Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1381: Minnesota Surprise

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Rays’ four-man outfield against Cavan Biggio and the gradual ascendance of four-man outfields across the league, Sam’s belated thoughts on the Mets and baseball in Avengers: Endgame, a few underappreciated aspects of the late Bill Buckner’s career, and the record number of MLB debuts this decade by […]

We once lost it all before Down to the last pair of shoes we've owned Nothing more to comfort me inside These four walls Good morning and welcome to episode 1381 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast. Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN and I'm with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello. Hello.

Hi, how are you? Doing all right. Cool. I want to mention something, but I only heard it described on the radio. I have not checked the visuals, so I might be wrong. But as I understand it, the Rays used a four-man outfield yesterday

against Kevin Biggio. Yes, I saw a picture. Okay, so he had 10 career plate appearances. Yeah. In the majors. Of course, he had 10 career plate appearances in the majors. Of course, he had batted many, many more times in the minors. But two things about this. One is that's quick.

Yes. Like that's an extreme measure for a player who you've basically, you know, we've hardly seen. That was the first time the Rays had faced him. Although, you know, that doesn't really matter. But 10 plate appearances in the majors and they had enough to decide that, which what's your take on that? That shocked me. And I don't know if what that tells me is that the minor league data is just so robust now that it's, you know, just as good as major league data. Or if it has something, if we can just, it might just be that generally speaking, you don't need that much to go on to sort of know what a guy's hit tendencies are going to be.

If you can see his swing and you sort of know his basic batter profile, and you've got some data behind it, including minor league data, then it's enough to know. But I mean, there's very few guys who are being four-man outfielded these days so so I would not have bet on on it being Kevin Biggio in his 11th plate appearance yeah well I don't know exactly what his minor league batted ball data says and we only have so much of it we don't have the track man stuff that the Rays have access to but I know that he's a guy who made a swing change, I think, the winter before last season, which was credited for some of his ascendance of the prospect lists. And I get the sense that he is a very pull-heavy guy, and they were obviously playing him to pull there, or at least, you know, in the infield. And so I think that they probably just saw something in his minor league stats. It sort of surprises me, but I guess it shouldn't really surprise me because there's no real need that many balls in play to see whether someone is going to be someone who pulls the ball a lot but you obviously need more than that so clearly they were looking at his

minor league stats and there's no real reason why you shouldn't trust those just as much when it comes to batted ball tendencies I mean mean, different pitching, obviously, you're going to see slower pitches on average, and you're maybe going to see certain types of pitches more, and that might affect where you hit the ball, but it's probably not going to affect whether you're a fly ball hitter or whether you're a pull hitter. So sure, why not? Why not?

If you have that data available, just put it into practice right away. Yeah, I wonder if it would have caught my attention as much if it had been a person whose name I don't have kind of a Pavlovian response to. It's interesting because Vlad Guerrero Jr., when he was coming up, I sort of expected a thing that he's not just because I saw thousands of plate appearances by a guy named Vlad Guerrero, who he's related to. And so I just kind of lazily imagined that he was going to be a sort of similar type hitter. And he's a different type of great hitter, not really Vlad-like in a lot of ways. And I had a vision of what a BGO would look like. And BGO, I don't know, maybe Craig Bgo is the sort of guy that you would have done a four-man outfield against now that i think about it i can't say for sure uh but it's certainly not like i mean the four-man outfield was designed for uh guys like joey gallo you would think and

first kind of implemented against guys like joey gallo and that's not what Craig Biggio is. So that's, yeah, I don't know. Like if just some minor leaguer had come up and they'd done it, I would have thought, oh, interesting how good minor league data is instead of like, what does this mean? Yeah, well, you can look at baseball savant, you can search for the guys who are getting the four man outfield applied to them the most often this season. And right now, if I just set The minimum at 50 pitches so that I Can include Kevin Piccio He is at 15.8% Of the pitches he's seen there's been a four

Man outfield in place obviously that is Skewed because he just played the raise But if you go beyond That you've got Brandon Belt Top of the list 9.6% Of the pitches he's seen There's been a four manman outfield in place. And then Alex Avila, Pete O'Brien, Curtis Granderson, Matt Olson.

Those are the only other guys above 5%. And you mentioned Joey Gallo. He is next on the list at 3.7%. So not a lot of guys getting the four-man outfield often, which is kind of interesting, I guess, because I don't know whether that says more about the teams that are facing them and about those guys. Does it mean that you actually should only have a four-man outfield in place 3.7% of the time against Joey Gallo? Or does it mean that only 3.7% of the time teams have been willing to do the thing that you should do against them? So I don't know how much it depends on the count and the pitcher and the ballpark and

the defense and all these things that could come into play here. I would guess that the percentage of the time that you should be doing it is probably higher than 3.7%. If it makes sense to do it that number of times, I would think it might make sense to do it more often than that. But I don't know exactly. Yeah, at this point in baseball, if you were the only team doing something, I wonder if it would make you just question it in a way that it wouldn't before. If the 3.7% is basically all coming from two teams, like 10 years ago, that would have made you feel cutting edge and sharp because you would have trusted your data. But now, after a few weeks, you'd start being like, how come nobody is following me? Perhaps. Fields on baseball savant before this season maybe or it hasn't been long but i think it's Been applied retroactively so if we look on a league-wide basis for the five stat cast seasons That we have so far we've got 409 pitches so far this year on which the four-man outfield was in

Place that is already more than all of last season according to baseball savant which was 252 pitches all last year and if you look at the years before that 2017 six pitches 2016 nine pitches 2015 19 pitches so i don't know for sure that this has been applied retroactively perfectly so maybe it sounds about right though i mean i i think it was 16 16 maybe 17 that the cubs did it to joey vato and it was worth writing an article about right and our book came out in 2016 and we thought we were so ahead of the pack doing the four-man outfield and that was kind of i think when major league teams started getting on board although historically it had happened from time to time as i i wrote about subsequently but but yeah it looks like this has gone from almost non-existent to very occasional last year to already more than all of last season, just through, what, 30% or so of this season.

So it's not common, but it's a heck of a lot more common than it was just a couple of years ago. just a couple of years ago. Would you think that minor league spray charts are almost perfectly correlated to major league spray charts when you are first called up? Because it seems somewhat dangerous to assume that given how different the pitching is, but it only seems that way to me. It might not be the case.

It might be that tendencies are tendencies. And so whether you're able to do that successfully might change, but your tendencies are certainly going to come with you and that it doesn't really matter whether you're facing harder velocity. And it might not even be the case that you are facing that much harder velocity in this day and age. So that you can just assume that double A and triple A are going to become major league. Yeah, I would guess it's very similar. And maybe you could even adjust it. If you look at what all

minor leaguers do when they get called up, like, I don't know if the velocity goes up a mile per hour, two miles per hour. Maybe you can see that guys pull just a little bit less often because they're not getting around on pitches quite as much. And you can kind of bake that in. But yeah, I would guess that it's very predictive. All right. I have seen Endgame now. And so now it's my turn to uh to talk about the spoiler alert uh-huh uh lack of mets yes i i know that you what did you do a whole episode on this with michael

we did like a segment on it so then you and meg spoke about it about it briefly yeah and also this all happened like two months ago and so i don't have much to say, but I will just note that the fact that it's the Mets that they mentioned, I think it's safe to say that the Mets and the Yankees, I think it's safe to say that it's not that the Mets all disappeared, but rather that baseball is no longer, which makes a lot of sense to me when you think about the infrastructure of society and so on.

But the fact that the Mets were mentioned and that the Yankees were not mentioned even though the yankees are obviously much more famous and would make more sense to an international audience leads me back to the roots video ben the where the met where the phillies logo was appeared but the yankees logo was blurred out it just makes me wonder how hard it is to get clearance on the yankees logo was blurred out it just makes me wonder how hard it is to get clearance on the yankees logo and if they actually were like that is too expensive we got to go with the mets because when i first heard the the the emailer who mentioned this i thought it being the mets was maybe like a joke or something something of that sort but having seen it having seen the way that it's discussed it's not supposed to to be funny, I don't think, that it's the Mets.

And so, yeah, I think that the Yankees priced themselves out of a cameo in Endgame. Could be. I think maybe that the director or one of the directors is a Mets fan, I think, possibly, of the movie, the Russo brothers. Because I think one of the Russos is actually in that scene and makes a cameo in the talking about the Mets scene. So I don't know whether I heard that or I'm imagining that, but I think it might have been that. Probably also was easier to get clearance to put Citi Field in the movie than it was Yankee Stadium, so maybe that's it too. Okay. All right.

Well, I'm on the lookout for the Yankees not being mentioned in things. I heard an ad for some sprint promotion uh where it was clearly an mlb licensed promotion but it is tied to the red sox and the yankees playing in uh in england and they refer to the new york boston rivalry and it sounded very awkward and i thought that sounds that sounded awkward they should have said the yankees red socks rivalry and so now i'm i'm constantly looking for places that the yankees are like not said so that got me wondering about endgame all right i think spider-man's a mets fan too according to canon but yeah so that could be it but but you came to the same conclusion well that we did about baseball being gone not not just the Mets, although I was making the case that I didn't think baseball would disappear in this scenario.

Oh, I think it's without a question it would. I think that there's two reasons that it could disappear, one being or that the league could go out of business or quit playing. One is that we're all too sad. And the other, and so I think that is a good question for the leftovers. Would Major League Baseball survive if 2% of the population were raptured as happens in the leftovers?

And that, I think that that might be, I mean, as the show, so before I finish this sentence, the thing that bugs me about superhero movies is that to me, the most interesting part of the story is always how would the world react to like aliens opening up like portals and like destroying entire cities and the you know the superheroes basically like smashing into each other and not hurting each

other for an hour and a half is the least interesting part of the story. The most interesting part of the story, the most interesting part of Endgame is the grief counseling or the grief group circle. And I want more of that. And that's why I like The Leftovers so much. And so the idea that maybe we'd be too sad to carry on some forms of entertainment is very interesting and plausible to me.

I think when you get to half the world gone, then it becomes simply a matter of not having enough people to keep society running and not having any free time. If you think about how much extra work we would all have to do in order to keep, for instance, nuclear power plants not exploding now you you figure you figure i don't know how many people there are in the world that maintain our nuclear power plants let's say it's a thousand and i don't know how many people there are in the world who are qualified to maintain a nuclear power plant but let's say it's a thousand and a hundred and fifty like most of those people trained for that and got the job there's not a lot of people who like on the side studied nuclear power plant maintenance.

And so if you need a thousand people to maintain those nuclear power plants and 500 of them are gone, now you've got to find 500 people and train and educate them. And those 500 people are going to come from other, you know, probably highly skilled, highly specialized sectors. And you've got to backfill them. I mean, there was a nod to this in the trash not getting picked up scene when Ant-Man is walking down the street and you just see trash piled up everywhere. But I think there'd be a lot more of that. I mean, cell phone service wouldn't work. The power grid would almost certainly

collapse at a certain point. You'd have like a real problem maintaining order in society. And so I just don't think that people would have the free time to go to ballparks. Not not even counting the fact that the ballpark size stays the same and to light it and so on. You would still need to, you know, get some comparable size crowds from half the population. But I think also like there just wouldn't be time. We'd all be very, very, very busy. And not only that, but I mean, like, reasonably, of the 50% of people who remain, many of us would be in a fetal position for years, as it sort of shows. And so I think there'd be a lot more retirement that I wouldn't want to, I mean, like, a lot of people would quit their job, right? At that point. Sure. Yeah. It's an, it's an existential crisis as it is in the leftovers. And that's only

2% because now you've got this sort of intrusion of the supernatural into the world, which our brains aren't, are not entirely like equipped to handle as it is. And so you'd have, I mean, you know, it'd get crazy and bleak. And I mean, that's, that's assuming that there isn't like widespread crime and, and, and like walking dead style breakdown where then you have like an entirely new set of ripple effects. So the idea that society would be functioning even as well as it is five years later is very optimistic, but I just don't see sports being able to survive. Yeah, I looked at it more from the perspective of you're going to need something to distract you from the horror and from missing half of your loved ones and all of

that. And sports is something that we use to try to get through tough times. But you're right, maybe it's just too much trauma for society to actually continue to function well enough to sustain baseball. Of course, you could just have fewer teams or less attendance or something, but yeah, it might be difficult. And I think I probably imagined the Russo brothers being Mets fans because they're from Cleveland. So maybe just the fact that one of them is the one who says, I miss the Mets probably just made me conclude that, but I don't know why they would be Mets fans. So it could just be, you're right, maybe it's easier to get the Mets in a movie. And our friend of the show,

Jake Mintz, actually had a cut for post at MLB.com earlier this year that says, why does Hollywood love putting the Mets in post-apocalyptic situations? So it's not just endgame. Maybe it is because it's easier to get clearance for the Mets in post-apocalyptic situations. So it's not just endgame. Maybe it is because it's easier to get clearance for the Mets. The amount of kind of consumption or I don't know, like frivolous costs involved in putting on a major sports league as well, I think would be hard to justify in this world. I mean, would you really be devoting private pilots and airplane management to transporting a team from city to city in this world? Would you be able to justify having a thousand healthy, able-bodied young men who are playing

baseball when presumably there'd be a lot of need for like, for instance, I mean, building repair. Think of all the helicopters that crashed into buildings. Think of all the planes that crashed into buildings, all that stuff would need to be repaired, all those fires would need to be put out. And it seems like you would have a similar situation to, you know, World Wars one and two, where there was a backlash against ballplayers who did not who did not quit playing and enlist, but I mean, even more extreme. And so I just, I think there's a lot of reasons to think that it wouldn't have survived in any form whatsoever.

Well, baseball was deemed important enough to continue during World War II despite that, and that was a pretty catastrophic scenario. So I don't know. I guess we won't know, but hopefully we never actually find out what would happen to baseball. It seems to me that, I don't know the extent of the powers of the infinity stones, but it seems to me that what he could have done is. They seem pretty infinite. I mean, I suggested it without having seen the episode that the movie that instead of cutting the population in half, he could have doubled the resources. But even if he didn't want to do that, just subtly and without anybody knowing it, dramatically affect fertility rates across all life on Earth and within a generation. You could have half the population and nobody would cease to have existed.

Nobody would know. They'd just think, ah, weird. Yeah, definitely seems like there's some less destructive alternatives there. But that's another conversation. He seemed like basically a nice guy. It doesn't feel like he did not, he definitely did not see himself as the villain in this story. He was trying something. He was a fanatic, but he was trying something.

And it feels like he just didn't think it through that well. Yes, right. Or relocate people maybe to some uninhabited fertile planets or something yeah i don't know universe out there that but it's better than being dust but anyway i guess that's that's enough for our what third end game conversation on this podcast but all right so uh just a couple things i wanted to mention first I went looking for something to say about Bill Buckner other than the obvious thing to say about Bill Buckner and

wanted to tell you about something that I came to appreciate more about him after digging into his career, after learning that he had died on Monday. And I think that when people try to say something nice about Bill Buckner, which is not hard to do, I mean, you can say many nice things about him personally, but you can also say many nice things about him in a baseball sense because he was an all-star and he won a batting title and he played for 22 years and he had 2,700 hits, et cetera, et cetera. But what I had not appreciated about him was that he was a really excellent defender early in his career. was that he was a really excellent defender early in his career. And you think of Bill Buckner as the 1986 Bill Buckner, the aging Bill Buckner who had ankle problems and foot problems and was not very mobile and was limited almost entirely to playing first base. But early in his career, that was not at all who Bill Buckner was. I'm not going to say he was an amazing fielder. He never won a gold glove or anything. But in his first several seasons, he was primarily a corner outfielder,

not a first baseman. And he was really excellent at that. He was one of the best defensive corner outfielders in baseball for the first several full seasons of his career. So if you look at, seasons of his career. So if you look at, say, 1972 to 1976, that's a span of five seasons when he was with the Dodgers. And I just play indexed guys who played at least 70% of their games in a corner outfield spot. He was actually second in baseball in fielding runs to Dwight Evans in that period. And he was fifth in defensive war in that whole group in that period too. So, you know, he was not a center fielder. If he were better, he probably would have been in center field. But for a corner outfielder, he was really excellent.

And it's not just the numbers, but he also had the reputation at that time too. Because I was looking at his Sabre bio and and it was citing the Sporting News in 1974, saying even more impressive than Buckner's hitting has been his fielding. The left fielder has made five brilliant catches, and then Don Sutton was advocating for him as an MVP candidate that year, and he said he's made so many unbelievable catches out in left field, we're starting to take him for granted. So this was contrary to my image of Bill Buckner. And what happened was in

1975, he had a pretty serious ankle injury. When he was sliding into second base, he severely sprained the ankle and then he came back, but the ankle was never fully healed again. And it kind of bothered him for the rest of his career. And in fact, in 1986, when he made the error, he was shortly due to have surgery on his feet or ankles or both. So he kept having surgery throughout the rest of his career, and it really slowed him down. But he was a really fine defender and even a stolen base threat. And I think that's pretty neat because that is not how Bill Buckner is remembered. But for that early phase of his career, he was a totally different guy. So that portion of his career deserves to be remembered too. Yeah, I'm just now admiring and appreciating his strikeout and also his strikeout and walk rates, which his walk rates are also extremely low.

And he had a, yeah, he had a knack for just being almost exact every year so like 1976 he struck out 26 times and walked 26 times in 19 from 1975 to 1977 actually yeah so for a three-year period he struck out 64 and walked 64 the year after that he struck out 17 and walked 18. So this would have been a very, if all of baseball had hit like Bill Buckner, well, it wouldn't be as offensive of an era as we're in right now. And we would never have had crazy home run records and things like that. But this is the style of play that many people long for, for aesthetic reasons. And in his career, he ended up striking out three times more than he walked.

And I'm just going to check something. It's just on a lark. Let's see. He has, nope, not quite. I was going to see if Byron Buxton has already passed him in career strikeouts. He has not, but he will around August. Yeah, his, well, I think he finished with exactly the same walk rate and strikeout rate, right? Didn't he fit 4.5%? Well, like I said, 453 strikeouts, 450 walks. So over

the course of 22 years, there's only three, a difference of three. Yes. And I think I saw the fun fact that he never struck out more than twice in one game in his whole career, which is pretty impressive. I mean, different game, different era, obviously, and it was easier to do that then, and that was a more prized ability at the time. And who knows? Maybe he would have been a better hitter if he had struck out more. I don't know, because he didn't hit for a ton of power,

especially for a primarily first baseman and not premium defender for much of his career. But, yeah, I mean, it's kind of incredible that he lasted as long as he did, a 22-year career, even though he had the ankle and foot problems and for the last couple of years was not that productive, but I guess was just very valued as a person, partly, and people liked that he hit for high averages.

So yeah, he had a very cool career other than the one thing that people remember him for. Tim Anderson has more career strikeouts than Bill Buckner. Wow. Okay. It's pretty good. Yeah. It's a pretty good one.

Carlos Correa as well. Uh-huh. So one other thing I wanted to mention, you mentioned Kevin Biggio and Vlad Guerrero Jr. Carlos Correa is 24 and a star. Yeah. All star. Yeah. All right. Sorry, go ahead. You mentioned Biggio and Guerrero,

and I keep thinking and coming across stories about fathers and sons and relatives in baseball. It seems like they're everywhere right now. I mean, they're always fairly common. But this weekend, for instance, you had Kevin Krohn come up with the Diamondbacks, and he found out that he was getting called up from his AAA manager, his father, Chris Krohn. And meanwhile, CJ Krohn just had a five-for-six day, and Mike Yastrzemski came up, the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski. And Vlad Jr. had a big day this weekend.

It just seems like there are a lot of sons around, although Yastrzemski is a grandson. although Stremski is a grandson. But this is something that my co-author, Travis Satchik, wrote about in March about the number of sons of big leaguers who are in the big leagues these days. And at the time, he found that this decade had, it was tied with the 1990s for the most debuts in a decade by sons of big leaguers. And so we've had four more of those this year

because we've had Biggio and Guerrero and Tatis and also Cal Quantrill. So we're at 48 sons of big leaguers who have made their debut in the 2010s. And that is a record. I guess this probably doesn't mean that much. I guess it doesn't mean that it's more likely for a son of a big leaguer

to make the majors this decade because there are more teams. And of course, now we're in the period where 20 years ago, there were 30 teams. And so there were more big leaguers back then. And maybe that is why there are just more sons of big leaguers because there were more opportunities for big leaguers then and more opportunities for big leaguers now. So that could be all it is. Travis actually looked at the percentage of all debuts that are sons of big leaguers too, and that is not quite a record. So right now, if you count the four guys this year, it's 2.15% of all debuts in this decade Have been sons of big leaguers And that is higher than any other decade

Except the 1990s Which was at 2.3% So this is not quite a record On a rate basis But just in terms of volume We are seeing an awful lot of sons of big leaguers And of course the Blue Jays Lineup has Guerrero

It now has Biggio It has Lord Scurriel Who is a brother of a big leaguers and Of course the Blue Jays lineup has Guerrero it now has Biggio it has Lord Scurriel who is A brother of a big leaguer and Bobichette when he recovers from His injury will likely join that group At some point so they're Everywhere these days and it's just a fun Thing I mean we've talked about

Big leaguers and fathers and sons and why it's More likely for big leaguers to make The majors there are a lot of reasons it's partly genetic perhaps but it's largely nurture and getting that instruction and modeling yourself on a major leaguer from the first time you swing a bat etc lots of reasons why that happens but it's it's nice it's uh as you mentioned you noticed a thing because it happened to cavendishio and you might not have noticed if it happened to some other rookies. So when we are old enough now to have memories of the fathers and then the sons come along, it is a cool story that I'm enjoying very much this season. Bill Buckner debuted when he was 19 years old. He struck out his 224th time when he was 31.

The record for home runs in a season is 223. So he would not have broken the single season strikeout record until he was 31 after debuting at 19. Yeah, different times, different players. We talked about a few years ago about how it seemed like our stars were kind of more boring than our stars were when we were kids. Because when we were kids, you had two-way players, and you had lots of family-related stars.

And so there have been lots of brothers and sons of baseball players throughout this whole time. But we were observing that there were sadly not many superstars who were sons of ball players. And did you already just say that no i didn't but but you're right now we're we're back to having that again and we've got our we've got the we've got the two-way players have we're probably not going to get multi-sport stars anymore sadly it just doesn't seem like there's i don't know maybe that maybe

there is room for that a year ago we would never have seen Kyler Murray coming. And, you know, who knows how close we got to having Kyler Murray. But it seems like we kind of got a little close, but maybe we didn't ever get close. Maybe it was an illusion, like getting two numbers on a lotto scratcher. But we do have two-way players now, like Otani. And we have, yeah, I mean, for a a lot of reasons i think that we're going to look back on this period of baseball we kind of know it now we're kind of enjoying parts of it and complaining about other parts of it but uh in the same way that i think that when we talked

about what each year is remembered for and briefly discussed how like 1988 to like 1994 or 95 was just like really peak baseball for memorable things, like memorable players, memorable storylines, memorable stuff. I think that we're going to kind of get that now too, partly because we have a very good, interesting crop of stars and partly, I think, because of the youth of those stars and the broadness of those stars and the broadness of those stars skill set yeah that's right still no records though no no records well

record number of sons of big leaguers debuting in a decade yeah fun fact number of big leaguers yeah big leaguers okay all right anything else that you want to no all right you want let's talk about the twins then okay all right so the, there are six division leaders right now. Five of them would not be considered upsets at all. Right. Three of them were obvious. Two of them were favorites, according to some projection systems, and certainly co-favorites with other teams.

And then you've got the Twins, the one team that is propping up the surprise part of baseball this year. They were 2080 underdogs in the al central coming into the year and after this weekend they are now 92 percent favorites to win the division 92 they have they have just completely taken that division over it is not just that they are good uh which would have been a small surprise, but that they have completely taken the division over and that they are playing like the best team in baseball right now. They have the best record and the best run differential, I believe.

And so the Twins have, in some sense, this has made Cleveland look really kind of bad in their decisions. But I mean, really, if you think about it from Cleveland's perspective, what are they going to do? Beat the team with a 680 winning percentage? Like if they had somehow known that the Twins were much better than they realized, it would have been an even more rational decision to not do anything. Because the Twins are an absolute powerhouse.

Here's how good the Twins are, powerhouse here's how good the twins are man this is how good they are you ready for this yes their worst hitter is williams astadio who i've been led to believe is one of the best players in baseball yeah that is still right is that still true well it's not it's a nice it's a good thing when william destiny is your worst hitter i would say so in may we're coming to the end of may they've averaged seven runs a game in may they've averaged six runs a game uh for the season which is a run and a half more than they had last year they have a 900 ops in may they've allowed three runs per game in may uh which is uh they which is to say that they have doubled their opponent's scores for a month. They have a

19-7 record this month, but their Pythagorean record suggests they should actually be 21-5. And so this has been an absolutely dominant team. We should talk about them. But I guess the first, maybe, I don't know, maybe this is the end of the conversation. Are they for real? Well, I mean, I think sort of, yeah. I think people picked them maybe as a surprise team or some people sort of did. Like it wasn't that hard to envision them maybe contending kind of. But even though Cleveland essentially took the offseason off, I thought they were good enough to beat the Twins, to beat anyone else in that division. to beat anyone else in that division. And it's funny, I was just reading Meg's chat at Fangraphs today, and someone, a fan of that team, asked if he should be upset about their lack of activity over the offseason. And Meg said,

the set of circumstances was both very predictable and quite easy to avoid, but then she amended it to, or at least quite easy to attempt to avoid in a more meaningful way, and they elected not to. And I think that is a good thing to point out, at least attempt to avoid. They didn't make a meaningful attempt to get better as a baseball team, but as you said, even if they had, it really wouldn't have made much of a difference right now because they were sort of whatever you did, kind of dependent on their core of stars and that core of stars for various reasons has been unavailable or has been less effective and so even if they had say gone out

and signed brace harper or something they just would be way behind the twins because so many things have gone wrong for them and everything has gone right for the twins so i think the twins are they're real in the sense that their performance thus far supports their record. So they're not that kind of fluke where their run differential doesn't make sense, but I think they're bound to come back to earth a little bit just because they are dominating everyone to such an extent. And I think that they made some good moves over the winter I thought they had a pretty good offseason I didn't think it would be quite enough but they added some guys who seemed like

were upgrades and some of those guys have been good but it's also I think that they turned over their coaching staff after having previously turned over their front office and I think they're probably doing a better job of funneling some of that information from the front office down to the field now and making meaningful changes to guys because I think it was something of a wake up call for them last year when Ryan Presley went from the Twins to the Ast't that the twins weren't aware that Ryan Presley didn't have really nasty pitches. It was that for whatever reason, they couldn't convey that to Ryan Presley and get him to change his approach in the way that the Astros did. And I think that and I'm sure other things played a role in their dismissing Paul Mulder and most of the coaching staff and bringing in Rocco Baldelli. And I think they have made changes this year. They hired Wes Johnson straight from college, maybe the first pitching coach to make the college to MLB jump,

which is interesting because as detailed in my book, which is a week away from being out, there is a lot of innovation going on at the college level. And so you have guys like Martin Perez, who has been fantastic this season and who saw that coming, but he added a new pitch and added some velocity and changes mechanics and everything. So there's some of that. And there's some, I think, launch angle change going on with some of their hitters that could account for some of those breakouts. And then

there's guys like Byron Buxton, who we all thought was good if he could just stay healthy and actually be his best self for a full season. And I don't know if this is his best self, but it's a pretty good self. And he just has to hit enough to be a great defender on the field every day. And then he's a star, essentially. And he's done that for stretches before, and now he's doing it. So it's a bunch of different things that are contributing to this, but most of it I look at and think it's kind of real. Yeah.

So first of all, I just want to say for the record, Byron Buxton is my favorite player in baseball right now. Okay. And watching him play defense does something to me that has not been done to me since Andrelton Simmons, well, was still fresh and novel to me that has not been done to me since andrelton simmons well was was still fresh and novel to me um i guess andrelton simmons still does all that stuff but i'm blacked out of his games um so i get buxton instead and buxton is just such an incredible defender and

he is so fast and his arm is such a majestic arm it's my favorite arm in baseball. And so I'm happy that Byron Buxton is doing well. We will, I just, I think that there was something about him struggling that was one of my least favorite things in baseball, partly because he was just so good. He was just so hyped. And to watch him struggle, he was just so bad. But also because he is, I've heard,, the, I've heard he's just, he's a very shy person. He is, um, he is, I don't know if shy is the right word. I don't know him.

I've never met him. So that might not quite capture the nuance of it, but you, um, somebody, for instance, at a baseball prospectus went and interviewed him when he was in like Cedar Rapids or something like that. and even that hearing of about that experience it was like you know you didn't get the feeling that he was like just i don't know i can't i've never met him i can't psychoanalyze anything about him i'm just saying that like i somehow i thought that i wanted him to be happy more than i want other people to be happy and i wanted him to struggle less than I wanted other people to struggle, if that makes any sense at all.

So I'm happy that Byron Buxton is good. And I'm happy that I'm watching a lot of Twins baseball because I get to see, you can watch Christian Jelic without watching a lot of Brewers baseball because you just flip over when Christian Jelic is batting. Or you can watch Noah Syndergaard pitch without watching a lot of Mets baseball because you just go watch the games he pitches but to see Byron Buxton play defense

to see those moments that just pop up in the middle of a game you have to actually be watching the twins and to watch the twins you have to want to watch the twins and so this has been a great blessing for me I would say that's yeah all right. As for the there are a lot of things about this team that look like, oh, yes, a plan came together. And that's one of the reasons that it's encouraging to know that Jonathan Scope has been good before that. CJ Krohn has hit the ball hard before that. Max Kepler was supposed to be really good. And look, here he is really good. And you could say that about a number of their pitchers and part of their bullpen and so on. So that's all really good. The things that are kind of like mind-blowing are... The catchers. They're catchers. So one thing is that they're catchers have,

I mentioned, I tweeted this the other day, but no team, other than the Brewers in right field, no team in baseball had gotten more home runs out of any position than the Twins catchers. And it's, you know, it's Jason Castro and Mitch Garver and Williams Astadio. So, like, that was not supposed to happen at all. And it probably won't continue to, but I don't know. Maybe it will. Castro and Garver really have been just hitting the ball super, super, super hard.

But, you know, realistically. And then you've got— Twins catchers have a 163 WRC plus as a group right now. That's good. Yeah, it's like a Mike Piazza season, so yeah. And then you've got Jorge Polanco might be the favorite for the AL MVP right now in as much as there is one at the end of May. He's more or less tied with Mike Trout

for the lead, the league lead in war. And Polanco's young and has been good in the past and didn't come out of nowhere by any means. But you know, come on, that's this is not it. This is not what you expected. Maybe this is real in the same way that other players have gotten extremely good as their careers developed. But this was totally unexpected. And if you were planning this season, this would not have been what you would have expected to carry the twins. Martin Perez, of course, is, you know, and, and then their closer is wildly, wildly, wildly outperforming his FIP, which is, if you're going to outperform your FIP, it'd be great to have your closer do it because that works really well for like leverage situations.

But, you know, that's maybe a thing that you're not sure can keep up. But then otherwise, you know, Odorizzi is going to regress. But like everything else kind of looks like, OK, like, oh, yeah, this is this is the good Jonathan scope. We didn't know if they get the good one or the bad one. They got the good one. This is the good Max Kepler. We didn't know. And they got the good Jonathan scope. We didn't know if they get the good one or the bad one. They got the good one. This is the good Max Kepler. We didn't know.

And they got the good one. And there's a lot here that kind of makes sense. It's sort of hard to figure out what has changed besides everybody playing a lot better. So if you start thinking about, well, what makes the twins different than everybody else other than scoring more runs?

One thing is that they have the highest fly ball rate in baseball as hitters. But then if you look at the teams just behind them, they're all bad teams. So that's part of why this is working, but that's no promise of it working. They have the highest swing rate at pitches inside the strike zone, but they're sort of more average on pitches outside the strike zone, which is just perfect. Like that seems real, seems like a real indication of success, like being aggressive at strikes and having, you know, some control of the strike zone at pitches that aren't is a really good model for scoring runs. They're throwing a lot more strikes this year as pitchers, like a ton more than they did last year, but they're not extremely distinguished as strike throwers. They're just kind of an average team.

Last year, they didn't throw that many strikes in particular in the strike zone. And this year they are, which I guess that goes to their improvement. It doesn't necessarily go to why they're such a great pitching staff, but it goes to why they're better than they were last year. to why they're such a great pitching staff, but it goes to why they're better than they were last year. Their first pitch strike rate has gone from very nearly the worst in baseball to very nearly the highest in baseball. And if you look at how many plate appearances end with pitchers ahead this year, it's higher than last year. And if you look at how many end with pitchers behind, it's quite a bit lower than it was last year. And so that is a good thing. But on the other hand, if you look at what batters have done when they're ahead in the

count against the Twins, it's much worse than last year. So even when the pitchers do fall behind, they're still really good. And when they do get ahead, they're much better than they were last year. So something about them is actually good. And I don't exactly know what that is but i mean there's a lot of things there's a lot of little improvements across the board little changes across the board and like you say there's nothing about the whatever their record is that 37 and 18 or something like that that suggests they shouldn't be 37 36 and 17 that suggests they shouldn't be 36 and 17 after these 53 games. But I also, I mean, you know, just this is not like some groundbreakingly hot take or anything like that to mix metaphors. But it's also not like the Astros where you go and they'll probably go 36 and 17 in their

next 53 games. But everybody knows that. You don't need me to tell you that. Right. So if you look at some of the batted ball stats, the stat cast stats, there has been a change and an improvement perhaps for the Twins since last year. So, well, for instance, if you look at balls, hard hit balls, 95 miles per hour or harder, and you sort by average launch angle, the Twins are second at 15.6 degrees. 15.6 degrees. Now, that doesn't mean that you necessarily just want the highest launch angle possible, but when you're hitting the ball hard, it is good to also hit the ball up. And they are second after the Mariners, and you say, well, the Mariners are bad, but the Mariners are a good

hitting team, or they have been so far. It's their pitching that's the big problem. So that's part of it. And then if you look at the percentage of batted balls hit in the so-called sweet spot, I think Tom Tango has called it the launch angle sweet spot between 8 degrees and 32 degrees where you get most of your damage done. The Twins are tops in all baseball. 36.2% of their batted balls have been in that sweet spot. And that's a sizable increase from last year when they were like middle of the pack, 14th in baseball in the percentage of batted balls in that sweet spot and that's a sizable increase from last year when they were like middle of the pack 14th in baseball in the percentage of batted balls in that sweet spot so i don't know exactly what has produced that improvement their hitting coach actually hasn't changed they've had the same hitting coach since 2017 but maybe they're getting through to guys and changing some swings in a way that has helped them or maybe it's just a guy a bunch of guys maturing and getting better on their own. And you add Nelson Cruz and Krohn to the mix, and you just got a better bunch of hitters.

So I would guess it's a combination of those things, better coaching, better instruction, and just better talent. But it's interesting because the Twins were one of the laggards in baseball as recently as a few years ago and i think of it as really like the twins and the diamondbacks when they got on board the sabermetrics trained that was it basically like up until then you could always find one rube basically or at least one team that was not looking at things the way that most of the teams were looking at things and and the twins were sort of old school the diamondbacks were defiantly old school and when those regimes were replaced by people who had been with other teams that are thought of as forward thinking or analytical

suddenly there was just no team really left in baseball that would kind of be the one that was going against the the. So I think that that changed things. I think maybe that contributed to why we suddenly saw the market change in such a dramatic way. It's just there were no takers anymore who were kind of looking at things the old way. And I think now they've kind of gotten on board what Travis and I argue is the newest, latest, most important revolution of player development. And they've implemented a lot of these changes. So I think that's part of it. And it's also just a lot of things going right. And it's that they were so far behind

that just kind of catching up in some very obvious ways has helped them. Like they were notorious as the team that didn't strike anyone out and didn't try to strike anyone out. And they had a bunch of Brad Radke's and that was all they wanted and soft tossers and control artists. And then they finally got with the program these last couple of years here. And now they actually have some guys who throw harder and miss bats. And that didn't immediately catapult them to contention last year. But they were no longer at the very bottom of the league in staff strikeout rate. And just going from like every other team is doing

this obvious thing and you are the one team that's not doing that thing to just kind of belatedly getting on board so that they're now 12th overall in baseball in strikeout rate. Just going from way behind to par for the course can be a pretty big boost. It's maybe harder to go from where they are now to even higher, but I think they had a lot of ground to make up in that area. I, before the season started, when I was doing my sort of season preview for every team, I want to read something that I wrote, which I've been thinking a lot, and I've kind of referred to it at various points since then, and I'm probably going to refer to it again. But I wrote this actually in relation to the Rays. I said, there are three main inputs from which fans

draw a sense of satisfaction. One is nearly permanent. It's the team's sense of self-identity. Are you proud of them, or do they embarrass you? The second one is mostly stable within the season. Do the games matter? Are they worth turning on? Is there a pennant race? Do I have a reason to care? The third one changes every day, sometimes many times a day. Are they winning this game or losing this game?

Those daily outcomes are ephemeral, but they also come at you constantly and start to pile up. So basically, a team makes you happy when they're winning, a team makes you happy when they're in a pennant race, and a team makes you happy when they have some self-identity or some identity that you're kind of proud to root for. And I made the case that the Rays were narrowly on the right side of all of those things, but that they also were kind of, it was narrow. They could very easily be out of it. They could very easily be seen as, you know, a bad franchise instead of a smart and plucky one, uh, if things had, had slid out of their control. And I made the case after that, that the twins seem to me at that moment in time

to be just narrowly on the wrong side of all of those things. They did not seem competitive. The playoff odds said that Cleveland, well, some playoff odds said that Cleveland was the most favored team in their division. In all of baseball, the twins were kind of in it, but like it would have been three bad weeks in April and they would have been not in it at all. And you would have had a totally lost season. The twins have been losing more than they've been winning for a number of years. And the Twins' identity, which had been so stable for decades that you could really trace the personnel from three decades ago to now, had broken up. And it wasn't entirely clear what that identity was going to be going forward. And I didn't really, I don't know, I didn't,

it wasn't, who knew what the twins were three months ago and if you look at them now they they're it's a great season from all three inputs i think they have um obviously they're in a they're in a race for the world series right now they're going to be trading for players in july they're it'll be interesting to see if they're trading for trevor bauer in july uh I am really interested to see whether given where each team is in the pennant race, given what the twins need is, and given the connection between the twins front office and the Cleveland front office, whether we might actually see a division in division trade for an ace pitcher and a big haul of prospects.

But anyway, they are independent race. They are winning more than any other team. And now they have, yes, they have this great, they have this great identity with a young, and I think by the end of the year is going to be extremely popular manager throughout baseball. Already is, but it's going to be. And they've got this new coaching staff, mostly guys that they hired this off season who is going to be and uh they've got this new coaching staff mostly guys that they hired this off season who are going to have articles written about how they're miracle workers and they've got this uh sharp front office and uh twins baseball it's like fantastic right yeah they've got they've got savants uh in the brain, and they've got youngish stars and awesome reclamation projects

in the physical positions. It's good years. Now, so I want to, though, mount a small, I don't know, a defense of Cleveland's offseason, which I also have at times criticized because it seemed unnecessarily cheap and, I don't know, kind of weird. But if you think about things, first of all, Cleveland's been winning for a number of years, and it's not like they're drawing three million fans. Even winning, even going to the World Series,

even winning divisions, they're still in the bottom third of attendance. They're a small market. They're a tiny market. And no matter what they do, there's not, they're just not going to get rich. And so you could make the case that the most important job for their front office is keeping a flame going so that they never get to where it's too hard to dig back out. And some years you might not win the division. They certainly were the favorites in the division this year. They were maybe the most favorited division team in baseball this year, even after trading Jan Gomes and not signing Bryce Harper or whatever.

But they managed to put together a team that was supposed to win without hurting their future, without risking putting them in a trough three years hence that they wouldn't be able to come out of unless they tanked for three or four years. And there is a certain, I mean, it's a pretty clear logic to that decision that does not come at the expense of putting a competitive product on the field. This is not like the Tigers refusing to sign anybody or a team tanking or whatever the case may be, where they're not putting a product on the field that you want to watch at all,

that can even give a credible opponent to the team you're playing that day, that can even give the fans three weeks in April to be optimistic. Cleveland wasn't doing that. I know that it was frustrating this offseason to have a feeling that all 30 teams were engaged in some sort of like near collusive act to suppress ballplayer wages. And so they in a way they picked the wrong offseason to do this kind of micro strategy, because it fit into the narrative that like, this is why Craig Kimbrell isn't being signed. And it is why Craig Kimbrell hasn't been signed. But they, you know, what they did was not to turn games into

a farce in any way. And it, it, I think that probably they, Cleveland has a sort of, because they've won so much, I'm not sure that we appreciate their market the same way that we appreciate like the A's market or, you know, the Marlins market or some of these other very small markets because they make it work despite having low attendance. But the fact is they have very low attendance almost all the time. And that's a, that's a real challenge that you have to at least be somewhat creative about. So, uh, so I can somewhat, I think I can respect it. I might go back to dunking on them at some point, but for this moment, this conversation, I can respect what they were trying to do.

And it's unexpected, almost unforeseeable, that they would end up getting burned by the Twins being the best team in baseball. Furthermore, just one last thing in their defense, the Twins cut payroll last offseason. They signed players. True. They also let players go. They signed players. True. They also let players go.

They traded players in July. Joe Maurer retired, which was a big help. But the Twins cut payroll by $10 million from last year. So it's not as though like the Twins were even like the Brewers of 2018 where they went out and made all the moves. And you were like, wow, didn't see that coming. Mid-market team that's really spending. The Twins are not really spending. The Twins might have a lower payroll than cleveland actually i haven't looked uh but they're in the same range i bet you they do i'm

just gonna leave that there i bet you they do instead of telling you that they do i'm gonna bet you that they do so so all that to say that i don't think that we need to turn well i'm more talking myself out of turning uh cleveland into some sort of like anti-competitive villains in this situation. Mm-hmm. Well, according to Kotz Contracts, they have almost exactly the same payroll. They're both at $119-point-something million. I don't know if this is opening day or current, but yeah, essentially the same payroll. if this is opening day or current, but yeah, essentially the same payroll. And you're right. I think when we had Aaron Gleeman on to do the Twins preview, he was talking about why the Twins weren't spending more because it seemed like they could or should. And yeah, I remember I'm trying to think what podcast it was that I talked about this. It might've been an Effectively Wild, but maybe it was a Ringer MLB show actually, because I think I was talking about the Dodgers and

Cleveland because the Dodgers were coming in for some criticism, too, for not being more active over the offseason, not trading for an ace, not signing Bryce Harper. And I was in their defense saying, well, I mean, look at the playoff odds. Look how they keep walking to division titles. Like at a certain point, the marginal value that you're getting from signing the big free agent, everyone looks at Cleveland and says, well, they keep getting close. So what they have to do now is sign that one last big guy to get over the hump and be better than the Yankees or the Red Sox or whoever. But you could also draw the conclusion that, well, they keep getting close so they can keep doing this thing. And we know that the playoffs are somewhat random and if you sign Bryce Harper let's say

I mean putting aside even how good Bryce Harper is but let's assume he's great even adding a great player doesn't increase your odds of winning that one division series or championship series by that much so if you really can confidently expect to win your division

then you don't have a whole lot of incentive to spend and the Dodgers have money to spend. I think Cleveland, among all the teams that sort of cry poor, I think Cleveland probably has the most legitimate case to do that because of the market size and because of the lack of attendance, even when they're winning. So I did sort of understand it. I mean, they went into the winter with a mandate seemingly to cut payroll. And if they had traded Kluber or Bauer or someone, I mean, in retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have hurt them that much. But that probably would have been, I think, a bit too far to go in taking the division

for granted. But I think they had reason to expect that they could win with what they have. And again, given how incredibly the Twins have played, they wouldn't be winning now anyway, even if they had gone on a winter spending spree. So maybe it doesn't change things. All right, let's just end this with a totally unforced prediction. I don't know why I'm making us do this, but the Twins have, I can't remember, they've played 53 games. They have 109 games to go. How many games will they win in the next 109? Let's see. 109 games.

I'll say they win 60 to 63. 63. All right. So you're saying that they will have a 577 winning percentage, which would be a 94 win team for the rest of the way. So not a 94 win team because they have so many. That'd be a hundred. Would that be a hundred? I got the, I've got so many tabs open.

They'd have an additional, what, 94 wins? And what do they have now? I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out. 36. Okay. So they have 36. You're saying they would win 63. So that would be a 99 win team. I'm going to say 55. No, that's if you think they're a 500 team. I't spend more, I feel like compared to some of the other division leaders, they're probably better positioned to add to this team at the deadline than most are.

Like, I don't know, the Cubs just went through the whole winter saying they couldn't spend. Maybe they'll change their tune if they're still very close to the Brewers. But, you know, the Red Sox are pretty maxed out, I guess, or didn't do much over the winter. The Yankees have, I guess they could afford possibly to do something, but the Phillies went on their spending spree already. So there are a lot of teams that are leading that kind of already made their big moves and maybe the Twins have some room and also some prospects that they could trade. So I don't know if that's a Keichel or Kimbrell or whether it's someone on the trade market,

but you'd think they'd be a leading candidate to add. You would. They have a double digit lead right now. You would. You definitely would. And they're still in that division. And it's conceivable that Cleveland could be selling in July. Not a guarantee.

Maybe. I don't even know if it's likely. It's probably not likely. What do you think? Is Cleveland selling in July? They're one game under 500. I don't think there's really any case for playing for the wild card. Well, they're two and a half games back of the second wild card right now.

Yeah, I just don't think that it makes sense. I don't know that it makes sense to play for the wild card at this point. I don't know. Well, they were evidently— I mean, you play for it, but— Yeah. The fact that they didn't spend over the winter, I don't know whether that means that they will be more likely to offload now.

If they were interested in trading Kluber or Bauer then, over the winter i don't know whether that means that they will be more likely to offload now like if they were interested in trading kluber power then then i guess you'd be more interested in trading them now except that back then they didn't think they'd need them to win the division maybe but now they might not need them to win playoff games so yeah i guess they're more likely to sell the the two and a half games back is did you say two and a half games. The two and a half games back is, did you say two and a half games back? The two and a half games back is behind the Red Sox. So you have to figure like that's. And the A's who are tied with the Red Sox right now.

Oh, so they're two and a half behind two teams, both of whom were 100 win plus teams last year. What did the A's win? 99. So that's the exact opposite of 100 win plus, but you know, a 99 win team last year and 108 win team last year. And so it's, you know,

it's not that likely and it's not that big a reward, especially for a team that, you know, has to keep the flame alive. Like you, I don't know if you start positioning yourself for next year. The problem is that the players that they have to trade are mostly primarily guys who are under contract next year. So Bauer and Brad Hand and Carlos Santana. And so if you're thinking about, well, how do we set ourselves up for next year? You might say, oh, well, we do as much of a flash rebuild as we can over the course of three weeks.

Or you might say that you got to keep what you've got. So I don't really know. I might've been too quick to trade pieces that are not mine to trade. But anyway, I'm going to say that the Twins win 60 more games, which would make them a 90. What did I say? 96? That's a 96-win team.

96 wins for the Twins. Good job, Twins. Yeah, that's pretty great. Fun team. Remember when they were a 59 win team three years ago and they were just they seemed so poorly constructed too at the time because they had like almost the worst defense in baseball and almost the lowest strikeout rate in baseball so they were just like compounding their problems like allowing so many balls in play and then not being able to field

them and it was just you got to fix at least one of these things. And now they have fixed both of those things where they're at least middle of the pack in both of those categories. And meanwhile, they're just demolishing the ball on offense. So yeah, it's been a fun season and Meg was right to draft them in her fun team draft.

They are a fun team. Yeah. All right. All right. Then again, the A's haven't lost in two weeks at this point. They are undefeated in their last 11 games. And I had kind of written them off two weeks ago.

And now here they are tied with the Red Sox for a wild card. So who knows? Maybe the next two weeks will not be so kind to the Twins. But we're both believers, it sounds like. Yep. All right. Basically. Okay.

Yeah. A few updates for you all. First, the Twins won again After Sam and I recorded So you can count that win Toward our predicted Rest of season win totals Cleveland also won To keep pace

Byron Buxton Did crash into a wall And was removed from the game But just seems to be Day to day That's the scary thing About Buxton He is sometimes

So good at defense That the park can't contain him And he smacks right into The outfield fence And congratulations Are in order For former effectively Wild guest Garrett Stubbs, who made his Major League debut for the Astros on Tuesday and had a double and also an RBI single.

Good job, Garrett. As some of you may recall, Garrett was my guest and Jeff's guest on episode 1040 of this podcast, where we had him on when he was still a minor leaguer to talk about his trampoline accident. He is a trampoline survivor, and he has made the majors. It's an inspirational story. That was a fun interview, so I will link to it. You can go back and listen if you didn't hear it the first time. And following up on two pitchers Meg and I talked about on our previous episode,

we talked about Lucas Giolito's turnaround. Well, he was great again on Tuesday. Struck out 10 Royals. I know it's just the Royals, but still. On a less happy note, we talked about Kyle Freeland and how he has declined this season. Now, we were remiss in not mentioning that Freeland has had blister problems this year, which could account for some of his struggles. Blister was bothering him early in the year, then he went on the IL for a while, but even since he came back from that injury stint, he has pitched very poorly. Now, it's possible that the blister is still

bothering him. I'd like to think that that's the explanation. Obviously a command pitcher, if his finger is bothering him, that could absolutely hamper his command. But if it is still bothering him, he should probably take some time off until it is fully healed because his last start on Saturday, he gave up seven runs over four innings to the Orioles and that's never a good sign. All right, as mentioned, we are one week away from the release date for The MVP Machine, June 4th. So you have less than one week to pre-order it and qualify for the pre-order extras, a bonus chapter, a conversation between me and Travis, and some other goodies. If you do choose to pre-order, it's much appreciated.

Send your receipt or confirmation to TheMVPMachine at gmail.com, and next week you will receive your reward. Also, Travis and I will be doing a book signing on June 4th. That's next Tuesday at Foley's, the baseball bar on West 33rd Street, starting at 630 Eastern. So we hope you'll come by, bring a book or get a book there. Just get some beers and talk to some baseball fans. It'll be a fun time. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Mike Livingston, George Lozano, Alex Thompson, Daniel B., and Benji Mallings. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions for me and Megan Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're already a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Trampoline Trampoline Trampoline Trampoline, trampoline, trampoline You're on my mind

You're on my trampoline Trampoline Trampoline You're on my mind You're on my mind