Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1375: The “Is This Guy Good?” Game

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about inside-the-park homers versus over-the-fence homers, the gratifying rise of home-run robberies, and the unique career of Edwin Jackson (who’s about to have played for the most-ever MLB teams and with the most-ever MLB teammates), then discuss the convergence of starting pitching and relief pitching and play a game […]

Would you rather be with him? Would you reconsider and come running back to me? Have you been making out okay? Have you been making out okay? Have you been making out okay Oh no, you've been making out okay along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. You didn't say what the name of this baseball podcast from Fedgrass was. Wait, what? It's a mystery.

No, come on. I did. You just said the baseball podcast from Fedgrass. You're kidding. No, I'm pretty sure. Good morning and welcome to the... I didn't say good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild? No.

You're kidding. Mystery podcast. Oh, my goodness. Effectively Wild is the name of the show. That's right. Weird. Hello. How are you?

I'm doing well. I was talking to some East Meadow Crew members in the past week. You're like an honorary member of the East Meadow Crew at this point. They, of course, are responsible for the true win, but I got my mind blown, Ben. I was introduced by another part of East Meadow Crew canon, which is that Andy, one of them, Andy has long argued that inside the park home runs should not be called home runs because they're so different. They're really just an extended triple. Like play does not stop. You aren't allowed to trot gracefully around the bases at whatever leisure you choose.

you aren't allowed to trot gracefully around the bases at whatever leisure you choose that it's a it's a it is in fact an entirely different act in a lot of ways than the home run that we all know and love that goes over the that goes over the wall and introduces a whole new set of protocols and so uh andy's view is that it should be called a quadruple uh and i can't argue uh the only the only thing i can't argue actually the one reason I can't argue is that you are running for home inside the park home run. It makes sense to have a home run be that one. It makes less sense to have a home run be the one that goes over the wall. It feels like that should maybe not be called a home run. It should be called a four bagger because as soon as you hit it, you get four bags or something of that sort, right?

Like a round tripper makes sense well i guess uh not exactly if you think of a round tripper as the ball the the ball that you hit being the round tripper then it makes sense if you think about it being the the trip that you make then that's no different than an inside the parker so i don't know but i do sort of agree that there's uh there's something so fundamentally different about the two processes that it's weird to call them the same name. It's also weird to credit players with the same stat because one does not necessarily tell you what kind of hitter is if the other is what you think of that being, right? If a guy has six home runs and they're all inside the parkers, you would not think, ah, that's a power hitter. Yeah, but the purpose of a counting

stat is not necessarily to tell you something about that hitter it's just to tell you about that play right and inside the park home run has the same result you get to circle the bases you drive in everyone who's on the bases you yourself score has the same value so i would say that for analytical purposes it's sort of strange that it's the same but it's the same as like a swinging strikeout and a looking strikeout both being strikeouts right either way three strikes and you got to go back to the dugout yes but maybe no i mean a double is the same as a walk into stolen base but it helps to to break those out into two different things even though the end result

is the same i mean we don't we don't we could take and take into the extreme we could simply credit the batter with how many bases he ends up circling before he scores or the inning is over and credit that to him but we don't because there's the the the stats are supposed to capture as much as as i think the point of the stats are to capture with as much detail as possible what happened in as few columns as necessary to know what happened. You want to have as much information as you can while simultaneously taking up as little space as you can. And so the question is whether the benefits of concision here outweigh the cost of precision. Yeah, I don't mind it. I think that as your example of the double and the walk and the steal, I mean, you're sort of conflating base running stats and batting stats there. They're both

offense, so you could lump them together, but I think you'd lose some valuable information there. And I guess you do with an inside the park home run, but at this point it comes around so rarely. In an earlier part of baseball history, inside the park home runs were the more common ones. I assume, I don't know exactly what the percentage was in early baseball history before people... At a certain point, all of them, right? I mean, I presume that there was a point in baseball when the home run was named where there probably were no fences. Maybe, yeah, at least in some places. I don't know if Major League Baseball ever had a year without any over-the-fence home runs. I would assume there were some. But yeah, obviously the percentage has flipped there. But I don't mind it just in terms of recording what happened, which is that the batter drove himself in and everyone else has the same value. So I'm okay with it.

I'm not ready to be yet. I'm still thinking about it. So we're going to, later in the show, maybe immediately, but certainly later in the show, I would like to talk about relievers and bullpens, and then I'm going to make you extremely unhappy for the last, last oh half of this show or so no predictions not exactly um so but before we get to that do you have any banter

yeah a couple things on the subject of home runs i've just written something about home run robberies because we're kind of living in a golden age of home run robberies, which I had not really made that connection until recently. But I know that you are not a big fan of home runs as highlights. You just don't think they're that entertaining. You don't want to watch home runs because there's not that much suspense and you kind of see it and we've seen it a million times and the ball just goes over the fence and there's no fielding play involved usually. But, of course, home run robberies are extremely exciting.

Maybe the best kind of highlight, one of the best kind of highlights, because you're taking something where you're almost sure that you know the outcome and it's a home run. And then the exact opposite is happening at the very last second. And it's, I think, probably baseball's most breathtaking play, the home run robbery. I mean, not all of them. There are some where it almost doesn't look that difficult. Maybe it's a short fence and the outfielder just times it right. And he's kind of playing deep anyway and doesn't have to go that far.

But, you know, like the Jackie Bradley Jr. type home run robbery from last week, that's about as good as a baseball play gets. junior type home run robbery from last week. That's about as good as a baseball play gets. And as we speak, entering play on Monday, we've had 20 home run robberies in 2019, which is a lot. You may not know just instinctively how many home run robberies is a lot. But for instance, in some low home run seasons like 2008, 2014, there were like 31, 33 home run robberies all season, and we're up to 20 already this year. And this is not a one year small sample blip. Last year, there were 65, which was a record since Sports Info Solutions started tracking this in 2004. The year before that, 2017, was a record also at the time, 60. And basically right now, this season,

we're at about 30 games per home run robbery. And if you look at, say, the 10 years from 2005 to 2014, taking us right up through the end of the low homer era before the recent explosion, it was about twice as rare. It was like 60 games per home run robbery back then. So it's not really something you can tune in expecting to see. If you watched every single game in a 15-game day, you'd have to watch two full days of baseball to see one on average, even this year. But it's something that I haven't really factored in when talking about whether home runs are exciting and whether this current brand of baseball is exciting and whether we've cheapened the value of the home run because there are so

many well it also means there are many more home run robberies and not enough so that you get sick of them or that they're not so special but enough that you get to see them a little more regularly and over this period 2004 to 2019 that this has been tracked there's a 0.82 correlation between home runs per game and home run robberies per game so basically when there are a lot of homers being hit there are also a lot of homers being robbed and so we're seeing more than ever you are right that it is not something that you would notice if you were just watching baseball but because home run robberies every single one of them rises to the level of highlight, rises to the level of getting your attention in some way. This actually was something that I, when we were having our conversation about noticing things and would you notice and over noticing, around that time I

thought, I'm noticing a lot of home run robberies. And I thought about adding it to the list. And then almost right away, Matt Trueblood actually wrote about this in his newsletter, the Penning Bowl newsletter. And he had a good observation in here, which is that not only are there a lot more fly balls being hit and fly balls that go home run distance, giving more opportunities for home run robberies, but that, I'm going to read this paragraph, it shouldn't surprise anyone then to know that the average starting position of the league's center fielders has gotten deeper every season since 2015 from 312 feet that year all the way to 321 feet this year the same applies for

corner outfielders as batters hit it further and poke fewer ground balls to the infield outfielders have every incentive to play deeper and try to catch everything that goes over their head while staying in the park so outfielders are also playing to play deeper and try to catch everything that goes over their head while staying in the park. So outfielders are also playing closer to robbery territory, which I think is good and makes it more possible. Yeah, yeah, I think it's partly positioning and I think it's largely home runs and fly balls being more common and air balls being more common. The average distance of a ball that becomes a robbed homer is 376 feet. Obviously, that varies by outfield position, but I think that's kind of the range where a lot of fly balls are being hit and line drives are being hit these days. So it's nice. And this was also something I just noticed because there was a day last week when there were a few home run robberies in a row.

I think there were maybe three in one night at least. And I made this connection, which I probably should have made sooner, but didn't. But yeah, these are, I think, the most exciting plays in baseball. And we get them often enough that we get to see them more often, but not so much more often that it spoils the fun. So I think this is an underrated aspect of the peak home run era. I agree wholeheartedly. And in fact, toward the end of 2017, I wrote a case, an argument that the best play in baseball, the most exciting sort of common play in baseball is no longer the home run, but is in fact the deep fly out.

baseball is no longer the home run, but is in fact the deep fly out. Because when you see the ball hit, when you see the ball leave your screen for the first time, and then you hear the crowd noise immediately, the expectation in a high home run era has become, ah, that's gone. You just now no longer think, will it get out? You think that's out they're all out everything's out so the now the subversion is actually the subversion of expectations is actually when the ball stays in right and i just anytime i see an outfielder going back on a ball these days i think i think gone and when he stops four feet in front of the warning track i mean in front of the wall on the warning track that is now a surprise to me every time. And I'm always like, ah, that's just as significant as a home run. A non-home run is just as significant as a home run. So I love deep fly outs and home run

robberies are the perfect deep fly out, the latest that your expectations can be subverted. I agree with you that some home run robberies are obviously not as equal to the Romon Laureano type home run robberies. And I also would say that there is home run robbery inflation. Not all home run robbery highlights depict home runs being robbed. And I believe that not all home runs tallied, just in my opinion, were on their way out of the park. Now, that might not be true this year, but I believe that in the past I have seen home run robberies that would have, in my opinion, come up short. So there is a little bit of inflation, but that's just because we like them.

And why not inflate? We all like it more when we think it was going to be a home run. And so, you know, you're telling a better story. Yeah, I agree with that. I don't know actually whether BIS or SIS's data overcounts them, but I do know that when I sometimes see highlights that purport to be of home run robberies, they are not always. It doesn't seem like they are. It depends on what angle you're looking at, because sometimes there's an angle that conclusively

demonstrates that, yes, that ball was definitely headed over the fence, if not for the glove. But there are other times where it can look like that from one angle, but then there's another angle and you see that, oh, no, it was probably going to hit the top of the wall. Yeah. But sometimes it gets passed off as a robbery anyway. I'm probably, I would say that in my life, I have seen maybe 25 highlights that were described as home run robberies that were not or maybe maybe 12 and a half maybe i'm over i'm exaggerating by by 100 so maybe 12 and a half and i can only think of one that i saw that i thought that was mistagged and i just want to have a a healthy amount of skepticism of that but that is the uh anomaly that i'm recounting so anyway yeah home run robberies. Yeah.

Yeah. One other thing I wanted to mention, Edwin Jackson was just traded or I guess technically purchased by the Toronto Blue Jays. Always a weird transaction type to say that a person was purchased. So I'd prefer to say that he was traded for money to the Toronto Blue Jays from the A's and he has not pitched in the major leagues yet this year, but he is probably about to in Toronto because their rotation has been thinned. They need some help, and where do you go when you need rotation help? Of course, you go to Edwin Jackson, as many, many teams have before. If he does make his debut for the Blue Jays, that will be his

14th major league team, and that will be a record. He is currently tied with Octavio Dottel with 13 teams played for, so he's about to be the all-time leader, and I wonder what it is you think about Edwin Jackson that made him likely to be the all-time leader, unless it's just a pure randomness and fate dictated that he would happen to be picked up and dropped and disposable or is it something about him in particular that allowed him to break this record huh well i mean it certainly helps that he debuted when he was 19 and you know that that gives you a few by the, for instance, by the time he hit, this is part of the hand-waving of the answer,

but by the time he hit free agency, he was probably 27 and had played for six teams already. And I mean, a lot of guys, when they're 27, they haven't even reached arbitration yet. He only played for two teams in his first five, in his first six years in baseball. But they were all, the first four were all partial years. He was very young and so on and so forth. So that by the time he was 25, he was playing for his third team.

He was in arbitration. He was in that sort of trade zone far earlier than anybody else generally gets traded there's the fact that he for a long time was sort of seen as more exciting than good i guess is a way of putting it like there was always a a feeling that like there might be another gear there he was a a highly touted prospect. He had glimpses of brilliance. He threw hard. And anytime you have a combination of throws hard and results aren't there,

it's like pitching coaches all think, ah, well, I can fix that. And so that probably helps. As to why in the later stages, though, why he would be, I mean, I don't know. Is it as simple as he he will go where james shields will not maybe maybe it's yeah yeah as far as like picking up and going as far as you know being out there and bring training trying to get you know a team to sign him whereas

uh another pitcher might just say i mean i don't really need this uh so if it's easy then i'll do it and if it's not then i'll stay home could be it could be that it's i don't know there he has sometimes been good even in these years when he has largely been bad uh which helps he's got you know he's not the thing about edwin jackson isn't it's not like every team regrets it by any means he's he's you know he's a he's a good tiger like if you're a tigers fan and you're naming good tigers he's a good tiger which makes sense he was 25 when he was a tiger but like he was also a good white socks player pitcher white sock he's a like he goes down in white socks lore is a good white socks and a good cardinal and he was a good brave and he was a i was gonna say cub but not really and he was a good a and so like you know you're flipping coin the gods flip a coin whenever edwin

jackson signs a new deal and about half the time it works out well and about half the time it doesn't and that's i guess how you end up signing with a lot of different teams yeah but i don't know i mean that doesn't really answer the question we have not explained why he's setting a new record which by the way if you'd had me answer the edwin jackson sporkle yesterday or a week ago naming his 13 teams a million percent chance i would have said blue jays before i said yeah a couple of before i said braves before i said marlins before i said blue jays before i said yeah a couple of before i said braves before i said marlins before i said orioles before i said diamondbacks even when he threw 134 innings with the diamondbacks that is partly because he was a blue jay for a minute okay he didn't pitch for

him though he was it was like a it was a transaction it was he was the three-team deal with the Cardinals and the Blue Jays and the White Sox. But it wasn't really a three-team deal. It was technically two separate deals. And so technically the White Sox traded him to the Blue Jays. And then later in the day, the Blue Jays traded him to the Cardinals. And I have lumped that deal together in my mind as he was a Blue Jay. He's only 35, so he could continue to add to his record. I kind of hope he gets to 15.

Oh, 15 is all. I hope he gets to 30. He's only 34. 35. Okay, 35 this year. So two teams a year for seven more years gets you to like 28. I don't know if he's good enough to be attractive to teams for that much longer i think he was very attractive to teams early in his career because he was a top

prospect he was one of the top prospects in baseball perhaps the top pitching prospect i don't know he was the number four overall prospect in 2004 according to baseball america don't know who was ahead of him but he was on that list for three years. And then because the results weren't there, and because, as you said, he did throw hard, a lot of people could look at that former prospect status and say, oh, we'll pick him up and maybe he'll break out for us. And this will be where he fulfills that promise. And he never really did, except for short bursts. He had the one all-star season with the Tigers in 2009, but for the most part, he's been mediocre, but good enough that almost any team could use him at any one time. So he's got like a 91 career ERA plus. He's a below average starting pitcher, but every team,

almost every team needs a below average starting pitcher at some point during the season. Every team, almost every team needs a below average starting pitcher at some point during the season. And yet, if you have him, you're not going to hold on to him too tightly. So if someone comes along and says, I need Edwin Jackson, most of the time you're going to be pretty willing to give him up just as that team is going to be willing to acquire him. So I think he's sort of in this sweet spot where he is both expendable and desirable. And he is a former top prospect he's had good stuff he's obviously played in a 30 team era when there's a lot of player movement which makes it easier to set this sort of record but it's a special sort of career i don't know whether it's a fun career a good career whether if we talk to him he would tell us that he wishes he had played for one team the whole time

or whether maybe he likes this. He likes being an itinerant starting pitcher who just gets to go new places and pitch in new ballparks and make new fans and have new teammates. So perhaps there's something to be said for this. It wouldn't be my favorite type of career personally but i could see why it would at least be interesting never gets stuck in his ways he never probably really gets tired of where he is because he's never been there that long one of the variables that uh is at play for edwin jackson that i might have said would have been a bad trait for this type of record but has maybe arguably turned out to be what has made it possible, is that surprisingly, he has not really ever converted to relief.

You would think he had one year where he was used exclusively as a reliever for the Cubs and the Braves. And then he had basically a very short stint with the Marlins and an even shorter stint, an extremely short stint with the Orioles where he worked out of the bullpen. But otherwise, he's been a starter this whole time and you would have thought like if you were talking about 29 year old Edwin Jackson who that year was 8 and 18 with the Cubs had an ERA plus of 78 and was 29 okay so if you'd said uh well Edwin Jackson's already played for eight teams or

whatever it is at that point uh what would it take to get him to a record 14 teams? You'd say, well, probably he'd convert to relief, find a new gear, be a pretty good right-handed reliever, and then sign one-year deals everywhere. But he didn't do that. And it strangely has made him more, he has never become the former mediocre starter turned dominant reliever that is a baseball archetype these days but he has in a way been rare mid-season like when you're in the middle of the season and you need a new reliever there's like a thousand options available from every direction but if you need a competent starter who can actually you know jump in right away and you

don't have one at triple a there aren't a lot of those guys out there and edwin jackson has maintained his status as that guy arguably i mean it depends how where you're setting the bar for acceptable starter not all years has he probably been above that bar but that's what presumably got him signed by the a's last year that's what presumably got him signed by the Blue Jays this year. It wasn't that they needed another reliever to add to their eight relievers. It was that you simply, unless you're going to bullpen it, you simply need five starters and it can be hard to find five starters. Yeah. One other thing I should say, this makes history in another way, which is perhaps not that surprising, but on episode 1288, I answered a question from someone who wanted to know. Actually, I think it was Eric Hartman wanted to know who has had the most ever teammates. And Dan Hirsch looked this up for me. You can't totally answer this question with complete satisfaction because it's hard for former years to tell like who was on the roster on any given day. So the way he did it was just to look at, you know, add up all the

total teammates on teams that you played for in the year that you played for that team. So maybe you didn't overlap at any one time with everyone who played for that team in that year, but close enough. So he added that up. This was last October. And at the time, Terry Mulholland was on the top of the list. He played for 11 teams over 20 years and had 791 teammates by this definition. And Edwin Jackson was second on the list with 763. So he was only 28 teammates behind Mulholland. And if Edwin Jackson adds the 2019 Blue Jays to his list, then that will get him over the hump. That will put him number one in the list of most ever teammates, which is kind of a cool distinction. If I just told you that someone had the most

teammates ever, would you assume that he was a bad teammate or a good teammate or a bad clubhouse guy or a good clubhouse guy? I have no idea whether Edwin Jackson is viewed one way or another, but does a lot of movement from team to team tell you, oh, they don't want to be around this guy. They like him maybe in the abstract more than they like him in person. And once he shows up, they can't wait to get rid of him. Or is it more that you hear that this guy's a good guy and so you're happy to bring him into any clubhouse, any team, because he's always a good fit? A thousand percent the latter. I i mean i think the key here is that we're talking about a player on 14 teams i i think if you're talking about a player on four teams five teams then you could go either way but once you get to a certain point then then you're

you're definitely the latter you're a guy that when you're sitting around going well there's nine million equally you know indistinct options out there kind of i mean i just i just argued that edwin jackson is unique and so but you know what i mean like nobody out there's gonna is gonna come in and pitch like a cy young you've got you you reach the point where i know that major league baseball is not like the stompers but where you the conversation is do you know a guy? Like, who do you know? Who do we know? And I think that being picked up over and over again like this, that I don't think that someone is looking at a list of players running projections on all these out of baseball or AAA guys and saying, who's got the.246 projected war instead of 2.245 projected war. I think

everybody at that point projects to be like a replacement level and you go who do we like? Who do we want? Who do we know? Who's somebody vouching for? Who's the veteran in the clubhouse vouching for? Who's the pitching coach vouching for? Who's the GM vouching for? I think that all suggests a guy that is pleasant to be around. And beyond that, I just don't think you can go to 14 teams without getting better at being a clubhouse guy. I think it's a skill that you would build up with each transition. And so even if somehow maybe Edwin Jackson was not clubhouse superstar at Team 7. By Team 14, I just think he's got those muscles.

Yeah, and if he were not a good guy or a good enough guy, he would have run out of chances by now. All right, I think I'm done with banter, so we can transition to the part that I'm not going to like. Oh, you're not going to? The first part you're going to be fine with. Okay. Oh, you're not going to, the first part you're going to be fine with.

Okay. So I wanted to just a little bit talk about relief pitching this year as it's been. We talked early in the season about how relievers were being outpitched in the aggregate by starters for the first time in modern bullpen history and wondered whether that would be true. time in modern bullpen history and wondered whether that would be true. And at the moment, and Rob Arthur then also wrote about this well at Baseball Perspectives in late April. So that's worth reading as well. At the moment, things have tightened as we might have expected. But currently, relievers have allowed a 4.31 ERA. Starters have allowed a 4.29 ERA. So starters are still lower than relievers. That has, again, never happened in the post, say, La Russa era. And it's generally,

relievers are generally about 8 or so percent better. And I don't think that they've ever been any less than 3% better. And that 3% better was last year. So while we are seeing some regression, I would guess that since you and I had the conversation, relievers have outpitched starters because they've closed the gap so much. But in the large sample of, you know, 6,000 innings in one group and 4,500 innings in the other group, it is still about about the same. Now, I will point out that by ERA measures, there are three kind of ways that starters have an advantage over relievers one and by advantage, I mean, their ERA, their pitching. Let me put it this way. If starters

and relievers pitched exactly the same starters would probably end up with a higher era than relievers for three reasons one is that if a starter pitches a partial inning and say allows two base runners those two base runners by definition came at the beginning of an inning and are more likely to score whereas if a reliever pitches a partial inning perhaps relieving a starter and gives up two base runners those those base runners are coming in the later part of an inning and are more likely to be stranded, not because the pitcher pitched any better, but because they came quite possibly with outs already on the board. So that's one way that more of starters' base runners are going to score minimally,

but that's out there. Another slight factor is that if a reliever doesn't have it one day it's possible that he will be bailed out by a walk-off victory which will leave more runners on base that might have scored uh had the inning been allowed to continue but will instead be counted as stranded um again minimal but it's a small factor the third one is that for some, I don't know if this is this year exclusively or if this is always the case for some reason or another, but starters have allowed, oh, well, I guess this one goes the other way. Let me think. I can't remember. Maybe all these go the other way. I don't remember which argument I was making here. Starters have allowed more unearned runs this year, which actually goes the other way, isn't it more of starter a higher percentage of runs that starters

allow have been unearned yes so if so if starters and relievers pitched exactly equally but more of starters runs were unearned then starters would have the better era oh so that cancels out that cancels out doesn't it okay yeah all right good so then we don't have to worry about this they all cancel out exactly equally uh so starters and relievers are basically equal so i was thinking about what it's like to be to have a carpool lane you don't have carpool lanes because you don't drive but the way a carpool lane works is if you're if you've got multiple people in your car you can go into the carpool lane and it goes faster and so if you're carpooling you hop intopool lane and it goes faster. And so if you're carpooling, you hop into that lane and that can save you a lot of time. And the question of whether it can ever cost you time, well, for

the most part, it can't because if it's ever going for some reason slower, if the carpool lane is more crowded than the other lanes, well, everybody who's in the carpool lane can hop over to the non-carpool lane and so at worst you should reach equilibrium right at the very worst the carpool lane could be going as slow as the others that happens all the time that's very common carpool lane and non-carpool lane going the same and also carpool lane going much faster than the others that happens all the time but carpool lane going slower than the others should basically never happen right and so in the same in in rob arthur's piece he has a sentence that says there's no logical reason that relievers should pitch worse than starters and so that would be like the carpool idea that if if relievers start pitching worse than starters, then teams could always go back to

giving more innings to their starters. And then at the very worst, it should be 50-50. And maybe that's what we have found. Maybe we have reached the point where the carpool lane is equally crowded. And so you're just going to have it be identical. But I don't think that's quite true. I think there is a logical reason that relievers could pitch worse than starters. And it's that this mode of pitching that teams use now is not exclusively about getting more relievers into the game, which is the main reason that teams do it. Relievers are all really good, and more innings to relievers is better than more innings to starters. is better than more innings to starters. But the other benefit of it is that it has made starters much better potentially. It has turned a bunch of starters who were throwing 240 innings a year

with an ERA of 3.7 now can throw 200 innings a year with an ERA of 2.9 because they're not facing the lineup as many times, they're not getting tired, they're not getting hurt as much. And so theoretically, you could have a situation

where relievers look worse than starters but if you were to give more innings to starters then starters would look worse than relievers and in the aggregate you would have more runs allowed does that make sense to you ben i think so okay i think so too but i'm not totally sure anyway the point is that we are still seeing this thing that we thought we were seeing now a few more things though that are relevant to this there have actually not been more innings thrown by relievers this year than there were last year exactly there have been basically the same share of innings going to relievers this year as last year it's up like tiny tiny tiny from 40.0 percent to 40.2

but that's that's basically the same i don't think that's a seasonal thing april and september are the two years when relievers get higher shares of innings than starters do but so it'll go down a little bit but then it'll go back up a little bit my eyeballing was that this is probably pretty consistent with what we're going to see for the whole year. So there's that. The other thing is that pitchers per game has actually dropped slightly this year from 4.36 per game last year to 4.31 this year. So the trend toward using more relievers has seemingly stalled this year. So we might have reached max reliever roll, or at least maybe hit a pause, because I think max reliever role is going to be there are no starters, and they're all relievers.

And that's going to be sometime between now and 75 years from now. But it doesn't seem like it's still accelerating right now. However, what has happened this year is that more different relievers are pitching than there were last year. So the total workload for relievers is basically the same as it was last year. However, through teams first 37 games this year, or for maybe through 38, every team has played at least 38 games, except for the Pirates have played 37. So I think I went through 38 games. There have been 413 different pitchers this year that threw at least one relief appearance, 413. That's up from 370 last year. So more than 10% more humans have been called into games as relievers to get the same number of innings this year. And that was a record

last year. That was 25 more relievers than had been used through the same point in 2017, which was more than had been used at the same point in 2016. And compared to 2010, so just 10 years ago, the same very decade, there were 130 fewer pitchers used through this point in the season in 2010 than there are this year so almost 50 percent more pitchers yeah are taking the workload and so you could say that that is because relievers are bad and that teams are going to more relievers because the relievers they have have not been pitching well and that that's the exact same that that's actually maybe the effect of relievers being bad. Or you could say that it's stretching the pitching ranks thinner by having teams do this, either through roster shenanigans or whatever reason that they're going to more pitchers, and that that is the cause of relievers being bad this year. I'm not sure which way it would go, but there are a lot more pitchers. The other thing is that, as you noted, go um but there are a lot more pitchers the other thing is that as you noted last two years ago you noted that the distribution of saves had become much more democratic you remember this yeah i

actually i wrote about that more recently you did i'm going to talk about both yeah so in 2017 you looked at how many what percentage of all major league saves had gone to each team's saves leader through April. And it was like, uh, like 79%, which was an all time low, but it wasn't that much of an all time low. It was,

it was lower than other years, but not like significantly this year. I just looked at the same thing for April of this year and it had dropped to 73%. And if you look at the number of pitchers who have at least one save the year that i think last year actually last year was an all-time record of 60 something 64 i think the norm is about like low 50s this year there were mid 80s so tons and tons and tons of pitchers are getting saves um you also wrote about the distribution of saves last year at the end of the year or toward the end of the year and found that this was true throughout the season and was accelerating.

Yeah, I wrote about it this spring, writing about the Red Sox, too. You wrote about it this spring. Yeah, sorry. You wrote about last year this spring. Right, yes. That's right. Yeah. mentioned because the last time we talked about this early in the season we got a bunch of questions asking is this just a combination of the opener and position player pitchers who are making starters look better and making relievers look worse so is that worth mentioning as a factor

since both of those things are becoming more common well the position players pitching i looked at when uh the first time that we had this conversation and it was not a factor. It was such a small, such a tiny percentage of innings that it did not really change anything. Like at that point, relievers were like 3% worse than starters. And if you take out position players pitching, it'd be like 2.91% or something like that worse. And of course, there have always been some position players

pitching, and I hadn't even controlled for that in previous years. So I don't think the position players pitching is a significant factor. Although now that they're tied, more or less that these two groups are tied. If you really want to know, like, if all you're thinking is binary, which one is better than Yeah, maybe that would flip it from slightly better to slightly worse. But the general theme is not. As for the bullpenning and the opener, I have not done the math. I think it is a complicating factor in doing any of this stuff these days. And RJ Anderson wrote a piece kind of about that last year.

It's worth noting that the opener or bullpenning has not really taken off this year. There are more in April this year than there were April last year because the Rays didn't really start doing it until May. But really, there's only been like 15 ish, maybe now it's high teens ish games that have used this approach this year almost all of them raise games a couple of angels games a couple of others but like we're talking like 15 to 20 of these starts out of like well over a thousand games played and so i i would not rule that out but i i just just glancing at it i we're talking about pretty big numbers here and those are pretty tiny numbers okay so uh so anyway i don't know if you have anything that i wanted to update those things and to point them out and i think that they're interesting i don't know if

you have any response or if you want to go straight to the misery part of it and i want to prolong the less misery as long as possible but we have to get there at some point so i guess i'm ready all right i'm uh sending you a link and i'd like you to open a random number generator okay all right so as noted there have been more than 400 relief pitchers this year more than 400 it is really crazy to think about how i mean is there any other sport where a greater percentage of the action goes to players who are a by almost by definition considered second string considered substitutes and that are because of various factors that sort of the most anonymous players on the team and where like literally half the league is those guys and they pitch half the time and they're in for all the most important moments.

It's crazy. Like what just thinking about baseball as a sport nowadays compared to how it was as a sport in the past is interesting. But anyway, 400 pitchers. I have sent you a list of the 200 who have the most appearances this year. And I have taken out. Well well i'll get to that so a few years ago maybe a year ago actually i proposed that i wanted to develop a game but i didn't know how it would be played called is this reliever good and you and michael bauman attempted to play it with no no instruction from the from the game's creator which i really respect you just took the idea and said let's play this game you tried one method of the game and the method that you guys played is that you picked a reliever who had notable numbers and then you

guys debated whether he was actually good like he had these guys all had like eras of like 0.6 and then you debated well is he good and you looked at their recent performance and their fip and so on and so forth that is not how i envision the game the way i envision the game was actually more along the lines of this game is the sport is populated by and dominated by this class of player that we have an extremely hard time keeping track of that we don't even know most of them. Like the vast majority of people on this list, I could not tell you what team they're on. And I've watched a lot of baseball this year. Like I've watched way more baseball this year than I think I do in a typical year. And I don't know, I could probably tell you 70%

of the teams. And these are only the 200 who have appeared the most. But beyond that, they're so flighty, these guys, that even if you know who they are and where they're pitching, it's very hard to remember if they're having a good year or a bad year. For instance, Greg Holland, who maybe I'm going to give you an answer here, but at one point, Greg Holland had a zero ERA like a week ago and is the closer for a team and has been extremely successful this year and last year greg holland

the only time i wrote greg holland's name was when i wrote about position players pitching and gave greg holland as an example of a major leaguer who had a higher era than position players pitching which was i wrote that in like j or something like that. And he had an ERA in the high sevens. So it's extremely hard to remember, to know all these players, to keep track of them, and then to have any idea whether they're good or bad in the moment. And then certainly to have any idea whether that means they're actually good or bad in real life, in reality, in true talent. And so my concept of the game as i thought that i was uh was introducing it was that you would have to without looking say is he good or bad and so

i've sent you this list i've removed every pitcher from this list whose era is between three and 4.2 those those guys who knows i don't even know if that is good or bad for a reliever. So all of these guys are clearly either good or bad. Okay. And so you're going to roll a number and you're going to give me the name and I'm going to tell you if he's good or bad and we're going to see if I'm right. And maybe we can look and maybe his ERA will be 2.6 and I will get that wrong. But then maybe you can then still

debate whether he has actually been good or bad based on things like fip or stranded runners or the last week or whatever the case may be this could be a two-tiered game but in the meantime we're just going to see if we can get it right so uh i have done no prep out of respect for you i have done no research into any of these players and and away we go. You want to go first? Well, so I'll just say that I prefer this game to the game that Andy McCullough and Pedro Mora have played on their former podcast, Sportswriters Blues, which was just like, is this guy a reliever at all? Or am I completely making up this name? Oh, yeah. Which that's a potentially even more embarrassing game.

But a game that I would fail really bad at that I realized recently is probably something I should be better at is does he switch hit? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've never been as strong as you'd think on handedness of hitters. But I think that this is something that calls to mind something Roger Angel wrote that was in Joe Bonomo's book that we talked to him about last week roger angel has been sort of nostalgic about

the 16 team era the pre-expansion era when you knew everyone and guys would come and go and teams would come in and out and you'd have a relationship to each one of those teams because you'd play them so many times in each season and i don't think that's a reason not to expand necessarily. I think it's probably better for the world, for baseball fans in general, to have more players, more teams, for more cities to have teams that they can root for and go see than it is for people who already have teams to be more familiar with everyone who's on those opposing rosters. But I think that is something that I think about and write about and have written about. This expansion of rosters but i think that is something that i i think about and write about and have written about this expansion of rosters and pitchers and players used i think is a net negative it's a net positive

in that more guys get to be big leaguers which is great for them yeah but it's a negative in the sense that at any one time there's a pretty high percentage of major league players who we just don't know and could tell you nothing about if quizzed which maybe makes it seem a little less special to be a big leaguer i don't know if you if you can be a big leaguer and no one knows who you are and no one knows that you are a big leaguer does that make it less special maybe but i think it it does kind of go hand in hand with what we've talked about before with the starting pitcher no longer being the protagonist of games and suddenly it's just this succession of faceless nameless pitchers who you don't know and you won't have to know for very long because they come and go and those guys are taking up

such a high percentage of innings that in terms of the game being a story and us being consumers of that story it's sort of a less rich experience i think but anyway i think we can uh we can get to the game and uh i guess i'll go first so yeah so roll and then give me the i think we should at the very least we we deserve to know the team name too so that we don't really humiliate ourselves so okay so so you've given me this baseball reference list here of uh what 200 players well it's minus the guys with the ra so it ends up being like 140 or something like that okay so i am going to use this random number generator to have a random number that corresponds to the the ranking on this list yeah so yeah do between one and 200 and you'll occasionally you'll roll a number that does not correspond to anybody in your role okay all right so i've generated my

first random number and i i give you the name and the team and that's it that's right okay dylan floro who is of course on the dodgers and is someone i've heard of dylan floro i'm gonna this is tricky because um dylan fl, I believe it was this year. Oh, but it was so early. But I believe it was he who was batting against John Ryan Murphy, the Diamondbacks catcher, twice in a blowout. And I wrote about that as what happens when hitting pitchers face pitching hitters. And so that was very early in the season. However, he was pitching along in a bad blowout.

I mean, it was the good side for them, but still it was a blowout. So clearly Dylan Floro entered the year with extremely low leverage. But the Dodgers, the Dodgers have been good. And the Dodgers are so deep that if you are pitching very poorly, they wouldn't necessarily have to go to you at least 10 times or whatever it takes to get on this list. And so almost by definition, being a Dodger who they keep going back to would suggest that you've been pretty good.

He did pitch well in that game. I'm saying Dylan Floro is good. Dylan Floro has a zero ERA. Yes! I knew it! You reasoned your way to that itcher. I did. I'm so glad I didn't say he's bad. No real awareness of what Dylan Floro has done this year. Dylan Floro, let's see has he even he has uh he's

given up three unearned runs but yeah zera in 18 innings and of course he was very effective last year too he has uh this is funny this is always funny when this happens but uh his last two outings he gave up two he both of those he gave up unearned runs. So before that, he had allowed zero runs. But he basically was still in low leverage for the most part until his very last outing in which he came into a game in the eighth inning as a setup man would do, and he blew it. And so that was his first. I mean, occasionally he's been called into high leverage but he had been a low leverage guy and it almost feels like this

was like the moment that they said all right dylan we believe it and uh he he didn't it was he gave up one hit and struck out two so it's not like he he melted down or anything it looks like he pitched pretty well he threw 17 pitches and got five swinging strikes. And so that's a pretty good outing. But the hit was a home run and he lost. Oh, that's wild. This is a stupid rule, Ben. What? This is a relief pitcher who came into a game and gave up an unearned run on a homer.

That's dumb. Come on. You can't do that. The fact that there was an error earlier in the inning that would have ended the inning when other pitchers were pitching and so you should have technically been out of the inning it shouldn't have existed but then you you shouldn't have even been called into the game if that's that's a bad unearned oh yeah you know this is uh we actually got a listener email about this game and about that scoring decision, I think, from Jeff Snyder, who's one of our Patreon supporters.

And he described the situation. He asked me to contact our official scorekeeper contact and listener that we sometimes ask for advice and input on these kinds of questions so he wrote jeff wrote in last night's dodgers nats game the nets won on a gerardo para grand slam because the inning was only still going because of a justin turner error all the runs were unearned but according to rule 9.16 and its comment the runs charged to scott alexander and dylan floro should have been earned against the pitchers but unearned against the team but all of the stat sites are still showing the runs as unearned i'm rarely 100 sure of anything but i'm 100 sure alexander and floro should each have one earned run charged to them last night am i missing something or are all the stat sites wrong so i did contact our official score listener and he said as kind of a preliminary

answer the listener is 100% correct I need to go back and watch the inning in its entirety But looking at the description he is right I also think the stat services have a tough time accounting for this The math doesn't work for totaling a box score I need to make sure that there isn't something else going on here Before I give a 100% answer I will respond as soon as I get a for sure answer

Including contacting the league To make sure I understand what happened So he has not followed up with me he was going to ask mlb for clarification but it was his opinion based on looking at what happened that those runs should have been earned for the pitchers so perhaps dylan foro should not and does not and will not have a zero era but either way he's still good he's been good yeah as i knew right all right so i uh i have rolled and your your reliever is sergio romo of the marlins huh okay so all the things that you just said about how you have to be good to be a dodger none of that applies maybe it applies in reverse because the marlins have been terrible. And Sergio Romo, of course, is quite old, although he has been pretty effective, as I recall, in recent seasons. He still misses bats, but I have no idea how he's doing this year. I recently wrote about the teams that had pledged not to use a closer during spring training.

And the Marlins were one of those teams. And they have, as most teams historically do, completely gone to a closer. And Sergio Romo is that closer. And so not only was the Dodgers-Marlins logic inverted for Romo, but the leverage logic was also inverted. Romo has been the closer. He has, I think he has six, if I'm not mistaken, he has six of the Marlins, seven saves, and his ERA is 6.0. So he's been poor. Now, with that said, four of his eight runs allowed came on opening, well, in the first game that he pitched in in Colorado.

So since then, he has an ERA of 3.09 and strikeout per inning and three strikeouts per walk. So, you know, your classic Sergio Romo thing. But no, he's been bad. Marlins closer, ERA of six, bad. Okay. All right. We are re-rolling again.

I've got my number. And your reliever is... This is the part I don't like. Your reliever is someone whose work I'm sure you're very familiar with, Ryan Harper. I just saw him a couple days ago he came into a bases loaded no ounce situation and got out of it without allowing a run and if you gave me two and a half minutes to think this through i could even tell you what team it was he is on minnesota twins yeah i was gonna i was

actually thinking it might be the twins he came in panetta i believe had left the bases loaded and uh he got out of it you have a specific ryan harper anecdote to share that i would not have yeah so uh yeah i don't know i can't remember if the twins were winning or losing though it makes all the difference in the world to know if it was like a three to two game and they brought him in then that would be big time that would be no doubter so the twins have a closer who's blake parker and then they have a relief ace who's taylor rogers and so whatever he is this man harper i forget his first name he is not one of those two which doesn't necessarily mean anything but he is not one of those two i do know he has one scoreless inning and so at the very

least like that's on his stat line i'm gonna say that harper has been good ryan harper has been good he has a 1.65 era all right all right oh it's ryan yes ryan is a name that only that only exists in baseball right is it only it's only relievers really yeah like all these guys named after ryan duran and their dads just like from the time they were old enough to walk, their dads were drilling them in having funk in their pitching motion. You've got a Hall of Fame, Ryan. You've got Ryan Sandberg. So maybe that's a little more likely. I've never heard the name Ryan outside of baseball context. Ever.

And I can name like nine Ryans off the top of my head. So he is a, yeah so seven seven strikeouts per nine a 3.05 fip this uh might not oh wow 30 year old who made his major league debut this year that's always fun 30 year old made his major league debut and has a 1.65 era 37th round draft pick in 2011 who was signed as a free agent uh probably a minor league free agent uh by the twins a year ago previously traded for the other jose ramirez all right ryan yeah i think your recent research has prepared you better for this game than than it has because i've written about harper no but you know who's the closer and like who's close to the closer on each team which is because i haven't

looked that up and i don't play fantasy i am not as well prepared to talk about that but all right well i've just rolled a low number so we'll see these are ordered by appearances so i think low numbers are generally pretty good so let's see here yes this corresponds to a player so is hansel robles on the angels good oh boy hey wait a minute yeah i think you get a i think you get a pass here i thought i deleted everybody with a three to four point two but he's at four exactly and so somehow he is not he is not that would have been impossible all right so i'm rolling again i'm rolling again and here oh, this is not easier. You have a player who I've never heard of. His name is Tyler Kinley, and he is a Marlin.

Oh boy, all right. I'm actually happier to get one that neither of us has heard of, because Hansel Robles, I know he's a pitcher, and so I feel worse about not knowing how he's pitching. Whereas Tyler Kinley? Or is it Kyler Tinley? Who knows? I wouldn't know.

Is it Ryan Tinley? Ryanler Rinley. So, I mean, I'm going off nothing here except for the fact that I don't know who he is, and he's on the marlins both of those things would lead me to believe that he's not good or that's that's evidence that is closer to the not good side of the scale i've already struck gold once betting on a marlins reliever being bad so i guess i'm going back to the well all right well would it help if i told you that his era is less than half of what it was last year well i don't know what it was last year but it would it was 12.27 oh all right so it would not have helped so his era this year is 5.4 all right he has struck out 22 batters in 18 innings but he has walked 14 batters in 22 innings. So he's been very wild. He has a FIP of 5.3, an ERA plus of 73.

And yet he was number 25 on this list, which means only 24 relievers in baseball have been as in demand as Tyler Kinley, who was a rule five draft pick by the twins who got returned to the Marlins for being not what the twins wanted. And so there you go. You got it. Tyler Kennedy, you're two for two. I've got a new name. And this one, see, I feel like this would be challenging, but I think you lucked out here.

I have a hope. I have my finger. I want it to be. I have a hope I have my finger I want it to be It's Travis Bergen Who Is a San Francisco Giant Which is why I thought maybe this would

Favor you because I don't know how much More Giants baseball you still watch Than other teams if any Alright well Travis Bergen Travis Bergen Is a He's young young, I hope. I think, I believe that Travis Bergen won the job out of spring training

and maybe throws 100 and maybe had good minor league numbers. And so if you'd asked me at the beginning of April, is he good? I might have said yes, but I believe all Giants are bad up and down the roster. So I'm going to say Travis Bergen has been bad. That's correct. Travis Bergen has a 5.14 ERA. He's a rookie.

He's a lefty. He's 25 years old. And hadn't the Giants bullpen been good for a while? Wasn't there like a period when I thought you had written at some point about like the Giants' bullpen was propping up the rest of the team or the staff or something? But anyway, he's not one of the people who's been good. That's right. Bergen is a Rule 5 pick this year. I'm now looking him up, by the way.

Bergen was a Rule 5 pick this year who had a 0.95 ERA last in the minors that's good which is a good era yeah and let me see if he does throw hard nope okay nope not at all throw soft 90 miles an hour all right let's see here do we have a player for this number no i gotta go again as a reprieve you dodged it uh all right you dodged another one wow that was i was one off from josh hater oh okay she probably would have gotten that one yeah um all right hector rondon who is an astro right yeah so hector rondon the Astros' closer last year until he was displaced by Osuna, I believe. And so he was pretty good, but not great. But given that he is on the Astros and the Astros are good and the Astros have so much pitching that you've got to be pretty good to be in the Astros' bullpen, which doesn't mean that you have to be good over 15 innings or so. But because he's a recent closer on a good team with deep pitching, I'm going to say Hector Rondon has been good. He has been good.

I think there have actually been two terrible Astros relievers. And so the logic could have led you astray. Maybe arguably three, in fact. But Rondon has a 2.19 ERA, which kind of covers up for some things. He has a FIP in the threes. He's striking out fewer than a batter per inning. But yeah, he's a guy. He's a guy in there.

He's been in the seventh inning this year, not the eighth as well, for whatever that's worth. But, yeah, he's good. All right. Okay. I've got a new number. It is not a pitcher. All right. Another number.

This is a pitcher. Okay. We've got Miguel Castro, Baltimore Orioles. Oh. Oh. You know, I almost got it. I've been meaning this morning, but I didn't get to it, to look up small fry Paul Fry because Paul Fry's got an ERA of like 3.2,

and I wanted to see if he was, in fact, as Pakoda prophesied, the best pitcher on the Orioles at the moment. By the way, Richard Beyer has a 14.54 ERA, but only four innings and then he got hurt. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an Oriole. What are you going to do is you got to say, you got to say, I, uh, yeah, you got to say bad on Castro. I saw Castro pitch on this, uh, I think on the third day of the season. Didn't really, I don't remember much. the season didn't really i don't remember much okay so i'm gonna say bad yeah 6.63 era for michael castro he's uh he's actually pitching a little bit better than he did last year when he barely struck out more batters than he walked but he has still been quite bad he's given up lots of

dingers so yeah it's a safe bet we're're doing well on using context clues here to make educated guesses with no actual knowledge of this pitcher's performance. All right. Should we do one more each? Sure. All right. And then we'll stop recording and we'll just keep playing this game for the rest of the morning. All right. Okay.

We have here Scott Alexander of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Right. Scott Alexander of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Right. Scott Alexander. Okay. So my impression of Scott Alexander is that he has been good, that he was good last year, except for maybe some important moments when he wasn't good. That's my vague impression. But he's pretty good and going with the Dylan Foro reasoning of Dodgers are good.

And if you're a Dodger, you're probably pretty good. I guess I've got to go with good. I mean, we're entirely using context clues here. I wonder just how many relievers I actually have certain knowledge of goodness or badness. I've been waiting. Right. Like, I really have wanted, like, if you gave me Chad Green, I would get it. I've been waiting, right? Like I really have wanted, like if you gave me Chad Green,

I would get it. I know that one. And I know Nick Anderson and I know Reyes Maranta. And I pretty much at that point, it's like, well, almost anything could have happened in the last two days.

Exactly right. There are very few pitchers who I know how they've pitched this year how they've pitched recently which if you're a reliever and we're talking about 15 innings total one or two bad outings can completely change the answer so i'm guessing basically no matter what name i get here but given the team and also familiarity with the past performance of this pitcher that improves my odds maybe but how'd i do with scott alexander alexander you got it narrowly he's 2.84 era so he's on the good side uh he has a

fip of 3.9 he's been used as a lefty specialist this year and while he is pitched well enough for you to win he's also pitched like perhaps a guy who might be eliminated from the league next year by rules changes right more than half of his outings have been two or fewer batters so but he's been fine okay he's on the good side all right last one last one come on i'm defeated perfect so far so the pressure is on all right we've got a number, and I've got a picture. Luke Jackson. No. Of the Atlanta Braves. Oh.

Oh. I've got nothing to go on here. Yeah. Nothing. Well, their closer just got demoted, which you might say if their closer got, like demoted, I think, if I'm correct, demoted to the minors. Oh, that's not good. And so if you get demoted to the minors before losing your job, it suggests that there's not a guy who they're dying to get into your job.

Yeah. It also might suggest, though, that there is a guy that they've got dying to get into your job. And that's why they're comfortable sending you down. But I would go with the the well, let's see. It seems to me the Braves feel the Braves feel to me like like I think about their individual performances on the rest of the team. And it seems like they got a lot of guys playing well, but they don't have a great record. So it must be the bullpen. I could be wrong about literally every single part

of that sentence i'm gonna say that luke jackson has been bad i got oh no no what is what has he done jackson's been good how good jackson 2.25 era 20 innings the fifth is uh also good 3.06 oh good i thought that this is not like a strikeouts, two walks kind of a thing. No, it's not that. No, but he's been very good. And I think your reasoning was solid because I think the Braves' bullpen has been a weakness for them this year. They have, let's see, by at least park-adjusted FIP, they have the sixth worst bullpen in baseball. And if we just want to go by war, which is obviously dependent on workload as well as effectiveness, they are the fifth worst bullpen by war. So I think that your supposition that the Braves have not been that great, even though other parts of the Braves have been very good, and so the bullpen must have been bad, I think that holds up.

But I guess Luke Jackson is the exception. All right. very good and so the bullpen must have been bad i think that holds up but i guess look at with jackson is the exception all right well good it would not have been appropriate for us to have aced this that would not have been the fun outcome anybody wanted yeah that's right okay well that was that was fun all right i didn't hate it i loved it i meant to ask you by the way i forgot to bring this up but you tweeted a picture of two giants bobbleheads, actually a video of two giants bobbleheads, and you made the the 2019 bobblehead just barely bobbles in comparison with the 1962 bobblehead. And I don't know whether this is generalizable, whether this applies to all bobbleheads past and present, but that is my impression, that bobbleheads A have gotten more realistic looking, which I think is a bad development. which I think is a bad development.

I think it's better for them to just not really look like a caricature kind of more than attempting to look like the player and falling into the uncanny valley. But also you want a lot of bobble in your bobblehead. That's the whole point. And there's just barely any bobble in this new one. Who's the new one and who's the old one in this? The new one is Willie Mays and the old one is nothing. The old one is just a guy. I don't think the old one in this the new one is willie mays and the old one is nothing the old one is just i don't think the old one is supposed to be any anybody it's just a just a funny looking

kid i think i should she's i'm sorry if this turns out if someone's gonna be like that's the orlando cepeda bobblehead but i think he's not i think he's just a funny thing here that bobblehead though though i mean i this video is only 15 seconds long yeah the 62 one was still going seven minutes later like like faintly but still going seven minutes later and it goes i mean it's awesome it goes when you walk when you walk across the house it bobbles yeah so i wonder if someone out there listening i'm sure someone listening has been involved in bobblehead production because someone who's listening is part of every profession that comes up on the show and this is baseball related so if you know about

bobblehead manufacturing and whether the methods are different and whether there is actually empirically less bobble across the board these days please tell us because i agree this is also my impression that there's just not enough bobble these days. And I don't know if it's just because there are more bobbleheads. We've had bobblehead inflation and you have to rush the bobblehead production. And so maybe you can't use as quality components for the bobblehead. And maybe there's just actually less bobble. But this is an unacceptable amount of bobble, I think, with this maze bobblehead. So if this is a trend, it's a negative one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not even the Willie Mays one isn't even a bobble, I think, with this maze bobblehead. So if this is a trend, it's a negative one.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not even, the Willy maze one isn't even a bobble. It's like the spring on the bottom of a door, like a door jam. What do you call that? The door, door stopper. It's like you spring it once and it's like, like it just, that's it. It's got a little tension that immediately wears itself out.

Yeah. All right. Well, I'll link to the tweet if you're in the know about bobbleheads please let us know so we will end there and you can all go play the random reliever has even good or bad game yourself you can play this at home it's very easy and you don't even need two people it can be like solitaire so thank you for uh showing us how it's supposed to be played. All right.

I'll see you later this week. All right. One quick follow-up. We mentioned mid-episode that Dylan Floro probably had a correction coming, and indeed it has arrived. Looking at his MLP.com page now, he has a.50 ERA instead of the 0 ERA he had when we spoke. So that scoring mistake has, in fact, been addressed. ERA he had when we spoke. So that scoring mistake has in fact been addressed. If you aren't already supporting this podcast, you can address that mistake by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount to keep the podcast going. Paul Hamann,

Ben Gosby, Emily Thompson, Michael Downan, and Jason, thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. We'll likely do emails next time, so please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. I hope you all enjoyed the return of Williams Estadillo and his touching moment on the field on Mother's Day when he caught the first pitch from his mother. As soon as he came back off the IL, he immediately had a memorable moment. That's just what Estadio does. And speaking of Estadio moments, he was playing third base and

Mike Trout was standing on third base when Shohei Otani hit his first home run of the season on Monday, which Effectively Wild listener Ryan says was the most Effectively Wild thing ever, confluence of Astapio, Trout, and Otani. Tough to top that. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine, the story of the ongoing revolution in player development. It comes out just three weeks from Tuesday. So make sure you get your copy. It really helps me and Travis to get those pre-orders in. And it can also help you, because if you pre-order and you forward your pre-order confirmation or some evidence that you did pre-order to themvpmachine at gmail.com, you will, when the book comes out on June 4th, get a bonus chapter and an interview between me and Travis

about the book and some additional documents that you won't want to miss. So get your book, get your pre-order goodies. It is much appreciated. And we will be back to talk to you very soon If the life's the life you're living, well, nod your head. Well, nod it up. Nod it down. Side to side. Round and round.

Round and round.