Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1374: Gallo’s Humor

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about dogs, nieces, and nephews, their ambivalence about gambling and the future of gambling and real/fantasy baseball, the on-field and off-field excellence of Chris Paddack, the significance of Sinclair Broadcasting’s acquisition of 21 regional sports networks, the divisive Red Sox visit to the White House, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s slow […]

I want to stay home. I want to stay home right here. I want to stay home tonight. I want to stay. When I realize the weight that's firmly on my shoulders On my shoulders Hello and welcome to episode 1374 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Winther of The Ringer and I'm joined by Meg Rowley of FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Winther

of The Ringer and I'm joined by Meg Rowley of FemGraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. How are you this week? I'm good this week. I got to hang out with my mom's dog this morning. He's a good boy. Have you considered dog ownership yourself or is living five minutes away from a dog enough for you? Yeah, I do live sufficiently close that this is like how my sister and my best friend both have two kids.

So I'm just sort of sated with all of my would require responsibilities. Yeah, I'm about to become an uncle for the first time in my life. That'll be exciting. I've never been an uncle because I'm an only child. So I'm inheriting uncle-dom, I guess now that I am married and my wife's brother is having a baby. So that'll be fun. Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben.

It's great fun to be an aunt. I can't speak to being an uncle, but I imagine it's the same. It's really terrific because you encounter these children that are sort of vetted by people who you know and trust, so they're not monster children. Because, like, we pretend that all kids are cute, and that's not true. Some of them are horrible. And so you have these good kids, and then when they have moments of being monsters because all kids, even good kids, have those moments, you get to give them back.

And then, like, you get to do things like my niece turned three yesterday, and I texted my sister, and I asked her her like, what should I get for Willa for her birthday? Like what, you know, what toy, what characters like really grabbing her. And my sister said, oh, well, you could actually get her a baseball mitt in her size because she's playing catch with her dad. And I had to pretend to not be too excited about that. But I was very excited about that. How small do baseball gloves come i don't know we're gonna i'm gonna go to dick's sporting goods and i'm gonna find out about it i think i mean back yeah i think she's like of sufficient size that there's probably like a

little kid kid glove although maybe it'll be too big for her hand and that'll be adorable too. I feel like aunts have a better reputation than uncles on the whole. I hear a lot about like weird uncles. Yeah, there are some weird uncles. I hear a lot about cool aunts. I don't hear so much about weird aunts. So uncles need better PR or maybe there just are more weird uncles than there are weird aunts or I don't know. You can be a good weird uncle, but it's usually kind of a pejorative thing. I'll probably be a weird uncle, but hopefully in a good way. You can blaze a new trail. Yeah. I'm going to restore the reputation of uncles everywhere. All previous uncles have fallen down on the job. So I have just been scanning some fun sports headlines. Let's see

what the big news in baseball this week is. We've got fan ban from Wrigley Field for white supremacist hand gesture. We've got Addison Russell welcomed back to Wrigley Field. We've got Sinclair Broadcasting buying 21 RSNs, which may mean higher prices or fewer people able to see baseball or more gambling content on our broadcasts. And we've got most of the white Red Sox going to the White House and most of the non-white Red Sox not going to the White House. So fun week in baseball, just some fun sports headlines I was just catching up on.

So should we talk about Chris Paddock? Chris Paddock was very fun. I would encourage people, the Sinclair stuff is kind of complicated, at least in terms of the RSNs. Craig Edwards wrote a really good piece, I thought, and not just because it appeared at Fangraphs.com, on sort of what the impact might be for folks who currently watch the RSNs that are being purchased by Sinclair.

And yeah, you're right to say they have a history of bundling things in order to extract higher prices, especially in markets where they also have purchased affiliates that they might force a cable provider to bundle with a sports network and then make their consumers pay higher prices. So that seems bad, but you should read about it in greater detail so you appreciate just how bad it could be. And Craig wrote about that. We can link to that when we post this. The acquisition will see Sinclair capitalizing on the new U.S. sports betting market in addition to increased fan engagement and viewership. He expects $1.5 billion to $2 billion of new ad revenue industry-wide in short order from sportsbook operators and other companies marketing in the space. live games, similar to how fans can wager in Europe now. Quote, if you're interested in gaming, we're going to add on extra stats, the ability to do prop bets in the game, pitch by pitch, play by play. You can play along and wager while you watch.

The in-game on-screen wagers, which it is currently exploring with its tennis channel, would be done in partnership with sportsbook operators, but Sinclair would not want to become a bookie itself. So that'll change things a little bit. This stuff is coming and it's coming soon. Yeah, I think in addition to all of the obvious ways in which this is tricky for the sport, I personally, and this is by far the least important part of this whole thing, so I don't mean to minimize the very real impact that this could have both on people who are inclined to gamble

and maybe to their own detriment and also to baseball as like an institution. But I just really don't care about sports betting. And now I'm going to have to know so much about it. I'm just going to have to learn about this whole thing that I don't care about. I don't. I don't care for the people who do care. Good for you. I care about all kinds of stuff that's goofy that no one else cares about so i i don't necessarily mean it as a knock on those who do care although i maybe mean it a little bit as a knock on those who do care but i just i'm gonna have to learn so much about this and i don't want to gonna have to for work yeah i know it's gonna be unavoidable i also read that fox sports became the first big media company I'm reading from a CNBC headline here to put its brand on a sports betting product.

Fox Sports is partnering with Canadian betting company The Stars Group to launch Fox Bet, an online sports betting product. So, yeah, this is going to be everywhere pretty soon. I don't begrudge, I mean, for people who enjoy it responsibly. I don't begrudge, I mean, for people who enjoy it responsibly, I don't see why it's worse than anything else out there except for, I guess, the byproduct of the fact that unavoidably there are some people who don't enjoy it responsibly and are perhaps unable to. And so that preys on their proclivity to that, which is bad. But on the whole, if you want to waste a little money wagering on sports instead of wasting money on some other thing that brings you happiness then that's fine with me and i don't know why it is that i am completely uninterested in it because like you i am also and like in principle it sounds like the sort of thing i should be into it's got numbers and yeah prop bets i enjoy like fun prop bets for for no money or anything just to see what happens. We do those

on the Ringer podcast sometimes. I don't know. It seems like a lot of other stat heads obviously have been interested in this in the past, but I guess partly it's just the fact that I accept that I won't win. And so part of me just isn't interested in actively losing money if the goal is to win money. Like if what brings you pleasure is the possibility of winning money, then that possibility is could be good. So I just tend to enjoy the game already, I guess. I don't know. So it's just, it's extra. It's something that I don't need and don't really want to be added to my screen with a lot of clutter and stuff while I'm watching baseball, but it's probably going to be. Yeah. I think that part of it is like you, accept that i just probably won't win much i've never been i mean like this is different than poker right in terms of its form but like i've never been a good poker player i have an expressive face and so i'm bad at poker i do not bluff well and so i just have never like

games or chance have never really thrilled me that much much. And so even when I'm able to like further intellectualize it by bringing in, you know, this thing that I really do like, baseball and all of its sundry statistics, it just does not, just doesn't do it for me. And I know that this isn't like a perfect, there isn't a perfectly clear path here, but I do get nervous about there being increasingly myriad ways for money to come into the game that don't really have much to do with, well, it sometimes has everything to do with winning. I should, I guess I should say that, but is not inherently necessarily tied to fielding a competitive roster. It's just, I don't know, it just makes me a little, it makes me a little antsy sitting shift in my chair. So I don't, I don't like that part. Right. I mean, it could be a good thing in the sense that it may increase interest in baseball.

Sure. Obviously, gambling, sports betting has been big for football and has contributed to that sports popularity. And baseball, it seems like, is very well suited to this sort of thing, to hotbeds and to wagering in real time because the odds are always being adjusted. And I could see that being captivating for people. And maybe that brings more people to baseball who will then like the sport and increase interest and increase coverage. And all those things could be positive. So I don't know how it will end up affecting the labor situation if teams are benefiting from this or the league is more than players or if anyone is benefiting from this. I don't know how that will happen. And of course, there are always concerns about just making sure that the games are on the level. But it's really hard for me to forecast because I am not at all an expert about gambling.

And yet it's going to be part of the thing that we have to know about pretty soon or immediately. Well, and I'm curious based on nothing but our conversation with James the other day in terms of what drove him away from baseball betting as he was looking at different sporting markets and then of course, applying his talents to Jeopardy. I do wonder, it'll be curious to see like how lucrative it actually is. I mean, I imagine it's going to be really, really lucrative, but it does seem like the kind of market that you would quickly lose in efficiency in just because there's so much information and so many stats. And I don't know, I'll be very curious to see how that evolves. Or I actually will not be at all curious, but I will have to pay attention to

that. It's fine. We pay attention to the Orioles, and they're not especially interesting either. Although the home run rate makes them potentially more interesting to me than sports betting. So good job, Orioles. You've won something. Congratulations. You did it. sports is. I mean, fantasy has kind of been almost like a surrogate for gambling, like a legal alternative. And you have DFS, daily fantasy, which has been ruled mostly, I guess, not to be gambling. I mean, I don't think it's purely a game of chance. Clearly, there's some skill involved there. But that has been one way to get that fix. And I don't know whether you just integrate them now so that it's just part of the same platform or whether it will pull people away from fantasy just to skip straight to the moneymaking. Obviously, you don't just play fantasy to win your league and hopefully win some percentage of the pot. You want to actually have some camaraderie and follow baseball

and test yourself and trash talk and all that stuff is still important. So I don't know what the ramifications would be for fantasy. Yeah, I don't know. I just don't know. We're going to find out, though. Yep. This will be a fun adventure. All right.

So maybe we can return to the White House thing. I'm scared to, but there's probably a way we could discuss it without turning everyone off. But I do want to hear about Chris Paddock from you as the nation's foremost Chris Paddock appreciator. You know, that start was just so delightful. I think that there is like a, there's a glass of pitcher where, you know, you get excited to watch every start of theirs. And I think that we tend to be a little slow on the uptake about who those guys are can sometimes lag for, you know, sometimes even a season, which is why breakout candidates are never really breakout candidates because they tend to have broken out the season prior. But he is quickly climbing into that tier of pitcher for me where it's like, I just want to see what this guy has to do. I want to see what he's going to be doing here.

And the fact that he is willing to be both pretty expressive as he is on the mound and is willing to do a little bit of trash talking, but the kind of trash talking that you don't feel like icky about, it's just, it's just, it's just fantastic. And then the, the, you get to the actual pitching part and you get to see how that change up plays with the fastball and you feel feelings makes, he makes you feel stuff. It's pretty great. And part of a very fun, although not always as good as they are fun, but very fun Padres team. And so I'm in on Chris Paddock. And not just because I picked him to be my NL Rookie of the Year, although that doesn't hurt.

Add some additional stakes for me, I suppose. You have some skin in the game now. This is your gambling. You've made a prediction. Which we hate doing so much, what we have to do. It is like our gambling. It's a thing of professional obligation that none of us enjoy because no one remembers when you get it right, really.

No one really remembers. They only remember when you get it horribly, horribly wrong, which is why we all pick such safe bets. Yeah. Well, right. You have conflicting philosophies there. I always make the safe, boring bets and other people will sometimes make the edgy, interesting bets because it's probably smart in the long run because if you actually do cash in on one of those long shots, then you get to gloat about it, I guess. So if I win my safe boring bets, then it's still safe and boring.

And I'd probably be reluctant to gloat about it anyway because I don't think I'm actually good at predicting things. So if I actually happen to predict something, it's probably just luck. So Chris Paddock is really fun. And Jay Jaffe wrote about him this week about his pitching approach, but I do enjoy the kind of like WWE promo type aspect of his personality where he's walking in with a cowboy outfit or picking a fight with Pete Alonso who I guess the origin of this feud is just that Pete Alonso was the NL rookie of the

month and Chris Paddock was mad about it which uh doesn't seem like Peter Wanzo's fault. Well, he was mad about it, but in such a tepid way, right? I mean, the beginning part of that quote was, does he deserve the Rookie of the Month honor? Absolutely. So it's like he's mad because he also had a very good month and arguably could have been deserving as well. But this is the best kind of this is the best kind of trash talking because it emanates from a confidence in oneself rather than a denigration of other people's abilities. And it is just I like I like myself better. But that guy is good, too. I'm here for that every day.

I did not enjoy the cowboy thing in the beginning because when I, you know, I remember watching, I guess it was his first start of the year, maybe, probably. And he came in and, you know, in the sheriff thing. And I had the reaction that I often have to young men making bold aesthetic choices, which is like, so you're going to feel embarrassed about this later. This is going to be a thing you wish you hadn't done. But now I think it's great. I've changed my mind chris paddock has won me over and wear all the weird cowboy stuff you want sir do it yeah yeah it's fun he has a personality and he's also a really good pitcher and i guess the padres will have decisions to make about how much to let him pitch yeah maybe that will be contingent on how the Padres

are doing, but Paddock is, I believe, represented by Scott Boris, right? He's a Scott Boris client. And I think that's true. If that's the case, and I'm not making that up entirely, that is always a factor with his pitchers and shutting them down or not. So we'll see how they handle that on that staff. They want him to pitch as much as they possibly can, but they don't want to jeopardize his future. Yeah, I would expect that they know that they are a little early and that they are perhaps likely to still struggle to overtake the Dodgers in that division and that they will make good sound choices about his health.

Baseball Reference does not list an agent for Chris Paddock yet, so I don't know. I Googled. It's Boris. Yeah. That makes sense. So perhaps he will not be signing a long-term extension anytime soon. Gosh, that trade looks so bad in hindsight. I know. Oh, yeah.

The all-savvy trade team over there in San Diego, geez geez those are two of the worst ones we've seen in a while it's weird to know rodney straight up yep straight up uh yeah is the tatis trade worse it's worse it's worse right yeah which of those is worse i probably would still pick Tatis, I think. Right. Eric Johnson and Tatis for James Shields and cash. And cash. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe it was a lot of cash. Could have been a lot of cash.

I think that I will firmly say that it's worse, even though it's weird to have a strong, firm opinion about this for either of them, considering how early in their careers they are. But Tatis is only 20, and he's a position player, so you worry a little less about injury, even though he is currently injured. But yeah, some bad deals. It's very strange to know what keeps a stranger up at 3 a.m., like when they wake up at 3 and their mind starts spinning on stuff that they've done in their lives that is silly. a stranger up at 3am, like when they wake up at 3 and their minds start spinning on stuff that

they've done in their lives that is silly. But I bet we know the GMs on the other ends of those trades. That's a weird thing to know. Yeah. So, all right, let's circle back and see what we can say about the hot button issue of the moment. So I just saw a tweet that was tweeted since we started talking, I think. And this was Tom Werner, chairman of the Red Sox, said, we don't see this as a racial divide. He repeated that baseball is apolitical. And he's saying this at a moment when his team is visiting the literal president at the White House and is extremely racially divided. So I don't know how he is pretending that that's the case. But when people say baseball is apolitical or like keep politics out of baseball, I sort of get what they mean. Sometimes you just want to watch the

baseball and not think about the politics. And it's a nice escape from that stuff sometimes. And on this podcast podcast we don't typically talk about politics we talk about political things sometimes or things that are considered political because so much is and sometimes in baseball there is just a direct overlap between politics or politicians and baseball and you just can't avoid it. Like when there's an agreement to have Cuban players come over and then Donald Trump says no. And his administration tosses that out. Or when Major League Baseball is lobbying Congress to make sure that they don't have to pay minor league players. And successfully, as it turns out, those are intersections between politics and baseball or local stadium funding or, you know, national broadcast.

I mean, everything comes down to politics. A lot of things do. And you can still talk about players like Chris Paddock and Penn Racist and all that stuff is fun and doesn't necessarily overlap with politics in an explicit way. But the White House visit is probably the most explicit of the explicit intersections of sports and politics. And in this case, because of this racial divide that is very evident, even if Tom Horder says it's not, it's kind of an ugly situation. Because regardless of what you think of the politics and of this particular politician, it's still not a great thing for a team to be splintered along racial lines for any reason. And this seems to have been the impetus for that.

Yeah, I, how do I want to talk about this? Well, the political theorist in me would say that everything is political. And so the keep politics out stuff is silly. Although like you, I am not unsympathetic to the desire to want to focus on the baseball part. I mean, the place where I am often confronted with this is when we can circle back to the Cubs stuff and Addison Russell later if we want to just continue the bummer train. But when players will be suspended for domestic violence i often feel like i should say something about that um and there is invariably someone who chirps about how they just want to focus on the baseball and my reaction is always like well your issue your gripe isn't with me like go talk to the guy who just abused his wife right that's why we have to talk about this because of his decisions. A literal baseball player. Right. Like go talk to that guy. I wonder if teams would be well-served just generally to say

that the White House visit is just going to be a tradition that we discontinue. Yeah. I think we're heading that way. Because you're never going to satisfy the totality of your fan base because you're going to have even in you know when there's an administration that is perhaps less controversial than this one is that a that's a very uh cop-out way of talking about it but like inspires less fervor one way or the other than this one does you're never going to have consensus among your fan base because you know there are people and they're going to espouse a variety of political opinions all along the spectrum. So I don't know that we, I think that we are rightly recognizing that that institution is never a political and that even the

ceremonial aspects of it involve, you know, you taking a happy picture with the occupant of that office and that that is going to read a particular way. And then when you have an administration whose policies do have often fall along racial lines and inspire sometimes racial animus, you know, I think that they probably would have been better served saying, we're just going to sit this one out. Having not done that, you're picking a path no matter what decision you make. And I think that teams would probably be well-served to have internal conversations amongst their employees, because that's what baseball players are, right?

They're employees of this organization to say, what decision can we make that allows us to have constructive conversations as teammates who have to work together about, you know, why some people are choosing to sit out and why some people aren't? I don't imagine that any of the players of color who are deciding not to go to the White House are doing that without a very real and visceral understanding of the impact that the policies of this administration have on the communities they come from. And that's a productive conversation to have and probably one that is more productive if it is done within the confines of the Red Sox organization and not as part of the broader discourse. And so I just don't know why they go.

I don't know why they decide to go because it isn't a neutral position. Going there is not neutral. And I think that given the specific objections that any number of people in this country have to that administration, particularly people of color who are represented on that team, that those are reasonable and real objections and should probably dictate the course of that decision more than the comfort that white players have being there because the policies that this administration espouses affect them differently. And this is part of representational theory, like if I can be annoying and put on my former life hat, like one thing that people talk about when they talk about representation is when you have two groups of people and one group cares a very great deal and the other group is neutral or if they're really excited, maybe are excited for not great reasons, we don't need to balance those things equally, right? So the group that is adversely affected in a much more real way should probably have more say here.

So I wish that they had had that conversation internally and listened to their players because this was an easy one to predict. I mean, the manager of the team is from Puerto Rico. That's the thing, yeah. Right? Like, what are we doing here? Right. Cora is sitting this one out as an explicitly political statement. He was deciding whether it would be more effective to go and perhaps say something or to not go.

And he decided not to go to bring attention to that cause. to go to bring attention to that cause. And I think it's interesting because a lot of baseball players, I think they want to keep politics out of things too, with some notable exceptions, of course, because they have to live in close proximity to each other all the time for most of the year in a clubhouse with many people who have backgrounds that are completely dissimilar and maybe political beliefs that are completely dissimilar and maybe political beliefs that are completely dissimilar. And when I've asked a couple of players about, is politics discussed in clubhouses? I think we may have had, I don't know, either Dan Heron or Brandon McCarthy or both talk about that on the show once. And they said, guys don't really talk about it that much because

it's just going to lead to fault lines and disagreements. And then you have to be in a clubhouse with that guy and stay in the same hotel as that guy and be on the bus and be on the plane with that guy. And you just you don't want to be arguing about politics all the time. So it's almost better just not to say anything and to pretend and just to coexist within the same small ecosystem. And something like this makes that kind of impossible to do because it brings it out in the open and you have a lot of players who feel strongly about not going you probably have some players who feel strongly about going and then you have other players who just don't feel strongly either way and i'm sort of surprised that more of those have not decided to stay home just sort of out of solidarity with

a lot of their teammates who clearly do feel strongly about this. And I wonder whether some teammates who opted not to go feel like this is a betrayal or whether they're just okay with it and they don't want to impose their beliefs on anyone else. I'm sure there's a bit of both, but it is the situation that if you're a baseball team, I mean, I guess there's some value in going to the White House and taking a picture with the president or at least some presidents and getting to celebrate your championship. That could be a nice thing, but in these extremely polarized times, seems like it's going to lead to a lot more problems than good things. So I wonder, just because it's become in every sport and more so in other sports, really,

but even now baseball, it's just this annually divisive thing that becomes a big story and the benefits can't possibly outweigh the costs. So I think you're right that this will come to an end sometime soon. the diversity that the Red Sox do coming from a city with a fraught history of racism, to know that the best case scenario, if you're a player who is sitting out and you're doing that in protest of the policies that this administration is espousing that directly impact your community adversely, that the best case scenario for another player on your team who is white is that they are indifferent to those problems, right? That's the best case scenario. And the worst case scenario is that they support those policies and then you have to go to work the next

day and root for each other and try to coalesce. And that's always the struggle that we have as people who occupy different spaces on the political continuum. But in a sport that is, you know, where the team matters so much, that has to feel horrible. And so I just don't know why the club wouldn't have tried to short circuit that inevitable problem, right? Or the inevitable problem of their manager making a very principled stance about how resources have been allocated to puerto rico in the aftermath of the hurricanes and then to look at you know to look at red sox twitter and see a bunch of yahoos telling him to go back to his country right yeah why put him in that why put him in that position right it almost

country right yeah why put him in that why put him in that position right it almost undermines his authority like he's the he's a leader of the team right and he's kind of being undercut in a sense i mean he doesn't speak for the organization in all things obviously but just to very clearly say the organization doesn't care that much about the thing that the person we've we've chosen to lead our team and has done so very successfully. And we value his service in that sense. And then you've got Mookie Betts, the MVP of the championship season. You have David Price, playoff hero. Neither of them went. You have the former face of the Red Sox, David Ortiz, saying he wouldn't have gone. And then you end up with these photos of an overwhelmingly white Red Sox delegation. This is the franchise that was the

last to integrate, which granted was 60 years ago, but this isn't the ideal image for any organization to project. And this administration is unique, I would say, is an outlier in a lot of respects. And so with previous administrations, with perhaps future administrations, it wouldn't be quite as much of a flashpoint as it is right now. And obviously, like, there could be something nice and wholesome about this. Like, it reinforces baseball's centrality to the American experience. And it shows that this is like a pastime that's valued in this country. And obviously, there is a lot of respect attached to the office itself, if not necessarily to any one of its individual occupants. So maybe there will be a world again where these visits could kind of go off routinely.

And even if you disagree politically with the person who is in the office, you don't personally loathe that person so much that you don't't want to be in their presence so i think that is a something of a departure from the past and yeah you know it'd be a shame if this killed a good thing but it's probably just tricky enough of a thing that we should just kind of keep these things separate yeah and people should like learn what country puerto is part of. That's a thing that people on Twitter should learn. Yeah, it's just a bummer. It's so strange because what is the real value of that photo op? It just seems like that has such minimal value,

even with a neutral, if there were such a thing, as a neutral White House occupant, right, where it's just about going. And like you said, you know, us honoring the successes that the team has had. What is the real upshot? No one's like, oh, yeah, now that they've gotten a picture with the Prez, it's real deal. That World Series trophy really means something now. So I'm surprised that there hasn't been a decision to be like you know we're just gonna we're just not i'm sure that visit has been meaningful to players in the past like i'm yeah i'm sure it's meaningful to players handshake and everything it's kind of like a perk

of winning the world series you get to go meet the leader of the country that's That's a nice reward, I guess, unless that leader is very distasteful to you. So I don't know. It's a tradition that I remember reading something about it, and I don't think it goes back as far as I thought it went back. It's not like a president throwing out the first pitch on opening day or something, which goes back quite a long time. I believe the White House visit is a more recent innovation. And so perhaps we can dispense with it without offending tradition too much. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think it is useful for us as human beings in the world to continue to evaluate our understanding of the neutrality of acts like this, because that's a useful thing to ruminate on as citizens. So in that sense, it is productive. But I imagine that

the clubhouse was pretty weird the day after that, especially when the lines were as starkly drawn as they were. And I do wish that these teams and the league would stop talking about the supposed apolitical position that they occupy. I mean, MLB literally has a lobbying group and a political action committee. So I think that's a little – we can dispense with that bit of silliness. Yeah. I mean, this is the team that has banned Fortnite because of concerns that it might be a distraction. And this is the team of chicken and beer in the clubhouse and overblown concerns about that kind of thing. This seems like it could actually be sort of serious.

I mean, I don't know. Maybe this will all blow over and they'll just go back to playing baseball and get on with their lives. And they have their eyes on the prize. And the Red Sox as a team have recovered somewhat from their terrible start and they're back to 500. And maybe they'll just keep rolling along and it'll be fine. I don't know. But you wonder whether there will be any lingering bitterness about this. It's the sort of thing where I think that we tend to hear about those concerns when underperformance or poor performance lingers. And so, you know, getting back on track as a team will probably heal a lot of this stuff. But, you know, these are, I think it's good to have the conversation, even if the impetus for it is not especially great, but, you know, it can't be an easy thing to realize that several of your most important clubhouse leaders are on one side of this divide and they are feeling likely pretty unsupported by the history of championship sports teams visits. So 1963 Celtics were the first NBA team to visit.

The 1980 Pittsburgh Steelers, first NFL team. The 1991, I think, Pittsburgh Penguins were the first NHL team. The baseball history does go back further. So there were some like amateur teams that showed up right after the Civil War. There were the Cincinnati Red Stockings, whose 150th anniversary is being celebrated now. They paid a visit. And the 1924 Senators, who were in the neighborhood already, they are, it seems, the first title-winning professional team to visit the White House in baseball. But it sounds like celebratory visits have only become common in the past 30 years or

so. So there have been some isolated instances, but this is not a tradition that goes way, way back. Maybe we should change it and everyone who wins a World Series gets to meet Beyonce. Everyone loves Beyonce. Yeah, that's pretty uncontroversial. Yeah, we should just do that. And then it really will be a celebration. Maybe we could ask her to sing a song. And we can sidestep this.

I don't want, you know, sidestepping it is, I suppose, a little bit cowardly. Because people have to pick where they're going to make their stands. And sometimes we're not able to pick when those moments are going to come. So I don't know. But I think that we should start a new tradition. It doesn't have to be Beyonce. It's just that everyone loves Beyonce. Right.

So one thing that I want to talk about is Vlad Guerrero. Yeah. There have suddenly been a lot of articles about Vlad Guerrero for different reasons, namely that he hasn't hit yet. So Fangraphs published one of these fine pieces. We did. Also by Craig Edwards. Yes. And Vlad has not hit, and no one is at all worried about it.

No. But it's sort of striking and disappointing because, of course, we were all extremely excited for him to arrive and we were waiting forever. And we sort of hoped that he would hit the ground running and be one of the best players in baseball from day one or best hitters at least. And he has not been thus far. Fangraphs still takes me first to senior Vlad. So I have to scroll down to junior Vlad. Yeah. I have to scroll down to junior Vlad.

Yeah. So younger Vlad has a 23 WRC plus as you speak through his first 10 games and 41 plate appearances. He has hit lots and lots of grounders. He's not elevating. He is also walking a fair amount. But I think what is interesting about this to me, obviously this is meaningless. No one is worried about Vlad. This is a tiny sample and he will be fine. Probably this season he will be fine. But what's interesting to me is that no one is throwing him strikes, which is probably part of why he is

struggling so far. So over the past two weeks, I'm looking at the split for qualified hitters. I'm looking at the split for qualified hitters. Vlad has the fifth lowest zone rate in baseball. 38.4% of the pitches he's seen have been in the strike zone. And that can be kind of a confusing leaderboard because you have guys who will swing at anything near the bottom there. And so teams will just throw them lots of balls, just hoping that they will chase them. So you have like Jorge Alfaro at the top of that leaderboard or bottom, depending on how you sort, and you have Javi Baez there and, you know, free swingers. But then you also have like Chris Bryant and Alex Bregman and guys who don't really chase. So there are a couple of reasons why a hitter may not be thrown strikes. It could be that he will chase anything and so you don't have to throw him strikes, but it could also be because pitchers are afraid to throw him strikes. And I wonder which it is in Vlad's case, because you could make a case for either. And for people who are wondering, I was curious to see whether rookies on the whole have a much lower or higher zone rate than non-rookies. And it's pretty similar. Last year, their zone

rate, I think, was slightly higher, like half a percentage point higher, which is what I would have expected because I think on the whole, you tend to just kind of fire strikes in there until someone proves that they can hit them. So Vlad, it could be that everyone is scared of him and genuinely respects him and wants to stay away from the big bat. It could be that they're thinking of him as his father and they think he will chase everything, which would be a bad scouting report, I think, because he is not that type of hitter and he doesn't really chase a whole lot. So I'm wondering which it is because obviously he came in with quite a reputation despite the fact that the Blue Jays were pretending he wasn't a big leaguer.

It would be interesting if when he appeared on day one, pitchers were treating him as if he was already one of the best hitters in baseball, which is what the projection said. Yeah, Craig noted after we published this piece that he has the same WRC+, or about the same WRC+, as his father did in the same number of plate appearances right after he debuted. So there's some nice symmetry there.

But yeah, I think that clearly his reputation sort of precedes him. I would expect that whatever hand-waving the Blue Jays did, as you noted, that he is supposedly not a big leaguer. I think that when it comes down to it, pitchers were given an accurate scouting report and were told to be afraid of that bat. It's going to be fine. It's going to be be fine i did get a question in my chat about this though or like have have have scouts changed their mind i was like no yeah they haven't thing is now they have not that would be very rash yeah but because you have teams like at this point i don't think i would be surprised if there's any big difference between like how a hitter is getting pitched pitched in AAA and then how he's pitched when he first comes up to the big leagues.

In the past, I think there would have been because maybe AAA pitchers know the guy and know what his weaknesses are, whereas you get to the big leagues and you're just a generic rookie except for a few exceptions. Now, I think you have video, you have stats and locations and almost all the stats you have for the majors, at least on the offensive side you have for the high minors. And so I doubt there's any difference in the scouting report. You maybe have certain pitchers who are sort of stubborn and think, I'm not going to follow the scouting report until I see this guy myself and see if he can actually catch up to me, rookie like welcome to the league I'm gonna blow this by you and then when you get burned you adjust so there's probably some of that macho stuff still going on but I'd imagine for the most part like no one's coming up and and I wonder if that's changed things because there's a

perception that like if you're on your first trip around the league, you can like feast on opposing teams and then the league catches up to you. And I wonder whether that effect is as pronounced now where you have all this information on guys on day one. And Vlad is obviously like in the spotlight for a while now and he's not your typical minor leaguer. But I think for most minor leaguers, even when they get to the big leagues,

the teams have the book on them already. Yeah, I think that that's right. And so, you know, it'll just be it'll be interesting to see. He is, as you noted, he is walking a fair amount. It'll be interesting to see how that number sort of shifts over time. I imagine there will come a point where they start actually throwing him strikes. But I think that the most useful one to remember out of all of this is Mike Trout because we can't make anything about anyone other than Mike Trout even when we're talking about Vlad.

And his WRC Plus was marginally better through his first 40 or so plate appearances, but only marginally. I think that what Craig had it at, it was like 52, something like that. And I think he's done fine. He's done all right. He's done okay. He's made good. Yeah. I wrote about Trout's rookie season, his 2011 rookie season a year or two ago, because I was sort of fascinated by how did Trout go from not actually being that good to then being the best player in baseball very shortly thereafter. And looking back on it, I think he was pretty good at the time. He had a low BABIP, I believe.

He was hitting in hard luck. I think I actually contacted a team and got some hit FX data, or at least they looked at his hit FX data for that year, which was not publicly available. And they said he was hitting the ball hard. So that's a little different in that Vlad just hasn't really been hitting the ball all that well, I don't think for the most part, but he's not seeing any strikes. Anyway, I think Trout was good from the get-go, but not otherworldly. And it's almost refreshing in a sense that like Vlad and Eloy Jimenez have not been spectacular

immediately. Not that I am rooting against them. I want them to be great. But those were two guys who, when I was doing my top 10 positional rankings for MLB Network this year, I think both I and Mike Petriello at least had those guys on our top 10s at one position or another, just as a reflection of how confident we were in them and in their minor league performance and in the projections of them.

And they've not been great. Just, you know, 21 games for Jimenez and then he got hurt. Vlad is 10 games, so it's nothing. But it almost feels like every hitter who comes up these days is just great right away, or at least that there's no aging curve. There's been some research that's shown that these days players just kind of come into the league and they're good right away. And then eventually they decline, but it's not really the standard kind of like get better

for a while and then get worse. And that's probably because teams are better at knowing when to promote players. They're better at developing players. All these players are really polished, but you can still struggle at times because the major leagues are still really hard. There's still a big gap between AAA and the majors, and that can be hard for even elite prospects to handle. Well, and I think that it's revealing of sort of how um biased we tend to be in our own brains to the sequencing of those slumps i mean craig made this point in his piece just about some established hitters and the sort of swoons that they've had over the last 14 days but you know if if lad had come up and he had lit the world on fire and then he had a random 10 games

in july where he was just kind of not you know he was just kind of off and things weren't working the way that he wanted to or he was having bad bad look or he's not getting thrown strikes we wouldn't notice that we just wouldn't notice or we we might but we wouldn't be it wouldn't raise any concern because i think we understand that while there are you know hit, hitters, some hitters are more consistent in their production than others. There is a fair amount of back and forth in terms of the quality of, um, a hitter's performance over the course of a season. You know, they can be pretty streaky and probably more streaky than we tend to, uh, realize or remember. So

it is sort of an interesting comment on how we, how we end up thinking about this stuff. It's like when we, you know, when we were talking with Sam, that, that thing that can happen where you see a guy for the first couple of weeks of a season and then stop paying attention to him. And that just remains your impression of him for the duration, even if, you know, he goes on to be wildly good or wildly bad afterward, you know? So Sam is going to think that Tim Beckham is amazing for the whole season and maybe he'll think that vlad is terrible but i think he will have more cause to check in on him than probably tim beckham so that might swing it but we should just remember these things these things ebb and flow he'll be fine yeah and speaking of players who are not

seeing strikes and are not swinging at non-strikes, Joey Gallo is one of the few hitters who is seeing fewer pitches in the strike zone than Vlad lately. And Joey Gallo has figured out not to swing at those pitches. And that is a wonderful development because now he is really good.

He has lowered his chase rate very significantly. It was usually in the 31-32% range in previous seasons Now it's down to 24% And he is really, really good And that seems to have made all the difference I mean, he's still striking out a lot He's Joey Gallo

But he's down to 33% instead of 36, 37%. And he's walking a ton. So he's walked 21% of the time so far. If Joey Gallo can lay off those pitches, which seems to be a conscious choice that he's made this year, he has this unbelievable power. And if he can pair that with walks, then it's okay if he also strikes out sometimes. And if he doesn't hit for that high in average, I mean, he's hitting 274 right now, which would be extremely high for him, but he doesn't even have to do that. He can hit 240 or something and 230 even if he's drawing walks and hitting for power. So this is exciting because he's one of the most fun hitters to watch and one of the hitters that I've been rooting for for years now. Well, and I'm so excited at this development because Gallo has been,

Gallo's one of those guys where like this profile of player doesn't exist in the majors prior to the modern moment, right? Like Joey Gallo can't find a job probably, at least on a consistent basis, you know, 30 years ago, right? Baseball has just changed in terms of the, the K percentage we're comfortable with, and the teams are comfortable with, and the trade-off they understand between that and power and what they're willing to field. And so he has always been really interesting for us, I think, as a barometer of the direction that the game is going. And now he's evolving that profile some. And so I'm just like so fascinated to see how long like the walk rate stays high. And does he sustain average throughout the whole year? Is this like a,

you know, I got asked about him in my chat too. And I expect that that'll, you know, it'll waver some because at some point people will adjust. But my goodness, it's so exciting to see that profile shift is like, you know, we're seeing the next phase of baseball evolution again in Jerry Gallo. Yes. I wrote about him for Grantland like five years ago now, and he was in the minors at the time. And the headline was the most interesting man in the minors because he really was like he didn't have any comps exactly at that point because he was striking out and also hitting for more power than just about any prospect had or at least the combination of those two things and so the question was which of these will win out will he be able to hit for enough power to overcome the

strikeouts or will the strikeouts overcome the power and will he be more adam dunn or will he be more dave kingman like can he be even better than that and of course he has more defensive value than those guys did he's a competent center fielder which is surprising not something you think when you think joey gallo but this refinement in his plate discipline could kind of answer that question and he's's still only 25 years old, and he's already hit 100 homers in his career. And as many people pointed out, I think he was, what, the first person to get to 100 homers before he got to 100 singles, I think. He's got 93 singles and 100 homers. So that's weird, but he's making it work. And still just the one sacrifice fly.

Yeah, right. Remains the best. Yeah, I mean, he's slugging 679. And the other thing I love about Gallo is that he's also a surprisingly competent base runner for a man his size. He's big. Yeah. also surprisingly competent base runner for a man his size like he's big yeah he's he is he is one of those baseball players where when you see them in person on flat ground you are taken aback by how big they are like he is in that aaron judge john carlos stanton range if not quite as physically

intimidating as those guys like he is in that ballpark where you're like wow that's a big human and he's a you know pretty good base runner so it's just uh it's just a really weird cool fun thing yeah one of the most fun exciting seasons so far and seems like sustainable like i don't know it's hard to assess sustainability because it's like if he keeps doing what he's doing then yeah he should be really good yeah but can he keep not swinging it at bad pitches i don't know but he has decided to and he is making that work and so now pitchers are not throwing him strikes and he's not swinging at them so he's walking a whole lot which is good and so maybe pitchers will adjust back and see okay he's not going to chase i will throw him balls in the strike zone but then he will hit them 450 feet because he's joey gallo so very very far

yeah so i don't know if there's a counter move that pitchers can make there he's taken away the big weapon that they had and now he has this extraordinary power i mean he could be a 50 dinger guy who walks a lot that That's a pretty valuable player, especially because he does have defensive value and base running value. So there aren't that many reasons to tune into the Rangers right now, but he is one of them. He's definitely one of them. He might be the only one. And I suppose the underperformance of, well, see, this is the thing. It's only been a month. And so I have to check in and make sure that my understanding is actually accurate and that it's not just the first two weeks of well i'd say the first two weeks of rangers baseball that i watched but that's uh not as much rangers

baseball as i watched that would be a lie it would not be that much i'm vamping so that i can run the leaderboard so their oh their offense is as a team is better than i thought it was it's still not amusing but it's it's better than average so never mind i was gonna say the rest of his lineup being bad might be their pitcher's best defense because you don't necessarily care if he walks but i guess they're hitting a little bit better than i thought they were maybe yeah it's still not great i don't know go hit a million dingers joey yeah do. It's nice when in this home run environment, it is very reassuring. Guys like Joey Gallo help to stabilize sort of the rationality of the game for me because it makes sense that Joey Gallo already has 12 home runs, right?

Joey Gallo doesn't need a juiced ball. He is not one of these guys that really you don't see an uptick in dingers with that profile because they're already sending it over the fence so it is it is a nice thing joey is is restoring my faith in baseball as a relatively rational enterprise so that's pretty impressive yeah like the other day when i watched the highlight of josh bell hitting a 472 foot home run into the river out of pnc park and i think he was the fourth player to hit one into the river on the fly. And when I watched that in the moment, my jaw dropped, and it was like, okay, that's an awe-inspiring home run.

And then after it splashed down, I thought, well, yeah, but the ball, and that probably went farther than it would have because the ball is carrying. That probably went farther than it would have because the ball is carrying. But it didn't in the moment ruin my enjoyment of just like the, wow, that's a dinger right there. So I don't know whether there comes a point where that kind of thing becomes so commonplace that it's no longer as earth-shaking when you first see it. And you kind of internalize, okay, this is how far baseballs go now. And so it's not as impressive that this went that far. But for me, it's still like a very visceral reaction. Like, wow, that was a bomb. And then after the fact, I think it wasn't quite as impressive as it seemed, but it was still really pretty. Yeah. I'm encouraged by, I'm just looking at the home run leaderboard and it is encouraging

how far down this list you have to go before you're like really taken aback by someone's presence there. I guess I don't really think of Eddie Rosario as a home run hitter, but that's maybe because I just don't think about Eddie Rosario that often. I guess he hit 27 home runs in 2017 and 24 last year. So shame on me. Bad job, Meg. up meg um but you know you have to go a little ways down here before you're really shocked by someone's presence which i think is a good thing because it you know it doesn't make you worry that the the game is broken although cattell martin has nine home runs that seems strange to me i watched cattell martin jeff sullivan favorite i know martin i'm like josh bell has nine home runs yeah won't you look at that josh bell has the same number of home runs as Paul Goldschmidt. That seems wrong. And more than Trevor Story. More than Manny Machado.

Do you like how me examining the leaderboards has become such a persistent theme of our podcast? Regular segment. And let me tell you about this thing I discovered the other day. People who watch these teams every day are like, don't you run Fangraphs? This is disconcerting. There's a lot going on, you guys. i can't keep up with every single guy sometimes i have to discover things on the fly yeah by the way you mentioned our pal james holtzauer earlier and uh dave scheinen has an article in the washington post about whether mlp teams would

actually hire him and boy they sound thirsty they want some some james holtzauer in their lives there's quotes here from multiple executives from billy bean from a red sox executive from an orioles executive they all want a piece of james holtzauer i can't pretend it's because he came on effectively wild but it probably didn't hurt no yeah they they want him i think he's gonna have his his pick of front office if he if he wants to go that way he did sound very content just being a professional sports better which you know again james i'm so sorry that i care so little about the thing that sustains you and your family but i super don't care but would think that working i don't know do you think it's more stressful to be a professional sports gambler or work in a major league front office? They both seem like they would have their moments of anxiety.

Yeah, probably. I'd like the lifestyle more of professional sports gambler, I think. Much more flexible. Yeah, that's true. That's right. I mean, you have to be used to wagering and losing large amounts of money, and you have to be confident that in the long run, it will come out ahead. So that probably is a significant source of stress unless you're so good at it and you've been doing it for a while and you know that it will play out in your favor. But yeah, I wouldn't love that.

All right. So Albert Pujols, he hit a home run, his 639th, and he got his 2000th career RBI. Congratulations to Albert Pujols. Good job. I was telling sam on the previous episode that i watched all of the angels game when shohi otani returned and how much fun i was having watching otani and simmons and trout i was not having as much fun watching pujols versus cabrera

in that game because it was an angels tigers game and like as much as i was enjoying trout and otani like poo holes and cabrera were like the reminder of one day what what everyone will be just because those guys were incredibly fun to watch and exciting and now they're sort of the opposite of that so that was sort of a sad like memento mori kind of just reminder of age and mortality. So I didn't enjoy that being in the same game. I guess it was a good dose of perspective. But yeah, Pujols obviously has been a shadow of his former self for some time now. Cabrera, I thought one of the most enlightening things in our team preview podcast series this year was when we did the Tigers interview with Anthony Fennec.

And he was talking about how Miguel Cabrera just really, really wants to hit for a high average. Like he takes a lot of pride in hitting 300, being a high average hitter. And Anthony was saying that he thinks Cabrera kind of prioritizes that over power, that he's opting for more of a contact approach. And that was interesting because Cabrera has recently blamed his teammates essentially for his lack of power. He blamed a lack of lineup protection. And he said, you know, it's not Victor Martinez back there anymore. It's not good hitters. It's like Nico Goodrum.

I don't think he specifically said Nico Goodrum. But that was the implication because Nico Goodrum's behind him a lot this year. And that can't have felt that great if you're Nico Goodrum. But, you know, right now Cabrera is hitting.303, but he is slugging.371 with obviously very little extra base power here and that translates to a 104 wrc plus which is you know league average which is not great if you're miguel cabrera and you're not giving your team any value in other ways but that is kind of an interesting alternative explanation for his kind of throwing his teammates under the bus and saying i'm not getting good pitches to hit could actually be that he's just prioritizing contact because he cares about hitting for high averages.

And so I wonder if he were to adopt a more power-centric approach and just say, I'm okay with hitting 260 or something, whether he would then get more power and whether that would work out for him and the Tigers overall. But yeah, he's obviously not the same guy. No, he is not the same guy. He is, well, he has the lowest slugging he's had of his whole career right now. Just the least amount of daylight between any of those slash stats. That's not great. He also has the highest BABIP of those slash stats that's not great he also has the highest babbitt of his career that's fantastic yeah i don't know i'm trying to adopt a perspective on

guys who are sort of in that stage of their careers where i'm i'm being more forgiving of those kind of grumpy quotes because as grumpy as they make me, he has to feel worse every day when he goes to work. But that isn't a great explanation of why he's hitting the way that he is. So I think that you might be right that the prioritization of contact is probably the overarching theme there. Yeah. He's actually not seeing fewer pitches in the strike zone than he has historically. His zone rate this year is like almost identical to his career zone rate. So that doesn't really support that. I mean, the whole topic of lineup protection is a fraught one in sabermetric circles, because I think what most of the studies have shown is that lineup protection is real in the sense that it can affect how you're pitched and it can affect the shape of your stats, but it doesn't tend to affect your overall production. So someone who doesn't have lineup protection may actually see fewer pitches to hit and may walk more as a result. But if you

walk more and you hit a few fewer balls, then you work out to be just as productive as you would have been anyway so it's not implausible that he could be seeing fewer pitches to hit because of this lineup and therefore that could be costing in power but it doesn't really seem like he's seeing many fewer pitches to hit and if he does have a preference for hitting for high averages then maybe that has more to do with it but yeah that's that's kind of a grumpy quote to say because you're criticizing your teammates who are mostly young and know they're not Miguel Cabrera, but then neither is Miguel Cabrera anymore. Miggy hasn't been Miggy in a minute. Yeah, I imagine you start to shift to think about your legacy.

And, you know, he probably, I guess the most disconcerting thing for Miguel Cabrera to contemplate is that probably no one's going to remember this tiger season really at all. And if they do, wow, that's a rough thing to say about a bunch of humans who are trying their best. But, you know, if they do, they're probably going to think about it in terms of like the revelation that Matt Boyd has been so far. And he would have to be quite resurgent, I think, to factor heavily into the national sort of discourse around baseball. Although if he were suddenly hitting like his old self, you know, we would definitely talk about that because he, I think that Miggy is probably one of, has been one of my favorite when he was, you know, himself, his old self was one was one of my favorite pure hitters to watch.

But yeah, it's like, Miggy, you should be less grumpy or you should be a lot more grumpy than you are. Don't occupy the middle grump space that you're occupying. Either decide to rally the young ones. Because Squidroom at least had a good start to the season. It seems like he's tapered off a little bit. I would bore people with my exploration of his game log, but I'll save that for another time.

But, you know, like you should either buck up the young guys or just go like real, real full grump. Go full grump. Don't be in the middle, especially with an explanation that doesn't hold water like this because it doesn't really. Right. And he's not the

most likable player there is just given some of his off the field history but he was one of the fun and satisfying hitters to watch of my lifetime and fandom so yeah it is uh sort of a shame that we don't have that pleasure to the same extent anymore and yeah yeah, I mean, the Pujols-Cabrera parallels in terms of contract and career trajectory are very clear. I don't like, I feel sad for you that you had to think those thoughts while Otani and Trout were on the field at the same time because I want them to be good forever. Now I'm thinking about my niece

who will probably grow up and like, you know, Mike Trout, who knows? She's three by the time she's like really aware of baseball. Who you know Mike Trout who knows she's three by the time she's like really aware of baseball who knows what Mike Trout will be this is terrible why did we do this oh no normally I'm the one with really sad thoughts about baseball

I guess it was your turn yeah do we have any happier thoughts to end on well Chris Paddock remains very good and fun so we should be excited about that. The Rockies played through a snowstorm, which allowed for some really stunning visuals. And I finally saw Endgame.

Do we want to answer that listener email as our last thing? Was the question about what would happen if everyone came back? Yeah, so I finally saw Endgame, and my quick review is that I liked it a lot but it was very long but other than that it was delightful and i enjoyed it but we got i'm going to find this email which i starred thanos and the mets from drew who asked about the post-end game mlb impact

and uh wondered and so if you have not if you're one of four people on the planet who has not yet seen this movie, you should just skip this part. But after all players suddenly return after five years, are they still under contract? That I don't know. Will there be a special draft for all the returned players? I guess my question is, I don't know that baseball, I don't know that there could be baseball.

I think that the infrastructure and sort of the interest and the new influx of players that you would need, I think that maybe if you take a five-year layoff, I think that maybe baseball does not recover at all. Well, I think that could be true. I think on the Ringer MLB show, Bauman and I talked about whether baseball actually would stop in the event of the snap and of 50% of people disappearing or whether people would want to play on just to have a distraction from that tragedy and whether baseball could sustain itself. And we tended to think that some form of professional baseball would survive. So I dispute the premise that the movie presents, which is that baseball disappears along with half of the life in the universe. But if we assume that it does, then after that five-year layoff, it might be tough to bring it back.

But I don't know. Wouldn't you want to just for nostalgia's sake and to show that the world has returned to normality? Well, plus I guess the real question is, and I guess we have the answer to this. It's not just that Paul Rudd never ages. You know, they're all the same. They're the same age they were when the snap happened so you would get this like healthy influx depending i guess on who was affected by the snap but like you might just get prime

mike trout back and you'd be like hey guys and he's gonna play baseball no matter what because what else is mike trout gonna do except be excited about the weather so i guess you could but i would imagine you had probably contraction of the league in the snap years and then you would so in that case you probably would need to have a draft because some players would have aged and five years is enough for some guys to just be done and other guys maybe aren't uh staying in as good a baseball shape or they're playing in a contracted league so the quality of play isn't as good and uh i think front offices would there would stop being i would imagine a ton of development of of new ideas or maybe they wouldn't be as good because you have fewer people who knows yeah there'd definitely be some players like thor who were no longer in the best shape of their lives so you'd have to come back from that i loved fat thor fat

thor was the best part of endgame and i love that he stayed fat i love that they have changed that character to embrace chris hemsworth's lovability yeah and being funny because he's funny yeah made it a lot better yeah but yeah i think that uh it would be very interesting to see i wonder who the snap would take from fan graphs oh no okay now i don't want to think about it anymore because that would bum me out but i think that there would still be i guess i've been persuaded that there would still be baseball i think that we would have a couple of really weird seasons as we got back to some kind of normal uh equilibrium of baseball and player development. And who knows if young people would want to keep playing baseball in those five years.

So as you said, maybe you do it to maintain a sense of normality. I don't know. Life did continue, although everyone seemed very sad. Yeah. There'd probably be no White House visits at least. So that'd be the one positive. I have a very snarky comment that I will keep to myself. All right.

So I guess we can call it there. I was going to bring up the Nationals and their struggles, but we wanted to end on a happy note. So that would be the opposite of that. But I encourage you all to go read Jay Jaffe's piece about how the Nationals are very bad at defense and how that team, work in that front office and who like who like that Cleveland team. So sorry, guys, but Dan is not super optimistic for you. the park home run would count toward a true win and we both agreed that it should but also that that would be extremely unlikely i wondered aloud when the last time a pitcher had hit an inside the park home run was well thanks to my ringer colleague and former effectively wild guest and co-host zach cram for doing some adept play indexing and deriving an answer as it turns out there have been only two inside the park home runs by pitchers in the DH era 1979, Joaquin Andahar off Bill Lee And 1992, May 8th, Butch Henry hit an inside the park home run off of Doug Drabeck And this was actually a Barry Bonds misplay

Bonds dove and misjudged a ball And Henry motored all the way around the bases to score Zach also found a video of this on YouTube, which I will link to for your enjoyment So thank you for answering that question, Zach Oh, and by the way, Joey Gallo, because he is walking a ton now in addition to striking out and hitting lots of homers, his three true outcomes percentage, so the percentage of his plate appearances that end with a walk, strikeout, or homer, 63.2%. For reference, the major league average this year, which of course is a record high, is 35.6%. So he's beaten that by almost 30 percentage

points. Next closest qualified hitter is Bryce Harper at 50.9%. So of the 178 hitters who've qualified for the batting title thus far, Harper and Gallo are the only two with TTO rates over 50%. And Gallo is so far above Harper that he's hardly the same species. If you're curious, the highest ever full season TTO rate for a hitter who qualified for the batting title is Joey Gallo in 2017 at 58.7%, which narrowly edged out 2007 Jack Cust and 2017 Aaron Judge. So Gallo already holds this record, but he is extending it by a considerable margin right now. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and keep the podcast going. Andy Kleinberg, Rick Gold, Jay Augsburger, Brian Langford, and Ed Pinojic. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and other podcast platforms reviews and ratings do help us and are appreciated you can email us send us your questions or comments at podcast at fangraphs.com

or via the patreon messaging system if you're a supporter thanks to dylan higgins for his editing assistance you can pre-order my book the mvp machine which is the story of the recent revolution in player development in baseball it comes out on june 4th which is very soon if you pre-order my book, The MVP Machine, which is the story of the recent revolution in player development in baseball. It comes out on June 4th, which is very soon. If you pre-order it, you can qualify for pre-order goodies, a bonus chapter, a conversation about the book between me and Travis Sawchuk, my co-author, and some additional documents that you won't want to miss. So please just send a photo or a screenshot of your receipt or forward your pre-order confirmation to themvpmachine at gmail.com and you will get those goodies on june 4th we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you next week the same reason you can't stand that virtual words the same reason you know it word for word dog is politics Outro Music