Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1382: Pitchus Interruptus

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a small way in which Willians Astudillo made the world better, baseball as a conversational icebreaker, Cody Bellinger’s incredible WAR pace, whether Bellinger is overshadowing the rest of the Dodgers (and Clay Bellinger), and a few of 2019’s other breakout batters, present a Stat Blast about Statcast no-hitters […]

Cody, Cody, I hear you say I hear your voice calling me away I'm not afraid to think of what I might find To think of what I might find I will be yours, will you be mine? Hello and welcome to episode 1382 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and I am joined by Sam Miller of ESPN Hello Sam. Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and I am joined by Sam Miller of ESPN Hello Sam. I had the wrong headphones in my ears.

I didn't know we were recording until I heard your voice from about eight feet away. Hi, Ben. Hi. You haven't had to say anything yet. This is the first thing you've had to say, so that worked out well. How's your bug-bombed apartment doing? It's so far so good. Yeah.

I don't know if we... I hate bug bombing. I hate bug bombing. It feels like there's poison on everything for the next few days. Plus you like killing them with your bare hands. Yeah. What bug problem did you have? Probably fleas.

Oh, no. Okay. Well, I hope the bomb worked. Yeah, me too. Okay. So, William Testadio, as you noted the other day, has not been hitting lately since he returned from his injury. He has still not been striking out, which is good, but he is also doing some good in the world. And I wanted to read this email, not related to his play, but still related to him. This is from listener Peter, and he is a longtime listener, first-time emailer. He says,

I just wanted to take a second to express my gratitude for something that happened this past week. I've spent the last few months on a frustrating and largely fruitless job hunt, but last week I managed to get an interview for what is essentially a dream job. Going into the interview, I was nothing short of terrified until I saw Joe Maurer bobblehead on the hiring manager's desk. This led to a conversation about twins baseball, which quickly and inevitably led to a conversation about our Lord and Savior, Williams Estadio. Thanks to Effectively Wild's extensive coverage, I was equipped with the knowledge I needed to hold my own in a brief discussion on the ample merits of La Tortuga. Today, I received a call from the company offering me the job, and I'm comfortable saying that at least in a small way, the discussion on Astadio was something that helped separate me from the pack.

Thank you all so much for providing a consistent quality listening experience. I learn something new with every episode, and as soon as my first paycheck comes in, I'll be contributing to your Patreon. It's the least I can do. I appreciate that. That's a nice tithe for Effectively Wild. But you can also send part of your paycheck to Williams Estadio, I guess, for being who he is and giving you something to talk about in your interview. That's great. Has baseball ever helped you in a non-baseball context in that kind of way, conversationally or otherwise? Well, I have written about how baseball gave me a sense of self-confidence as a child among adults. And so as a kid, to have baseball as a sort of equalizer, where in a lot of ways as a kid,

you're kind of in an advantageous position because you can pay more attention to it and watch and listen to more of it than a working adult often can. It's one of the rare cases where you have an information advantage on a topic that adults also care about. Usually it's one way or the other. Either they really don't care about what you are interested in, or they've been reading about it for their whole life and read at a higher level than you, and so you're disadvantaged. And so in that sense, I don't exactly know how to calculate how much of a developmental lifesaver it was for me, but it certainly felt like it. Now, as for an adult, it's hard to say because it's my job. Yeah. And so I don't really know. That's a good question. I have to think about that.

There are still times when it comes in handy just to break the ice, I think, and small talk with strangers. I don't mind it at those times. Sometimes with people I know but don't know well, they feel like they have to start talking about baseball when they see me. And that's the opposite of what they have to do, really, because I get to talk to you and Meg and Michael for a few hours every week about baseball. So I don't really need to talk about it in other contexts. And so sometimes when it's forced, when it's just like, so how about that baseball? You do baseball stuff. You must want to talk about baseball constantly. That can backfire. But I think at times, just because small talk with total strangers

when you have nothing to say, and suddenly you both realize you can say something about baseball. I like that. Yeah. I'm going to think to see if I can think of any other examples on a somewhat related, somewhat different topic. I was just thinking the other day that, so a couple of days ago was Sally Ride's birthday. Sally Ride passed away, but it would have been her birthday. And I've done a couple of career days in elementary schools and I have a pretty good job for career day. Like it's a good job. But the thing that is the most reliably, the thing that is most reliably guaranteed to get me like oohs and aahs

is when I tell classrooms of elementary kids that I interviewed Sally Ride. They are much more interested in that than the baseball. Huh, that's cool. Yeah. All right. It is cool. Well, yeah, I'd rather be an astronaut,

but we're doing all right, I guess. So I just went to MLB.com and I saw an article by Mike Petriello. Headline is, Best Season Ever? Bellinger Could Do It. And I was going to bring this up in banter. I was going to ask you, why have you not written the Could This Be the Best Season for Bellinger Ever article? Because in the past, you've written that article About Mike Trout But before I accused you of that

I just went to your archive just to check And published today By Sam Miller how Cody Bellinger Could have the best season in MLB history So you have delivered What I thought you would at some point So now that Bellinger's Hitting what a lowly

378 I know he's not as interesting to you as he was when he was hitting 400 but he is still on pace to blow by babe ruth for the best single season war ever and he's leading the league in everything essentially mike just has a list of all the things that he's leading the league in and it's a very long list it's offense it's defense it's every kind of category you could imagine and that's been a lot of fun so are you enjoying this as much as you would if it were a mike trout record-breaking pace season i would say i'm not quite but i am enjoying it how could you not enjoy it it's really impressive well i so i framed the question a little

bit differently than the headline does. I think that it's extremely unlikely that he could have the greatest record, the greatest season in history, but I think that he has played for two months at the level that it would take. And so just to see that to me is really fun to look at and explore and to see how how high the peaks are and how few the flaws are and so um so to me it has been extremely enjoyable to see a player play at that level i'm a little bit less interested in the pace and i have to say that so the thing about the record as i wrote about when i talked about Mike Trout last year, is that Babe Ruth's best season by war is not the season that you would pick. It's not really any of the seasons that you would have picked. It's his 1923 season when I think he had like his ninth highest home run total, 10th highest home run total. And he had a good batting average, but he always did. And he had, let's see, well, I guess it was his second best OPS plus and he played more games. So maybe this isn't really a flaw, but something about the fact that it was that season for Babe Ruth and that it was so much better than all the

other seasons that Babe Ruth had, like his second best season by war was under 13 and that season was over 14 makes you wonder whether he really did it. Yeah. If that makes sense, there's all sorts of fog. There's already fog. Oh, wait, am I going to do it, Ben? Am I going to do it? I don't know what you're going to do.

There's already a fog of war. You did it. I did it. For current players, which I'll mention in a second for Bellinger, but certainly when you're talking about calculating the base running and the defense of a player in 1923, there is a lot of fog. And the fact that Ruth's war was so much higher that year than it was in his other incredible incredible unbelievable seasons makes you wonder whether anybody has ever really had a 14 war season or whether we just counted a 14 war season and that really he you know probably maybe he was more like a 12 war season and so when i think about the war record as being the greatest season of all time, it's very satisfying. When I think of the

war record as being perhaps the, I don't know if the right way to put it, but maybe like the most miscalibrated great season of all time. Like if you took all the 12 war seasons and you assigned a, you say, well, there's a margin of error in our ability to precisely calculate war. And so some years you're going to get right on with 12, and some years it's going to look like 10 and a half, and some years it's going to look like 13 and a half. And once in a while, you might even get to 14, but they're actually all 12 war seasons. If you think about the record that way, then it's like, oh.

So a little bit less satisfying. And the fact that Bellinger's doing this, I mean, it's incredible. Everything he's doing is incredible. He is an absolute joy to watch. His highlights alone are absolutely joys to watch. And the way that a Cody Bellinger game just comes at you in a series of tweets that you don't even have to be watching. It's just like a series of tweets. And every every kind of highlight every kind of highlight exactly and the fact that he

i mean there's it is great because he is undeniably hitting the ball really well like that there's no ambiguity about that he's hitting better than we've probably ever seen mike trout hit for this period of time maybe Maybe, probably. I don't really know. I haven't looked. All feels very satisfying and great. But I do feel a little bit of sort of discomfort with how much of this is his defense and his defensive run saved.

Now, you didn't, it doesn't, so he was, he's a plus 16 defender. He doesn't have to be, and that would take him way past the greatest outfield season of all time certainly the greatest right field season of all time that would that would put that would put him on pace to beat the best right field season of all time by like 15 or 20 runs and he is a very good defender he's a great defender uh he was a pretty good center fielder and so it makes sense that he would have bonkers numbers in right field but i, a 50 run season is hard to believe. And in particular, the way that defense works, especially for, I think for defensive runs saved, you don't get the opportunity to make a one and a half run play very often, which is like what robbing a home run is, or I don't know what

throwing a guy out at home is, but let's say that that's a one run play. Those come along very, very rarely. It's a bit of luck that you even get the chance to do it. And then the difference between getting that run and not getting that run is going to be a couple of inches. And if you're a couple of inches off or a couple of inches late, that's not really necessarily even a failure on your part. It just wasn't quite there for you. And so he's been able to build up these

16 runs, partly because he's making incredible plays, but partly just because the opportunities have been there for him and the inches have gone his way, which isn't to dismiss those 16 runs saved, but just to say that you can't really just triple that. Oh, I remember what I was, I mentioned 16, because if you cut the 16 down to 10, which is more realistic, then he'd still be on the record pace. I almost wish it were 10. I almost wish he were not on pace to have 16 war and 50 run defensive run save, but rather 14 war and 30 defensive run save. Cause then I could really enjoy it as like the undeniable level of performance that he's had. And maybe he could, he maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe he could keep it up, but that big flashing 16 just looks,

it looks cartoonish. It looks like a cartoon. Um, and so it makes me a little bit, a little bit less grounded in what he's doing. And to be honest, this is a very small part of it, but a couple of the plays that he gets credit for, like one, he gets credit for throwing Luis Castillo out at first base, a pitcher who singled to right field, and then he threw Luis Castillo out. But Castillo had this bizarre reaction where he thought he had fouled the ball off and he didn't even run he actually started to go back to the dugout to get a new bat and then he's like oh look the ball's in straightaway right field and so that didn't take anything except good circumstance for Cody Bellinger to get credit for throwing out a runner at first base and that

certainly is unlikely to be there's not a lot of those there's maybe one or two of those but when you start tripling the impact of those plays then it gets you to a bigger number than is probably realistic well he's projects now basically for almost a 10 win season not even yeah saying that he'll continue at the pace he's been playing at but just at what you would expect him to play at based on his preseason projections and his success so far, just adding together what he has plus his rest of season projections, depending on whether you're using Fangraphs War or Baseball Reference War, because he's got almost a win more at Baseball Reference right now. But yeah, it's like the realistic expectation right now is close to 10 wins, which is pretty impressive. So if he could just play halfway between his projection and how he's played thus far, he'd have like an inner circle best season ever. Not quite the best season ever, but one of the, I don't know, top 10 or something. Like if you get to 12 war, there are only a few guys who've ever done that. So it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Well, if you get to 10 war, in fact,

what the, since bonds, I think Bryce Harper is the only national leaguer who's been over 10 in a season. And then, yeah. And he was 10 on the dot at least at reference. And then you have trout and bets in the American league. But since in my lifetime, only eight players have had a 10-war season at reference. Trout and Bonds and then Cal Ripken are the only ones with multiple, and then you have Betts, Harper, Sosa, A-Rod, and Robin Yount in 1982. So that 10 would be inner circle. 10 is nuts. Yeah.

It's funny. I've almost forgotten that Corey Se seager exists i was reminded yesterday that cory seager exists and if you had asked me two months ago i probably would have said that cory seager would have the better season this year than bellinger and i mean seager was like a mvp caliber player before he got hurt and missed most of last season and then he came back and he's been fine he's you know he's been like a better than average player but he got hurt and missed most of last season and then he came back and he's been fine he's you know he's been like a better than average player but he's just been so overshadowed by Bellinger that I honestly just he hadn't really crossed my mind until yesterday so it's uh he's

kind of overshadowing everyone in baseball right now it's been been a really fun season. I also had the experience yesterday of when Bellinger flied out to deep right field and then Seager came up and I had the distinct feeling of it being a letdown. And I also registered my surprise at that emotion having come up. Yeah, right. We know the Dodgers are great and we know that Bellinger is great. Do you feel, I want to test this. He's overshadowed. So he's overshadowed other players. So tell me Ben, without looking, who else on the Dodgers is having a good year?

Oh boy. Well, I'm thinking. I mean, I can name the Dodgers for you. Justin Turner's doing well, right? He's doing well. He's doing well. Yeah, he's not having a great year, but he's doing well. He's having his worst year since he was a Met. Uh-huh.

Yeah. But he's having a good year. Well, and I noticed the other day that Max Muncy's doing well. He is better than I realized. Yeah, not as well as last year, but he was the kind of guy who just kind of came out of nowhere and you figured oh can he keep this up and he has for the most part i mean he's been he's been good i am discovering max muncy's good year right now live on radio yeah the other one i know that jock peterson started the year really well and i can't say whether he has sustained that,

but I'm going to say that he's having a good year. He has. Okay. Jock Peterson is having a fantastic year. Yeah. He started really great. Yeah. He started like a Bellinger type great.

And well, Verdugo I know is good. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's about it. Okay. So David Freeze is hitting 257, 409, 486 so david freeze has a ops plus of 140 so he's having a very good year and yeah that i mean that's pretty much it russell martin is

is having a a nice year for for his age and austin barnes is having a nice bounce back from where he was last year neither one one is a star or anything this year, but they're both having nice years. And that is pretty much it. Yeah, it's funny, the players who have been so prominent this season. I feel like Derek Dietrich is like the name I've seen in baseball this year, more than almost any other name. And if you had asked me before this season, I would have said Derek Dietrich was not remarkable at all. Worthwhile major league player, but not someone I ever really paid attention to, partly because he was on the Marlins, but also because he was just kind of like an average-ish player, if that. And now I'm just seeing headlines about Derek Dietrich on a daily

basis. I mean, for good reason. He's hitting really well. And also I'm much more aware of Derek Dietrich's personality now than I was before. I don't know whether that's because he has been more ostentatious this season or whether it's just because we care because he has a 170 WRC plus right now and 17 homers. So that's not one I would have have expected i would not have expected to be reading derrick chitrick's name so much this season the yeah i hear his name a lot and heretofore i've mostly known him as a guy who would take his shirt off and show incredible abs right of course we hear josh bell's name a lot yeah uh we hear i hear tommy listella's name yes lots of tommy listella deservingly but uh i hear like i hear tommy listella's name way more than i hear tommy fam's name yeah and tommy fam

is i think having the better season yeah i mean he he is uh-huh let's see i but then like i don't hear paul de jong's name yeah very much and he And he is second in the National League in war. And I mean, you know who's first. And so just think about, just start thinking of the guys who that means he's ahead of. Right. That's ahead of Bell

and it's ahead of Jelic. Yeah. But I don't really hear much about him. I mean, I'm aware of it. He's good. Or who he is. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm looking at it. Most of the guys'm looking at most of the guys who are good. Oh, you know whose name I don't hear enough of? Who's having an extremely good year is Marcus Simeon. Oh, yeah. Haven't heard much about him either. No. He's fantastic.

Although maybe that's early season defense. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, Ben. I hear Brandonu's name a lot and i like brandon lau a lot i've watched most brandon lau at bats but i have a friend who has a fantasy baseball team and he has named it lookout be lau but like he i have told this guy a million times that it is pronounced lau not Lo. And he now knows it. And so he named his team that anyway.

And it is just, I think about it like twice a day that this name exists out there. And it just kills me. Yeah. Meg and I have talked about the Lau Lo on the same team thing a couple times this year. It's tough to keep track of. All right. Well, I'm grateful for Cody Bellinger although Clay Bellinger will always be

my favorite Bellinger and I'll probably be the only person whose favorite Bellinger is Clay I guess if you're Clay you're just now known as the father of Cody which is not a bad thing to be either but I like Clay Bellinger because he was the first player who ever gave me an autograph

and I'm not an autograph guy not a person who seeks autographs. I mean, obviously now I can't really do it for professional reasons, but even when I could do it, I always felt, I don't know, nervous about it or anxious or like I was imposing or I went to spring training a couple of times and you would just like line up on the fence and just try to hold a baseball in someone's face and they're baseball players they're used to it but I always felt uneasy about it but Bellinger signed a ball for me after a spring training game I think or during

one I appreciated that and then I also appreciate the fact that he played four partial seasons in the big leagues and each of those years his team either won the world series or won a pennant and clay bellinger has three world series rings and came the ninth inning in game seven of 2001 away from having four world series rings and going four for four despite playing 183 games total so he has to have the highest ratio of world series rings to games played i would think in a career for a player wow yeah um uh yeah so 2002 was uh with the angels huh yes he played two games but he got a ring wow yeah extremely efficient career yeah do you still have do you still have it yeah i do i think it's uh I think it's at my mom's place, but it's still there.

Maybe it's appreciating because of the Bellinger name, or I could just pass it off as a Cody Bellinger ball. So I also wanted to bring up your previous article about StatCast no-hitters. That's the StatBlast. Oh, okay. Well, then that can wait, I guess. Yeah, you could also just play the song now. All right, I'll play the song now. Here we go. Step last. Yeah, so Ryan emailed us a question that led to this. So Ryan wrote,

Ben and Sam's discussion of true wins versus no hitters got me thinking about how stat cast should, put a pin in that word, be incorporated into the admiration of these performances. A pitcher could conceivably throw a perfect game while giving up 27 balls in play that had a 1% out probability. So then he went on his recording, 27 outs, all of which had an out probability of greater than 50% elite enough. So those would all be outs that would all be balls that, that would be more likely to be outs, but collectively would of course yield hits.

And so, and then he said, how many times has this occurred in the stat cast era? So how many times Ryan's question is, has a pitcher recorded 27 outs, all of which had an out probability of greater than 50%. So I will just start by answering that question. Going back to 2015, there were five complete games in which a pitcher allowed no batted balls that

based on launch angle and exit velocity were 50% or greater to be hits. So five, only five, there have been like a dozen or so no hitters in that time, and only five of this thing where there should have been no hits, if you want to call it should have been. So then I then took that a little further, which was to look at whether there have been any starts in which the cumulative probability of all the batted balls was lower than one. Because of course, if you allow three balls that are each 33% likely to be hits, you can't very well say that you shouldn't have allowed any hits. You probably should have allowed about one. So I looked at the combined, the cumulative, the sum

of all hit probabilities for complete games, the Pitchers have thrown since 2015, and nobody has had a game where the combined uh probabilities were less than one the greatest start by this measure is max scherzer who in 2015 in june of 2015 i think he struck out 17 he allowed a broken bat flare into right field by carlos gomez and all of his other hits all of his other batted balls combined well actually all of the batted balls combined, including that Carlos Gomez hit were 1.6. So the probabilities tell us he should have allowed 1.6 hits and he allowed one, but otherwise it was incredibly dominant. Three infield pop-outs, five, I think five or six grounders, five of which were 75 miles per hour or slower,

and a routine fly ball. And so that has answered a couple of questions. It has told us by this alternate way of thinking about pitcher performance, what the most dominant start of the last five years is. And that is Max Scherzer, June 14th, 2015. And also by this alternate standard, which pitchers have gone an entire game

without allowing something that was likely to be a hit. And those five pitchers are Scherzer again in a actual no-hitter that he threw. Chris Heston in the actual no-hitter he threw. Clayton Kershaw in one of his many good games. And then Irvin Santana and Scott Feldman in games that were otherwise just normal complete game shutouts but um but now they're slightly different so Ben I've told you

those results Ryan starts with the sentence he it got him thinking about how stat cast should be incorporated and the reason that I wanted to write about this is because I couldn't decide whether I thought it should be incorporated, whether this is a way of a demeaning no hitters by saying, ah, he should have given up a hit. And he just got lucky, which is not my intent. Or if it's a way of creating glory where there is no glory, because in fact, these pictures all did allow hits. And why would we try to say that it should have been historic when it clearly wasn't? Is that missing the point entirely?

Or is it in fact a good way to add another element to our baseball watching that can be fun and distinguished and that gives us a way of identifying this Max Scherzer start that would otherwise have been forgotten? And I did get a tweet from somebody who said, thank you. I was at that game and it was indeed the greatest game I've ever seen.

And because of that stupid broken bat flare, nobody remembers it or noticed it, uh, or something like that. Uh, Oh, Kevin, Kevin from Texas. I said, there's room in my brain to acknowledge that Scherzer start on June 14th, 2015 was truly something special, arguably the best performance by any starting pitcher in the past five years. And Kevin says, yes, a million times this best pitching performance I've ever seen with my own eyes. But because of the bloop single and the almost perfect game that he threw later that week against Pittsburgh, it's forgotten.

He was more dominant against the Brewers than he was against the Pirates. I just wanted to write an article about this and see how I felt to see whether while I was writing it, I felt good or bad about looking at games this way. And you read it, it sounds like. So how did you feel reading about it? How does the concept feel to you? Is this something that we should throw out or tinker with and keep? I like it. I think we should keep it. It's something I would pay attention to. I don't expect it to catch On I don't know that other people Will care about this but

I personally care about it because The stat cast no hitter is A better accomplishment really For the pitcher at least than an Actual no hitter right probably An actual no hitter as we've discussed Is sort of a team accomplishment Often the pitcher pitches really well, but not always.

Sometimes it comes down to these fantastic plays that would not have been hits in most situations. And the stat cast no-hitter is saying this should have been a no-hitter. This would have been a no-hitter if you could have simulated these exact batted balls many times. This would have been a no-hitter, or at least no one of these hits would have been a hit under normal circumstances. And so to me, I think it's a more impressive accomplishment for the pitcher. It's a more impressive individual accomplishment to have a stat cast no-hitter, however you define that, individual accomplishment to have a stat cast no-hitter, however you define that, than a real one. So it doesn't have the historical component. We can't compare it. We can't say it's the

Xth no-hitter in history because we don't have stat cast before 2015. So it's unsatisfying in that way, but it's satisfying in other ways. And I could imagine tracking it. The nice thing about it is that you can track it in real time we were talking about how some of these advanced stats aren't so satisfying for record chases because you don't even know when a record has occurred a stat cast no hitter you you could know that that's happening because you could pull up baseball savant and you can look at the game feed and every batted ball on there has an expected batting average. And so you can see if a pitcher is going through a game without giving up any should have been hits. So to me, I think it's fun to follow.

It tells you something about the start. I don't think it replaces or supplants the traditional no-hitter, but I think it's a nice wrinkle. I do too. I'm glad you said that. I do too. And I think in particular that I've been trying, I think when I started following all of this stuff, when I started reading Baseball Perspectives, I was partly, partly one of the reasons that you start reading this stuff in 2002 is that you're into fantasy baseball

and you are really into the idea of finding the best players. And I think I developed a real feeling that the goal of sabermetrics, the goal of information is to isolate a player's performance as much as possible and to really focus on stripping away everything you can, all the influences around a player so that you know exactly how good he did. And that's really important for analysis in a lot of cases. And it's, I don't know, it's one of the, that's not a controversial thing to say that that is sort of like at the core of what Sabermetrics does, right? Or has traditionally done, would you say? Mm-hmm. And I'm trying to, in a lot of of ways build up the muscle that sees these things as team

events and that celebrates these things as team events and that doesn't just think that the point of stats is to figure out whether mike fires was better that day than some other pitcher was some other day and to find some way to put him slightly above or slightly behind some other pitcher and to instead appreciate that it is a team game and that he is part of a team and that the accomplishment that I'm watching is actually not Mike Fiers centric that Mike Fiers existence or reason for going to the mound that day was not just to glorify Mike Fiers but rather that it's to accomplish something as a team that the goal is a team goal that the sport is explicitly designed around team success. And so by the process of doing this really to me gave me a lot better appreciation for the fact that all no hitters are team events

and that it is not diminishing to say that Mike Fiers should have allowed whatever hits three, I think that game, because it brings the whole rest of the team into the accomplishment. And when you start thinking about team accomplishments, I feel like there's a lot less of the, oh, well, he's just getting lucky aspect. For instance, with BABIP, BABIP is such a, in a lot of ways, it's kind of a stat that players and traditionalists don't like the way that we use it sometimes because it depends on the word luck, like, oh, he's gotten lucky or he's been unlucky, and nobody really likes that word luck or even fortune. But if you think about BABIP as the interplay between pitcher, defense, and coaching, then it's not lucky. There is an aspect of a ball can's caught is caught because your fielder was there and did play it. And so if a pitcher gives up three extremely hard

hit balls and they're all turned into outs, we can use Babbitt to say that pitcher's not as good as, you know, whatever some number says, but we can't say that team is not as good as whatever. And so, like I said, I'm trying to kind of build that muscle that sees almost all of what I'm watching through a more team-centric lens. And this actually really helped me to do that. Yeah. I linked you to something that when you were working on this, it sort of sparked my memory that MLB.com had done something on stat cast hitting streaks last February, I think. They were looking for whether you could kind of manufacture a DiMaggio-esque hitting streak by using expected hit probability rather than actual hits. And they found, I don't know, I think that you had to like lower the threshold to a 20% chance that a batted ball would be a hit to get to a DiMaggio

level hitting streak. And that's, you know, only using three seasons of data at that time. But basically it kind of confirmed just how hard it is to do. And that one was interesting, but I found that a little less satisfying for some reason. I don't know i i think if a hitter were to have a stat cast likely hit in 57 straight games would that impress you would you enjoy that too if like if you know you have a at least one batted ball every game that is uh like a 51 chance to be a hit to me i don't know it's it's not quite as satisfying as the stat cast no hitter was it's not quite as satisfying but i don't know why yeah why wouldn't it be i'm not sure it's sort of the same principle so it it kind of should be just as satisfying but i don't know

maybe partly i guess is the the luck aspect of of it almost adds to my enjoyment of the hitting streak. The no-hitter, it's just one day, and it just feels to me like, well, of course, you can get lucky on one day. That's not that improbable, but to have a really long hitting streak, you have to be probably good, and also you have to be lucky lucky and things just have to keep bouncing your way over a period of months and that to me is uh i don't know it's fulfilling in a way that just having things go your way on a single day isn't it sounds it seems fluky it can be fluky i mean dimaggio had things go his way too he had some lucky hits in there he had some favorable home cooking scorekeeper calls, classifications during that streak that probably helped extend it. So I don't know. To me, I guess the luck aspect doesn't bother me as much when it's over the period of weeks or months. to strike out a batter, to not walk a batter,

and to, in the absence of a strikeout, to get him to hit the ball not hard. And then the defense can, you know, hopefully convert the not hard balls to outs. A hitter's job is kind of to hit the ball hard, but really it's to hit the ball where they ain't. It's not really the pitcher's job to get a batter to hit the ball where they are exactly. Like you don't really pitch to the defense in any real meaningful way. You pitch to avoid good contact.

But whether the ball is hit five feet to the left of the shortstop or right at the shortstop is essentially, as I understand it, as it seems like all evidence points to, totally outside the pitcher's control. He doesn't have any way of controlling the direction of a ball within the feet that determine hit versus out. But for a batter, there is an aspect of your BABIP, your ability to overachieve or underachieve the quality of contact is partly under your control because you can be really fast and beat out balls that otherwise wouldn't be hits or put pressure on the defense. You can be the type of hitter that maybe sprays the ball around and makes you very

hard to defend against because they have to cover the whole field against you. Or if they're playing a particular defense, you can chop a weekly against the shift or contra to the shift and get a hit on a ball that StatCast would say is a hundred, you know, a 98% chance out. But I mean, you know, it's not an accident that you hit it right to where the third baseman would be playing when the third baseman isn't there. And so in that sense, the relationship between a batter's hit probability and a batter's hits to me doesn't feel

like the difference is all outside his control it feels like that difference is partly a reflection of his actual skills so uh so if a guy every day managed to have balls that were that should be hits and he's not getting hits i would say that there's an aspect of that that's out of his control but there's an aspect of that that's out of his control, but there's an aspect of that that I would say, well, maybe you should try something slightly different too. Uh-huh. Yeah, that could be why. All right. By the way, I don't know if I need to acknowledge, but when I was saying that I liked doing the stat cast no hitter piece, my defense, the reason that I liked it was entirely about how much it made me appreciate actual no hitters in a different way

i also liked knowing what the stat cast no-hitters were in addition to that to see the scherzer game at the top of a leaderboard that i otherwise wouldn't have acknowledged is satisfying to me to understand that the chris heston game which i remember and which i've always sort of thought like is one of the weird great flukes of the last decade because it's Chris Heston to see that it actually was not just a no hitter, but, but a notable and, and, and distinguished no hitter. I also really appreciate. So I liked, I liked both. I liked truthfully. I like as many possible ways of looking at baseball events as possible.

And so to me, this is, this is good. And I encourage everybody who doesn't like it to just to not look at it right i agree with all of that so that concludes our stat cast stat blast and now a couple more emails here i wanted to answer this one because this is related to another topic that you have written about perhaps more than once this is from from Aaron. He says, I'm curious about long but possible playoff odds for projected to be bad teams. For example, the Fangraphs playoff odds, this was a few days ago, currently give both the Mariners and the Giants a 0.3% chance of winning a wild card. Similarly, the Baseball Perspectives playoff odds currently give the White Sox a 0.2% chance of winning the AL Central and the Angels a 0.1% chance of winning the AL West. Long odds to be sure, but I'm also quite shocked that in a season exactly like this one to date, the Angels would win the AL West one in 1,000 times.

Even that seems too often. How should I rank the following four factors in terms of their contribution to these teams' non-zero odds? Or are there significant other factors I'm overlooking? Number one, lucky breaks. Sometimes even bad teams catch good breaks and the ball bounces their way, so the projection systems are accounting for the possibility that all the lucky breaks could stack up to favor a team. Maybe the Giants can post a playoff-worthy record despite a strong negative run differential. Number two, true talent. It's possible that the play we've seen to date has been unlucky and the projection system's fooled

by some historically bad run of luck for some players with some really good true talent. Maybe the White Sox are actually a really good team and we just haven't figured it out yet. Number three, a new gear. Maybe everything we think we know is true, but players are going to develop between now and the end of the season in unforeseen ways. Maybe three Mariners pitchers are all going to learn a new pitch that's going to completely revolutionize each of their games. And lastly, number four, the other guys collapse. It could be that the team's projection is accurate, but other teams are going to see a major injury or underperformance from here on out that ruins their seasons. Maybe the Angels can win the division with a 77-85 record.

It ruins their seasons. Maybe the Angels can win the division with a 77-85 record. Do you know to what extent the projection systems are accounting for each of these factors in generating their odds? I asked you this because you have occasionally done the article where you look at all the Pakoda runs and you see where the really terrible team of that year makes the playoffs and what happens in that universe. So I don't know if that gives you any insight into this question. I think what gives me insight into this question is that I've often asked Rob McKeown about this because there's something about the playoff odds that felt somewhat...

I always thought that underdog teams should probably have slightly higher chances than they do. And so every year I would ask Rob, like, okay, walk me through, how does this work? And so if I'm remembering this all correctly, and if I understood correctly, and if Rob conveyed it correctly, the way that it basically it works is that you project a team's true talent for offense, how many runs they're, they're likely to score a day. And then you project their true talent for run suppression how many teams they're likely to allow per game based on their individual pakoda projections and depth charts and so then you have each team has an expected win percentage and then you run every game basically every matchup that they have of the season against every other team with their expected win percentage against another team's expected win percentage. And so if you have a team that is say a 550 true talent team, and then you have another team that say a 520 true talent team over the course of 100 games, then maybe the better team is expected to win like who knows 60. But in any individual game,

you can only win one or zero. and since you don't play each team 100 times you're gonna have like a series of like oh well this team maybe the team wins you know two out of three this this week even though they're slightly worse like you just simulate you're basically flipping coins and the coins are slightly weighted and we know that coins don't flip uniformly. And so what you end up having is some seasons where you're, even though you're worse than other teams, you win more of your games against better teams and vice versa. And so if you run a million simulations, which we've done, which, which we've, uh, I've written an article about million simulation seasons. I think they usually do 50,000 simulation seasons. Most years your coins are going to land about right, but some years just because of how

it works, you're going to win more games and that's it. And so that would fall under what Aaron here calls lucky breaks, which isn't really lucky. If you're a 400 winning percentage team and you beat a 600 winning percentage team some of the time you weren't getting lucky those times you were just winning some games as would be expected and if you win more than some games then you're also not lucky it's just unexpected it's just like i don't know is that lucky is it lucky i don't know it's not lucky you just happen to have a good season and so that's how you end up with the chance that a team that has say a 380 winning percentage expectation could win 86 games some years and 60 games most years and 42 games some years just different simulations of these weighted coins now to me, that's all well and good.

And that is a very strong way to understand what's most likely to happen, given what we know and what we can say and without speculating wildly on all sorts of other things. But it assumes that those true talent levels are also accurate. And it seems to me that there's a chance that we've just, that you also have to factor in the fact that we could be all wrong about them. We could have just misassessed them. We, uh, we were wrong about Cody Bellinger this year. There's just no way around it. We got it wrong. And there's a chance that every player is much better or much worse than they, than we think they are going into the season and that a team might actually be better or worse than they are.

And so I would always wonder whether all of these things should be regressed somewhat for uncertainty. So if you have a 1% chance, if one team has a 1% playoff odds and another team has a 99% playoff odds, but then you throw into that, the we're all fallible in our assessments factor, maybe you regress them slightly toward 50%. And it should actually be 98 and two. And so that would be kind of the what Aaron, I think that would fall under what Aaron calls both true talent and

a new gear. In some cases, we might not have accurately understood a player's true talent and more likely, I think more commonly players change and we might've had their true talent right in the first place, but then something changed. They changed their swing. They hurt their elbow. They found or lost a gear and suddenly their true talent is very different than it was in February when all of these simulations ran. Yeah.

But the projection system, I guess, is not really thinking that, right? To the extent that it's thinking anything. I mean, it's not building in, I might be wrong about this. It's saying, this is what I think reality is, and here's what might happen, even though that's reality. I mean, we might think that that might not be reality, and we might think reality is something different so we could mentally account for that but the system itself is probably not building in some percentage of chance that it's totally wrong about things right well like i mean they it's so the marcel projections definitely do they have a regression um for individual performances and it's i don't know if other i don't know if pakoda and zips and

all the others do as well so that might be all incorporated into the individual projections and that might make it unnecessary to do it at the team level and i don't know if that is means that it is a good idea or a bad idea for a projection to think this way so i've got some unanswered questions here i've got some things that I can't speak to. But I mean, what is, I don't know, what is the point of a projection? Is the point of a projection to say, given what I know, here's the most likely outcome, in which case, the most likely outcome is that there are things I don't know. be cautious. I mean, if the goal is to point you to the most likely outcome, probably where regression is helpful, summit regression should be incorporated. Yeah, that's true. And there's some volatility to teams. I think Dan Simborski sometimes writes about this, that there's a bigger error bar, a wider range of possible outcomes around certain teams, because obviously there are

around certain players. You can look at the Pocota percentiles and some guys have wider ranges. And so if you have a team that's made up of guys with wider ranges, then you can have a wider team range. It's never like an enormous difference. There aren't really teams that have like a six win range of potential outcomes and teams that have a 10 winwin or, you know, a 12-win range or something. It's not that dramatic, but there's some volatility where if you're looking at two teams that have the same true talent estimate and whatever, they're the same number of games back in the division, you'd think they'd have the same odds. And you'd think they'd have the same odds. Maybe they wouldn't quite have the same odds because you can actually imagine Team A breaking out and being really good, whereas Team B, you almost can't imagine that happening in any scenario. So I guess that could play a part in this also. I don't know how much it is necessary. Like, again, if you have five teams, not again, I haven't said this yet. If you have five teams that have a 0.1% chance of winning the ALS, I would feel like it would be very dangerous to say, well, which of those do you think should actually be 0.2? But if you said all of them should maybe be 0.2, that there's a sort of a fundamental

tendency for the unknowns to be incorporated into these projections, then maybe I could see that. I don't know. It'd be interesting to have somebody much smarter than me think these things through. Whether it's necessary, it's hard to say, though, because I looked at, I think for an article I didn't end up writing, I looked at like five years of teams hitting 0.0 playoff odds. I did that last year. And in those five years or however many I did,

it's not just that none of those teams won, but it's that like none of those teams even like got back above 5%. Like they were done. Like as you would expect, like when you hit zero, which is at not actually zero, it's actually 0.4, 0. Like, as you would expect, like when you hit zero, which is at not actually zero, it's actually 0.4, 0.49, I guess. But when you get down to 1% or 0.1% or 0%, most of the time you're not coming back.

And so, in fact, that is the case. For five years-ish, whatever I looked at, no team had made a charge. And like the Rays last year hit zero. And then they were, they were like the real exception to all this. They hit zero. And then they got incredibly hot and they missed the playoffs by a bunch because they had already fallen way behind, which is like sort of, that's what happens. You get to zero, you're already way behind. Sometimes you hit zero because you're terrible. Like the Marlins on day one, you might

hit zero. Sometimes you're terrible because you're the Rays and you're a good behind sometimes you hit zero because you're terrible like the marlins on day one you might hit zero sometimes you're terrible because you're the rays and you're a good team but suddenly you're 16 games behind either way you're probably not coming back but but ben we all remember the 2014 a's i think it was 14 who did hit zero and did we all remember the team that may have been that year yeah it was was it it was 2014 though right that was the the team that may have been that year. Yeah. It was 2014 though, right? That was the team that they hit zero and then they ended up, was that? Yeah. Then they ended up in the wildcard game against the Royals. That was the year.

No, it was the year before. It was 2013. Okay. 2013. 2013, they hit zero in July. They were at zero for most of a month or maybe they hit zero in June. They were at zero for most of a month. And maybe they hit zero in June. They were at zero for most of a month. And then they ended up winning 96 games and the AL West and playing

the division series. So this was, I led with the five years, but of course, five years is not enough to know this. I only had to go back a sixth year to find a team that was at zero that ended up winning the division. Actually, it was the 2012 A's. Ah, yes, of course. How could I forget the 2014, 2013, or actually 2012 A's? I'll always remember them. Anyway, that's what I was going to say is that it would be nice if we had thousands of seasons

so we could validate whether a one in a thousand team actually wins one in a thousand times. That would be great. It's like the exercise 538 went back and did just uh last month i think which was really cool they just went back and they checked how good their forecasts actually have been over the past several years because they've made thousands of predictions and every political race and many sporting events and other things and so they actually just went back and said like if we said that this team has a 70% chance of winning,

does that team actually win 70% of the time? And for the most part, they were pretty spot on. Oh, fantastic. I'm going to read this as soon as we hang. I have wanted to do that with, because you're right. We don't have, we, unfortunately, we don't have 150 years of playoff odds. Right.

And we have 150 years of baseball, but not 150 years of playoff odds. And I always thought have 150 years of baseball, but not 150 years of playoff odds. And I always thought it would be very fun to assign somebody smarter than me again, to basically look at every day of every playoff odds for every year that we have it. And then look at all the teams that are at 70% and see if they make it 70% of the time and so on and see if these things make sense. And so I can't wait to read the 538 one. And I think everybody should do it just because I want to read it.

Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I'll link to it. But I just don't think we have enough to do that with baseball in a really satisfying way. Certainly not with these low odds teams that we're talking about. You can look at 70% chance teams if we have, I don't know how long the playoff odds have been around. Not that long

at least in their current form or something close to their current form so it's just not nearly long enough to go back and see whether the long shots actually pay off as rarely as uh as they should so i guess we'll see in a thousand years yeah all right another question here this is from anthony and anthony wants to know about mid-count changes. He says, I started covering college baseball last year and have been surprised at how often I've seen pitchers pulled in the middle

of an at-bat. I was at a game a few weeks ago when Duke, the road team, pulled their starter after he got to a 1-2 count. Duke's student assistant, who was in the stands to chart pitches, got some heckling from the crowd and justified the decision by saying that their data shows that the reliever was more likely to finish off that particular hitter with two strikes, but the starter was

more likely to get to two strikes in the first place. He struck him out on the next pitch, for what it's worth. I'm curious if you think we'll see this more often in MLB or if we already have and I'm just missing it. It seems odd to me that college, where pitch tracking is way less consistent, would be in front of MLB on this. My best guess, it's an ego thing. Easier to pull a soft-tossing 19-year-old in the middle of an at-bat than a major league pitcher. Are there other explanations for why this doesn't happen more often? So I asked Michael Bauman about this so i asked michael bowman about this before you ask michael about this can we just acknowledge that that what duke did is like crazy

yeah to say that yeah it's probably crazy now now tell me what michael's okay well so i asked michael because he actually knows things about college baseball. And I guess college baseball teams have 35-man rosters, which I could not have told you. So they have 35-man rosters playing four or five times a week. And Major League Baseball teams have 25-man rosters playing six times a week. And so just that alone, it seems like it's probably easier to go through pitchers if you want to. It seems like it's probably easier to go through pitchers if you want to. If you decide that this is advantageous, it's much easier to do with a bigger roster and fewer games than it is in MLB, where you have to worry about how you're going to get through the game and how you're going to get through tomorrow's game and all that. So I think that's part of it.

And the ego thing is also probably part of it. Like, it's embarrassing if this happens, I think. Remember when Joe Girardi did this in 2015? I think we talked about it on the show because he, let's see, it was a Yankees-Red Sox game, and I think it was like a lopsided game. Let's see. So Justin Wilson came in. He replaced Tanaka in the seventh inning after Tanaka allowed a leadoff homer, Wilson gave up a single and a stolen base, but he'd gotten two outs and he had Jackie Bradley Jr. in a one and two count.

And then as Wilson was going to pitch to Bradley Jr. with two strikes, Girardi came out and he replaced him with Dylan Batensis. And do you remember what he said? His only justification for why he did this was strategy. That's right. Yeah. I did not remember any of this until you said strategy.

Yeah. So evidently he told Wilson, according to Wilson, that Patantis was simply the best option to close out the inning. Now, I don't know. Maybe this is an example of Joe Girardi not dealing well with players, and that's why he's no longer the manager, I don't know, maybe this is an example of Joe Girardi not dealing well with players and that's why he's no longer the manager. I don't know. But I mean, evidently, there was some strategy. At least he was saying there was. I mean, maybe he thought he saw something. I'm sure we talked about why he might have done this at the time. So I'll go dig up that episode and link to it. But you could imagine i don't know i mean i wrote last october

about how teams just know so much more than we do about matchups and they can tell based on pitcher stuff and hitter stuff and swing playing and all of that stuff you know who matches up well with who and is this an advantageous matchup based on this pitch type and all the things that go into a projection that we can't really take into account in any kind of rigorous way. So I guess in theory, you could have like it's two strikes and you know something about this hitter on two strikes and you know something about this pitcher on two strikes and you have pitchers who are better at finishing off hitters with two strikes than others. Maybe they're just generally better too,

but there are some pitchers who seem to have trouble finishing hitters off above and beyond what you would think they would have. So I could kind of construct an occasional scenario where maybe there could be a legitimate case for doing this. So I'm going to withdraw my, this is crazy. I just think I was too quick there. I'm going to say that I think that Duke is probably crazy. I am surprised there are not more mid-count pitching changes,

but of a different sort. To me, it makes a lot of sense that when you have a pitcher who's kind of wild or kind of struggling, has maybe just walked two batters or has just walked a batter on four pitches and then falls behind 2-0 i'm surprised at how often he's left in to finish the walk and then the pitching change is made i think that 2-0 should be a pitching change count uh if you've got the guy ready and if you're, you know, I mean, at this point it almost feels like everybody who's pitching is pitching because they're a lefty and

the guy's a lefty or they're a righty and the guy's a righty. That's not really true, but it feels that way sometimes. And so maybe you wouldn't do it because you've got the platoon, the platoon advantage that you want. But to me, that makes a lot of sense. So if Duke had decided, we don't really like what we're seeing from the guy on the mound, to me, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm surprised we don't see more of it. I could also be convinced that it is a, actually, I'm not saying that is the case, but I can be convinced that it's a huge disadvantage for a batter to see three pitches from one pitcher and then have to see a new pitcher right away, mid at bat for three pitches. Like that seems to me that it could be

extremely disorienting and you might get a huge advantage. And if you made it a practice as a team that every pitching change you made mid inning was going to be mid count to take advantage of this, I would totally see that. And, and I think that, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if that became the norm around the league. Now, it also wouldn't surprise me if there was no advantage at all for the pitcher in doing that, and that the batter sees your warmup pitches and he gets a minute to reset his mind and that it's harder for the pitcher to get comfortable in his first throws and that it's actually a disadvantage for the pitcher. And so then we wouldn't see it but if you told me that the data shows that it's a big disadvantage for a batter to see a new

pitcher mid at bat and then sure do it definitely do it the concept of having an early count pitcher and a late count pitcher as like roles that feels really weird to me the idea that duke is going into this at bat with the plan of my guy's going to get ahead one, two, and then I'm going to bring in the finisher. Like that feels like a little too try hard for me. Yeah. But there are guys who are good at throwing first pitch strikes. Exactly.

And maybe those guys are not great at missing bats on two strikes. So yeah, I mean, Batonsas is extremely good at throwing one strike in four pitches. Like nobody in the baseball, like honestly, nobody in baseball is probably better than throwing one swing and miss strike in four pitches. And if he doesn't have to throw three strikes to get the out, then it makes sense. I, I, so that when I started thinking about, honestly, Joe Girardi's one word answer got me on Duke side. Like to me, it feels a little try hard.

I don't love it. I don't really love it. Ben, I like the idea of adjusting to the bat as it goes on. I'm fine with that. I like the idea of the, um, of using the batter's discomfort against him. I like that. I have come around somewhat on the, we have a plan for this at bat

and it involves two pitchers in roles. I've come around on it somewhat, but I'm still a little shaky. I do like your idea of just having this be a team level strategy because that removes all the stigma. Yes. Right now, if you get yanked in the middle of an at bat,

that's embarrassing. That rarely happens. And so if that happens to you, that's just the ultimate sign, or at least it comes off as the ultimate sign of a lack of confidence. I don't even think you can get one more strike. I don't even want to watch one more second of you pitching. That's how eager I am to get you out of this game. But yeah, if it were a team level strategy, if it were, you know, the opener of you face him, then maybe you gain some insight on each particular pitch. We know that I think the more pitches you see in your first plate appearance, the bigger your advantage is in subsequent plate appearances. So it stands to reason, I think, that that could apply within a plate appearance too. And so if you're at a one, two count and you've seen three pitches and they're all from the same release point, maybe you're a little more comfortable than when a guy comes in totally fresh. And maybe the pitcher is a little less comfortable coming in in that situation because he hasn't done it much. But if he were to do it regularly, then I would think that would help the pitching team more than it would hurt. I mean, really, too, you could even amplify the effect if it is there

by not having the pitcher warm up on the mound, by having him warm up entirely in the bullpen. And then he comes and, I mean, maybe, I don't know if you have to use your throws, but he just mobs balls in. I don't know how in the world a batter could know the difference between 97 and 93 in that situation like if it went from 93 to 97 i don't know how he would time that i don't it seems impossible to me yeah and then you throw in

the different breaking balls and all that and the different release points and the size of the pitch i mean just imagine just imagine you're batting in a batting cage and then they come out with a totally different shaped pitching machine throwing three miles an hour harder. And you can't even pick up the release point. What are the chances that you're hitting that first pitch? Zero? Or is there less than that? Is there a less than zero that we can go at?

Now, that's you at a pitching machine. But I think it's about the same. So, Ben, I am not aware of anybody who has previously proposed that this should be a team-wide strategy, that all mid-inning pitching changes should be coordinated so that they take place in the middle of an at-bat to take advantage of the batter's inability to adjust that quickly to pitchers, with the pitcher possibly even doing all of his warm-ups in the bullpen so the batter can't even see him throw. I'm not aware of that being proposed. I'm not aware of there being a

sabermetric movement toward this, or there being, um, like articles that have been written about this before. So can we just say that this is going to be our thing and that if it happens, we get credit for it being our thing. Can we name this? okay the the yank i don't know what you what you'd call it um something else strategy strategy it's strategy it's the strategy yeah i don't know i i i'm trying to think if you could test that contention probably like well i mean you it would help if you had like say like nine high level baseball teams that all play games that don't matter and that you can control and if they did that like every day for a whole season and you could experiment with this maybe yeah i wonder how

widespread this is in college if we can get some duke data that tells us this is a good idea but because you couldn't really test it like i mean doesn't happen often enough in the majors to have a sample there but could you even test like can you test if there's a per pitch improvement i guess you could maybe kind of test that right within a plate appearance like if you just looked at what happens when you swing at a first pitch compared to what happens when you swing at a fourth pitch in the first time you see a pitcher maybe that would give you some inkling of whether there's an advantage to seeing those subsequent three pitches the intervening pitches so i don't know there are probably ways you could look at this

but yeah yeah i'm not aware of this being suggested so i don't know if it's a good idea or not but if it happens if it happens you heard it here first yeah and to be clear duke gets credit for the mid mid and bat platoon like for the having pitcher roles based on count that's all them that they invented that or some other team invented that we're talking about something different that uh that um is different than duke and we're gonna name it but i mean really just start doing this in the minors, right, and see how it works. Now, would it be worth persisting with a less optimal matchup for the first, like, three or four pitches of the plate appearance

just because you are theorizing that you're getting this big advantage? Like, do you leave the guy in only as long as the matchup favors him but then pull him even in that supposedly favorable plate appearance for another guy just to get this element of surprise? Or do you leave him in longer than you would otherwise to then get this surprise effect when the new guy comes in? It depends on how extreme the effect is and how successful this is. I mean, presumably you're bringing in a new pitcher because you think the new pitcher is, is actually probably slightly better. So you're, you'd be, the question is, are you going to leave a slightly worse option

out for three pitches? Or are you going to bring your better option out and try to extend your better reliever for three pitches to get him in? Or are you going to lose the platoon advantage to do this? Assuming that you don't have like equal, equal quality pitchers that are, you know, that there's no difference. So that would be sure that'd be part of the math. You'd have to figure that out. You'd have to figure out how big an advantage this is to do. And I don't know how many mid so that the real obstacle to this in widespread use is that there aren't many mid inning pitching changes that aren't platoon based.

Usually you bring your setup guy in for the eighth and you, you kind of like that. He's going to start the eighth, like managers sometimes talk about wanting to get their high leverage guys, clean innings with, you know, nobody on base, their closers and their, their main setup guy. So you're not doing a lot of like,

I'm taking out a righty and I'm bringing in a righty unless something is already going wrong, unless you're replacing an ineffective pitcher. In which case, yeah, you might want to pull that ineffective pitcher rather than extending him into the next at bat. But this might

be a way to get him out slightly earlier i don't know how many opportunities you have i don't know how many like how many mid-inning pitching changes there are that you would consider the two pitching the the guy coming out and the guy going in to be roughly comparable quality so that's uh that's part of the math but uh we're high concept, guys. Don't we have a staff for this? Right. We're just the idea men. We're putting this out in the world

and you can all follow up on it and do the research and let us know. Or don't let us know, but just put it into effect and we'll know that the math checked out when the race start doing it next year. Exactly. All right. All right. Okay, that'll'll do it you can support the podcast on patreon by going to

patreon.com slash effectively wild the following five listeners have already pledged their support both moral and financial dave go mariners wesolowski sorry about your mariners dave sean ezra poor donald vincent john randall and ryan nicholas parker thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're already a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Thank you. extra chapter and some other good stuff, you will need to pre-order it and send your receipt or confirmation to TheMVPMachine at gmail.com. Again, that's TheMVPMachine at gmail.com and your faith will be rewarded next week.

Also, if you're in the New York area, remember that Travis and I will be doing a book launch and signing at Foley's on West 33rd Street on the launch date, June 4th, starting at 6.30 Eastern. Hope to see you all there. Meg and I will be back with one more episode this week, so we will talk to you then. There is no time to pray

And there's no time to beg And then it's off with an arm Or it's off with a leg And if I spare your life It's because the tide is deep