're happy with it it's that people have always thought that that baseball was worse than it is right haven't people have been complaining about the pace of play for like a literal century and uh people have been probably complaining about batters striking out too much. It's not the same thing, but batters striking out too much. I mean, certainly I remember in the 90s, there was both a kind of a gleeful giddiness about what we were seeing batters do with home runs, but also a widely discussed conversation about the mockery that it was making of the game and so on.

So people feels to me are more prone to think things are worse than they are or have changed. I guess maybe that's a way of thinking about it. People always think that in baseball, it's much different than it was when they were kids, even when it wasn't that much different. And so if it is that much different, then they would still think it is that much different than it was when they were kids, even when it wasn't that much different. And so if it is that much different, then they would still think it is that much different. I think certain things stand out, like home runs stand out probably if your team is hitting a ton of them, maybe. I think if you were to just watch a single game from 2019 and watch a single game from some earlier era and,

you know, everything else were the same. It wasn't like flannel uniforms or, or something. I think that it would be tough to tell from that. We had that conversation about what would stand out to like a 1998 baseball listener about today. So I don't mean like the shift and all of that.

You would know that you would see pitcher usage changing, but just the like rates of strikeouts and walks and that sort of thing, I think that would take quite a while to notice. Possibly like homers, you'd think, oh, that ball really carried. That ball traveled. Because there are times when I think that even now kind of knowing what's going on with the ball, I'll think, wow, that got out. I can't believe that that actually went that far. And you hear players saying that, of course. But otherwise, I think that we are way more aware of these things than the typical baseball fan is. Like, we like to talk about the way that baseball is changing. We write about this. We podcast about

it. We are tracking it constantly. And I mean, look, most baseball fans probably wouldn't know what you meant if you said three true outcomes, I would think. You'd have to provide a link or something. So I think just because it has been covered extensively, it would be hard to follow baseball today and not realize that strikeouts are at an all-time high and home runs are at an all-time high. But if you could somehow avoid consuming that type of article and you were just kind of watching baseball, I don't think you would really notice that much. I don't know. When people complain about baseball being different or worse than it was in their day,

I guess sometimes they're citing that sort of thing, like hitters are swinging for the fences, and it used to be that you'd put the ball in play, and you hit the ball the other way, and that sort of thing. So I guess people notice that to some extent, but I think it would take a lot longer to define that just from watching baseball. I don't know. I might be about to repeat myself. I'm not sure. I don't exactly remember what I said a minute ago. But I feel like people notice, again, I feel like people notice more things than there are. And I'm going to give a few more examples of people noticing things that weren't. One thing is that people used to notice that what the, I don't even remember which league it was. One of the leagues was the curveball league.

And one of the leagues was not the curveball league. One of the leagues was the curveball league, and one of the leagues was not the curveball league. And that was not, I think I've read that that's not true. That was just a total myth, but it was taken as truth for a very long time. People talked about it. People assumed it was true. And it really wasn't true, but it got noticed. And it got noticed probably because there were three curveball pitchers in one league who were who were especially successful and there were probably three fastball

pitchers in the other league who were especially successful another thing that people notice is that batters and extra innings are only swinging for the fences and that once you get past a certain inning then uh offense becomes really it goes it offense becomes totally different because every batter just wants to hit the home run. And that's not true. I looked at that a couple years ago. I looked at how baseball changes with each extra inning, and it doesn't change in the way that people think it does, but everybody notices it happening, even though it's not. I have noticed this year, and I've been telling RJ every couple days, that outfielders this year have terrible arms. Every time I see somebody throw the ball in, like on a sacrifice fly or play at the plate, it's just dud after dud after dud. It's obvious to me

that the league's arms this year have gotten really bad. That's not true. I've noticed it, but it's definitely not true. I mean, why would it be? What? And yet, I mean, every time I see it. And I think another thing that might fit into this, I'm not sure. You hear constantly these days about how pitchers nowadays throw, there's no such thing as a hitter's count. There's no such thing as a fastball count, right? That even 2-0 pitchers throw sliders and even 3-1 they throw change-ups. And I am not saying that that's not true. What I am saying though is that

I think a year or two ago, I dug into this to write about it and I could only compare it to like eight years earlier. But over those eight years, nothing had changed. The degree to which it had changed was minuscule at best. Now, I swear I've noticed it in the last year. It's gotten a lot more. And so it might be true now, or it might be that I'm also noticing something that still isn't happening. I think it is true now. but my whole point is that you notice lots of things because we're we're always like we're always drawing league-wide trends out of the

what two percent of games that we see and of that two percent maybe the five percent that really sticks in our memory or that we are like really closely noticing and uh you know triples aren't going to be down this year that much that's what i'm saying so all those are maybe examples of where i would say that that people would notice it and probably i think they might notice other things too that aren't true but i think they would notice it okay by the way we're prone to notice right what i mean uh-huh cody bellinger has 3.5 baseball reference worth. Yeah. So eight defensive runs saved, though.

A 50 run defender. Right. Right. Okay. Snap blast? Sure. sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways.

Here's to Deist-a-plast. You know, another thing I've noticed this year that I wonder if it's true. I've really noticed that there's a lot more pitchers who fall behind 0-2 and lose the batter to a walk. And I don't know if that's true, but that's something that I've noticed. I mean, actually, this is the easiest thing in the world to look up. I'm going to do an impromptu stat blast, all right. Okay. All right. So what I'm doing is I'm at baseball reference. I'm looking at splits, the play index split finder. I'm looking at league wide MLB teams together. I'm going to go since let's say 2010 individual seasons. I'm doing count balls and strikes after O2. And I'm going to see if there

are more walks per plate appearance. All right, so I have taken all this data, put it into a Excel spreadsheet. And I'm looking at percentage of O2 counts that end in a walk in 2010 it was 2.7 percent and then 2.7 2.7 2.7 2.6 2.7 so 2000 through 2015 remarkably similar isn't that remarkably similar yeah all right and then 2016 three percent 3.0 and then 2.9 2.9 so that's a clear and convincing bump to a relatively stable thing. And then this year, 3.1. So it is up, but it is up by about one every 200. How many played appearances would you have to watch? How many or two played appearances would you need to watch to come to that conclusion?

So even though you're right, you're kind of wrong. I'm totally wrong. Yeah. I mean, it's absurd to think that I noticed this. watch to come to that conclusion so uh even though you're right you're you're kind of wrong totally wrong yeah yeah yeah it's i mean it's absurd to think that i noticed this right okay what was the real step list the other day a pitcher was coming to bat the pitcher was pitching well and through like five innings and it was a tie game and he came up with like two men on and two men out and this was i don't remember exactly who it was but he men on and two men out. And this was, I don't remember exactly who it was, but he, you know, it was a horse. It was, this was a famous pitcher who would have been, you know, maybe as a team's opening day starter. And he'd thrown like 84

pitches and it was like a one, one game or a two, two game, two on two outs in the fifth and bottom of the fifth. So he'd pitched five. And I was surprised to see him bat for himself. It has gotten to the point where I was surprised to see even the ace allowed to bat for himself in a clearly high leverage situation. And he did bat for himself and he made an out. And then I think he went out the next inning and, you know, like let two runners on and got pulled as always seems to happen in that case. But it seemed to me that one thing that we should be seeing is that the average leverage index for pitchers batting should be going way down because pitchers are no longer allowed to bat for themselves in such high leverage situations as that. This one instance being the exception.

is that this this one instance being the exception and so i uh looked at the average leverage index for pitcher plate appearances and this year it's 0.89 which if you don't know average leverage index basically one means that it is a the likelihood of the game's state being significantly changed is average the closer the score then the higher the average leverage is average, the closer the score, then the higher the average leverage index is, or the higher the leverage index is, the if there are runners on, then the leverage index goes up, etc. And so one is average and like, you know, bases loaded two outs in a one run game in the bottom of the ninth, for instance, maybe would be like nine, that's basically as high as it goes is about nine. And then in a blowout, game in the bottom of the ninth, for instance, maybe, would be like nine. That's basically as high as it goes is about nine. And then in a blowout, it's like zero because nothing

that you do in that plate appearance is going to change the win probability for your team significantly. So 0.89 is a little bit below average. So maybe not unexpectedly, pitchers overall are close to average, but a little below average. They don't tend to bat in the ninth inning when the game might be on the line, but they also maybe don't even get to bat in the sixth inning with the game on the line. So it was 0.89 this year, 0.9 last year, 0.91 the year before, but my hopes of finding a trend dissipated. I started looking at every decade previously, and it's basically been 0.89 to 0.92 going back to the 30s. I don't exactly know why, but there's not a big difference there. So there you go.

But one thing that I started wondering about was the highest leverage that pitchers were allowed to bat in. So I started looking into situations where pitchers were allowed to bat in the past, where of course, I think it's fair to say they would definitely not be allowed to bat these days. And so I only look at years ending in zero as well as the previous, the past three years. So 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 199017 1980 1990 2000 2010 and then 17 18 19 and so the the ultimate example of a pitcher batting when a pitcher these days would certainly never be allowed to bat is april 23rd of 1930 when phil collins the great ph Phil Collins, came into a 15-14 game

and pitched a scoreless ninth to, no, was he, he was actually trailing. So he kept the deficit at one and then in the bottom of the ninth inning, Phil Collins' team down by one, down 15 to 14, got a leadoff single and then a line out and then another single and then a fielder's choice and then a double. Sorry, I've ruined the ending. It's not that ruined. to bat with two on, two outs, runners at first and third, two outs, bottom of the ninth,

trailing by one, and they let Phil Collins, the pitcher, hit. The pitcher hit, and he doubled. He doubled to tie the game. And then the game, somebody else drove the winning run in with an error so phil collins both tied the game and kept the the anyway the leverage of that event was 0.769 which again is like very nearly the top of the scale so if you look at how many times a pitcher was allowed to bat with the leverage index over three which which is very high. A leverage index over three. Let me see. I'll give you an example of a 3.0. So this is 3.0 is down by one in the bottom

of the sixth with runners on the corners and two outs. So relatively late in the game and not super late in the game, tying and go ahead runs on base, two outs. That's a three. Here's another one. Down by two in the ninth with two outs and the tying runs on base is a three. So pitchers were allowed to bat in 1930 125 times in such situations, whereas in the last three years, 51, 41, 59. So even though they're roughly the same number of pitchers batting because there are more

teams but at dh far fewer with with those high leverage situations this year there have only been five which means that we're on pace for a lower one but that's probably one of those things that will wash out but finally oh well one more thing if you look at the highest leverage index that a pitcher was allowed to bat in in 1930, 7-6-9, and then 1940, 6-8-9, and then 1950, 7-3-5, and then 1960, 6-8-4. So these are all extreme. There's at least one time each year where a pitcher was allowed to bat in extremely high leverage, like Phil Collins was.

And then in 1970, it basically drops down, and those types of at-bats become almost never 4.8 is the highest than 4.4 then 4.4 then 4.7 uh in 2000 so those become rare but that all takes me to this final thing which is the i keep thinking you're coming to the crescendo and then there's there's more i have reached the crescendo ben okay which is that the last pitcher walk-off that we saw was 2011. So I don't know if you remember, you would remember this. 2011, Scott Proctor was batting in the, I think, 19th inning. And the winning run was on third. He grounded to the shortstop, fell on his face, running out of the box, just completely flat on his face the third

baseman throws the ball home the catcher tags the runner coming home for the out somehow does not notice that proctor has uh been you know shot by a sniper so does not turn and get the out at first but it doesn't matter because this is the game that the umpire famously for some reason said that no tag was made even though it's clear the tag was made the pirates uh almost assaulted the umpire it was so egregious and the braves won in the 19th inning and scott proctor had the walk-off that was the only walk-off of this decade there was only one walk-off in the pre by a pitcher in the previous decade and there was no walk-. In fact, since the strike, since the strike in 1994, there have only been two walk offs by pitchers. And that might seem

normal to you, but it is not normal for most of baseball history. To a baseball fan from 1930 to 1994, it would have been odd to go that long without a walk-off. There was at least one pitcher walk-off every single year from 1930 through 1958. In 1930, there were six. In 1933, there were seven. In 1944, there were seven. There were, on average, about four or five per year. 59, there was none, but 60, there were three. And most years up until really the early 1970s you would have multiple pitcher walk-offs every year and then it really after the dh uh it really got rarer it became sort of like maybe one every other year on average until 1994 when i don't know who had it in 1994 but since then uh coming up on 25 years only two

and you probably will have another one because the more pitchers bat in extra innings nowadays because teams run out of pinch hitters much earlier than they used to so i'm not saying that we have seen our last pitcher walk off but a thing that used to be sort of common is now almost entirely not. So the next time you see a pitcher up to bat with a chance to walk it off in any situation, just know that you've gotten a rare opportunity to perhaps see something that happens about once every 10 years. Yeah. Baseball used to be better back in the old days. Pitchers would hit walk-offs. Pitchers would, yeah. Pitchers would hit walk-offs and probably never make the, never make that.

And Phil Collins probably never made an out in that situation. And everybody just screamed, why are you letting him hit? Yeah. Probably that never happened. He actually hit pretty well that year overall. He did, but not the year before. I wondered whether this was a Micah Owings situation. And it might have been.

He had like a, a what 550 OPS that year uh year before well he had a 703 in uh okay yeah 30 so yeah five 550 the year before so he was a he was a hitter I don't know maybe he was a minor league outfielder or something fidgety Phil Collins fidgety Phil that's his nickname wow all right speaking of Pitchers who hit sort of better than Most pitchers this is a question from Tori who says I am a Giants fan awaiting The ever more seemingly inevitable Madison Bumgarner trade it seems like

Local beat writers and radio personas Say that Bumgarner's value would be Higher if they wait so this means that In the offseason people say his value Will be higher at the deadline and Midseason they say to wait until the offseason. It seems like people are saying their opinion out of both sides of their mouth. Now with his contract up at the end of the year, their only trade option left is at the deadline, so this point is moot. But essentially, I would

like to know if it would have been more worthwhile to trade him in the offseason, or if they are right to wait since now a trade partner gets him as a rental and you've got the article uh right in front of you where dave cameron did the math right well i was thinking of that i don't actually but yeah dave cameron he pointed out was this reliever specific when he did it i think it was yeah i think so he noted that you do get more value when you trade relievers at the deadline because, well, for maybe for a couple reasons, possibly because relievers are maybe disproportionately more valuable in the playoffs than they are in the regular season because you get to use them more. You have more days off. You can just throw a higher percentage of your team's innings with your best relievers in the playoffs than you can in the regular season. And so if you wait until teams know they're going to be playoff teams and that they're going to need a lights out reliever, then maybe you can get a premium there. So it seems like maybe there's like a weird relationship where you get more if you trade them over the winter, but then you get less for a little while after that because you're getting them for fewer innings, but you're not getting the certainty of knowing whether you need them. But then it ramps up again so that by the time you get to the

deadline, there's less time left for them to be on the team that trades for them. But you have a better idea of which teams they'll be more valuable to, and so people are more willing to pay. So I don't know if that applies as well to a starting pitcher. I mean, I guess if you're talking about an ace who can come back on short rest, like Madison Bumgarner, for instance, then he kind of gets the same playoff boost that a reliever would. So I guess it would apply to him too. Well, even without the short rest, he's going to be throwing. He's not going to be throwing fifth starters anymore. Right. Yeah.

So he'll maybe throw, you know, maybe a third of your starts instead of a fifth, given that you get to maybe reset your rotation each series. And, I mean, I think there's obviously a big difference between a first baseman and a pitcher. Literally every team needs pitching literally every day. Like there's never a point where you can say like, I have 12 pitchers who are all better than, I don't know, Cole Hamels last year. Is that an example of a guy who, you know, like there's a place in every pitching staff for somebody who's an above average pitcher, right? Some teams need them more. Some teams are desperate and some teams are less desperate, but every team basically needs pitching all the time or could benefit

from better pitchers. Whereas first baseman, like you probably aren't, you, there's a good chance that in the winter you're looking at first base and going, well, now is the, now we got a really good chance to upgrade at first base. Um, and there's a good chance that in the middle of the season, you look at your first baseman who's got an 820 OPS or whatever, and you say, oh, well, that's not where our problem is. It's hard to get rid of your existing first baseman in July too, so you can't necessarily clear the spot. And so if you happen to be in a situation where two teams really need a first baseman in July,

it seems like the two competitive teams, I should say, really need a first baseman in July, that you would potentially still get the same boost in value. But you could be in a situation where nobody needs a first baseman in July, and then it really hardly even matters how good your player is, right? Yeah. And with Bumgarner specifically and some other players who are in similar situations, I think there was a wait and see attitude toward him because he missed a lot of time in the last couple of seasons for various reasons.

And he had some erosion in his stuff and his results. And so I think there was some desire to wait and see what he could be and can he bounce back. And I guess he hasn't really. His fastball has not bounced back and some of his stats are better and some of them are worse, but his deserved run average is worse than it was. So I don't know that that has paid off, but that was another thought that maybe he bounces back to his previous level and we get more for him. So it seems to me that you've got every team has basically the stage of their their year where they're they're building a plan and they have four months in the offseason to build a plan. And for much of the year, that plan survives. of the year that plan survives and then they've got the part of the season where they're desperately trying to hold it together or they're trying to adjust on the fly or they're trying to take advantage of some unforeseen circumstances and some positions fit the planning phase better and some positions fit the adjustment phase better and pitching seems to me to more fit the adjustment phase better that you're more likely to want

the cavalry to rush in late from the veil or whatever that was what was that the veil the veil the knights of the veil yeah sure yeah uh rather than have them at the beginning of the year and they just run right into the to the wall does that analogy yeah the cavalry yeah so you want the cavalry to come in the trade deadline whereas you want your uh your uh your uh archers to be there at the beginning yeah that really illuminated the situation for me. Thanks. This is now an SEO-friendly episode. I can put Game of Thrones in the episode summary.

Yeah, and also it's somewhat dependent on your trade partners and the offers that are out there. So you might be thinking, well, I'll hold on to him until the deadline, but then someone really needs a pitcher over the winter and they make a big offer or vice versa. You don't get the offer that you want and you figure, well, someone will need a pitcher at the deadline. So I'll wait and see what comes along. So sometimes your plans adjust based on what other teams need and offer you. All right.

Question from Mark Rogers, Patreon supporter. I write with a series of questions prompted by something that other Red Sox fans may already have brought to your attention, the Go Zone. Mary Craig has a funny little piece about it at BP. The Go Zone, is this supposed to be an ozone pun, is something that Nesson introduced to Red Sox broadcasts for the first time this spring. The basic idea of the Go Zone is this, and some of you have probably seen this on other broadcasts.

Whenever a base runner at first takes a lead, a number and a line appear on the screen. As I understand it, and I may not understand it since the graphic has not been introduced or explained during a broadcast I've seen, the number represents the chance that the base runner would have of being successful if they tried to steal second from their current position. The line represents the point at which the runner's chances reach 80%, and thus the point at which an attempt would be reasonable. A week ago, my wife and I were eating dinner with the game on in the other room, and she noticed the Go Zone. She likes watching baseball with me occasionally. She's very smart, a college

professor, and she has a reasonable understanding of the game, but she thought that the premise of the Go Zone was absolutely ridiculous. As we talked about it, two questions arose. The first and less interesting question is this, what kind of data is Nessun using to create the Go Zone? It's StatCast. As we continued talking about MLB and data collection, I told her about StatCast, and she raised what is, to my mind, a much more interesting question, notwithstanding the conspiracy theory logic underpinning it.

What if MLB were simply making up all of its StatCast data? The question we have for the three of you or the two of us today. Wait, this isn't even a question about the GoZone? Not really, but you can talk about the GoZone if you want. I've just spent this whole time trying to figure out what I'm going to say about the GoZone, and you have just changed it. Yeah, you can talk about the GoZone, but the question is, if MLB were making up StatCast data in order to impress the quantitatively oriented among us, would we ever be able to tell? And if so, how long would it take us to figure it out?

I'm watching a Nessun broadcast right now. There are runners on base and there is nothing. No go zone. No go zone. I guess it's maybe only in certain situations. But yeah, I mean, I think the way that works is StatCast. They get a bunch of data about success rates from certain points on the base paths.

I don't know whether it takes into account the base runner's speed or the pitcher's move to home plate or the catcher's arm or any of that stuff. It could, but it could also not. And just kind of gives you average success rates from that point if you have a steal attempt. So that is basically what they thought. So I don't know if you have a steel attempt. So that is basically what they thought. So I don't know if you have other GoZone thoughts, but I like the conspiracy idea that all of this data is bogus and launch angles and exit velocities are all just someone looking at the screen and saying, that looked like about 110 mile per hour exit velocity to me. Yeah. Well, I've mentioned this before on this show.

I think this is one of my favorite moments in baseball in the last 10 years. It's a very, very niche favorite moment. But it was when two broadcasters were recounting Peter Borges inside the park home run from a couple of days earlier. And this was when Larry Grineo was doing his tater trot tracker. And so he had clocked, he was clocking the trot, every batter's home run trot, right? And so then Borges' home run trot was the fastest quote unquote trot because he had run sprinting and he was very fast. And so the one guy goes, did you see Peter Borges the other day? Had the fastest time,

the fastest time around the bases in baseball over the last whatever number of years. Only took him, get this, 18 seconds to get around the bases. And the other guy goes, wow. And then the guy goes, beg your pardon, it's 14 seconds. And the guy goes, wow. And then the guy goes, beg your pardon, it's 14 seconds. And the guy goes, wow. So there is definitely an aspect of seeing numbers that you don't really know. Like the gallon and a half of milk.

If I'd said two and a half gallons it wouldn't have really meant anything different to you like and maybe it is two and a half gallons and it wouldn't change the joke of what i was doing so yeah like a lot of these things and we i think that i think i think mlb advanced media is actually has gotten a lot better at the way they present these things especially like in articles and in tweets. I mean, the first couple of years, it was really kind of like goofy. It'd be like, you know, like, whoa, that guy had a 91% root efficiency. And you'd be like, what?

What? What is that? Is that a lot? How many root efficiencies should he have? What's the median? And that was like kind of endemic to a lot of these things, like so-and-so's launch angle, so-and-so's exit velocity. It would just be sort of thrown out there and you wouldn't have a sense like, was that

more than average? What does that normally do? And they've gotten really, I think, way, way, way better and way more useful at putting these in perspective, both for the fan that doesn't really know a lot of the context for these metrics and the fan that does know a lot of the context for these metrics. But you could definitely fool some of the people some of the time. But on the other hand, I'm saying, is this one of those things where we're supposed to say how long before we notice?

Yeah. Because I think you'd notice. I mean, a lot of times I, you know, there will be something where you aren't really like, like there'll be home runs that go too far. Like someone will hit a home run and you'll see the tweets and it'll be like 494 feet and you'll see all those tweets and then you'll watch and you'll be like, boy, I don't think so. And then like an hour later it's gone because it was a tracking error and they'll say, yeah,

that one that got, it was a tracking error. That like, that happens from time to time. And I feel like people notice that. Yeah. Well, I mean, there were equivalents of that sort of thing prior to StatCast and there still are human stringers who measure those things and it's not exact, but if you wanted to pretend that it was like, you could probably get kind of close most of the time like uh you know you can tell what a hard hit ball is i think that is why exit velocity has kind of caught on is that it's not something abstract really i mean it's uh you can see that aaron judge hits the ball really hard so they're even like you know stats that are called hard hit rate and it's sort of subjective but it's just based on looking at it basically so

i think if you had human stringers who were instead of saying that was hard or that was not hard they were saying that was 115 or 109 or something like they could get close enough to the real thing that none of us could tell the difference because of course we wouldn't have anything to measure it against so i think you could get close with that kind of thing and yeah you'd be off on other stuff but like you can estimate distance pretty accurately maybe more accurately even without stat cast sometimes stat cast occasionally has bugs or misses plays so you'd be forgiven like if you had the occasional weird one other things like you know spin rate i mean you could completely make that up and i guess no one could call you on it but uh you can't see it can i rephrase this question a little bit and ask you let's say that

stat cast broke and they came to you and me and said, we got to keep this data. Cover us. Yeah. Can you cover, can you make it up? Do you think that we, you know, could it be faked? I was sort of taking this to mean like the numbers would be just sort of like whatever. They'd be like random numbers. But if you were really trying, given that we have four years now of living with these

data, how do you think that you could convincingly fake most of it and what would be the the hardest thing to fake what where would you get busted where would you get busted on this well you definitely get busted by the team clients because they have access to everything and that's no throw throw them out forget about them because that's that's terabytes of data that's like tracking every fielder at every second. Like you'd need an army of people working constantly to replicate that. So, you know, forget that. But yeah, from the veil.

Sure. So if you're talking about the stuff that you see, the other thing is like the turnaround would be tough. Like if we're talking about broadcasts, that would be tough too, because that's almost instantaneous. Like they have the lines on the screen or, you know, how far that guy went. Like you'd need to have someone watching every single game and just on call constantly. That would be hard to replicate. If we're talking about like the way that you and I tend to use StatCast maybe, which is like looking up a leaderboard or looking at a player's page

and seeing where he ranks or something. Like a lot of the stuff that gets cited in print or is just on Baseball Savant, I think that we could probably convincingly pass off at least for a while if it were like our full-time job. I think we could do that. If we had enough people, like I don't know that one person could or two people could because you'd still need to record

a lot of data. But I think with human stringers, if you just took like the people at, you know, Sports Info Solutions or Inside Edge or whatever, and you said, hey, MLB wants us to cover for them instead of saying that was hard, put a number on it or whatever, I think that you could come pretty close. So what would be the hardest thing to do or the most likely to get exposed? That's a good question. I guess there are certain things that you can't tell, but no one else can tell either, like spin rate, as I was saying.

Right. I wouldn't be able to tell but uh no one would necessarily be able to tell that i was guessing either so i'm trying to like launch angle that would be hard to estimate but also hard to to know that i did it wrong yeah i i mean you'd probably right you're right you'd probably you can tell the difference between 30 and 20, but can you tell the difference between 45 and 49? Once you get to sort of weird angles, then yeah, it gets hard. I feel like ground ball, I'm constantly surprised by how hard ground balls are hit. If I'm asked to guess, I'm routinely off by 15 miles an hour on ground balls. But I think where I'd get caught, where I'd be wrong a lot and get caught quickly is home run distance. I think that to the eye, once you get past like four rows deep,

then it becomes very disorienting and trying to figure out how far a ball was hit. To me, a 440 and a 480 can look like each other, can look the opposite depending on where they're hit. Balls hit to center field never look as far as they are. Balls hit down the lines always look farther than they are. Yeah, and of course, there used to be what was ESPN's home run tracker, which was very accurate and was based on hang time and ballpark diagrams and where did the ball land.

So if you really wanted to do it accurately, you could. But just judging it in the way that we would be judging it, I'd be wrong. I'd probably be pretty wrong about outfielder distance and how far people ran, especially because you can't really see where they start necessarily from the broadcast, for instance. So that would be tough. I don't know what else. Everything that is hard to guess would also be hard for people to realize that you were guessing. So I think you could get away with it for a while, especially because no one would suspect that suddenly it was just humans making everything up.

So if it were just like, hey, we need you to cover a day or two here, I think we could get away with it. Maybe like Rob Arthur would discover like a year later that something was really weird about the data that day and maybe the system was wonky, but I don't think Twitter would know in the moment. Yeah. Runners on first and third on Nesson.

That's a stolen base opportunity i am watching for the go zone no go zone hi maybe they just oh it's uh it's kendry's yeah they probably just bring it out there for like you know really likely steel situations or something but sorry i got it wrong kendry's morales is the a's are pitching it's okay it's not on first all right can we do like a very quick one last one yeah all right this is in response to something Okay. He's not on first. a game against a team, what level would that team have to be for Scherzer to be better than 50% to throw a perfect game? I was thinking it might be some middling high school team, but I have no basis for understanding how different the levels in baseball are. So to recap, Rich Hill had a rehab start in extended spring, which is like low A players,

and he struck out 16 of them in six innings with like a couple ground outs and gave up one very weak jam shot base hit. So take a better pitcher than Rich Hill. How low do you have to go for it to be likely that he throws a perfect game? I'm trying to find an email from Zach Levine when he answered my question of how often you'd walk if you never swung. And it's like 5% or 10%, right? And so maybe we're talking about a pitcher who has better control than that. And doesn't have to worry about the hitters too,

so you can just kind of blow them away. Yeah, but if you assume that pitchers can only throw the pitch in the strike zone something like 75% of the time, even when they're trying to do nothing but that, or 80% of the time, even when they're trying to do nothing but that, and you figure they have to go through 27 batters without issuing a walk, I think that maybe the math works out where there would never be a point that they wouldn't be better than 50% to throw a perfect game against, uh, you know, cardboard cutouts. Now maybe they'd have better chances against batters who, who would swing, uh, cause their goal is not necessarily to avoid a perfect game. Their goal is to get a hit and tell their folks about it. In which case then I think that it's much lower. So let's just say that this is a team that is not taking every pitch, okay?

Yeah. All right. So I would say that if we're talking about, like, Max Scherzer over the last five years, chances of throwing a perfect game against short season ball is over 50%. I don't know. I mean, it's easy to hit a guy, to clip a guy, and it's easy to walk a guy. I'll say no hitter. I'll say he's greater than 50% to throw a no hitter against rookie ball. Okay. Yeah. I think I would go non-professional team for a perfect game. I was thinking that.

for perfect game. I was thinking that. I guess even the best college team in the country are really good. Certainly once you get down to below Division I, let's say, I'd say the odds are in favor of perfect game. And maybe even in Division I, unless you're talking about the best team in college baseball with a bunch of top prospects on it.

But that's about where it is for me. I think it's somewhere between Division I and rookie ball, short season ball. Okay. Well, there's a way that we can kind of answer this and that might show me to be wrong right away, which is to simply ask this question, who would you say is better at batting, a major league pitcher or a rookie ball? Rookie ball.

So we're talking short season, we're talking pioneer league hitter on average. I would probably say, oh man, that's tough. You can say the same too. Yeah, it's probably about the same because i athletically speaking the pitcher's probably better but uh you know maybe it depends on like whether you've been hitting because the pitcher if it's like an al pitcher who who never hits then he's going to be rusty as opposed to pioneer league hitter who's hitting every day so

yeah but let's say it's it's close well in that case, then, I'm way wrong, like just wildly wrong because pitchers have an on-base percentage of 145 in the majors. And if you assume that, let's say that we're saying that batters are the same level as pitchers than a pitcher facing them, well, of course, Scherzer's better than the average pitcher too. So, now I'd have to look up what sure i can i can do that hang on you want to play the song can i do career for scherzer or do i have to break it all right all right so uh 116 for scherzer in his career on base percentage uh however since 2015 it's like uh 0.95 so let's just go with 0.95 all right so so he basically has a 90 chance of getting individual every individual batter out

and so the chances of getting 27 in a row are seven percent so he'd'd throw a perfect game every like 16 games. Okay. That's against an all pitcher lineup. And that's, you know, also pitchers take it a little easier when they're facing pitchers. I mean, they throw less hard. They throw lots of fastballs. They don't throw inside.

You know, they don't try their absolute best. That's like the breather in the lineup for them. So it kind of depends also like is this guy doing it for fun? Is it just an exhibition game? Or is this like, you know, a playoff game to him? And he's absolutely taking it super seriously. So, yeah. All right.

So does that change your answer or no? Yeah, it definitely does. I was wrong. Okay. So now what do you say? I'll say I was wrong. Okay. So now what do you say? I'll say, I'm going high school. I think even D3 is better than 50% to get a base runner over nine innings. I don't know. Yeah. I'm thinking below division one, but Juco or division three, division two,

even. I think it's somewhere around there i would go up i mean high school but yeah to be clear he would throw a lot of perfect yes like there have been 20 22 23 something 19 i'm just naming numbers perfect games in major league history and i'm saying that over a season of facing that team uh scherzer would throw like like five so there'd be a lot like i'm not i don't think i'm being unrealistic about that but i am lowering the bar significantly so yeah i i'm i think uh what did i say did i say d3 or did i say high school you said high school high school i'm saying high school all right so i guess we can end there all right couple quick things when we can end there. All right. Couple quick things. When we referenced that Dave Cameron study earlier, I implied that it was just about

relievers, that teams pay more for relievers at the deadline. That's probably true. But in Dave's original piece, he was just applying it to all players and said that teams pay twice as much per win in July as they do at other times. I was getting that confused with another post he wrote actually within a few weeks of that one about how relievers are more valuable in the playoffs but that piece about the trade deadline is now five years old and wasn't based on a huge sample so take it with a grain of salt and the other thing is I wanted to relay a little life update your friend and mine Jeff Sullivan got married as did Jeff's wife they

married each other so I think he's happy and thought you'd like to know they climbed Mount St. Helens together after the wedding you can congratulate him on Twitter if you like or not. I'm sure he's not on there as much these days. Anyway, we miss you, Jeff, and we're happy for you. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. David Egan, Robbie Sampson, Zev Rovine, Jeff Liggett, and Peter Mazziak. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can preorder my book, The MVP Machine, now less than five weeks away. I'm getting the finished copies in in about a week. Can't wait to hold it in my hands. You too can hold it in your hands soon, but please pre-order it if you're interested. And if you do, you can qualify for some pre-order bonuses,

an extra chapter, conversation between me and Travis, and some additional documents we picked up along the way. Send proof of your pre-order to them mvp machine at gmail.com order confirmation screenshot picture your receipt whatever and when the book comes out we will send you the goodies we'll be back with one more show this week talk to you then Thank you.