Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1376: Root, Root, Root for the Run Differential

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Chris Sale’s seven-inning, 17-strikeout game and the Marlins’ ineptitude, then answer listener emails about differences in home-run distance, rooting for run differential, reimagining errors (and quality starts), whether catchers would still squat after robot umpires were implemented, when relief innings will surpass starter innings, no-hitters as team accomplishments, […]

I'm blue tonight, I'm red when I'm mad I'm deep when I'm jealous, yellow when I'm sad I guess I can't have everything So much has gone between us when I was twenty Hello and welcome to episode 1376 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Ben, hello. Hi. Chris Sale had 17 strikeouts through seven innings, a new record. Did you get your hopes up? No. To me, the process of writing about 21k outings has really helped me to root more efficiently, I think, because it focused my attention. And I think it was the play index

that we did probably in the episode 900 or so that really did. The key thing is, of course, pitches, you don't have 27 outs to work with necessarily, and you don't need 27 outs necessarily, but you do have something like 120 pitches with maybe a little bit of margin on either side. And so you basically need to be pitching at six pitches per strikeout to have a reasonable chance. And Sale had eight strikeouts through three innings with 47 pitches, which is on pace. And I was sitting in a piano lesson waiting room and couldn't tweet out an alert at that point. But a few minutes later, he had like a seven-pitch at bat against Charlie Blackmon, who I think grounded out after foul tipping a pitch into and out of a mitt. And at that point, then it became sort of a strain.

And then the next batter, I think, had like a five or six-pitch at bat and didn't strike out. And that was pretty much it. I quit. I quit watching. I mean, I didn't quit watching, but I quit considering it a chase. It was no longer a chase, in my opinion. So they took him out after 108 pitches and seven innings, and then the bullpen blew the

game. They went to extra innings So perhaps they regretted it But perhaps not Because their priority is keeping Chris Sale healthy And it looks like Chris Sale is good And it looks like the Red Sox are good And all of the early season worries About both of those things not being true

Have eased up somewhat Chris Sale's last couple starts Have had pretty extraordinary strikeout and walk totals. So I know his velocity is not all the way back, but he's making it work. He, I mean, theoretically, he could have struck out the next four batters on 12 pitches and done it. But I mean, that's very unlikely. And he, it's strange to say of a guy who had 17 strikeouts and no walks, but he wasn't even leading at the time, right? And so it made sense in the moment to pull him after 108 pitches. 20 was a reasonable thing.

If you thought 20 is worth chasing, then maybe you keep him in for 122 pitches because there's a decent chance he'd do that. But I don't think 20 is worth chasing. I'm not impressed by 20. I only want 21. So I thought everybody behaved, you know, more or less appropriately here. All right. Do you have any, Benter? I just want to correct something. My process of determining whether Dylan Floro had been good was somewhat misinformed. Dylan Floro did not bat twice against John Ryan Murphy this year.

He batted last year against Eric Kratz. So he was in that article, but he was not the pitcher that I had been thinking of. I believe Brock Stewart was that pitcher. And Brock Stewart was not on our list because he has only played three games for the Dodgers in which he gave up eight runs. And so just, just to clarify that, I think, I think in every single one of my processes, I said at least one untruth,

which is kind of what's going to happen when you're trying to remember what a, uh, middle reliever did in the fourth game of the season to try to do something that you don't actually know about a pitcher who, you know, almost nothing about, but mostly true stuff. And Dylan Floro, I think the process more or less was still accurate. Anyway, Dylan Floro. Yeah. So I brought this up on the Ringer MLB show yesterday, but I have to bring it up again. I talked to Michael Bauman about how bad the

Marlins have been. They've been really historically terrible thus far, and I focused specifically on their offense, which has been horrendous. And then after we did that segment, the Marlins went out and got shut out by the Rays. So now the numbers are even worse than they were when I talked about it yesterday. The Marlins as a team are 10 and 30. That is, of course, a 250 winning percentage, which puts them on pace for 41 wins if you round up and according to their run differential wait if you round up from 40.25 40.5 right would be yeah would they would they would win half of two games yeah that's right so yeah uh yeah so that that gets into the metaphysical question of whether.5 should round up or round down. Yes, I'm not sure.

But their run differential is that of a 9-31 team, which is a.225 winning percentage. That would be a.36 win team, and that does round down. So they've been really bad, and that's not surprising because they're the Marlins, and they're playing in a good division where the other teams are all competitive and are beating up on the Marlins all year. But their starting rotation is actually pretty credible. They're pretty good. They've got Pablo Lopez and they've got Jose Ureña and they've got other guys I'm forgetting right now. Caleb Smith is maybe the best of the bunch. He's been

pretty good this year. But beyond that, it's a sorry group, and the bullpen has been a disaster. But the offense right now, the Marlins as a team are hitting 218, 281, 307. They have 24 home runs, which is by far the fewest in the league. And that gives them a 64 WRC+, which, to put that into perspective, the all-time worst team WRC+, in a full season, in baseball's modern era, back to 1901, is the 1920 post-fire sale Athletics, who had a 67 WRC+. So right now, the Marlins, through a quarter of the season or so, have had what would be the worst offense ever in a full season of course it is easy to be terrible or great over

a quarter of a season or easier if you look at the top of that all-time leaderboard the 2019 Astros with a 135 WRC plus would be the best offense ever which is not that inconceivable given that the 2017 World Series winning Astros had, I think, the fourth best offense of all time by that measure. I think the best other than the Ruth Gehrig Yankees. So the Astros are good. The Marlins are incredibly inept. And I don't know if it's going to get much better from here. Their best hitter, I think by far so far, their really only above average hitter is Neil Walker.

And it just falls off from there. Yeah, can we talk about their second best hitter? Because they have... Who is it? Alfaro? Well, they have 22 players have batted at least once. 22, okay? Five of those are pitchers. But I'm going to include them because including them can

only benefit them and i want to give them the benefit of that so 22 hitters with at least one plate appearance the second best hitter in any number of plate appearances has a 344 slugging percentage and a sorry 342 slugging percentage and a 683 OPS. That is backup catcher Chad Wallach. So he's the second best with a 683 OPS, and that's bad. It's really bad. I mean, obviously you'd expect someone to be better than that, but I don't know who you'd expect to be good. Who is actually the second best hitter on this team?

Is it Alfaro? It's probably Castro or Bryan Anderson. Bryan Anderson was good last year. Yeah, gosh. It's just, it's not a good team and it's not a good group of hitters. And the ones who are kind of good may be traded at some point,

like Neil Walker might go somewhere. And if Castro or, I don't know, Granderson recovers at some point, maybe they would go somewhere. So I don't see it getting better. I mean, I don't know that they have prospects who are ready right now to make a major difference. Like they started the season with Louis Brinson again, who was terrible again and was sent down.

So I don't know that help is really on the way. And yeah, it's not going to get much better than this. So I think the Marlins generally have been something of a blight on baseball and have been very hard on their fans who are still sticking with them. And I don't think it's good that the Marlins are this terrible, but it is as someone who is at least captivated by extremes and historic performances and novelty, this is going to give like last year's Orioles a run for their money when it comes to the worst teams we've seen in some time. It's going to be a long season for the Marlins and it's not a particularly fun team either. It's not like a bad and fun team beyond

some of those starting pitchers I mentioned. So sorry, Marlins fans, but this is going to be replacement level, sub-replacement level. We'll see how low they can go. All right. Well, that might be the last time we talk about the Marlins for a while now. So just want to check in on them. We're going to do some emails today and presumably a stat blast. Stat blast.

Yeah. So I will start this with a question from Henry Clark, Patreon supporter, who was nice enough to mail me a 1953 Ned Garver Topps card this week. That is not why I'm answering his question, although thank you, Henry. That was very kind. He says, last Friday, May 10th, Jock Peterson hit a home run. His second of the game that StatCast recorded as having exit velocity of 113.7 miles per hour and a launch angle of 22 degrees. This home run traveled a launch angle of 21

degrees, one degree less, nearly identical in exit velocity and launch angle to Peterson's bomb, but this home run traveled a reported distance of 466 feet. I am about as far from being a physicist as you can be and still be a functioning member of society, but none of what I can remember or can find about projectile distances and vectors and stuff can explain an almost 16% disparity in the flight paths of two such similar projectiles. Peterson pulled his to right in Los Angeles, and Acuna hit his to center in Arizona, but unless the Diamondbacks turned off the humidor and had a bunch of jet engines blowing to straightaway, the difference seems hard to account for. Can you please take a minute to explain the forces that so radically alter the flights of such seemingly similar balls? I assume environmental factors have an impact, but maybe spin, or maybe the balls are juiced inconsistently.

And if distance is only indirectly linked to exit velo and launch angle, are they really the best measures we could use for batted balls? So I did ask someone about this and have an answer from him, but do you care to hazard a guess or hypothesis? No, I'll mention, so yes, is actually the answer to that. I'll mention two things. One is that in the Baseball Prospectus book, Extra Innings, from maybe eight years ago or so. Jay Jaffe wrote a long look at the home run era of the late 90s and early 2000s and whether steroids could explain it. And he talks a lot about ball composition and the range of acceptable baseballs within Major League Baseball's regulations or standards that they give to manufacturers and i don't remember i'm speaking off the top of my head now so i'm not going to get into specifics

and you probably since you've researched this all and since we all have read a lot more about it since then we all know a little bit more about this now but the i just remember the gap between what a ball at the low range low end of the range and what a ball at the high end of the range and what a ball at the high end of the range, which are both, they both could theoretically be used in the same baseball game. Theoretically, it was massive, like way more than you would think. Like I want to say it was 35 feet. I think it was 48 feet. Yeah. And so that has been something that I occasionally think about with wonderment, thinking how

much of the sport that we think we're seeing is variation within the balls. But mostly, I have to suppress that memory because I assume that it's A, not the case. Well, I assume that it's not the case that there is that much variation, particularly within batches or within seasons. And it would be kind of the fun of that idea wears off quickly if you start wondering about it, particularly if it's not true. So that's one hypothesis is that it's that it's the whatever we're calling that. The second one, which I'm almost certain is wrong. But if you just think about, I mean, a baseball traveling straight 400 feet travels, well, maybe it goes, you know, 65 feet high.

And so it's traveling in a line 400 feet, but also 65 feet high. So up and then down. And then there's a way that you could calculate how many feet it actually traveled, right? Like think about planes that travel from here to Japan, they don't go straight across the latitude, because you end up having to travel farther than if you go up to the North Pole and then back down, right? Or like not to the North Pole, but up to a higher latitude, because you're not traveling as much around the sphere of the earth. So I don't know if that's applicable here,

but I think about the actual distance traveled of a 400-foot baseball is not 400 feet in space. It's like, I don't know, 510 feet or something like that, right? Up and then down and then out. And if you add a third dimension to that of a ball that is hooking or slicing, it has to travel even farther in real terms to get to 400 feet it has to go up and over and out and so to travel 400 feet if you had like a frisbee's hook on it then it would have to travel maybe you know hypothetically like 600

feet or something like that and so in theory you might think that a ball that goes straight would travel further with the same energy than a ball that hooks or slices that has the same energy would travel from home plate, right? Now that's complicated by the effects of backspin and topspin and loft and things that I don't really know much better than Henry does.

But that would be the question I would ask a physicist if that could explain something. Well, I have asked a physicist. And yeah, launch angle and exit velocity tells you the vertical angle and it tells you how hard it was hit. It does not tell you where on the field, the spray angle, the horizontal angle. And that can be important. So I sent this question to David Kagan, who's a physics professor at CSU Chico. He writes a big twist in this podcast. You sent it to not Alan Nathan.

That's right. Yes. I'm just mixing it up. Yeah. We got a couple of physicists we can call on. But David Kagan, he writes for the Hardball Times frequently about the physics of baseball. So he says, what a wonderful question. To answer it, we could go through the usual suspects like elevation and weather.

It was 83 degrees at game time in Phoenix, but only 63 degrees in LA. However, the higher temperature only explains a paltry five feet of the difference. The wind might be a factor. And indeed, the roof was open that day in Arizona. The wind was 13 miles per hour, but the stadium is very tall, even with the roof off, so there isn't enough wind inside to affect the flight of the ball much. In Southern California, it was a still evening with the gentlest breeze of only 2 miles per hour. At most, we're looking at perhaps another 5 feet. The humidity at game time was only 40% at Chase Field, while it was around 70% at Dodger Town, but this would at best explain only a single lousy

foot of the difference. Next, the elevation difference. Phoenix is at 1,082 feet, while the ballpark in LA is up on a hill 267 feet above sea level. This is another minor effect, four feet, and of course Chasefield has a humidor, as David Kagan wrote about recently for the Hardball Times. So it seems that elevation and weather are not the culprits. Well, what does explain the 63-foot difference between the two homers? The spin on the ball. Acuna smacked the ball just to the left of center field, while Peterson launched his ball down the right field line. Every good outfielder knows that balls hit down the line tend to veer off toward foul territory,

while balls hit toward center don't fade as much. This is all due to the fact that the ball-bat collision imparts almost no sidespin to the ball when the bat is level and perpendicular to the trajectory of the incoming pitch. However, if the bat and ball collide when the bat is not perpendicular and level, sidespin occurs. There's more sidespin when the ball is hit further away from center field. Estimating the spray angle off the bat and putting in all the weather elevation and spin my calculations give 464 feet for Acuna's homer and 402 feet for Peterson's so we aren't looking at some stat cast data error bottom line Peterson hit a slice while Acuna drove it right down the fairway did I get it right I think so more or less he didn't mention planes flying over the arctic circle or anything but i i think you kind of did uh-huh so

the the concept would be that they did travel roughly the same distance just not in since peterson's was not in one direction it i i think well okay so more of its energy moving laterally that's what i said so if it's that i don't know if that's if it's it could i don. So if it's that, then I'm right. I don't know if it's that. The difference between the spin, though, I mean, anecdotally, at least, backspin will get you more carry and topspin will sort of push the ball down. So I don't know if that's what we're talking about. I think that is largely what we're talking about. Because Peterson pulled it. Yes. All right.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, that's unsatisfying. Okay. I think that's it. Yes. All right. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, that's unsatisfying. Okay. I think that's it, but yeah. It shouldn't be. We got the answer to the question that I was interested in hearing answered.

It would have been satisfying if you had not asked me first to put my own self on the line. Okay. Grant says, last night, the Mariners seriously piled on some runs in the late innings against my Yankees. This got me thinking. I already knew the game was over. So in the long run, all this affected was the team's run differential. Should I be rooting for the team to keep that number up? Certainly you want your team to have the best run differential since that's the name of the game. At the same time, it felt weird to think about run differential as a rooting category. Counterintuitively, I wondered if I should be rooting for the Yankees to win, but in

a manner which is representative of the team's ability so that they could be adequately assessed. That felt silly, and my mind started doing loops. Don't I want players to overperform? Don't I root for overperformance every day? What about how this affects the front office? Would I actually want the team to underperform in order to incentivize Steinbrenner to better the team so long as underperformance didn't jeopardize the division? Did the Mariners do the Yankees a favor by getting Yankees Twitter riled up? Of course, no data-driven team is going to be duped by such a basic measure, but you get the point. Should we be rooting for or against run differential? Does it matter? I have gone through much of this

process before and gone to some of those same places it's a tricky one isn't it yeah the other thing is that that i feel like maybe as a factor is that you want your players to be confident and feel like they're doing well and so if a loss is baked in or even a win is baked in but they're coming off a four for five day. Maybe that helps them. Maybe that's something that carries over. It's certainly to get away from the question of what is going to affect the future, what is going to be a cause of future goodness for your team. Simply as a fact, if you're rooting.

So basically you root for your team to win, but you also root for your team to be good. And that's kind of an ongoing process that takes place all the time. You just like you want to be like you want to be born to a team that is good or for that team to somehow be good. You're sort of stuck with them. And there's a luck factor as a fan of like, do I have a good team? And it's kind of a constant, like you're always kind of assessing whether it is a good team or is not a good team. And that affects your feelings about that team. And so if they have a good run differential, because they are actually good, that seems

like the sort of thing that would make you happy, regardless of whether it changes anything for the future, right. Yeah. If that makes any sense at all. I mean, the nice thing about all this is that you rooting doesn't do anything. And so you don't actually have to worry that that much about whether you're rooting wrong. I go through this now. I have through my life. I have gone through this a lot where I have like, Now I have, through my life, I have gone through this a lot where I have like, maybe you turn on a game. So my TV, my parents' TV, it used to be that you'd turn it on. I think this was how TVs all were.

You'd turn it on and the audio would begin immediately, but the picture would take like two and a half seconds. And so sometimes you'd have two and a half seconds of hearing action, but not knowing what team was batting or who was doing. This also happens a lot when you turn on a game on the radio and you might pick it up mid play and the ball is in play or the pitch has been thrown, but you don't know who's batting. And you end up rooting for those two and a half seconds for what turns out to be the wrong team. And that feels terrible. But that's just an awful feeling you feel

like like you've done like you are asked to do so little in this game as a fan and you know you did the one thing you had to do wrong it's like an odin goal yeah but the nice thing to remind yourself is that it doesn't matter like they don't know what you what is going on in your heart and so uh i think whatever feels comfortable for you as a fan is probably safe. That said, I root for run differential. I think that there are some small cases that he makes that it could be damaging if it gives a team maybe an overinflated sense of themselves or vice versa. It might hurt their ability to assess, but it probably doesn't hurt their ability to assess because the run differential is the thing that they should probably be using to

assess. Now, it gets a little tricky if it's a 17 to 1 game and Scott Kingery is pitching and it becomes totally inauthentic baseball and nothing that anybody in your lineup does is in any way suggestive of their baseball talent and then if they if you hang eight on scott kingery then that does affect your run differential and it does affect your stats and it can mislead people who are trying to assess how good the team is so that becomes a little bit of an issue and then the question is do you root for scott kingery to get in the game so that you can run up the run differential and feel good about

yourself and people will think that you're like so that you can run up the run differential and feel good about yourself? And people will think that you're like, so that you can win arguments with your friend who's like, my team's better. And you're like, my team's run differential. And like, that's a fun argument. So I don't know that there's an exact answer. I think that probably different people have different comfort levels, but I do and always have rooted secondarily for run differential if the game is done. At the most basic level, if you're a fan and you're watching a game through the lens of your fandom, then you want your team to do well. It's always the happiest outcome is for your team to score and the other team not to score. I guess at a certain point, maybe the game is just so out of hand that you want it to end because you want to do something else.

And there's something to be said for close games just from an entertainment standpoint. It's kind of more fun to watch a 3-2 win than it is to watch a 10-1 win in most cases. I think in the playoffs often when I used to really root for teams I would like blowouts actually because I would just get so nervous and it would cause so much anxiety for there to be a close game that actually mattered that I didn't really want it to be that close but in general close is good but you also want your team to do well you want to see your players do well every little hit and run scored brings you some little dopamine burst so yeah of course you want that and i think the fact that it then augers well for the rest of the team and tells you something about the quality of that team i think just adds to it there's more value there

it's interesting because i've been thinking about this question the whole time as do you still root for your team to score six runs when it's down by 16 but i mean obviously the whole time as do you still root for your team to score six runs when it's down by 16 but the i mean obviously the flip side is do you still root for your team to score six runs when they're up by 16 and that yeah has all i i love a big blowout i mean i've always wanted to see the biggest blowout possible without a doubt in any team in any sport that i'm rooting for i love a blowout this also brings mind, because I like to see the stats. I like to see stats. I like to wake up and see,

like, I like to be the opposite of the Marlins experience. When you open the daily paper as a nine-year-old and you scan your team's stats, you already know the record, but you look at their stats and you go,

this is a good team. Like, look at that bullpen. Look at the bullpens only allowed three runs in the last week and a half. Like, there's something to that that is satisfying as a fan and you want that to be the case this also reminds me of something that we have occasionally mentioned on this show which someday i'm going to write about it's one of my favorite things about baseball history which is that in the very old days you batted in the bottom of the ninth even if you were winning and i've always wondered what is that what was that bottom of the ninth even if you were winning and i've always wondered what

is that what was that bottom of the ninth inning like how was it played out and um wow did they do it because they were too dumb to notice what was happening or did they get something out of it and i think they did get something out of it i think that there is the what we're watching is partly the suspense of competition but partly the act of baseball played well. And you want to see the guys that you like playing baseball basically impossible or should basically never happen because if the winning run is scoring, what are you doing going from second to third? Your run cannot by definition possibly affect anything. And all you're doing is possibly getting thrown out. And one of the theories I had for why walk-off triples happened is because players respect the aesthetic purity of a baseball act done well. because players respect the aesthetic purity of a baseball act done well.

And so a walk-off triple is essentially like, in a way, it's like the same thing. It's stat padding after the outcome of the game is already certain. And I'm pro. Yeah, I am too. Maybe there's a point at which it cheapens things or you want almost a mercy rule. But I don't know. In the majors, I don't think there is a mercy rule. I think you always want your team to pile on probably because there's never such a gap between the best team and the next best teams that it doesn't become fun to see that team win. were the Marlins and you were just trouncing them every time out, then sure, maybe it wouldn't feel as special. You wouldn't take as much pleasure in racking up the score. But as it is, all the teams

are good and there isn't that much separation. And when you can put a big number up, I think you pretty much always want your team to do that. I would be pro-mercy rule, Ben. Yeah, pro-mercy. I'm not pro-mercy though. i don't like teams to quit trying i like the baseball and a blowout to be played at a non-boring high level and i don't like the unwritten rules that suggest that you should quit trying to play like you always play but yeah a rule that said that a game that's uh you know already got a 10 run say differential in the you know seventh inning or later could end that seems like i mean oh man that seems perfectly fine the only complication with that is that you kept

serving alcohol until the very end and now you've got this like dui problem but otherwise yeah i mean i like the mercy rule i think that there'd be a lot of hot takes from talk radio people complaining about the existence of mercy in the world so maybe you'd want to call it something else maybe you'd want to just call it like a time efficiency or like a go weed your garden rule or something like that all right question from another sam baseball is so rooted in math and hard numbers that when something happens that isn't based on those things it's very very interesting to me. I wanted to get your take on errors. They seem to be so cryptically decided. As a fan, you watch the play, listen to the guys in the booth debate it, and then some random magic

E just comes out of the blue. Do you see MLB ever making an attempt to use more quantifiable data to assign errors? If advanced defensive metrics evolved into a more dependable source could they be used for example all fly balls hit to the outfield with a catch probability of x percent or higher must be caught or it's an error regardless of how the play looks this is all stemming from a jameson tyon start a few weeks back where polanco missed a ball with like an 80 catch probability but it was still classified as a hit and And this is sort of in the same genre as a question we got from Everett, who was upset about quality starts. You just answered this one via email.

His fantasy league counts quality starts, and he's upset when a pitcher records what would be a quality start. He goes six innings with three earned runs or fewer, but then he blows the quality start after the fact. And Everett wants to know whether that should still be a quality start, whether you should be able to lose one after you have one. And both of these questions are in the category of sort of garbage stats that we're stuck with at this point because they've been around for a while and errors have been around since the beginning. And I know that I think what Henry Chadwick didn't like errors

and was kind of up on what makes errors not so great from the very start, but we've been tracking errors forever. And so the question is, now that we know errors are not that telling from an analytical standpoint and we have better ways to assess the probability that play should be made, should ditch errors should you keep recording errors the same way you always

have just for historical continuity or should you change errors to be some more objective measurement of whether it actually was an error i kind of come down on the side of just don't pay attention to bad stats when we have better stats, but don't necessarily change them either. Like, don't necessarily make the bad stat into a good stat if you already have good stats. and not pay much attention to it, because we still have an official scorer. We're still going to have that person up there, so sure, have them rule on whether it's an error or not, but we'll all choose not really to pay attention to what that person said, and we'll be looking at DRS or UZR or outs above average or whatever the future defensive metric of choice is. Of course, players are still going to care about this stuff

because it's their reputation on the line, and sometimes there's money at stake in arbitration still, but that's all changing to an extent too. And players are more and more often paid based on the actual underlying performance more so than those superficial stats. So do you think that there is a distinction that is useful for you to see made between a fielder who misplays a ball, who fails to make a routine play, and a fielder who simply over the course of many games fails to make a bunch of 95% or like, you know, 50% plays? Like, is there something about a blooper, a botch that needs to be categorized? Well, for analytical purposes, I'm not sure, but for descriptive purposes, I think so. Like even UZR, for instance, you can break it down

into error runs and range runs. And so you can see guys who are good because they never flub a routine play. And you can have guys also who just make the extraordinary play and maybe they do flub a routine play every now and then so i would want to know that and maybe you'd want to know that just to know what the player should improve and work on and how likely he is to improve like maybe it's easier to improve a player who just bobbles balls right at him than it is to improve a player who just can't get to balls in the first place. So I think it's a worthwhile distinction, but in terms of value, probably doesn't matter. What about just for you as a, as part of your knowledge of the story of a game or the story of a player's season?

Do you, do you find it interesting to know? Like if there's a, if a pitcher gives up six runs in an inning and they're all singles that theoretically are all the failure of the defense to be standing in the right place, in some cases might be the failure of the defense to have the appropriate range or to field balls that are difficult but theoretically playable versus like, well, the shortstop threw the ball to the first baseman and it simply clanked off his glove. Do you like to know the distinction between those two innings? Is that the same as asking, I mean, for a pitcher, if we have earned runs and unearned runs, and now you have stats that can tell you what a player should have done, how a pitcher actually pitched just in terms of say the batted balls he allowed and how likely they were to become hits on average or just his strikeouts and walks and strip the defense out of it.

I don't mind having ERA and unearned runs and having those be separate categories, but I wouldn't want to go back to having that decide everything because I would still want to be able to tell how he actually pitched independent of those things. So these are all things that I'd kind of like being recorded. It's like win-loss record is something that we don't pay attention to anymore from an analytical perspective, and we don't even cite it that much anymore. But it can be fun for trivia, and it can be fun to track the changes in the game.

If you can see that suddenly no one's winning 20 games anymore, that tells you something about how pitchers are being used. Not that you need that. You could look at other ways to assess that. But I think it's nice just to be able to compare win-loss records today to win-loss records decades ago and see that, okay, this is reflecting what a starting pitcher was expected to be at that time and this time and so i wouldn't say toss out win-loss records don't don't record them it's not like it's hard to do you just keep doing what you've always been doing but you pay less attention to it or you pay attention to it in a different way yeah i i like that airs are i like that there is a category for airs in theory

like if i were designing if they didn't exist, I would propose it. To me, there's something about the egregiousness of an error that feels like it's worth jotting down. Just like there's something about a home run robbery that I'm glad people count now that they don't just treat it as an out. That Sports Info Solutions is doing the work and accounting it for us. They have good fielding plays and bad fielding plays, and it's kind of like errors, except it's, at least in theory, more rigorous and based on video review and comparisons to other players. So I'm glad that the clanked-off-the-glove is somehow recorded in the annals.

Now, I don't think that it should be used for anything else, probably, including ERA. I don't think that ERA, even though I use ERA instead of runs allowed for everything, I don't know why, but I don't think that ERA, that for the purposes of measuring the pitcher, we should only make allowances for defense in a particular subset of plays that are not that different from a much larger subset of quite similar plays, in fact. So I would dump ER, earned runs. I would dump errors from any sort of analysis.

I heard a broadcaster the other day say that some team had been the worst team in the worst defense in baseball because they had the lowest fielding percentage. And I just groaned and thought, wow, still saying things like that doesn't seem right to me. So that's where I kind of come down is like

unfortunately anytime you have a stat it is going to be used in a way that grinds you particularly when it's a stat that has a 150 year history in the game and was for a long time until quite recently the most seen as the most important stat so it's a long process but it doesn't bother me that much but it does't bother me that much, but it does bother me a little bit. But I am glad that we count errors, more than I'm glad that we count quality starts, by the way. Did you see Emma Batchelory's tweet about two days ago about the,

it was kind of like a you make the call sort of thing from a 1966 newspaper? No. Okay, I'm going to read it and then you can make the call. And then I'm going read you emma's tweet above it which i think in fact is the answer to this question that we should have just simply read and then saved all this time but all right francis wooden former saint joseph's high athlete told us about it in essence it went like this with a runner on second base and two outs the batter hit a routine grounder to the shortstop, who fielded it cleanly.

The runner was on route to third base with the crack of the bat. The shortstop became confused as to where the runner had been. He moved towards second base, tagged it, and thought he had completed a force out to end the inning. Then he suddenly realized that there had been no one on first base when the ball was hit. So he quickly pegged to first base. By this time, the batter had crossed the bag and was ruled safe. So what would you call it? Three options have been advanced. They are hit, error, and fielder's choice. Well, it certainly is an error of a type. It's a mental error. But if he had bobbled it and failed to make that throw to first, then that would be

counted as an error. And in terms of the effect and really also the reason, it's sort of the same thing, right? So it's kind of difficult. I mean, historically, you haven't really counted mental errors as errors so much. And you also, I mean, the problem with errors is that like if a fielder touches a ball and drops it it's an error if he never touches it even though it drops right next to him because he never saw it or something then it's it's not an error so in some ways errors strip out what the player was thinking or his motive at times it's more about like the physical act so maybe it's inconsistent with how errors have usually been assessed, but I'd call it an error. It's very odd because it, so this short

stop, the play was at first and he instead, you could call it, he went and tagged second, but you could assume he, let's, let's just hypothetically say he tossed it to second and the second baseman was there and was like, what? I don't have anything to do with this. So that would have been the exact same thing as what he did. okay so if the shortstop had fielded the ball and then turned and thrown it to the left fielder that would be also the same thing throwing it to a place where there is no play at the expense of the outs that are there to be made and i think then throwing it to the left fielder would definitely be called an error and so why not throwing it traveling traveling it,

you know, locomoting it to second base where there is also no play would not equally be an error. This reminds me, I've mentioned a couple days ago that I'm in a no hitter league with Mark Simon and Sarah Langs. And all that matters is how long a no hit bid survives. And so I pay a lot of attention to the first hit of games and what they are what they look like and i have this has really clarified something for me which is that a ton of hits are just so stupid like not just like we all know that like bloopers fall in and line drives get caught but a ton of them are so stupid they're just the stupidest plays like so many hits are swinging bunts pop-ups in no man's land that are like that the short stop is there but then gets turned

around and it falls like i'm talking like you're not gonna believe me ben but of all the hits in major league baseball 85 are that are one of those two things i just described and then there's another category of this which i've noticed i i've seen two no hitters that these could be in the first inning but they are no hitters broken up this year where the the ball was hit to the first baseman the pitcher broke late but got to the bag you know in time to beat the runner but narrowly and at a full sprint and it's a very tricky play at that point right right? That's the tough play. Whereas if he'd broken right away and gotten there in time to sort of slow down and angle into it, that's an easy play. And so both times the throw was dropped and an error was called instead of a hit. Whereas if the pitcher did

not break at all, I think they would maybe call that a hit because now there's no pitch there. Or if he broke even later and didn't get there before the runner, like if he got there a foot behind the runner because he broke even later, that's also a hit. And so that's what I mean when I say that like the difference between many hits and many errors is almost indistinguishable. And that's before you account for, well, if you were standing one foot over which is totally an option then it wouldn't have been a hit it would have been an error or vice versa anyway i think that the example that emma gave to me is clearly an error the newspaper at the time polled some scores some scorekeepers and the consensus was error but the consensus on twitter seemed to be that it

should be one of those other two anyway uh to get to the what i was saying emma sums this entire thing up which i will now read okay i stumbled across this in a newspaper while looking for something totally unrelated and in the space of five minutes i've gone from i don't care to hit to fielder's choice to what is an error really? Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of where every contemplation of errors leads is what is an error because that's what official scores have to decide every time and they decide it pretty inconsistently. So we end up puzzling about this often.

Yeah. All right. Stat blast. Stat blast. puzzling about this often. Yeah. All right. StatBlast? StatBlast! They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystablast! So we talked a couple days ago about home run robberies and Matt Trueblood's findings that part of this seems to be that outfielders are playing much deeper in this deep fly ball

home run era, which makes home run robberies probably more possible because you're able to get back and catch them. And if fielders are playing back deep like that, it also opens up possibilities for another one of the most exciting and expectations subverting plays in baseball, which is the hustle double, right? If you're playing deep and a ground ball goes through center field and you've got a hustler and you lollygag just a little bit,

then suddenly he's tearing around first base, hustling in for a double. We all love a hustle double. One of my favorite plays in baseball, though I don't think that that's how hustle should be used. But anyway, I wondered if there are more hustle doubles this year than there have been in previous years and so i looked at some stat cast data and before i tell you what i did i um i'm curious to know how would you how would you look for this how would you what would you do to try to find out

how many hustle doubles there are and now we'll see if that aligns with my process. Gosh, I don't know. I'm blanking right now. All right. Well, here's what I did. And the goal, of course, is to capture as many hustle doubles as possible while including as many non-hustle traditional doubles as possible. So I took a fairly narrow view of what I was going to count.

So I went to StatCast search and I queried doubles hit on ground balls to basically the middle two thirds of the field. So I'm taking out anything down the line, down the lines. So I went from 60 degrees to 60 degrees. So that is basically, you know, to straightaway left to straightaway, right. I think. And, uh, so anything down the line is not going to count because that's a traditional double. So these are going to be ground balls up the middle. And then I also did a separate query for anything in the air up the middle that had a exit velocity of 83 miles per hour or less, because that is almost certainly not going to be a ball that an outfielder has to run back on, but rather that he has to run in on.

I don't know if that's a good way of defining these things. However, I can tell you that I watched, I don't know, maybe 20 of these and not one of them was not a hustle double. Every single one that I found was exactly what you think of as a hustle double. So this would be either a ground ball at the middle or like kind of a, you know, a flare or a line drive that's kind of up the middle and kind of, kind of in the gap, but that the outfielders are running in on, not running even sideways on. If anything, I am leaving hustle doubles on the table, but I am not

capturing non-hustle doubles. So I looked at how many there were each year and to restate what, well, I guess you had this chart in your article the next day. So in 2015, the average center fielder played 312 feet deep. Now it's 321 feet deep and the corner outfielders have moved more or less correspondingly. I can't remember. Is it a pretty four or five feet in the corners? And it's gone a little bit back each year. It hasn't every year. Okay. So even 2017, which had more home runs than 2018, uh, was still a little more shallow than in 2018, right? Yes. All right. Um, so I threw out 2015. more shallow than in 2018, right? Yes. All right. So I threw out 2015. I just looked at 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. And the number of hustle doubles in 2016 was 118. And then in 2017, it was 158.

It's a big jump, got a trend. And then in 2018, it was actually only 127. And then this year, it's on pace to be only 116 which would actually be the low for the last four years so that was a dud uh i sorry since i don't know why do you have a theory or why we are not seeing more hustle doubles ben i don't know maybe it could be maybe it's like less valuable to try to take that extra base because uh there's less contact fewer balls in play it's like the same stuff we've talked about with uh you know it makes less sense to try to go to third when you're on second and you know you're just kind of waiting for a homer or not expecting to be driven in at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. Could be. Although the peak home run year of the previous three was when we saw the most hustle doubles.

I think that it's just that players don't hustle like they did in my day. My day was 2017. These guys today, they just don't want it. They're paid too much. I don't really know i'm disappointed in it but that's that's what that's what it says that's what all this says uh you're right though that fewer balls are put in play and of course more of the balls that are put in play are fly balls so even fewer grounders and flares are put in play so but, but all the same, I mean, this is significantly uninteresting. I will give

you a little bit of a little bit of an extra fun fact, which is that three players, three players, four players, four players are tied for the most hustle doubles in the past four years with a relatively unexciting total of six apiece, but they do. These four players have six a piece. One of them is Carlos Gonzalez. And the answer to that seems pretty easy to explain. He played in Coors Field for a lot of that time, which is very spacious and outfielders have to play even deeper. One is Ozzie Albies, who I think of as a major hustle double kind of guy and also a hustle triple kind of guy. And so I don't know if he is. I don't watch the majority of Ozzie Albies ball playing, but it fits a narrative that I already had about him. One is Kevin Kiermaier. Kevin Kiermaier has

three of each type. He's the only player with three of each of these types, the ground ball and the fly ball hustle double. And then Eddie Rosario, who has four of the fly ball type and two of the ground ball type. And I watched all of his. And they are really, they are glorious. They are all like, he beats it by an inch. You don't see it coming. You don't even know he's doing it until he's two-thirds of the way.

And then the hurried throw and the tag and the overslide, and he keeps his finger on it, and it's beautiful. So those are all the six hustle double guys. Anthony Rizzo has five, and Billy Hamilton has five, which I like because those are two extremely different player types, but they both get to kind of the same place here. Yeah, I was going to ask whether it's better to be extremely fast or sort of sneaky fast. What's the best way to get a hustle double? Because if you're Billy Hamilton, obviously everyone's expecting you to try to go where they're aware.

And they're not playing deep. Yeah, they're not playing deep on you either. Right. So the fact that he's done that anyway is even more a testament to his speed. speed well yeah there's both types at the top of this list and uh so either way i think works but i think that being sneaky fast slash power hitter just eyeballing the top is is a little bit better all right well i appreciate a stat blast with a null result gotta mix in one of those every now and then yeah no publication bias on this podcast if we if we get a significantly uninteresting stat blast we will still tell you about it it's our commitment to you all right andrew patrick patreon supporter says if we had robot umpires perhaps we should say when we have robot umpires would or will catchers still squat yeah so this uh we emailed a bunch of this stuff back and forth, and so now I feel weird saying it because you've already heard me say it.

I have not seen your responses. All right. Oh, good. So who asked this question? Andrew Patrick. Andrew. And so I asked Andrew whether he meant to go back to the way they used to do it where they just kind of lean over in that old-timey catcher way

or whether he meant that they would just kneel, that they would just be on their knees like uh you do in little league when you're tired and it's the sixth inning and your coach yells at you and he said the latter um so let's quickly just address the former which i wanted to mention i i had a conversation with uh i believe dave schumannfield and brad doolittle earlier this year about when that they had been discussing when the catcher leaning over way of standing disappeared and I said like 1810 right like that that's way old timey and they said that it's actually much more recent than you think like if you look at I believe if I'm remembering this right, if you look at world series video from like the fifties, they're still standing that way,

which is crazy. I might be wrong about all of that, including who I was having this conversation with. But Andrew said the kneeling one, which I think is extremely interesting. I'm glad that you brought this question up. Not because I have a ton to say about it, but I think that, that what Andrew and I briefly talked about is very interesting to think about. Andrew said, if you don't have a runner on, you would just kneel because the squat is really good for framing. It helps you kind of center your body around the pitch,

helps you kind of lean into it so that you're not jabbing at it. If you kneel, you're going to be jabbing. And so a big part of the reason that you would squat, even if there's no one on base, is to give the umpire that good presentation. If you didn't have to worry about the umpire, because this is all math now, you could jab. It doesn't matter if you jab. You could drop it for all anybody cares. And so you just kneel. And so the first thing that you would

think is when you hear robo umpires is, ah, robo umpires will mean more catcher offense because we'll no longer be selecting catchers primarily for defense because their defensive contribution will be so much smaller and mobility will not be quite as important but andrew's suggestion suggests that you'd have another big improvement to catcher offense because they they could rest they their legs would not break down nearly as quickly. They would have fresh legs because they would only have to squat a couple dozen times a game instead of a couple hundred times a day. And their careers would be longer. They would run faster. They would be healthier.

They would have strong, fresh legs, maybe even into the summer. And all in all, you'd expect catcher offense to go way up. And then this further led to the realization that the players union, the players association should be fighting for this, you would think. Now, maybe there's, I don't know, maybe there's union solidarity. I don't know where the players association considers the umpires association to be their allies or their foes, because they're going for the same, in some ways, the same control or power in the game. But from the players association perspective, and from the players association members specifically, we're talking about roughly 10% of the workforce for whom this is a workplace safety issue, a career longevity issue,

and a quality of life issue. For 10% of the workforce, this would be a significant improvement in their work life. And you would sort of think that if the Players Association thought about it that way, that this would be something that they might be fighting for and demanding now that the technology is there. And I don't know, maybe that's, I don't know. I don't know how you handle the fact that the other guys are a union too, and you're basically trying to get rid of their jobs, or some portion of them replace them with automation. So maybe that, I don't know, maybe you don't think that way. Maybe you do. I'm not sure. But strictly from players' perspective, you could see the union really taking this as a priority.

Yeah. So you'd have to be somewhat mobile just so you could block balls. You'd have to get down and you wouldn't want to stand up, obviously, because you still need to present a target that's in the strike zone. So you still got to get low. Well, you only have to block balls with two strikes. Yeah, that's true, I guess. So you'd still have to be down, but you wouldn't have to be as down as you are currently. And I think being on your knees probably wouldn't hurt a whole lot for blocking pitches. You're even lower than you are squatting. You're less mobile laterally. So that's kind of a problem. You know, maybe there'd be more

wild pitches and passed balls. So you'd have to keep that in mind. But I think kneeling makes sense just from a less strain on your knees. I mean, it's not easy to kneel either. That can hurt your knees sometimes too. But I think that's probably what would happen. And you could even, you know, if you're just kneeling every time, you could have thick knee pads and you'd be fine that's that's kind of what you do already so i i think that's probably what would happen but those concerns that you bring up are interesting ones and it would be nice for catchers because uh jeff and i did an episode episode 12 15 where we talked to all of the tallest catchers in history. So we had the three 6'6 catchers in history all on one episode, including current Tigers catcher Grayson Greiner.

And the older catchers we talked to were just reeling off a litany of surgeries and, oh, my hip has been replaced and my knees and this and that. And their entire lower bodies are are just like cybernetic at this point because of their height and the strains of playing the position but yeah you would get to see less wear and tear on catchers you'd get to see catchers playing more games so it would change the position we're like at the low ebb for the position offensively right now primarily it seems because there is so much emphasis on the defense because it can be quantified now. So we'd do a complete 180, and you'd have the opposite in this scenario. So it really would change things dramatically.

All right, maybe last one here. Let's see. This is from Mitch, also a Patreon supporter, and we were just talking about starters versus relievers the other day, so this is perhaps inspired by that. The opener seems to me like it's here to stay as a strategy, even if it never becomes widespread. In light of that, how many seasons do you think it will be until relievers throw more innings than starters collectively? As you said, I think when we just talked about this, it hasn't changed much this year relative to last year right so it's it's just over 40 percent i think is going to relievers right now yeah just over 40 percent and if my memory serves me right it's gone from like 30 to 40 fairly steadily upwards since like the since 2000 or since the 90s it goes up when there's high offense a little bit uh So it's not a perfect line up, but it's gone up sort of slowly but steadily. This year it has kind of stalled, but that's a one-year stall, and it's not conclusive yet.

Yeah. So is there any reason to think that it will pick up again to the point that relievers will outweigh starters, do you think? Well, I think that there's maybe a case that the slow and steady progress might be done that like i would say that within in in i i've given the the the long answer before like i think within 50 years the answer is undoubtedly yes but i don't think that it's going to be it goes up 0.2% every year for 50 years or anything like that I think that we might have reached a point now where it's kind of maxed out under the current way of playing but the next like the next change in pitcher usage will flip it in like entirely

quite quickly and so I don't know when that year will happen though when that flip will happen and that flip basically being that rather than having even the notion of a five-man rotation of guys who go six innings you have uh you know maybe two dozen pitchers in baseball who go five or six innings and everybody else is on a three or four day rotation has one to four inning relievers or one to four inning pitchers and that the the the roles are entirely broken down but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen like this year and that doesn't seem to me like something that's likely to happen gradually it seems like the thing that's likely to happen when one or three teams commit to it suddenly and it works and then lots of teams do it and it becomes the new economic model for pitchers and player development and everything else yeah well that could happen

fairly soon if one team decides this would benefit us could happen this summer yeah like when the rays debuted the opener last year in may by the end of the season what like 10 teams had tried it something like that and entering the season you would never have thought that that any team would do it really let alone you know a significant percentage of the teams in baseball and that had to do with the fact that the raysays were pretty successful with that strategy too. But still, it just took one team to break the ice there and for baseball to be ready for it. Because as I wrote, the 93 A's experimented with something like that too. And it was just before its time.

And it wasn't adopted. And they didn't stick with it that long. But if one team entered a season, I mean, the Rays could have done this instead. Maybe they could have just as easily said, we lost a lot of guys to Tommy John surgery, and this is what we're going to do. We're going to have Blake Snell will be a starter, but everyone else won't be a starter. And maybe if they'd done that, it would have hastened this change. So I don't know. It's conceivable to me that it might be decades, but it's also conceivable to me that it could be two years or something. That is exactly where I stand, yeah. So should we hazard a guess because Mitch asked us to? Yeah, it just is not a thing that you can apply averages or anything to. So, yeah, I mean, I'll say that it happens in eight years. Six years.

Huh. All right. No. I'll take the over, I think. I'll go 11 years. Yeah. All right. I don't know.

That's a tough one. But it will happen. We both think it will happen Yeah I mean within 50 Or maybe within 75 But quite possibly next year Okay alright Should I wrap up there? Sure

Well after Sam and I spoke the Marlins lost again And they got shut out again That's two consecutive shutouts They've scored eight runs in their last seven games They have not scored two runs since May 6th. Not great. Before I wrap up, I'll just talk about two more questions, one of which will be quick. This one came in after we finished recording from Eric Hartman.

He says, what's the highest number of runs a team has scored with one player scoring every one of those runs? As an example, I write this in the sixth inning of the Jays game, and Brandon Drury has scored all three of the Blue Jays' runs. That is how that game ended. Blue Jays lost 4-3 and Drury scored the three Jays runs. Sam answered this one via email. It's four. Matt Kemp scored four on July 19th, 2009 in a Dodgers 4-3 win. Eric Davis scored four in an August 24th, 1990 4-3 Reds win over the Pirates. Sam says it may have happened before that, but that's the most. I'll take his word for it.

And this other question is one that I had on my list, and I'll answer it now because it's peripherally related to something Sam and I discussed. This is from Brendan. He says, Recently, I saw Landon Powell's name listed as an alumnus of a local youth baseball league, but what stuck out to me is that they listed catching a no-hitter as his accomplishment. I read that and laughed, thinking, is being a catcher and a no-hitter really an accomplishment? Then the dialogue surrounding Mike Fiers' recent no-hitter made me think, are we thinking of no-hitters wrong? We tend to think of a no-hitter or perfect game as a player accomplishment, but in actuality it should be considered a team accomplishment.

It's a combination of good pitching and good defense not making any mistakes. Why do we seem to give all the credit to the pitcher and not to the team as a whole? To bring this back to the Landon Powell comment, why don't all the players credit in their list of accomplishments that they were part of a no-hitter? Ramon Laureano made a great play that preserved the no-hitter slash shutout, so shouldn't he be recognized in his career for this too? And yes, I think that's true. I think we acknowledge that no-hitters and perfect games, even to an extent, are team

accomplishments. I know that, for instance, Jason Veritech and Carlos Ruiz, I believe, have caught four no-hitters apiece. I think that's a record. And there's always, it seems, a play that comes along in a no-hitter that preserves that no-hitter. Like when we think of Mark Burley, for instance, Mark Burley has a no-hitter and a perfect game.

And when you think of Mark Burley's perfect game, I think of Dwayne Wise's home run robbery to preserve that. And if you think of his no-hitter, I think Jermaine Dye had a home run robbery or at least a catch at the top of the wall that preserved that. And as we've noted, many no-hitters are not actually that impressive from a pitching perspective. Often there are a lot of balls in play and a lot of fantastic plays. And when you're talking about a perfect game, of course,

often there are many balls in play, and there are many fielders who made spectacular plays that if they hadn't made them might have been ruled an error but still would have broken up the no-hitter. Of course, it's defense-dependent. I mean, every start is catcher-dependent. The catcher's involved in every pitch, and so we might as well list the winning catcher and the losing catcher

along with the winning pitcher and the losing pitcher. We don't do that. I think the reason why we give pitchers credit for no-hitters and perfect games is that they're the person at the center of that story. They're the protagonist. They're the one who has the ball. They're initiating the action. They're the one we're focusing on. And they're the one most responsible for the outing. But I believe it's a tradition, right? When a pitcher pitches a perfect game, often they will give a watch to all their teammates or something, and it will be engraved with, you know, the date and the perfect game. And that's a recognition of the fact that, of course, it's team dependent, and the pitcher

can't actually do it himself unless he strikes out every batter. And even then, he'd still be dependent on the catcher to call those pitches and catch them. So it's really just for convenience sake, for storytelling sake. You don't want to say, this team threw a no-hitter and list every player on that roster, so you list the starting pitcher. But there's an acknowledgement that all players or most players played a part. You can play a part in supporting this podcast by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support and are helping preserve the podcast. Mitchell Uetzler, Eric Albers, John Russo, Tom Hawk, and Matthew Penny. Thanks to all of you. I have

something else today to ask you to support. I know the point of this podcast is to distract us from death, let us forget our mortality, but sometimes mortality intrudes. And it intruded for me today after I finished recording this email episode with Sam, as I do after every email episode. I sent a document with all the questions we answered to a group of several listeners who started or have helped contribute to the Effectively Wild Wiki. Then they take those questions and they add them to the synopsis of that episode when it's added to the Wiki. One of the guys I always include in those emails is Mike Moriarty, whom I've mentioned once or twice before on the show because he's been such a big part of the Effectively Wild Wiki project. And sometime after I sent that

email today, I learned that Mike passed away recently, leaving behind a wife and a young son. Mike was a White Sox fan in Chicago, and he's been a listener for years. He's been a member of the Facebook group for years, and he has contributed more than 500 episode synopses to the Effectively Wild Wiki. He's been one of the two most active participants in that project, and he has contributed more than 500 episode synopses to the Effectively Wild wiki. He's been one of the two most active participants in that project, and he was working on it right up almost until the day he died. It made me very sad to go look at the sign-up sheet on the Facebook group where people claim episodes to recap, and he is the last one to have edited that. I think episode 1364 is the last one that he worked on and added to the wiki. I didn't

really know Mike well. We had corresponded via email and Facebook chat, but he was a presence in my life and I appreciated his contribution to the community. He's a big part of the Facebook group and a huge part of the wiki project. He was also a contributor to Banished to the Pen, the blog started by Effectively Wild listeners, and I know that they're planning to publish his last post very soon. I know from looking at his Facebook page that he's missed by many people, and some of them have set up a GoFundMe page for his wife, Ruth, and his son, Mike Jr., who's three. I'm going to link to that GoFundMe in the show notes today and in the Facebook group. If you'd like to help out his family, that would be a great gesture.

He gave many hours to listening to and documenting this podcast, and if you ever use the Effectively Wild wiki to look up an episode, it's very likely that you're looking at his handiwork. I know that he was working toward completing that project, which is almost complete. Almost every episode has been recapped, and I'm really grateful for that. So even though I never met him, I sort of felt like I knew him just because he was a part of this community that has grown over the years and has meant a lot to people. And I can see just from looking at the list of people who've contributed to that GoFundMe, there are a lot of other Facebook group members, podcast listeners, Banished to the Pen writers who got to know him through the show and everything

that sprung up around it. So thank you, Mike, and condolences to everyone in his life. I'll start a thread in the Facebook group for people to share remembrances of Mike. You can join that Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam coming via email at podcastandfangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And please consider pre-ordering my book, which can be in your hands in less than three weeks. Order it anywhere. Send some confirmation that you pre-ordered an email or a receipt to themvpmachine at gmail.com and you will be eligible for a bunch of bonus goodies that we will be giving you when the book comes out on June 4th, an extra chapter, conversation between me and travis and some other fun documents that are related to the book that you'll want to see so pre-ordering really helps us and it helps you too we'll be back with another episode a little later this week so meg and i will talk to you then and i

remember the last thing that he told me he said would you say a prayer for me? Friends say I shouldn't know about that I don't know about that I wish I felt like standing tall But I don't know about that I'm just sad about that I could use a place to fall