Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1391: Down Goes Frazier

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller review Sam’s latest observations on Jeff Sullivan-era EW episodes, including musings on Ketel Marte, the worst team draft of all time, and Johnnie LeMaster, then banter about Shohei Ohtani’s tools, Todd Frazier’s wild swings, Max Scherzer’s nose-breaking bunting practice, and Mickey Callaway’s odd pitching-change justification. They also answer listener emails […]

Up on my lawn, and there's something very wrong. And I know it must be late. Been gone since yesterday. I'm not like you guys. I'm not like you Same. All right. So we're going to do some emails today. I've been told to expect a real whopper of a stat blast. I don't want to get everyone's hopes up too high, but my hopes are high. I actually have some supplementary stat blasts today. You did a stat blast a while back during the Jeff years where you had Dan Hirsch look something up for you, which is great.

Dan's very helpful to you oftentimes. This was absolutely a stat blast that you could have done faster by hand than the amount of labor that went into writing the email to Dan and then Dan doing it. And, you know, it would have, you gotta, I don't know. I'm just, there's something great

about clicking a bunch of times on things to figure it out. What was it? This was figuring out the longest career by somebody who had won a Cy Young award but had otherwise not received any Cy Young votes. Uh-huh. Okay. I mean, that's like a six-minute thing. Yeah, I guess. You get the list of Cy Youngs.

Yeah, click them all. There's only 50. There's only 50 of them. Then you've got a duplicate, so probably, well, I guess there's 50 times there's only 50 of them then you've got a duplicate so probably well i guess there's 50 times two leagues so 100 and then you got your duplicates that probably takes you down to 50 uh you can sort of off the top of your head remove some of them but you know you open 30 or 40 tabs and scan real quick and you're done okay yeah i guess that could have been doable sorry dan so do you have any banter before we get to emails yeah a few

things i just got to the episode where jeff sullivan is talking about how katel marday is gonna break out and i knew that you you had made reference to the fact that he was a jeff sullivan favorite but i did not realize how strong he came out in favor of katalina i mean he did a post on it i believe yeah like this was not like ah yeah i like this guy or or something like now he was like the official breakout pick of the season yes wow uh so do you think that if jeff let's say that jeff did his own projection system and he just he dedicated an entire offseason to projecting a thousand different baseball players Using whatever method he wanted to do How much

Do you think that the world would prefer that To a Pakoda or a Zips Could he make a living Doing projections by hand A sharp giving his picks Well I guess the race thought so I don't know but I think probably

He wouldn't be better than the projection systems on most players and you don't think so probably he would even think that he wouldn't i don't really he's he's a man who has a lot of faith in the projections and i'm sure he has access to better projections now probably trust those even more but i don't think so i think if you had asked him before he went to work for the race he would not have claimed to be able to beat projection systems on a wide swath of players. But I would have trusted him on his picks, like the guys he felt strongly enough about to say that he deviated from projections, which I don't even know if I'd trust myself on that. But I did and do have a lot of respect for Jeff's player evaluation skills, as do the Rays, apparently. So when he was strongly in favor of someone as being better or worse than the projections, then I would give that a lot of credence.

Yeah. Generally speaking, would you rather have a projection that you could look up and see what Zip said about somebody, or would you rather have Jeff spend 10 minutes on something and then come back to you and tell you what he thought? I think I'd rather have Zip's if I wanted to be more accurate, but I'd be much more entertained by Jeff's analysis. I definitely would have said Zip's until I got to the Quetel Marte episode. Wow, that really shook your faith in projections or gave you greater faith in Jeff. But remember, we're still waiting for that Keon Broxton breakout that Jeff forecasted.

I think he was higher on him than he was on Marte. You guys answered a question about the worst draft ever. Yeah. And I don't know, do you remember your answer? No, because it was kind of complicated, wasn't it? There were like multiple ways to define worst draft. Right. And so I actually one time wrote an article about this in 2013 for you. I don't remember that. It was headlined the worst a team ever did in the draft. And I also acknowledge that you could think about this question a lot

of different ways. I don't remember exactly the process I used, but I settled, I ended up on a team that you actually mentioned in that draft, which is one of the teams that had no major leaguers come out of it rather than one of the teams that had negative war come out of it. So this team was the 2000, like the Reds of the early 2000s, 2002, maybe 2001. And I reread the article and I think it holds up. So I'm going to tell you, this is my answer to that question. So the Reds who signed no major leaguers, the best player that they took, if you include all professional baseball performance was their 32nd round pick, David Schaefer, who had a pretty good stint at high a and reached triple a, and they traded him to the A's for Kirk Sarlos. So they got some major leaguer out of him, but not much,

because I don't know if you remember the career that Kirk Sarlos had for the Reds. I don't think it was that distinguished. They had one player from that draft make a top 100 one year, a Baseball America top hundred. So they basically created one prospect out of the entire draft. Oh, Sarlos had 43 innings for the Reds and a 7.17 ERA. So they got that. And then they also traded another guy for Kenny Rogers, but Kenny Rogers blocked the trade. So basically they got 43 innings of a seven ERA out of the entire draft in trade. They failed to sign their first round pick, who was Jeremy Sowers. And then the next year they got a pick in compensation for failing to sign Jeremy Sowers. And he also didn't make it to AAA. They had at this time, 10 years after the draft or 12 years after

the draft, there was one player still active in professional baseball. He was playing in Mexico for his sixth consecutive year. So 12 years later, they were all out of baseball, maybe 11 years out of baseball. Only five players reached AAA out of 40 whatever. And here's the crucial thing too, is that they're, well, let's see. Okay. There's a lot of crucial things. The next year they had the third overall pick. They had narrowed their choices to two guys, but they ended up signing the signability guy because they were so gun shy from having failed to sign Jeremy Sowers the next year. And so they ended up getting the signability guy, who was named Chris Gruler, instead of Scott Casimir, who was only asking for a half a million dollars more.

But that half a million dollars made all the difference because they didn't want to lose another Jeremy Sowers. And their scouting director, here's the ironic twist, was fired one year later, but probably not for that draft. Rather, industry lore was that he was fired for his next year's draft when he signed a second round pick that people thought was a bad process pick, that it was an unusual pick, an unorthodox pick, a pick that much of the industry thought didn't make sense. That pick was Joey Votto. So this is according to Tracy Ringlesby writing later, many people believe Votto is the reason that Casey McKeon was fired as Red Scouting director. Votto coming out of high school in

Toronto was an under the radar prospect. Red Scout John Castleberry saw him in a showcase and brought Votto to Cincinnati for a workout. McKeon, wanting to make sure nobody got wind of Votto, didn't inform anybody else, including the general manager. The Reds took Votto in the second round, and by the 2003 draft, McKeon had been replaced. So I don't know if that's true. I don't know how much of that story is true. But pretty much every step along the way, the 2001 draft was disastrous, and it just kept on getting more disastrous for

future decisions. All right. Well, that's a good answer. You also talked about Johnny LeMaster. Yeah. In that same conversation, you talked about Johnny LeMaster as being, this question was inspired by somebody asking whether Johnny LeMaster is the worst draft pick ever because he was like a first round pick who had been worth negative five war for the Giants or if a draft pick who never makes the majors is a worst pick because he never made the majors. And so you talked about Johnny LeMaster. And so I am obligated to bring up the large effect

that Johnny LeMaster has had on baseball. Do you know what I'm going to talk about right now? I don't think so. All right. I have told this story once before in a baseball prospectus lineup card from five years ago. Johnny LeMaster, in 1982, when Johnny LeMaster was at the peak of his badness, he was horrible.

I think he had recently worn the Boo jersey. He had a 51 OPS plus that year. He was 28 years old and had been a Giant for a long time. And he was negative 2.3 war that year. And my mom was an antique dealer, antiques dealer. And so she was working a booth at an antiques show in San Mateo, which is on Peninsula, south of San Francisco. And Johnny LeMaster's wife came by.

I'm reading now because I don't really remember this story. I consulted with my parents before I wrote this. So she wanted to buy two brass and iron beds with gallery footboards that my mom was selling for $850 as a pair. But she had to see if her husband, Johnny LeMaster, liked them. My parents asked what sort of job he had that he had to work on a Saturday. She said he played shortstop for the Giants. His name was Johnny LeMaster. So my parents had no interest in sports at this time. If anything, they had antagonism towards sports and it would, I'm still reading, never occur to them to fall in love with something like a baseball team. And LeMaster was at that point one of the least popular, worst giants of all time.

But his wife told my mom, he's in a good mood because he just got a hit. A hit, singular, a hit made him happy. That's how down Johnny LeMaster was. So he came to the show after his game and approved the purchase. My dad says I had to help him load when he came to pick it up and I was shocked. He was smaller than you, smaller than me. He looked like a 17 year old. So I started following him.

That's when my dad became a Giants fan and a baseball fan. He'd listen to every game on the radio while he was out working or while he and my mom were on antique buying road trips. He started out just wanting to know how LeMaster did. I thought that's so cool that he's excited just because he got a hit. But eventually he became the most diehard Giants fan I knew.

Eventually I turned six and he taught me the game, and while I might have fallen for it anyway, my relationship with the sport was always pretty explicitly an extension of my relationship with my dad. He doubts I'd be a baseball fan today. If not for LeMaster's wife stopping and noticing those beds, he thinks I'd be a tree surgeon. So Johnny LeMaster is the reason this podcast is happening right now. So there are lots of ways, I guess I'm saying, lots of ways that people can leave their mark on the game or the team that employs them, or in this case, a fan who loves them anyway.

a fan who loves them anyway. So Johnny Lemaster's greatest legacy in baseball is making you a baseball writer and podcaster. I wonder if he'd agree. Yeah, that's right. Grant Brisby, after I told this story, originally sent me a photo of him as a, I don't know, four or five-year-old getting an autograph from Johnny LeMaster. Johnny LeMaster is sitting on these plastic orange chairs at Kaiser, at the hospital, Kaiser Hospital. And Grant was there with something for him to sign. It's a very cute photo.

I noted that Johnny LeMaster is signing with a purple Sharpie, which I thought was pretty cool. Grant noted that he wasn't sick. Grant was not at the hospital because he was sick. He feels like it was sort of shady that he showed up at the hospital where Johnny LeMaster was signing things for hospital patients, but he did. Yeah, you shouldn't do that you shouldn't try to pass yourself off as a sick kid to get exactly i suggested that grant was like that episode of say by the bell the middle school years where zach pretended to be sick so that stevie the pop singer would come sing at bayside

i want to say one last thing which i've been meaning to bring this up for a very long time and I keep forgetting. I had a perfect opportunity because we were talking about Shohei Ohtani's value as a right fielder if he played defense. The other day I was listening to a broadcast and Shohei Ohtani, I don't know, beat out a grounder or something like that. And somebody said, yeah, you know, the people don't always talk about how fast he is. He's very fast. And then somebody else, the other broadcaster said, that's right. He is a true five tool player. And I wanted to get your opinion on whether it is acceptable to call Shohei Otani a true five tool player when he has never played the field in the majors.

And I mean, he presumably we would all feel comfortable saying he has a great arm. And you can clearly say the three of the other four hit power and speed. But can you say that he has a plus glove if he doesn't play? What is your thought philosophically on that? Well, if he was basing that on a report on how he played the field in japan maybe if he's seen some testimonial about that then okay because he actually has played outfield in high level professional baseball but if you were going just based on the tools i don't think you could safely say that obviously we know he has the arm and he should be able to have the range and be able to catch fly balls because he's fast and there's no reason why he shouldn't. But not everyone has the instincts and gets the jumps that it seems like they should.

athletic and fast as Shohei Otani, who was just a terrible outfielder and just misjudged balls so poorly, so badly that he couldn't catch anything and he couldn't get to anything. I don't know that that person actually exists or exists in the majors, but I don't think you can say it with certainty unless you actually see it. because he has done it in npb maybe it's safe to say it maybe it's been five years since he played in the outfield in npb and he only has in his entire life 98 chances in the outfield and this was as i this this was a said by a person who was playing ball in those years in in the majors and so I don't think that he was scouting him out there. But I mean, look, I think we all think he would be an above average outfielder. Yes.

And I think that that fact has absolutely nothing to do with 98 chances that he got. And so it all comes down to the question of whether you need to have any, any, anything at all to go on or whether being right is fine just being right is enough i'm confident saying that it's true technically speaking you probably should have had to demonstrate that yes i think it goes back to my the point of i think this was the point of my christian yellich five tools article which is that we don't actually mean anything close to literal when we say somebody is five tools we just use it as a shorthand for balanced. And that, in fact, I think that I concluded by saying that we will be calling players

five tool players long after we have ceased to use five tools in scouting or even know what the five tools are. It will just be a shorthand. It'll be an idiom for broad skill set. Yeah, well, I actually wrote an article once where I called Otani a 10-tool player, so I'm not one to talk. All right. So how quickly, by the way, are you going through these old episodes?

I know you do a lot of walking, and I assume you're listening to these episodes while you're walking, but it sounds like you're at a pretty rapid pace. No, I would say it's like one episode per, one or two probably per episode that we record here. Okay. It sounds like I'm going faster because I'm not listening to the team previews. I've already listened to the team previews. I listened to them because I realized in February that I needed to hear some team previews. I also am not generally listening to any guests because I listen to podcasts to hear

people gab. I'm not a person who is that interested in guest type episodes, just as my own personal temperament. I really like hearing, I like to hear people talk. I like hearing gabbing. I like eavesdropping on conversations. So that's more what I'm doing. Okay. Well, it seems to be a popular segment, according to some threads in the Facebook group that are probably not representative of listeners as a whole, but they can't get enough of Sam responds to old Jeff episodes. Well, if I learned anything from re-listening to this segment of your podcast is that you should not put too much weight on the handful of responses that you get from people because otherwise you'll quit writing idiosyncratic me and leads to start your

articles that's true so did you see the todd frazier swing i did yeah everyone i'm sure saw the todd frazier swing on tuesday this was uh was classified as a curveball From Tukey Toussaint Todd Frazier Swung at it and it was Way way way outside And unbelievably far outside I went looking to see if I could find Any farther outside Pitches that were swung at

By a righty and I didn't really Come up with any at least That matched this situation Because I think what made this special was that it was a 1-0 count, so he wasn't protecting the plate. It wasn't two strikes. I got a swing at anything close. Not that this was close, but it evidently looked close to him. And there wasn't a runner going. It wasn't a pitch out. It wasn't a hit and run, anything like that. There was no excuse for Todd Frazier choosing to swing and whiff wildly at this pitch. This was like, you could have stuck a bat on the end of his bat, and I'm not sure he would have made contact with this pitch. in farther outside pitches that were swung at, and in fact, you don't have to go back very far.

I'll just, I'll send you a link to a video. This was the only farther outside pitch that was swung at by a righty this year. It was just a few weeks ago. It was Kevin Pillar against Sergio Romo. It was one of those patented sweeping Sergio Romo sliders that make hitters look silly sometimes. sliders that make hitters look silly sometimes. So Pillar swung at this, but it was 0-2 and the runner was going. And I don't know whether Pillar was exactly protecting the runner or whether he was trying to just foul off the pitch. It's kind of hard to say. It's not like a good swing. It looks like maybe he was late reacting and just trying to make contact. But anyway, there are a few of those where it's two strikes, it's a pitch out, runner going, etc. And I couldn't find any others. I couldn't find any farther outside swings on less than two strikes without some data error or mitigating circumstance. or mitigating circumstance.

So as far as I can tell, this may have been the worst swing by a righty in the PitchFX era, which is a pitch tracking era. There are a couple candidates from 2008 and 2009 that I can't easily access video from. So if I later look those up on YouTube and can find them

and see that they're real and worse than Todd Frazier. I will give him his due in the outro. But otherwise, I think this was as bad as it appeared. It was really bad. All right. Well, let me stick up for Todd Frazier in a few ways. There's a big difference between Todd Frazier's swing and Pilar's swing, as you know. But I mean, the big one is that Kevin Pilar is trying to hit that pitch all the way to the bitter end. Like he, he starts swinging at it and then he sees it's far outside and he lunges out farther for it. And then he sees it's even farther outside and he extends and sort of gasps for it. Kevin Pillar until that pitch got past them was thinking, hit it, hit it,

hit it. And Todd Frazier's swing is a perfectly sensible swing for a pitch he got fooled by. It was 1-0. He thought he'd get a fastball. He took a big swing at a fastball. It wasn't a fastball. And he didn't go, well, maybe I can still hit it. He was content to take the strike. He was going to, you know, he was going to get a strike and he swung right through it. I mean, that, his bat did not deviate from its plane at all. That's true. It looks like he's swinging at a fastball down the middle. Exactly. That's exactly right. And he, I think that's a rational thing to do. He guessed, you know, he guessed or he misidentified it and he was wrong but that happens all the time it's quite a i would say a persuasive case for tuki tucson's uh stuff that he was able to uh mislead him so but is this any

different than a batter who bails out of the way at a curveball and then the curveball drops into the zone for a strike not really you know you you You just identify it wrong and then it does something different. In fact, as long as we're talking about bad swings, I'm going to send you a video that is titled, is this the worst swing ever in the MLB? Must watch. You're going to be delighted when you open this. Okay. I must watch it so watch it this is from 2015 and it's todd frazier and it is a it is a curveball yeah he gave up on and then it broke back into the zone

and he thought ah swing and he's way too late he's way too late. He swings like, you know, like this. He swings as though the handle of his bat is sewed onto his stomach like an umbilical cord, like the bat never really leaves his gut. And he tries to sort of desperately chop at it. And that's Todd Frazier getting fooled another way. And that happens all the time. I think that if you just think about the incentives here, you'd rather, once you're fooled that badly on a breaking ball, on a 1-0 count, you'd much rather take the strike than possibly make contact with it.

And so I think that Pilar's was rational, too. There were two strikes, like you say. He might have been trying to protect the base runner, and so he was trying to make contact. And so he did what he, you know, once he got fooled, he had to keep going through with the plan. Todd Frazier, once he got fooled, was able to just say, uh, we'll, uh, you know, we'll, we'll try to hit the bank tomorrow. And then Todd Frazier in 2015 had two strikes and had no choice but to look a little silly. I think everybody's doing the right thing here. And that's all.

One would conclude, based on those two swings, that maybe Todd Frazier's not great at picking up curveballs. It turns out, looking at his pitch values per 100 pitches, curveballs are actually the pitch that he's had the second best result on of any pitch type in his career. He's been a good hitter against sinkers, and he's been a good hitter against curveballs, and he's actually worse at everything else. So he's good at picking up curveballs, usually it looks like. Just goes to show that when we're at our worst, it's not necessarily representative of our typical performance. I think that more hitters should be guessing more often.

Yeah. So maybe that's why he's good at hitting curveballs. Maybe he guesses and he takes some strikes and hit some dingers. Uh-huh. Okay. All right. And last thing, Max Scherzer bunted in batting practice and broke his nose, bunted it right into his nose. I sympathize as someone whose nose has been broken by a baseball

under different circumstances, but equally embarrassing-looking circumstances, I think. In my case, it was just playing catch in the park, and a ball bounced off a tree root and right into my face. So bad hop. Can't blame me for that, but probably still looked pretty uncoordinated on my part. This bunt attempt by Scherzer, it's poor form, certainly, I think you could say. He's not, doesn't look like he's taking the bunt attempt very seriously. He's kind of lazily extending the bat out there. I'm not saying that

he deserved to break his nose on this bunt, but it was not proper bunting form. And every time a pitcher gets hurt, and I guess Scherzer, is he even going to miss any time? I don't know. He had a CAT scan and it was negative for anything more serious than this so i assume he will be back soon but he is someone who has in the past seemingly come out against pitchers hitting and by extension pitchers having to take bunting practice but then walked back those comments there was a weird kind of controversy where john hayman quoted max scherzer as saying something to the effect of he wants to do away with pitcher hitting. He wants the DH in both leagues. And then Max Scherzer said, no, wait a second. And he put out this tweet with a very long note that he had written about this. And he said,

Heyman took him out of context. And all he was saying was that maybe it made sense for both leagues to have the same rules, but he didn't want to be the spokesman for getting rid of the pitcher hitting and instituting the DH, and he likes hitting, and he likes running, and he likes doing all these things. So I don't know whether he was actually taken out of context or whether he just didn't want to be seen as someone who was pro-DH in both leagues. I don't know what the story was, but I thought of that when he was taking bunting practice and this happened. So I guess if you're a pitcher, you do need to take bunting practice because if you're a National League pitcher,

you're called upon to bunt often and it makes sense for you to bunt. You could argue that other hitters need not practice sacrifice bunting because sacrifice bunting is usually bad. Bunting for a hit is good, but maybe that's a different type of thing to practice. But in this case, he should have been there, should have been doing that. But I guess maybe you should take it a little more seriously, perhaps, because you can hurt yourself. And the reaction of the batting practice pitcher i don't know who that was who was throwing bp for the nationals there but at first he twinged he he kind of you know he put his shoulders up like oh oh no that hurt and then he put his hands on his

hips and just stared in there almost as if he was annoyed about how scherzer had gone about that but maybe he was just annoyed about i Scherzer had gone about that, but maybe he was just annoyed about, I don't know, himself being the impetus for that injury or just the universe conspiring against them. Anyway, it's not a graceful-looking event. No. No. No. I mean, it's a stretch to call this bunting practice. Yeah. Whatever he's doing. stretch to call this bunting practice. Yeah.

Whatever he's doing. This looks like nose breaking practice. Yeah. Bunting practice. Yeah. And that's what hitters often do. Like they get in the cage, they're obligated to, you know, lay down three bunts or five bunts or whatever, before they start taking their hacks, which is what they really want to do.

And so you can tell they're just kind of half-assing it, except if you're a pitcher, you shouldn't be, because that's like your most valuable offensive contribution. Most of the time it's probably going to be a sacrifice bunt. Yeah, the thing about it is that, you know, if you really wanted to practice bunting, if you really wanted to do it like you do it in the game, rather than the way that Scherzer does it here,

then you'd slide your hand up the barrel of the bat and you'd do the whole thing. And then eventually somebody would break their thumb practicing batting practice bunting. And that would actually be more serious. Scherzer's not going to miss his start. But if he broke his thumb or broke a finger, which would happen over enough

Batting practice practice bunts Then it would be even more serious I'm not sure what to do here Yeah well Maybe get rid of pitcher hitting I don't know Just putting it out there Yeah you could I wonder why they practice I wonder why they practice

With hard balls do you think there's any Reason that batting practice has to be done with baseballs because various people have gotten injured like they've gotten hit with pitches with the batted balls while shagging didn't mariano rivera missing here because he hurt himself he wasn't hit by a ball get hit by one but but various players have yeah and so i don't know if there's any reason that you couldn't use a rubber baseball for batting practice i don't know if it would totally mess up your swing to have a different kind of contact off of it probably what am i talking about yeah maybe i don't know at driveline they use these like softer plyo balls that get deformed in a certain way so that if you mishit it, you can kind of tell how you mishit it based on how the ball leaves the bat and the impression it leaves on there.

So I bet you could use those and you'd be less likely to hurt someone. Great idea. Okay. All right. Let's answer an email here. This is from Steve, who says, I play a lot of out-of-the-park baseball, which, in case you've never played, displays interesting stats and funny baseball quotes on its loading screens. One of these that I see all the time is the following, attributed to former Reds assistant GM Bill Bavesi. If an alien dropped down from Mars and asked what a baseball player is, I'd tell him, watch Scott Rowland. My question is threefold. What exactly is Bavese trying to convey with this hypothetical? Is Scott Rowland a good choice to get across whatever point Bavese is trying to make?

And if put in the situation of trying to explain a ballplayer to a Martian, what one player would you tell them to go watch? And I looked up this quote. It is a real quote. I will read it here. This was from 2011 Dayton Daily News. And Bavese said, a lot of people inside our organization and a lot of people outside

were against signing Rowan, said Bavese. This was after the Reds signed Rowan. We gave him a lot of money. I'm proud to say I support that move. If an alien dropped down from Mars and asked what a baseball player is, I'd tell him, watch Scott Rowland. I assume this is just sort of, you know, how people will say, that's a baseball player right there. I assume that's what they mean or what Bavese meant about

Scott Rowland. He just embodied baseballness. Not that he was the best player at that time, but maybe he was a grinder and he left it all in the field and he was good at baseball and didn't really have any weaknesses. I assume that's sort of what he meant. Yeah. I assume that what he meant was less if an alien asked what a baseball player is, rather if for some reason the alien asked, how should we play? Like what is, how would you recommend that we coach our youngsters?

Some sort of a thing. Like he was saying like this is his platonic ideal of the way that a baseball player goes about the act of playing baseball. So not- Fundamentally sound. Yeah, like fundamentally sound or just like does the job.

It's weird because I think what he's trying to say is he does the job the way that the job is perfectly done. Not necessarily that he is able to accomplish everything. This was 2011.

He was 36 years old. Coming off a good year. Very good year. But like you say, he wasn't the best player. But something about his approach, something about his approach, I think. Did not have a good year that year for the Reds in 2011, that is. In 2010, he was very good, yeah. Although actually, he was an all-star in 2011.

So he must have had a great first half and then totally tanked after that. How great could it have been? He had five home runs that year, that season ended up with an 81 ops plus scott roland make the all-star game in 2011 yeah okay hang on quick detour here so in the first half of 2011 scott roland hit 241 276 398 with five homers what uh What? Yeah, he only played three games in the second half. So the stats you're seeing are the stats he had. What in the world? And the Reds were not terrible that year.

Joey Votto was having a good year. So it wasn't like he was their lone representative, I don't think, because Votto was an all-star that year. So let's see if he was voted in 2011 All-Star game. He was not. Oh, he was. He was the starter. He was the starter. Scott Rowland started that game. Scott Rowland had that sort of fan support at that point. Yeah. And in Cincinnati, too. Yeah.

So it's not like he was playing in New York. Pablo Sandoval was active at that point. Pablo Sandoval that year hit 315, 357, 552, and was more famous, I would think, than Scott Rowland, especially coming off of the World Series the year before. What's going on there? I don't know. But maybe it was aliens voting for the next again that year. I don on there? I don't know, but maybe it was aliens voting for the

next decade. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you know, it's, it's a weird way of, of describing what he's trying to describe. I don't think that he picked the right hypothetical for what you hope to convey. If you wanted to say what a ballplayer looks like, then you would pick somebody who is, who is, you know, typical across the board. Like you might say Andrew Benintendi is what a ballplayer looks like. You know, pretty much, you know, like he's not extraordinary at any part of the game. And he doesn't fail at any part of the game. He goes out and plays like a baseball player.

Yeah. At all times. It's like average. like a baseball player. At all times. Like average. Scott Rowland was good at everything too, but he was too good at everything to be the typical baseball player, probably.

Yeah. And sometimes you'll hear this invoked, like, well, if you had to win one game against the aliens or like... What, you do? Yeah, I hear that. Wait, you hear invoked if you had to win one baseball game

against the aliens? Yeah, well... How often. You hear invoked if you had to win one baseball game against the aliens? Yeah. How often does that get invoked? I guess I've heard it more if you had to pick an athletic champion to take on the aliens. So it's not so much a baseball game. Max Kellerman always used to talk about which professional athlete are you taking to win a game against the aliens? Maybe he still does. I don't know but it was like you know are you picking lebron or who's who's the champion of humanity if one person has

to represent you in in combat for the fate of all existence or something so that i've heard i don't know that scott roland i mean he's an excellent ball player should be a hall of famer but i don't know if i sent him to the aliens i'd probably just send mike trout i don't understand if you if the aliens asked you what's a ball player you could pick any of them like they're all ball players what are the if you're assuming that the aliens genuinely are like i don't know what a baseball player is what's a baseball player you wouldn't even show them scott roland you'd be like well okay first let me explain baseball is this game of tag where you start uh at a home base and someone throws you a ball and you hit it and as long as the ball is live then you're allowed to run around stopping at various safe points along the way while the other

team is trying to get the ball and tag you with it if you get home before they tag you then you get a run there's some more specifics than that but that's basically the game and then they go oh okay like what do baseball players look like and you you go, well, they look like, you know, your typical humans, but a little bit bigger. They're good athletes. And look, I'll show you a team. They wear pajamas. And that would probably answer the question.

If they wanted to know what a baseball player looked like, you'd say, well, one of the great things about baseball is that because of the rules of the game and the different roles, all the different segmented duties of a team, they actually don't look like anything. We have very short ones, we have very tall ones, we've had extremely athletic ones, and then some that are actually fairly rotund. We have them, baseball players from all over the world. It's not specific to a region, it's not specific to a certain type of human being. So a ballplayer can look like this guy and you'd show him a picture of each row, orplayer can look like this guy and you'd show him a picture of Ichiro or he could look like this guy and

you'd show him a picture of, you know, Michael Pineda. Or he could look like this guy and you'd show him a picture of Scott Rowland and then they'd go, well, thanks. We understand now to the best of our ability to understand something that we've only had explained to us for 45 seconds. And then you'd say, say well if you have any other questions like if you want to know who's the best defensive third baseman i can go into more detail by the way i also think that at the time i the first name i thought of when you said if you had to show aliens what a baseball player is or whatever the first name that i thought of was andrew benintendi for reason. And then the first name I thought of for putting myself in 2011 was Brandon Phillips, who was also on that very same team. And you can just imagine the aliens pointing and going, watching Scott Rowland and then going, what about that guy?

And pointing at Brandon Phillips and Bill Bovese going, nah. Well, if you wanted to demonstrate to the aliens what baseball skills looked like in action, not just anatomically speaking what a baseball player looked like, then I think you would want to send Shohei Otani, right? Because if you can only send one player... Oh no, he's the extreme out like, here's what it looks like when baseball is being played, and for some reason you can't just send them a video or something, you'd want to send Otani because he can demonstrate everything in the way that it should be done. So you could send Max Scherzer to show them what pitching looks like, but then you'd have him in the batter's box and he'd bust and break his nose. Do they always bust the ball into their face? Yeah. him in the batter's box do they always break his nose yeah yeah so you have to send otani because he can show you what a top pitcher looks like and what a top hitter and a top fielder he can do it all base running so that's not what the yeah that's not yeah i i feel like the aliens the the phrasing of the question specifically says don't show me your outliers show me your yeah your your most uh representative data point and uh so to me I would be unable

To say that I'm going to show you Somebody mediocre And unmemorable but I will show you Somebody who is a representative Of baseball broadly And that's Brandon Phillips By the way Scott Rowland was not actually The leading vote getter at third base

In the National League in 2011 He was replacing Chipper Jones who was having having surgery to repair a torn left meniscus so scott roland replaced chipper but he was still the second leading vote getter somewhat surprising okay let's do stat blasts and i will say plural stat blasts because i think we have a few here so yours is coming in advertised as the showstopper show. Oh, golly. This is not fair. That's not what I was trying to do at all.

I was just giving you a little bit of reason to want to wake up and record this morning. So should I build up to it? I have a couple. It might take a while at least It sounds like It won't take a while It's nothing You're all going to hate it So do you want to be the opener or the closer here

I've got a couple and you've got one I'll just go Okay T-R-A plus. For us in amazing ways. Here's to days still past. All right. I'm going to talk about Ryan Sandberg, who I was looking up facts about Ryan Sandberg yesterday because Mike Trout passed him in war this month. And so do you, I don't know if you, if you know what Ryan Sandberg's children are named.

I don't know. One of them is named Justin Ross, I believe. And Justin Ross, the story about Justin Ross got his name Justin Ross is that Ryan Sandberg was at a Broadway performance of A Chorus Line in 1984. And he saw that one of the dancers was named Justin Ross. And so he named him after that. Justin, a great dancer. So that's what he's named after. Okay.

So this is important because the way that folks in the Sandberg family are named is the impetus for this stat blast. We talked not long ago about how Rhines only existed in baseball, it seems like, and we had a little fun with that. And while further digging on Ryan Sandberg's life and history, I discovered that Ryan Sandberg actually is named after Ryan Duren, the relief pitcher, closer, hard throwing, wild, interesting pitcher from the 1960s. And Ryan Duren is a kind of a, not the person you would necessarily think a player would be named after i mean he's i don't know like it seems weird to me that ryan duran would be the inspiration for naming your child um especially because well at that point yeah okay so at that point he was uh an all-star for the yankees. Ryan Sandberg's family was not in New York. I don't even, his dad, famously a mortician.

That comes up in every profile. His dad was a mortician. It's not like his dad was a pro ball player. I don't even know if his dad was a mega fan, but he was watching a Yankees game or maybe at a Yankees game. And he saw Ryan Dern and thought, oh, I'm going to name my son Ryan.

And that, so, so so so far we're two for two there's two ryan's in the world and also just seeing people at an event and saying i'm gonna name my son after that guy so uh so we thought ryan's only exist in baseball and in fact ryan duran his name was not actually ryan his full name name was Reinhold, maybe named after the the theologian, I'm not sure. I forgot to look that up. But so his name was Reinhold. He was known by Rhine. That led in 1959 to a Spokane mortician to name his son Rhine, and then years later that Rhine made the majors, and then Ryan's start to show up. So this actually, I am grateful to Lisa Winston in 2080, who actually wrote after somebody named Ryan had shown up in the majors.

This little bit. Fun fact, there have been three major league players to bear the first name Ryan. The first was three-time all-star pitcher Ryan Duren. It was for him that the second Ryan, Ryan Sandberg, was named. The third is Rays' righty, Ryan Stanek, who made his debut on May 14th and remains with the club. But with all due respect to Duren, it's a pretty safe bet that the other 19 players in MLB and minor league history named Ryan, the other 19 were named for Sandberg. A little breakdown for you. There have been 12 players, including Stanek and the aforementioned Ryan Harper, listed in baseball reference with the given name Ryan,

first name Ryan, that have played in affiliated baseball. There have been another five whose middle names were Ryan, but who went by Ryan professionally. And there have been another two who had the middle name of Ryan and used their given first names, both of whom are named Patrick Ryan, coincidentally, Pat Faleca, and Pat Palmero, who is the son of Raphael Palmero, who was Sandberg's teammate with the Cubs. It is probably no coincidence that all 19 of these players were born between 1985 and 1994 during Sandberg's active playing career. That's the end of Lisa Winston's very helpful segment of

this. So now to test the theory that it is probably no coincidence that all 19 of these players were born between 1985 and 1994, I've gone to the Social Security Administration's name database to look up the rise of the name Rine. So the Social Security Administration's name database will show you the top thousand names for any given year. They will also show you the top, I believe, hundred names for any given year for any given state. And through 1983, there was never a year when Rhine was in the top thousand names. It was not a name. It was an extremely uncommon name, if at all. And then in 1984, it jumps up into the top thousand at number 605. And then 1985, it's number 516. And it stays there, rising

and falling, but staying within the top thousand through 1994. And then in 1995, it's not in there. And then in 1996, it's back in there. And that is extremely important that we see it disappear from 1995, because that was the year that Ryan Sandberg first retired. And that is also the year that baseball was on strike and coming out of the strike, and everybody was mad at baseball. And so it's very telling that that year, the name dropped significantly in popularity. And it's also significant that in 1996, when Ryan Sandberg unretired, it clawed its way back into the top 1,000. And then in 1997, it disappeared for good. So the bottom line is that over that period, about 2,000 Ryans were born in the United

States, and almost 1% of them are in professional baseball, which is nuts, right? Like that right now, that's crazy talk. But, so the question now is, like we have very strong evidence I think that this is the Ryan Sandberg effect, but can we really confirm it? And so, I took those rankings, I actually took the raw count per year. And I graphed them alongside Ryan Sandberg's career achievements. So 1984, the year that it shows up, it's not just that he was in the majors at that point. But that was the year that he broke out. He won the MVP award.

That was his best season. And the year after his MVP award was actually when the name peaked. And then it started to fall. And Ryan Sandberg also started to fall off a bit in those years. And then he had a kind of a mid-career resurgence in 1989, 1990, 1991. He led the league in home runs in 1990. He also won the home run derby, I believe, in 1990. And the name starts to rise again. And so I took the, every year I

took his war plus the war that he had the previous season, because you figure there's some lagging effect here and there's some, like, yeah, you know what I mean. And so like for 1984, for instance, he was 8.6 war, the year before that he was 3..7 so he'd get credit for 12.3 for that year plus the year before and the correlation between this two-year war and the number of Rhines born in the United States is 0.87 Which is very strong and so that's like that's ignoring all the years that he's not even that it's not in the top thousand So I mean obviously if you were to include that's ignoring all the years that he's not even that it's not in the top thousand so i mean obviously if you were to include 1982 when we have a much lower number in 1981 when it was probably

lower still then this correlation could even possibly get stronger those are just not even in the data set we're only talking years where we know that it was a popular name correlation of 0.87 extremely strong too hard to ignore but one other thing which is i believe ben that not only are all the rinds in the world named after ryan zandberg and that they are extremely overrepresented in the baseball player pool for that reason but i think that there's reason to think that he might have actually been driving Ryans in that time, that there were Ryans being named after him. The correlation between Ryans and his war is also healthy, not as much, but healthy. And if you look at it in the years when Ryan Sandberg was at his best, the name Ryan was overrepresented in Illinois. It was much more popular in Illinois

than in the rest of the country. And if you look at the beginning and end of his career when he wasn't as good, Ryans in Illinois are actually track Ryans in the rest of the world. So that's a little harder to say. There were nationwide Ryan trends going on then. And you have other famous Ryans, including Nolan Ryan. But it is interesting to think about how we used to live in a world where the seventh best player in baseball could drive names, could change names, could shift naming trends in the country as a whole. And that happened in the 1980s with Ryan Sandberg, he basically invented a name. He, he took, uh, it went from one guy with the name shortened

to a mortician in Spokane to a actual popular baby name in the 1980s. And so there you go. That's why, that's why we have so many rhymesheins. By the way, there were three Rheins in this year's draft. One was, we're now to the tail end of Rhein-Sandberg's career. So one was drafted in 1996 when this was on the top thousand names. There were about 250 Rheins that year. Presumably it didn't drop to zero immediately when he retired. It went down. So there were two Rheins this year drafted who were born in 1998. But it does seem possible that barring, you know, some new Rhein doing something new that is noteworthy, that the Rheins in baseball will disappear. That we might have a few more years of Rheins that will trickle off and that could be the end stat blast. And this is still the stat blast. So both of mine are inspired by listener emails. Now, this one is from James, who is a Patreon supporter. He sent in this question almost two years ago. And I've been thinking about it ever since. ask someone if he could answer it at the time and then that person didn't answer it and then

we dropped it and James I'm sure gave up on getting an answer but he's a Patreon supporter we go the extra mile even if it takes a year and a half so this was sent in August 2017 and he asked about the Angels being a 500 team he said after Friday night's

come from behind win over the A's the Angels are once again a 500 team it's the 24th time they've been at 500 this season or so the broadcasters told me at the end of the game. For nearly all of the season, the Angels seem to have been within five games of 500. My question is this, are the 2017 Angels the 500-est team ever? How do they compare historically to other teams in terms of their proximity to 500 for such a long stretch. And this question is still relevant because as we speak, the Angels are 500 right now, just as they were when James sent in this question. And the Angels have rarely deviated far from 500 in all the time since he sent that question

because, as you may know, the Angels finished 80-82 in 2017, they finished 80-82 in 2018, and now they are, what, 37-37, I think, as we speak. So they have not had a whole lot of extremes here. I just finally did get an answer to this question courtesy of Rob McEwen at Baseball Perspectives, and I sent it to James, so I will just read it, and James was onto something here. I sent it to James, so I will just read it. And James was onto something here. The 2017 Angels that he was asking about in August of that year were within five games of 500 for all 162 of their games that season. group to distraction again about what I'm talking about when I say 500. That is the worst debate, and it's been had many times. I'm just saying the difference between win and loss totals is five or fewer. That's how I'm defining it here. So the Angels that year were, for their entire season, within five games of 500. They are one of three teams to have been within five games of 500 for that many games.

The 2011 Blue Jays and the 1998 Dodgers were also within five games of 500, 162 times. Now looking over multiple years, the 2017 to 2018 Angels, because they were kind of 500-y that whole time. They were within five games of 500 for a combined 282 games. That is third. That trails the 2007 to 2008 Jays at 288 and the 2005 to 2006 Rangers at 285. Now, if you want to talk about three years, and I want to talk about three years, because the Angels have a shot at the three-year record for staying within five games of 500.

The 1991 to 1993 Cubs were within that margin 399 times. The Angels, after Tuesday night's game, have been within for 351 games so they have to stay within five games of 500 for i think it is 49 of their remaining 88 games this season to set a new record for 500ness over a three-year span i believe in their abilities i think they can do it know they're going to tack on at least a few more here because at least for the next five games, they'll be there. So if you're wondering, the record for most games at exactly And in a two-season span, the record is 50, again, by the 2011 to 2012 Jays. And the Angels were at 41 in that span, which was tied for eighth. So the Angels have been one of the 500-est teams in recent years, which I think fits with the general understanding of the Angels just sort of treading water and walking in place while Mike Trout is the best and seems to keep getting better and better. The team around him does not.

So thank you, James, for that question that I very belatedly answered. Unless you have any comments about that, I will move on to the next question. Well, I would just note that I think you're right to not get into the discussion of what 500 means, but I was wondering during that discussion what the word within means. Is within inclusive or not? And so I went and looked to see if anybody has answered this, and there's a disagreement on the internet among scientists and mathematicians about whether the word within is inclusive and whether you need to state in each case whether you mean it inclusively or not. I see. Well, in this case, I think it was inclusive.

All right. Yeah. Just to clear that up. Ryan Duren, by the way, was named after his dad, Reinald, as well. And so not after the theologian. Not a baseball player. Reinald as well and so not After the baseball player Reinald Alright so Now the next question Also inspired by a listener

Email this one was from Paul in Austin and you Wanted to know the answer to this one he Says Derek Gould of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Has taken to calling a particular pitching Situation a Houdini. It's when a relief pitcher enters with the bases loaded, nobody out, and escapes without allowing a run. Since Houdini was never a ballplayer, my question is whether Sam can determine if there is a pitcher in history who has done this enough times to have it named after him.

And then he says, StatCast. No, it's StatBlast is the name of the segment, but close. StatCast is also a thing. Wait, is StatBlast a pun on StatCast? I don't know, actually. I think Jeff came up with it, so we'll have to ask him. Sam could not easily determine an answer to this. This is not play indexable, so I couldn't either. And Dan Hirsch rode to the rescue again here. So this is a case where I definitely did need Dan Hirsch to answer this question for us. And I'll just say, I don't know whether Derek Gold has coined this particular usage, like the term Houdini,

that's in the baseball dictionary for, you know, like a pitcher. It can mean a pitcher who just kind of like uses smoke and mirrors to be effective but also it means like escaping a tight situation i don't know whether it is always used to refer to this particular situation probably not but if we use it this way so we're talking about a pitcher who enters the game with the bases loaded no outs and he gets out of the jam without allowing any runs. This is a fairly rare occurrence. So Dan says this has happened 861 times in the Retro Sheet era. The Retro Sheet era currently, their play-by-play coverage starts at 1921, but it's spotty until the 40s when they have most games, and then we don't have 100% coverage until 1974

and I asked Dan how many times it's happened just since 1998 so I could get a sense of these days with 30 teams how often do we see this in a season and he says it's happened 281 times since 1998 with seven of them coming in 2019 so he says it happens about 13 times a season. I don't know whether that has ticked up a little bit now that we just get so many pitchers used and so many pitching changes, perhaps, but 13 times a season. So, you know, twice a month or something like that. It's pretty rare and it's worth celebrating. And Dan sent me the list. There are only 17 pitchers who have done it more than two times. And the clear leader, the guy who I think we should name this after, if not Houdini, is Alan Embry.

Alan Embry has done this six times. No one else has done it more than four times. So I think we should rechristen the Houdini the Embry. And there are some unusual names like Embry. That's someone maybe, I don't know that you would predict that it would be Embry, but when you hear thinks it's even more amazing than Embry that Lefty Grove did it three times when most of his appearances were as a starter. And that is quite true. Also, he has started his career in 1925, so may not have full coverage there. And, you know, he pitched 616 games in his career and 457 of them were as a starter, so he would not have been eligible for an Embry. So I guess he was brought in at high leverage times, and that's how he racked up three of these.

And obviously he was a Hall of Fame pitcher, but Alan Embry is the Houdini master. Do you feel like you definitely need to come into the game as a reliever and get out of somebody else's jam for it to be a Houdini? Because it's not like Houdini got himself into the jam, you know? that's still good. It's still, I mean, it feels great as a fan because, of course, you're expecting runs to be scored. And if you somehow get out of it, that's wonderful. But I think so because the pressure's on you, like the spotlight's on, the game stops. Here you come, you're running in from the bullpen.

You're confronting this just impossible situation. You're just hoping to limit the damage. You want to get a double play and one run scores, or maybe you get a sack fly, and then you get a double play and one run scores or maybe you get a sack fly and then you get a double play or a couple strikeouts or something you're you're not even really hoping to get out of it with no run scored and when you do that's the ultimate thing that a reliever can do like relievers pride themselves on stranding runners and this is the most runners you can strand in in the most difficult situations yeah, I think you need to inherit the situation and get out of it.

I'm glad you mentioned Craig Stammen because he was actually, he made possible my favorite Houdini ever, my favorite Houdini of the modern era that I saw live, where he actually was the one who loaded the bases. And this was in the NLDS in 2012. It was the bottom of the seventh inning. He had a one-run lead pitching for the Nationals against the Cardinals. And he loaded the bases with nobody out, got out of the game, was taken out of the game.

Ryan Matthews, who I should just note was born in November 1983. If he'd been born one year later, quite possibly would have been Ryan Matthews. Ryan Matthews came into the game and did a Houdini on two pitches. A two-pitch Houdini. Got a ground out on the first pitch, fielder's choice, force at home, and then got a double play on the second pitch.

Okay, yeah, that's a good one. Houdini. That's going to be the name of my next podcast. Remember when we were naming this and it was hard to find baseball terms because everybody every baseball term was already in a blog and we were like what should we call this thing

well I'm calling the next one two pitch Houdini okay or Embry I like that alright good one speaking of getting out of jams and stranding runners did you see the Okay. Or Embry. I like that. All right. Good one. Speaking of getting out of jams and stranding runners, did you see the justification that Mickey Calloway gave for his bringing in Robert Gesellman? So you justified Todd Frazier's terrible swing and you made that sound okay. Can you make this managerial rationalization sound okay? So this was also on Tuesday.

Jacob deGrom was pitching a gem, and it was, what, an eight-run margin at the time, and yet Callaway brought in Robert Gesellman to protect this eight-run lead because he told Anthony DeComo he feared there would be runners on base and he didn't want any inherited runs to go on Jacob deGrom's stat line. Because I think Gesellman has pitched the most innings of any reliever in the NL East this year. He's been worked hard. And so people were thinking, well, eight-run game, this is the time to bring in someone else. And yet he brought in Gesellman.

And what made matters worse in this case was that there weren't any runners on right weren't there well if they were warming him up in case right right he was warming him up in case there were runners on and then there weren't runners on in the end but he brought him in anyway so uh is protecting jacob de grom's era a good reason to bring in a heavily worked reliever to To be fair, deGrom was very good, and deGrom hasn't been his usual self for much of the season, and this time he was. Maybe you want him to feel good about himself, but it doesn't seem like the best rationale. Buddy, I don't know. There's way too many things going on in this decision for me to really say,

and so whatever I say, a Mets fan who's been following the team more closely would be able to say with a lot more detail. So the stated rationale, since that's really the question, the stated rationale feels a little bonkers to me, and I don't respect it. The actual situation at hand, you know, Gesellman was used a lot in April and May. He has not been used very much at all in June. He had had two days off before that. This is only his sixth appearance in the month. It's June 19th

today, and he's only thrown five innings, fewer than five innings this month, including the two outs he got yesterday. And he, well, this was a while back, but he hasn't been good this month, including the two outs he got yesterday. And he, well, this was a while back, but he hasn't been good this month, particularly. So, and I don't know, it's not, it's, so anyway, that's all to say that who knows, but I saw someone make the case that it would have been a great time to get your, your rookie in, get his feet wet. And that makes sense. And probably

everybody who thinks it was a weird move is doing so based on an understanding of the situation. And I trust that it probably was a weird move. And on its face, it's a bad explanation. But watching this, I would not have thought you unearthed in your Ryan Sandberg discussion. I love this quote. You tweeted it. So do you want to read it or should I? You should go ahead and read it. Okay. So Don Zimmer said, I don't know at what point in his career he said this, but he said, Cubs third base coach at the time, I don't know how the hell he can play any better if he lives to be a hundred Just a great quote because it implies that tons ever just thinks that you Continuously get better at baseball with experience the longer you play the longer you live Don Zimmer obviously could not play until he was a hundred but he did try

Yes to coach until he was a hundred.. So, he lived this theory. Yeah. Yeah, you just get better and better until you get to 100. That's a steep aging curve after 100 though. Yeah. All right. All right. Can I read one more question because I have an answer for it? Okay. Wow, you asking to extend the episode. I know. Well, it felt like you were stalling for these last like 15 minutes to try to pad the show,

and I was thinking, I got a question, Ben. Let's just get to it. We don't have to re-read tweets. Chris writes, I was at the Orioles-Red Sox game yesterday when something strange happened. In the second inning, Dylan Bundy ran the count full against Sandy Leone with two outs and Jackie Bradley on first and Michael Chavis on third. Naturally, Bradley got set to run on the pitch, but Lyon proceeded to foul off the next four pitches, with Bradley running on each of them. By the fifth pitch, it was clear Bundy had stopped paying any attention to Bradley.

As he got set, Bradley took off. Bundy remained set for a lengthy amount of time. During this period, Bradley easily arrived at second. Indeed, if I remember correctly, he even briefly paused the base and then proceeded to round it before Bundy finally raised his leg and delivered it to the plate. Bradley had clearly arrived safely at second and even advanced beyond it before Bundy had began his motion. The next pitch was ball four to Leon, but instead of crediting Bradley with a stolen base, the official play-by-play from the game states that Jackie Bradley Jr. advanced to second on Lyon's walk. But that isn't true! He stole second of his own accord and deserves credit for doing so. Why was this not a stolen base? I like the passion in this email.

So first to just answer this question, Chris was at the game, as he said, and did not have access to replays and different camera angles. The actual answer here, Chris, is that Bradley did not quite make it to the bag. I have a screen grab here that I sent to Chris. I don't know why I'm still addressing you because I've already emailed you back. But pitcher Dylan Bundy began his pitching motion when Bradley was about a foot from second base. Extremely close, but he didn't quite get there. And so I did, though, ask our scorekeeper friend what the deal is. If Bradley had gotten there, would it have been a stolen base?

And so this is the answer that I got while we were recording. It would be a stolen base if he had gotten there before the pitch was delivered, not before the pitch was delivered, before the pitcher broke his set. So the umpire's manual addresses this and the umpire's manual actually addresses it not about the statistic, about the statistic, the stolen base statistic, but what you should do if the batter fouls the ball off. If Leon, for instance, had fouled a fifth ball off, then what would happen? And the manual, the umpire's manual states

that if the runner has reached the next base at the time of the pitch, then he is entitled to that base, regardless of the outcome of the pitch. So if it's a foul ball, he gets to stay there, and it's not a foul ball, he gets to stay there. And it's not a foul ball. He gets to stay there anyway. And at the time of the pitch is actually defined as when the pitcher breaks from the stretch or when he begins his windup. So it doesn't matter when the ball is released. It matters when the pitcher begins his delivery. So if Bradley had reached second base

before the pitcher broke from the stretch, he would have been entitled to second base regardless of whether it had been fouled off. And if the batter had walked, then he would have gotten credit for the stolen base rather than what actually happened, which was that he was considered to have advanced on the walk. And an interesting question, an interesting scenario, which was brought up in this reply to me, was what if, now this was with two outs, but what if this had happened with one out and Leone had flied out

and Bradley had already reached second base? If it were determined that Bradley had already reached second base and was entitled to second base, then he would not have had to return to first base, but he probably wouldn't have known that. So he probably would have run back to first thinking he had to go back to first base, which would then get us into the Gene Segura territory where you try to figure out whether there is a rule that makes him out. And I think in this case, all the reasons that Gene Segura should have been out

in that weird steal of first base would probably not apply to Bradley. And so Bradley probably would get credit for the... I think, now I'm speculating. I think Bradley would get credit for the stolen base if he had gotten there. And then he would have been allowed legally to accidentally go to first

because he had not given up on his base running. He was not attempting to deceive or confuse the defense or make a travesty of the game and he had i believe what didn't the rule have something to do with the base that you're at when the pitcher comes set in the previous thing where where do i have that let's see do i still have this and then the third rule that would have applied to Segura was if a runner legally acquires title to a base, which Bradley would have done, and the pitcher assumes his pitching position, which the pitcher had already done and so would not have applied there, the runner may not return to a previously occupied base. But because Bundy had not re-come set after the stolen base, he was already set,

I think that he would have been allowed to return to a previously occupied base. So anyway, long story short, we're bringing all the threads together here. Bradley was not there yet, so this is all moot. If he had been there, it would have counted as a stolen base. If that had happened, it would have set up all sorts of confusion and possibilities for shenanigans, because probably he was, I don't know, everybody would have set up all sorts of Confusion and possibilities for shenanigans Because probably he was I don't know Everybody would have been a little confused about this rule And we could have seen a Legal example of a

Batter stealing second base twice in one inning Theoretically Sorry we missed that Okay thank you for Doing the legwork and to our Official scorer friend and I will be back with a guest host next time because meg's away so i will talk to you next week all right see you all right that

will do it for today by the way following up on the discussion that meg and i had recently about foul balls and protective netting the white socks this week announced that they are planning to extend the netting all the way to the foul poles next season. I think they're the first team to do so in the majors. So perhaps that will set an example, put pressure on other teams to follow suit. Once one team decides it's unsafe not to do that, I think it becomes a little more difficult PR-wise to maintain a contradictory stance. So we will see how quickly that movement spreads. In other news, Max Scherzer is on the mound and is pitching pretty well as I speak,

sporting a fine shiner. So good for him getting out there. And in the best news of all, Williams Estadillo is back in the big leagues. His exile didn't last long. He was only in AAA for nine games, and he made the most of his time there. He hit.526,.525,.763. Classic Estadillo lower on base percentage than batting average. That was 40 plate appearances. He

walked once. He struck out once. And now, minimum 40 plate appearances at the top of the International League leaderboard this season. Williams Estadillo with a 230 WRC+. Best hitter in AAA. Had to bring him back up. And also Marwin Gonzalez got hurt. You can go get

my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It has been very well received. We thank all of you who have given us feedback, who have left reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. We hope you'll do that if you enjoy the book. Tell a friend, give it as a gift.

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effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and other podcast platforms please keep your questions coming for me and sam and meg via email at podcast at vangrass.com or via the patreon messaging system if you're a supporter thanks dylan higgins for his editing assistance and i will be back with one more episode a little later this week talk to you then. No more Let go Or put your heart

But if you don't do anything Sleep on