Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1401: The Premature Celebration

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Colin Poche, the “Is This Guy Good?” game for relievers, Mike Trout entering the All-Star break as baseball’s best hitter and player, whether Trout could ever have his number retired league-wide, the rate at which Trout is surpassing Hall of Famers in WAR, an old discussion about Derek […]

That's when you go, you go, you go to the max, you go to the max. Max. Get funky. Max. Get funky. Max. Get funky. Let's go.

Good morning and welcome to episode 1401 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com Let's go! a lot of what happened. You want to tell me? Just like all of it? On the podcast or in the sport that we talk about? In the sport. I did. I actually have listened to episode 1400. Oh, okay. Well, that's the important thing. As long as you're up to date on Effectively Wild. I don't know, a bunch of baseball happened, but you now have a few days where no baseball happens, or at least no major league baseball. So you can catch good timing yeah that's what i'm gonna do yeah i was away too with no wi-fi or anything for a few days wow it's a holiday week so you go to the woods yeah no woods recurring character in this podcast the woods yep every now and then these are in like canada western canada not that woods this time yeah this was just an upstate new york

woods we have woods here too. I see. All right. Yep. Okay. Well, anything going on? I have some stuff. Do you have some stuff? Yeah, I have a couple of things.

All right. Yeah. Should I go first? Let me go first with my one because I've been waiting. I almost made you jump back on the podcast last week after we finished recording because I realized that I had forgotten to tell you this. Do you remember when we talked about how i praised you for this phrase that you used that i loved so much called a bullpen poochie

yes which was uh in reference to josh hater as the poochie of course we didn't spell this out the first time we talked about this but poochie was a character on the simpsons a fictional character within a show on the simpsons where every time he wasn't he was so popular was it that every time he wasn't on screen everybody would just ask where's Poochie yes that was the idea that the network executives wanted him to be where's Poochie exactly and so Hader Josh Hader in the playoffs last year was a bullpen Poochie where whenever he was not in the game you were thinking where is he is he warming up when he coming in? How many outs can he get? Is he available? Is he busy stretching?

You know, so on and so forth. And you told me that actually you think Jeff made up that term, which is you agreed was a great term. I think that's true. I think he did it in the 1200s. If I, my Googling turns this up correctly. So bullpen Poochie, we've established that's a thing that we all like and that Jeff is responsible for, right?

Yep. Did you know the Rays have a bullpen poachie? His name is Colin Poachie and he is a left-handed reliever. The Rays have a bullpen poochie. His name is actually bullpen poochie, kind of. It's poachie. It looks like it should be poachie which would be closer yeah and in fact jeff discovered him too or at least he was the one who brought colin poche to my

attention if that's how you say it because he did a post on him last june wait did he call him a bullpen poochie i don't think so no i think that was maybe before he came up with that term but he did bring colin poche to the internet's attention and called him the most unhittable arm in the minors. And these days he's pretty unhittable in the majors. Oh, dang it. I was going to ask, is he good? He is good.

He has Josh Hader stats. He has in 15 and two-thirds innings in the majors, he has struck out 14 batters per nine, and he has walked one batter. That's 24 strikeouts per walk. He is the most unhittable arm in the majors right now, which is basically the same joke you just made. Yep.

Anyway, so I guess sometimes we make a joke about our friends who work for a team being responsible for every move that that team makes. I'm just going to acknowledge that we're kind of doing that right now. But Poche was acquired before jeff was acquired yes he was however called up this year despite a 6.26 era i don't suppose jeff is the only person in the raise organization willing to look past a minor league era in favor of much stronger peripherals and even much better data than peripherals but yeah i don't know maybe he just wanted a bullpen puji all right i. All right, I just wanted to bring that up. I have other things, but you can go now.

Well, I should mention, since you just invoked the Is This Guy Good game, that one of our listeners created the Is This Guy Good game. It's Corey Martin, who earlier developed Minordraft.ml. That was a site that you could use to create the minor league free agent draft essentially to draft your own minor league free agents and track their progress throughout the year he has now come out with a sequel to that game which is uh is this guy good.gq goodness and it is exactly what it sounds like it's inspired by episode 1375 show his can choose to show his team. It's so humiliating that I'm going to click show his team. I know this guy's team. It's just an automated.

It updates every day with the reliever stats, so you can go to the site, and it will just give you a reliever, and you can guess whether he's good or not. It's great. Oh, for one. I don't think there should be a skip option. I'll just throw that out. Oh, I know this one.

Okay. Yeah, I think there are position player pitchers in there. I'm not sure there's an innings minimum so maybe there are a couple tweaks that could be made, but I appreciate the effort and we'll link to it if anyone wants to play at home. I just got Chris Mazza. Do you know that Chris Mazza is in the majors? Nope.

Chris Mazza, a year ago, Ben, was in the Pacific Association. One year ago he was in the Pacific Association. You just mentioned that to me. Now he's in the majors? Nope. Chris Mazza, a year ago, Ben, was in the Pacific Association. One year ago, he was in the Pacific Association. You just mentioned that to me. Now he's in the majors. Yeah. While at the same time, one year ago, Brandon Phillips was in the majors and now he's in the Pacific Association. Yeah. A big moment for the Pacific Association. Oh my goodness. Dan Otero is a guy I should know. I've written more about Dan Otero than everybody else in the world combined. Yeah. One article.

My impression is that he is not so good right now. Dylan Moore. Isn't Dylan Moore? Dylan Moore is the Mariners shortstop who I drafted in the minor league free agent draft. And now he's in here. Yes. We need a five inning filter. Yeah.

I think we need an innings with him. But I don't know whether he's good or bad. You could guess that he's probably not good. I got it. All right. I'm over 500. I'm now at 63% and I'm stopping. I didn't mean to derail us and actually play the game.

Just letting you all know that you can play the game in an easy way. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that, Corey. One thing I wanted to mention is that Mike Trout, who homered twice on Sunday to close out the first half, quote unquote first half, he finishes that fake first half with a 186 WRC+. That's a 301-453-646 slash line. And he is officially the best hitter in baseball. Not just the most valuable player, at least according to Fangraph's War, but the best hitter, too. He is pulled ahead of Cody Bellinger and Christian Jelic just in straight-up offense, let alone the rest.

Incredible. You can come after Mike Trout. You can keep pace with Mike Trout maybe for a few months, but that's about it. After that, he is going to overtake you. And I wrote something to that effect recently, but we've been talking about that for years. That's impressive, I think, that he managed to make up that ground. And also, I wanted to mention it in the context of this question. on our email answer about what a player could do to have his number retired. He says, it was basically taken as a given that like Jackie Robinson,

a number would be retired because of some sort of social barrier being broken. However, neither Ben nor Sam mentioned the only other number that is retired in one of the big four leagues, Wayne Gretzky's number 99, which was retired throughout the NHL just because he was awesome at hockey. What would Mike Trout have to do to get his number retired purely for being the greatest of all time? Would a player who hit a thousand homers get his number retired? That's kind of an interesting question.

If Mike Trout retires as just the best baseball player ever, would that be enough to get his number retired? No, I don't think it would be. I mean, clearly there have been players who were the best of all time before mike trout and we didn't retire their numbers and even i think even i think babe ruth for his era comparable to his peers comparable to the game around him when he started doing the babe ruth thing i didn't really almost until the end was gretzky like and maybe more than gretzky he was i mean you know babe ruth is probably the maybe the biggest sports outlier in a major sport that there's ever been and no one that i know of was leading a charge to retire his number so i guess there is theoretically we could keep raising the number of things that mike trout did. Or maybe it's probably too late for Trout.

But let's say that somebody else came along and, I don't know, if a guy hit 1,700 home runs in his career, 1,700 home runs, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's hard to say how we'd feel about that guy at all. But maybe, I don't know, though. It seems to me, especially once you've established that Jackie Robinson is your baseline, like yeah that's what that's tough the practice of retiring numbers was not as common in babe ruth's era as it is now i think i i think luke eric's number was retired shortly after he

was retired but i think that was because of the circumstances of luke eric and his illness more so than just luugarig being good. So I don't know if that practice actually existed at the time in any widespread way. So maybe if a Babe Ruth were to come along today, now that we've established that practice, it would be a little more likely for it to happen. But we haven't gone back and retired Babe Ruth's number retroactively. So my dad gave me an answer that I think is correct, and I didn't bring it up because it's a little uncomfortable to think about and to talk about. But I think that he's right, that if a ballplayer died on the field saving the life of somebody else,

that he would have his number retired, and particularly if it was many people. And you can imagine some scenarios that are uncomfortable to talk about. And so let's change the subject. Yeah, okay. And you can imagine some scenarios that are uncomfortable to talk about. And so let's change the subject. the Yankees game yesterday and the announcers were discussing how number 99 jerseys and jerseys for Judge are now seemingly as ubiquitous as number two jerseys for Jeter once were. This was what prompted his Gretzky question. But he says, this made me think about a discussion during the original Sam era, episode 759 at 16 minutes and 40 seconds, November 2015, regarding in what year Jeter jerseys would no longer be the plurality at Yankee Stadium. The emailer does actually mention Judge as well as Greg Bird as an example of a prospect who could break through,

but it's just one item in a list of possibilities for who could break Jeter's mark. Sam said that with greater than 50% confidence, he thinks Jeter will be the Yankees manager within nine years, which leads to a discussion of what Jeter will do in his post-playing career. Ben says that without a charismatic young superstar, it doesn't seem there's anyone likely to beat Jeter, although he does raise the possibility that a prospect could do it. Ben also raises the possibility that everyone who owns a Jeter jersey might die, which is very on brand for the podcast. Both of you recognize that there's a possibility of someone coming up and breaking through, though it wouldn't be possible to see him coming. Sam estimates it'll happen by 2029. Ben says 2030. I guess I just took the over. So what would you think about this question today?

And is it surprising how quickly Judge has become the central figure of the Yankees? Do you think Jeter's jerseys would be more popular if he weren't doing things in Miami right now. So I don't know how to establish whether Judge jerseys or jerseys are actually more common than Jeter's are now, but seems plausible. He is very popular and I know he's been among the best selling jerseys or maybe the best selling jersey in recent years league wide. So that happened faster than we thought and we wouldn't have guessed that it would be Aaron Judge to do it. But yeah, seems like maybe that's happened already. Yeah, we might have underestimated the degree to which Derek Jeter's fame is. So you remember how Russell used to write about how surely there is a great deal of value to being the clubhouse chemistry guy in your

clubhouse. But if you left, someone else would fill that role. There is a leader in every clubhouse. And just because you're the leader doesn't mean that nobody else would step up and be the leader. Clearly, someone has to function in that role. It's very important someone functions in that role. But out of 25 adults, highly successful adults uh usually one of them will step up and do that and maybe just maybe the replacement level for chemistry is actually quite quite high and so it's not your you who's special brandon inch i'm sorry brandon inch but maybe just the role is an important role that someone feels. And maybe Derek Jeter wasn't actually the transcendent superstar, celebrity, heartthrob, etc. Maybe it's just that there's going to be someone from New York in that role. And unless, you know, unless everybody else kind

of falls down on the job. I certainly didn't feel that way at the time. I mean, to me, the Derek Jeter mystique was somewhat mysterious to me at the time, didn't feel that way at the time. I mean, to me, the Derek Jeter mystique was somewhat mysterious to me at the time. Didn't seem like it could be explained just by his city and probably still doesn't. But it is incredible how quickly Aaron Judge has become, by my understanding, according to some market research, the biggest star in baseball, the most recognizable star in baseball. We always talk about Mike Trout and Bryce Harper and why is Bryce Harper more popular, but Aaron Judge is, as I understand it, much more popular than either one of them. And I didn't see that coming. I don't, I don't know for sure that that's even a New York thing, but it seems like it probably is. Maybe it's because of the home run

derby. Maybe we should talk about that. We're going to talk about that, but I've got some other things too. Yeah, I do too. Actually, one more thing about trout i wanted to mention i noted in the outro the other day when you weren't here that your latest mike trout passing hall of famers article had gone up and in june he passed eight hall of famers and i was wondering because i'm sure you've looked ahead and planned out how the rest of the series will go. Are you in like the fattest part of the trout passing Hall of Famers area right now? Like is he right now passing Hall of Famers at a faster pace than he will for most of the rest of his career? I mean, at a certain point, obviously, it gets to be such rarefied territory that there just aren't that many Hall of Famers. So I would imagine that most Hall of Famers are clustered in the 70-ish war area where he's passing through right now.

That's a great question. Let me check. It would make sense. I mean, there's not going to be a lot of guys at 100. Right. And there's not going to be a lot of guys at 50. And it makes sense at some point if you're still doing this series years from now there will be months where he probably doesn't pass a hall of famer i mean someday he might just be number one so then he won't be passing anyone i'm just going to real quick rattle off some numbers he started this

year behind 75 hall of famers uh willie mccovey was 75th at 64.5 and we're only talking hitters here 64.5 so if you include dave winfield who's 64.2 you have three in the 64s one in the 65 and four in the 66s and then three in the 67 six in the 68s so this was the month i just did it was a very crowded month and it snuck up on me my last few days were frantic and then three five six zero 71s four one two three one one two two one one zero one two one one zero zero zero zero in fact only one person between 86 and 91 um so yes yes it the the 68 looks like it is the fattest month in the boa concern no they don't put python in the python but then we have it's going to be a very busy july is what i'm saying is he's in fact what is he at right now i don't know i don't know either we just hit a couple homers so as we record this it is july 7th and in this week he's passed one this month only uh but he'll probably end up

passing so he i wrote eight last month if he's worth one and a half war this month he'll pass another um eight so this will be another and then it should start to slow down okay so you started it at the right time yeah Yeah. Or the wrong time. Yeah, not coincidental though, probably. There's a, I don't know if I mentioned this phenomenon after May, but there's this weird phenomenon where, so the whole point of this series, this premise is that there is a leaderboard that Mike Trout is up among Hall of Famers in. And a lot of people think that this leaderboard has a lot of merit. So let's give proper credit to the people who he's passing,

that they are not merely pawns for Mike Trout, the king. I guess the king is a bad metaphor. But they're not simply secondary characters for Mike Trout to blow past. They are, in fact, great major leaguers. Let's appreciate how great it is, how great they are, so that we can, therefore, properly appreciate how great Mike Trout to blow past. They are, in fact, great major leaguers. Let's appreciate how great it is, how great they are, so that we can, therefore, properly appreciate how great Mike Trout is. And so pick a player, write maybe, I don't know, 400 to 700 words about that player,

and like 370 of them are just glowing, gushing about how great the player is. It is basically a series of the best fun facts and the best testimonials that I could find about this player so that you really understand how this player that you never saw, or maybe that you saw when you were very young, or maybe that you've forgotten how great he was, how incredibly great he was. I'm determined to make you appreciate the greatness of Carlton Fisk, right? And then there's like 20 words at the end where it's like this is why Mike Trout's ahead of him and I get all these Replies to this series that are angry at me because I'm not giving Eddie Murray enough credit The whole point of this article is how great Eddie Murray is I'm just going on and on about Eddie Murray

How many articles has this guy read about Eddie Murray in the last year none? It's just me. I'm the whole market right now this guy read about Eddie Murray in the last year. None. It's just me. I'm the whole market right now. I'm telling you how good Eddie Murray is. And he's very mad because I didn't, I don't know, say that Eddie Murray's also better than Mike Trout.

So that's what happens when I write these articles. You want to ask me my favorite fun fact from this year's? Sure. What was it? Actually, I'm going to tell you right now. This is not really even, well, episode 1322, Ben, you and Jeff talked about how many stolen bases Ricky Henderson would have if he were playing now. Remember that?

Yeah. You concluded he'd steal a lot. And this, in researching Tim Raines, I was reading things about Tim Raines from 1986 and came across a Peter Gammons article in Sports Illustrated about Raines and Ricky Henderson as the two best leadoff hitters in the world and how they were just, how they were changing the game with their base stealing. And it's a really great article. So there are two things in this Peter Gammons article that I really loved about his base stealing technique and acumen and how he approached it the one of them the fun fact though which i don't even think is in the article but it's in the peter gammon's article at the point

in rain's career when he had uh when gammon's was writing about this he had still rains had stolen 434 bases 434 bases now sometimes he got picked off but if you throw out the pickoffs where he then went on to try to take second base and was tagged out he was only thrown out by catchers 32 times so he stole 434 bases had been thrown out by catchers 32 times which is wild right like that really makes you realize like that 90 feet was not far enough that to stop tim rain. He could go and it was almost impossible for a catcher to throw him out. The only way he ever got thrown out was when he was picked off, probably usually by lefty pitchers, probably in a lot of cases because they balked, but whatever. It's long past time to litigate that.

So I thought that was an incredible thing. 434 stolen bases thrown out by catchers 32 times. thing. 434 stolen bases thrown out by catchers 32 times. And he has a line in here actually that I had never really thought about, which is that he never really took a big lead. He said that he and Ricky both took fairly small leads, but I'm just going to read this. The running styles of both men show pure athletic skill. Neither takes a long lead. And then here's the Tim Raines quote. Diving back head first is too much of a pounding for both ricky and me the jump is more important than the lead and so that's an interesting thing to think about that they that he took smaller shorter leads because he didn't want to put his

body through the process of having to dive back head first over and over and get injured and he was still able to beat the catcher pretty much every time and that is going to be something i think about when i see the whatever that stolen base tracker thing on ness and his and uh it tells me how long the guy's lead is i don't know i haven't i haven't figured out what i'm gonna think about when i see that lead but i'm gonna think about that yeah okay that's a good one let's see there was a uh howie kendrick doubled today uh juan soto scored a run as he was sliding into home. He slid into Howie Kendrick's bat, which Kendrick had dropped in the batter's box. And the announcer, the radio announcer at the time said something like, you don't see that very often. Usually the on deck hitter will move the bat, will get the bat out of there. move the bat we'll get the bat out of there and um i have uh as a lot of people know i've watched hundreds i've deliberately watched hundreds of bat drops and the um throws home to see uh where the bat ends up um and after writing an article about that topic i have probably noticed thousands since and so i would like to say that i'm kind of an expert on uh both where bats get dropped and

also what happens to bats that get dropped in certain places and i'm here your expertise thank you subject i'm here to tell you that uh this is i don't know probably widely believed that sometimes the batter on deck moves the bat it's not true never happens the batter on deck does not move the bat in little league he probably does because in Little League, the on-deck circle is like eight feet away. But if you just think about the time that it would, you know, the time you only have maybe six seconds before the throw is going to get home, it's hard to imagine that the guy on deck is running out, picking up the bat, throwing it clear, and then getting in position to tell the guy whether to slide or not. The guy on deck gets in position to say slide or no slide. He's not removing the bat. The bat almost never gets removed. Now, sometimes the umpire does move

the bat. And I think a lot of people think the umpire always moves the bat. In fact, when I wrote about this, when I wrote about batters dropping the bat in front of the plate, I got people saying that this is a stupid article. The umpire always kicks it out of the way. The umpire almost never kicks out of the way, but occasionally he does kick it out of the way. But the key thing here is that Howie Kendrick did do the worst possible thing. It's the opposite of what I wrote about. You do not want to drop the bat in your batter's box because the catcher is going to let it sit there and block your slide. That's actually what catchers want. In fact, as I wrote about, there's at least one catcher who will occasionally deliberately kick the bat into that area.

And I have twice caught that catcher doing it, and I have gifs of it. But because he swore me to secrecy, I am not publishing those gifs. Someday I might. I don't know how long my vow of silence lasts. But just to be clear, because sometimes there's confusion about this you want to throw the bat about six to eight feet in front of the plate uh that way the catcher can't move it the umpire's not going to bother with it uh and it's right where a throw would bounce if it were coming in from the outfielder um and you don't want to drop it right in front of the plate or in

the right-handed batter's box because that makes it very hard for your runner to slide coming in and that's what happened to Juan Soto. Yeah. Okay. I think that's it. All right. I have one or two other things. Did you see? I'm going to find one or two other things while you're doing this just to keep the gag going.

Did you see that Max Scherzer celebrated what he thought was the Nationals winning in the eighth inning. I didn't see it. I heard it. Yeah, it's great. Did you see that after the Howie Kendrick double that he dropped the bat and Juan Soto slid? He did a show of pretending to do it again. Go ahead. So Scherzer thought the game was over in the eighth inning.

Adam Eaton crossed the plate. Scherzer runs out. Just the most awkward looking thing you can imagine. Show me. Okay. I'll link to it so that everyone can watch because you should. And no one else walks out. It's like Soto is out there, and it's just Scherzer by himself

just extending a high-five, doesn't get the high-five, is left- high five, doesn't get the high five, is left hanging, ends up converting the high five into a butt slap. Then he gets back to the dugout. Everyone's laughing at him, and he's like awkwardly pacing with a smile on his face in the dugout because he, in his defense, not that he really needs to be defended. This is kind of funny, but his wife had a daughter on Thursday, so he's got a newborn baby around. He's probably a little bit tired. He's got other things on his mind. He's got some back tightness. And Sean Doolittle had come into the game in the eighth inning, the closer, so he was confused. He thought the game was over. Anyway one was was upset about this of course it's just funny Brian Dozier said that's max I mean come on man the first time I've ever

seen it which is true I don't think I can remember this this happening and uh everyone was like that's max Brian Dozier said that's max Howie Kendrick said that's max the same article it's just everyone saying that that's Max, even though he's never done this before, but no one was surprised that he did this. And I'm just wondering what combination of team lack of success and player lack of success, at what point, where's the threshold where something like this gets you scolded instead of celebrated. It gets you talked to and criticized. The cranky columnist writes a cranky column about how the team's head isn't in the game because someone didn't know what inning it was. Obviously not in this case because Max Scherzer's

the best pitcher in baseball. He's coming off one of the best months arguably a pitcher has ever had in recent memory at least. The Nationals have been winning. They won this game. They are currently the wildcard leader. So everything is going relatively well for Scherzer and for the Nationals. So of course, everyone was saying that's Max. But if this had happened to, say, a New York Met right now, it would be perceived in a completely different way. Of course, it would be the team isn completely different way. Of course, it would be the team isn't focusing and Callaway's lost control and Brody Van Wagenen's throwing chairs and everyone's distracted and the team is playing poorly. And if the player were playing poorly,

then it wouldn't be, oh, that's Max. It's funny. It would be this guy's got to get his head in the game. So where's the line where this goes from being endearing to something that you would get condemned for i think uh this is a hard question to answer and i think to have any hope of answering it we have to first figure out when they say that's max what are they saying what part of it is max and what does it represent about max are they saying that's max his head's never in the game are they saying that's max he's over excitable are they saying that's max he doesn't wait for the crowd he just follows his heart are they saying that's max he's dumb i don't think it's that one he's not no kendrick said uh he's a great teammate he has some quirkiness about him. But is that quirk? He wasn't doing it to be quirky.

No, he just wasn't paying attention. So it could be like he's, I don't know, sometimes you see it celebrated like a guy's head is so in the game that he doesn't know what's going on around him, which that's something that you would hear about Scherzer because he's so intense on the mound. But this is kind of the opposite of that. It's not that he was so intensely focused on some aspect of the game that he missed the obvious

thing, which is the game wasn't over. I think in this case, he just wasn't paying that close attention. And he didn't have to be. He wasn't pitching or anything, so whatever. But I think they're just saying that he's a little off off kilter i don't know it's you know he's on the mountain cursing at himself and that's max and this is a different manifestation of max but you know he's got two different eye colors he's max that's max i don't know i'm i'm gonna say that he's that that what they I'm going to say that they're just saying it. That they haven't really thought about what it is about Max. They're just saying that.

They're just literally going, that was Max. Who is that guy in the field? Oh, that's Max. Because we saw it and we we wrote in the book right That remember when there was that Big feud there was the fight On the stompers because someone's wallet Was misplaced and someone thought

That the wallet was stolen and then someone Found the wallet and they didn't think they Had turned over the wallet quickly enough It was very silly but I think The point that you was probably you Made in the book was that If this had happened early in the made in the book was that if this had happened early in the season when the team was winning, it would not have been a fight. There

would not have been words exchanged. It would have just been, that's whoever it was. So it wouldn't have been a problem, but because the team was struggling at that point, it was a problem. And that's not quite the same situation but i think it's it's dependent on a lot of things it's it's probably dependent on too many variables to answer this question in a neat way because it's dependent on how that player is playing how the team is playing generally how that player is liked or perceived i mean you could be like the the quirky there are guys who are not superstars who are valued for their quirkiness. This isn't quite, this is quirky, I guess, but it's also just you're not paying attention.

Yeah, but he's also not in the, he doesn't need to be in the game. Yes. So it helps that that's not his role. And it helps that they won the game if they had blown it in the top of the ninth. And I think it would have have it wouldn't have mattered because wherever the threshold is they they're far below it here i mean it's like you say it's max scherzer one of the most awesome players in the game uh for the hottest team in baseball and so who cares right that's max um but if you know if it whatever scenario there was it would

probably be worse if it were a situation where i the one of the more embarrassing moments of the season for me when i was in with the stompers was when there was a uh one of one of our guys hit a line drive and i i audibly exclaimed and then it got caught and everybody looked at me like i was just like it was my first game watching baseball and they actually uh Schwieg made some comment about whether it's like sabermetrics to overreact to line drive outs, and it hurt. It was very hurtful to me

to be in that situation. It is sabermetrics to do that, right? That's true. I said it's ex-woba. Good launch angle. Good exit velocity. But I think this was all good fun. I think that

anybody you name in baseball in any situation it would mostly be beloved. I think that if, I don't know, I think if an Oriole did this it'd be charming. If a Red Sox did this. By the way. I don't know if an Oriole did it. I think it would be seen as

a sign of the apocalypse As a sign of these guys are not major league quality players And I think that would be condemned probably You do? Maybe Yeah, I don't know I think even if it were Scherzer Like if Scherzer had been in the game

And he had forgotten how many outs there were or something And he threw to the wrong base And it proved to be a costly mistake And the Nationals lost the game or something even scherzer you wouldn't have guys going that's max after the game probably because that would not be endearing that's a different situation though because as you said there's no cost to this it's just a silly thing it's embarrassing for him but the nationals didn't suffer for scherzer freaking forgetting what ending it was

the most interesting thing about it to me is that he went to to eaton the runner who scored and everything comes down to once i wrote an article but i have written articles about how you celebrate uh walk-off errors which is a situation where the hitter is the least heroic he could possibly be and yet even then it is protocol to to go mob the hitter, never the runner. There's hardly ever any attention paid at all to the runner. And it's sort of odd that Scherzer ran to the runner, to the scoring runner. Maybe he was so out of the game, he forgot who was hitting and who was running. He thought, yeah.

Okay. All right. Sounds good. Sure. Should we talk about the topic today? Okay. All right. But first, I got topic today? Okay. All right. But first, I got to mention something on episode 1320.

I actually do. I have one other thing, too. Come on. All right. You go. Okay. All right. So I think as we've been speaking, Yadier Molina has been leaving Instagram comments lambasting Jake Marisnyk for the collision with Jonathan Lucre that happened on Sunday.

Bringing this up now because it's timely. There were a couple of catcher injury related news items on Sunday. The first was Marisnyk just crashing into Lucre. It was an illegal collision and he was ruled out. And to Marisnyk's credit, he seemed remorseful after the play. He was hanging around the plate. He tweeted after the game that he feels awful about it. He hopes for the best for Lucre. But Brad Osmus is agitating for a suspension. Yadier Molina is coming to Lucre's defense here. So catchers clearly upset about

catchers getting hurt in a collision. On the same day, we got the news that Francisco Cervelli is done catching. He's had one too many concussions. I think he's had six, which is probably more than one too many. And he is now finished with catching. He's hoping to continue playing. I don't know whether he will be able to do that, but he has played corner infield before. Anyway, still a problem. Catchers get hurt. They get seriously injured, even though there are rules put in place to protect them, even though there's a seven-day injury list to get them out of the game so that they're not pressured to come back and play with concussions.

Catchers still get concussions. They still get hurt. It's part of the hazard of playing that position. And Andrew, one of our listeners, brought up a point that I hadn't considered, which is he wonders, do you think this will be an important factor driving us toward a robot strike zone? They could be farther back and in less risk of getting hit by the bat, foul tips, etc. I think Cervelli's last concussion was from a bat collision, not from a foul tip. And Andrew says, furthermore, I think MLB would want to get ahead of the issue so they don't end up like the NFL with many brain-injured former players. And I think they have. They've made an effort to do that, but obviously catchers are still getting concussions so do you think this will be an impetus toward the robot strike zone which we're probably heading toward anyway at some point in the not terribly distant future but they could spin this for people who are upset about losing

the human element that this is in part a safety measure to keep catchers from getting concussions oh man it's a good question yeah i don't think probably it would be seen as the impetus. I could see it being used as a selling point. I think that this is a topic where most people have much stronger opinions about just sort of the top-level issue of, should we replace the umpires with a robot strike zone? And you're probably while obviously catcher safety is a more important issue than accuracy of strikes called in a in a in a

baseball world i think that it would definitely feel like you're making a massive change for something that most people watching would consider a very small. Most people don't realize that catchers are getting banged up the way that they are, I think. And I think it sort of would have a hard time selling this to the general public. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'm probably labeling with a broad brush here, but I would guess that there'd be a lot of overlap between people who are pro robot ump just because they like technology, they like progress, they want to make the game better or what they perceive to be better, and people who would care enough about catcher safety to actually change something major about the game to protect catchers. Whereas I think there would also be a lot of overlap between people who kind of

reflexively want to preserve the human element for tradition's sake and people who will say we're protecting players too much and back in back in the day players would run into each other and that was just part of the game and now we're we're you know protecting everyone and taking it too easy on people i think that i'm in favor of human umpires because I like the human element in terms of how it affects the strike zone and how it affects framing. And I've talked about that before, but people who are just sort of like, I like the human element because there's always been a human element and tradition would also be not eager to change things in a major way to protect catchers because catchers getting hurt is kind of a tradition too

that's a staple of the game isn't it also fairly simple to just put a front of the catcher's box if you wanted to and you know recognize that that would probably make it harder for catchers to frame but that's not if you're the league office that's not your main priority the game will be the game it will be competitive and equal for both teams and so as it is now i don't believe there is a front of the catcher's box i think the catcher's box is a horseshoe um that goes uh on the sides and behind him and he could theoretically go as far as he wants up front and with the incentives in place they do and they will continue to and they might even do more and more and so if you if you're a league that wants to protect catchers from having to engage in this sort of race forward into danger,

then it seems like the first step you do is simply draw a line and say you can't go in front of that and have a little bit more separation between the batters and the catchers. So I don't know. I don't know how disruptive that would be, but yeah. Okay. Well, that's it. You can get the last word on banter 40 plus minutes into this episode.

I'm just going to, this is more of a segue, but you in episode 1320, you and Jeff were talking about Williams' Ast't say with his wonderful home run pose and you talked about how there were people you you you talked about how the idea that there were people out there who were mad about this was a straw man argument and in fact nobody was mad about this everybody loved it and jeff said uh you both agreed that the war over fun was largely over jeff said the conversation is over we have won the fun people have won and then in episode 1321 he talked about how williams astadillo got the living daylight beamed out of him by the opposing team who did not think it was fun and that was a good time for me to have listened backwards because i got to

listen to that whole second conversation first anyway you talked about how a friend of yours had noted something very interesting which is that the home run trot itself is an act of celebration an act of self-aggrandizement there's no actual reason to trot was this will woods yes it was all right there's no reason to trot necessarily but we give the batter a chance to to sort of uh bask bask in the cheers of the people around him. Now, there's also the fact that he's probably already ran to first base before the ball is officially out and he has to go somewhere. So I don't know if I totally agree with Will, but this goes to something that I have been thinking about a lot lately,

which is the home run derby where you hit big dingers and you don't run at all. The home run derby is Monday. I wrote an article that went up, I think, over the weekend and is up now that is a little bit of a piece of speculative fiction based on the premise, sort of, that one could imagine a next century where the Home Run Derby, in a way, eats baseball, becomes more popular than baseball, or becomes a secondary sport entirely. And the reason I was thinking about this is because I started wondering, well, this last hundred years of the home run derby's development, the rise from home runs weren't even really a thing to now the home run derby is a

total star making vehicle. I would say that plausibly Josh Hamilton had his career defining moment in the home run derby. I would say that Aaron Judge has Josh Hamilton had his career defining moment in the home run derby. I would say that Aaron Judge has plausibly had his career defining moment in the home run derby. The home run derby sometimes draws as many viewers as the all-star game itself. It's one of the most watched baseball events of the year. And if we think about the derby, not as this interesting exhibition that has grown in popularity, but as we've been watching the origin story of a whole new sport, because it's not baseball. It's totally different than baseball. The only thing it has in common with baseball is that you swing a bat at a ball

and try to hit it over the wall, but otherwise everything is very different. And you could imagine, perhaps, you could imagine those differences kind of diverging even more. You don't need to have a lot of the things that people don't like about baseball. Well, I don't know. I'm not going through this article in a very organized way. So now I'm kind of getting all over the place. But I wanted to bring it up partly because I just wanted to know what your relationship to the home run derby is.

Do you enjoy it? Do you feel different about it than you did when you were a kid? And is it something that you watch as a baseball fan? I completely tuned it out for a while there. I used to enjoy it as a kid. I did just because it was fun to watch the superstars hitting baseballs a long way. And, of course, one of the best parts, maybe the best part of the whole All-Star Week is just players hanging out on the field and watching the Home Run Derby. And sometimes they're mic'd up and sometimes they'll stop by the broadcast.

And it's kind of casual and fun to see players with their families and just guys from all teams hanging out and being friendly in a way that we don't typically see them. So after an initial period where I enjoyed watching that, I stopped watching for quite a while or I'd pay some peripheral attention but not really tune in unless I just happened to have it on in the background. And just with the new rules that they put in place in recent years, I've started paying attention again. But I wouldn't say it's a highlight of my baseball-watching summer, I don't think. I think it's a fun event because it happens once a year. I don't think I could see it being something that I would enjoy as an alternative to baseball, as a standalone product.

enjoy as an alternative to baseball, as a standalone product. I think its rarity is really why it's so compelling, just because we don't really get to see guys try to hit home runs in this focused way and get served up meatballs to hit home runs for the sole purpose of doing that. We don't get to see that, and this is a time when we get to see guys who hit baseballs a long way hit them the longest way. So I do enjoy it. And it's probably the best part of All-Star Week unless you're a prospect person and you enjoy the Futures game. I think it's probably more fun than the All-Star game at this point, more compelling and maybe more potential for a landmark moment like Hamilton, like Judge, etc. But that's about as far as I would go with it. Yeah, I also have never been a huge home run derby watcher or enjoyer.

And I think that the fact that both of us feel that way is part of why I think that it feels a little odd to think of this as a subset of baseball, of the baseball experience, because it's so very different from baseball it doesn't really appeal to me in any of the ways that baseball appeals to me it does appeal to me in ways that baseball does not appeal to me and i'll get to those in a minute but it is not a sport that you're gonna want to live with every day you don't want to see obviously you don't want to see 15 home run derbies a day for six months. Right.

And you don't like seeing home run highlights even. You're on record as thinking that home run highlights are boring in actual games when there are stakes and there's tension and it's an unexpected surprising event. I don't like the highlights because in the highlights, it's not unexpected anymore. You pretty much know what it's going to be. In a home run derby, it's never unexpected. No, a home run derby is a different thing. A home run derby, what has appealed to me in recent years is the suspense of it. I actually find it to be a pretty clear story.

You can jump in and out at any given point. The rules are very simple. The conceit is very simple. And the scoring is fairly simple. And so you turn it on and you have the time element. You have a clock counting down, which I know you hate, but you do have a clock counting down. You have a pretty clear competitive narrative. It is very fast paced, which is something that obviously is something that baseball has now it is it didn't used to be that's right it has gotten much better it's very fast-paced it is a great television i would say a great uh now that television i watched the old home run derbies the really old ones in the 60s but also some of the ones from the from the 90s and that the broadcasting technology just wasn't there like you didn't you were it was basically just like you were watching a guy swing and then someone was telling you whether it went out a lot of times

and now you have just this gorgeous cinematography for these home runs you have one of the great things about it is that there's no because there are no real foul balls because there are you know you don't have misses you can can get really close. You can have the players on the field. Like the players aren't just in the booth talking about what's happening. They're on the field. They could be a few feet away from it. So there's a feeling that you can get much closer to the action than you do anywhere else. And of course, there's, I mean, obviously it's not a sport. It's not a sport that is played full time or anything like that. But it's also nice that you don't have injuries.

You don't have to even wear a helmet, let alone worry about the pitchers, Tommy John, surgery, recovery, or whatever. You don't have ball strike calls. You don't have that ambiguity of umpiring like that. A lot of drives a lot of people crazy. You don't have long and bats of foul balls, and you don't have strategies that aren't pleasing. Pretty much the only strategy for home run derby is to hit dingers, and that's what people want. There's no counterintuitive strategy that's horrible to watch but helps you win.

It's just like dingers. You don't have relievers. They're all stars, every one of them superstar. And so in that way, it's kind of great. And so, uh, just to be clear, this is not going to happen. Like the home run derby is not going to be a big four sport, but there's a chance, right? I can envision it. I can see a plausible way that it happens. And I think that this year's home run Derby, which we're going to watch tonight, marks that pivotal moment where we figure out whether this is going to be a sport or not.

Because now you're going to have a million dollar prize that is more than some of the players in the Home Run Derby are going to make this year. And that's a big difference, right? You have some real incentive now to get really good at this game. And not probably if you're a major leaguer, not if you're like one of these young superstars, but you could imagine that there are probably players in the minors

who could get really good at home run derby and probably aren't going to get really good at baseball, but could get really good at home run derby. And you could imagine that if the game, if the idea of a derby opened And you could imagine that if the game, if the idea of a derby opened up, if it became more popular, if it got expanded just a little bit, and if we started seeing different types of players, like sort of specializing in derby to try to get that million bucks, it could, there is a way, I could envision a way that it would start to take off.

And if it started to take off, then it could get really fun. Because right now, you're right. You wouldn't want to watch this all the time. It would be boring. But if you were watching it all the time, they would have to innovate. They would have to start having a lot of different settings. They would have to have a lot of different probably rules, types of derbies. There's no reason that you

would have to be limited to a baseball field as we know it. You could have a home run derby in a desert. You could have a home run derby in the Grand Canyon. You could have a home run derby on virtual reality and put it on Mars. You could do anywhere you want and you can make it really interesting. You could have weird rules. You could have like all sorts of different styles. I'm probably not convincing anybody of this and it's unlikely. I agree. But I can see it happening. I mean, the rise of the home run from basically not even a part of baseball a hundred years ago, except as like a very occasional thing to central to the game's marketing to where derbies themselves are in a lot of ways more memorable than the play.

Some of our most defining moments of every summer has been a kind of a steady progression. And we've now reached this point where there's real money involved and real popularity involved. And I'm looking at a world where like you have like American Ninja Warrior, which is basically like very good athletes, amateur athletes who have mastered the ability to do certain athletic feats in an urban setting and an unconventional setting. And it's showcased television on primetime and it doesn't happen, you know, 2430 times a year like baseball does but it's a huge success uh in the in a limited run and i could sort of see it like i can i can envision it so not going to happen but i can envision it well i think mike pesca has expressed the opinion i think on the gist that what we want out of sports what we find most entertaining in sports is basically something flying through the air a very long way. So we like the deep Hail Mary pass, the touchdown pass in football.

We like three-pointers in basketball. We like home runs in baseball. And so if you think that home runs are compelling, that things flying through the air is fun, then the Home Run Derby has a leg up there. Flying through the air is fun Then Home Run Derby has a leg up there I would say the fact that Home Run Derby's go back a long way And haven't made any major inroads When it comes to becoming a standalone sport Oh, wow

That probably argues against them See, I feel the exact opposite I feel that all the evidence suggests that it has made major inroads It was, I mean, it was the first home run derby in 1985 wasn't even televised. They didn't televise it for seven years, for maybe nine years before they started televising it. They were these sort of things that you would do, you know, before charity exhibition games. They would be things that Babe Ruth would do when he was barnstorming. They would be.

That's still what it is. It's an exhibition once a year. Well, once a year, but it's a massively popular thing. More people will watch this than will watch any regular season game for sure. And probably any game other than the All-Star Game in the World Series. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's been in its current form for what 25 years or so that it's been broadcast in something like the modern way and i guess it's maybe more popular now than it

used to be or at least than it was like a few years ago i don't know how it compares to many years ago and obviously the broadcasts have gotten better and clearer, but that's true for all sports. So I don't know if TV, probably TV has benefited the Home Run Derby more than just regular baseball. But I don't know if you go back and look at grainy black and white footage of regular baseball games, that doesn't look so great either. It was what you had at the time, so you took it. at the time so he took it but i think it has had star making moments or star cementing moments which is very true i think that it's always kind of a secondary thing though i mean that may be what you remember about aaron judge or josh hamilton but you really remember it because of what they do outside of the home run derby. And they attained the status to be in the Derby because they were an MVP caliber player beyond that. And this was maybe the moment that

best distilled their talent. But on its own, if they had just, well, if they had just wandered in off the street, then that would have made them a star too. And that's something that you speculate about in your article, that maybe eventually it gets to be the type of thing where you just have home run derby specialists. And it's not even major leaguers anymore. It's just people who practice the home run derby swing. And you can imagine that people who practice that in a focused way could get good at it. I think it'd probably be harder to do that than like free throw shooting. I think it's just an inherently harder act to perform.

You have to be pretty strong to hit even a BP ball out of a field. And also they're just more variables. I mean, you know, there's a pitch coming in and it's moving and there's environmental conditions and distractions and free throw shooting. It's just kind of you and a ball and the same condition. The hoop is not moving. So I think it would be harder to master. But I think baseball became like the national pastime really quickly. It took off very quickly, whereas home run derby has not taken off very quickly, I would say.

Maybe it's made some inroads, but it's not on a trajectory where I would look at it and extrapolate and say, we're heading toward a future where this will be a dominant sport, which I know you're saying is unlikely, but maybe you can make a case that the million-dollar prize and where we go from there, that could be a pivotal moment where that changes things. where we go from there, that could be a pivotal moment where that changes things.

Yeah, I think that the money would, that what I would see driving it would basically be three things. One is the money getting bigger, which this is why I think this is such a pivotal year, because I think that if a young player wins it, and in particular, step two of this process is we somehow have to get minor leaguers into it in my how this could happen thing. And so I think that seeing a kid making $30,000 win a million dollars, I think that has a long history of being crowd pleasing on television. So I'm thinking that the three, anyway, the three factors, one is the money needs to get really, really big. Two is that the winners need to start being like not famous baseball players, but they need to, maybe some of them would be famous baseball players, but otherwise they probably would, they would have to be a new athlete population pool.

And the third thing would be that those athletes would have to be even better at it. They'd have to be able to do things with derby that players today have heretofore not been able to do. That might not be possible. It might be that Aaron Judge is the best derby player in the world.

Because all you can do is hit more dingers. Or farther dingers, I guess. More dingers mostly, though. And at a certain is hit more dingers. Yeah. Or farther dingers, I guess. More dingers mostly, though. Yeah, more dingers. And at a certain point, more dingers, probably not more entertaining. Well, you mentioned a hypothetical of a guy who hits homers on, what, 100-something consecutive swings. And maybe that's fun because the tension ramps up every time. But if it were just every hitter is hitting 30 per round or something

instead of whatever they're hitting, then it would just take a lot longer, and you have the time limits put in place to prevent that, really. So I'm not sure that's more entertaining. Maybe. The other thing is that— I'm imagining a lot more variety in these games. Yeah.

But maybe. That's the thing. I mean, A, I think there will be more money if there's a bigger audience, right? If the audience is there to make this an event that can support an enormous prize, then that will happen. And if it doesn't, then maybe that suggests that the audience isn't there for it. I don't know. But the other thing is that to make it more compelling, the inclination maybe is to make it more challenging, to make it harder to add obstacles. Oh, yeah.

And yet that then maybe makes it less entertaining, right? Because isn't the thing that we like about the derby is that we get to see lots of dingers? So if you just make it harder, now if you put it in the Grand Canyon or something, yeah, that's fun just because it would be fun to see baseballs hit in that setting, just like it's maybe fun to see Evel Knievel jump over something. But I don't know that making it harder actually makes it more entertaining because then you're reducing the pool of players who could do it and you're just translating to fewer diggers, which is the opposite of what we want. Ben, that's a good objection.

That is true. That's something that Derby's brain people, the brain folks at Derby are going to have to spend a lot of time on. Because that is true. That could be a real obstacle. Yeah, look, not going to happen, probably. But I think that, yeah, sure. I agree. I think that the rise of the Derby is very interesting. I think that there's a lot to the last hundred years that show continued growth and expansion and movement towards something that

we relate to in a very different way than we relate to in baseball and so i'm mostly just interested to see where it goes from here i i think that it could possibly be that that home run derbies have a an interesting future ahead of them feels more likely to me that that they would uh change and adapt and become somewhat bigger than they are now than that they're going to suddenly go away uh or not or not so suddenly go away because it feels like right now baseball derby in a way feels more durable nah that's it that's going too far well we like strongman competitions we like feats of strength and this is that basically so i do think i mean people are fascinated with who has the longest drives on the pga tour and who has the the longest home runs so i think as long as that's the case it makes

observation that we like to see stuff fly through the air a really long way i don't think that will change so i think the derby's place is secure but i don't know that it has the potential it's just not complex enough it's just it's so simple well the three the three things that i kept thinking about when i imagined derby having a moment of like massive cultural phenomenon status uh that could then propel it to innovate and get different and big and wild in ways that we can't imagine the three things that i kept thinking about were, A, who wants to be a millionaire?

Remember when we were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And it was like the biggest show in the country. Like it was the number one show. And they were airing it five nights a week on Prime Time. Just got canceled very recently. And it took 20-some years. And that's a dang quiz show. And a slow one at that so anyway i thought about

who wants to be a millionaire i thought of joey chestnut and the eating a lot of hot dogs um which of course is not that's a even a competitive eating i guess is a got a whole schedule and a whole tour but that's a one time a year thing but i mean that's way less likely to me than home run derby uh and the third was american ninja warrior uh which i thought you could produce in a lot of the same ways so those are things that are i don't know all of those have reasons that you'd go well how would that appeal to 30 million people um and in various ways that they all have but yeah mean, if you put enough money at stake, then people will probably watch anything. People will tune in to watch someone flip a coin

if there were millions of dollars at stake, especially if it were you because you claim to be able to tell by the sound. By the sound, I gotta work on that. But I would watch if it were a $20 million prize for heads or tails, I'd watch. That would be compelling to me, even though there's no skill involved and it's very simple. That's something I would watch just to see like the human drama of someone either winning a lot of money or being disappointed that they didn't win a lot of money and having their life changed or not having their life changed.

So if you put enough money into something, then I'd probably watch it at least once, certainly. I just think that even with American Ninja Warrior, like the whole thing is this is so hard. How do they do this? Let's keep making the obstacles even harder. And then it will be just awe-inspiring that they're able to complete the course. Whereas in derby, it's still just like that

70 mile per hour well that's just laid in there so you can hit a home run it's true although you do i don't know if you if you've if you've read my future derby article but yes uh i did imagine that one of the things that one of the rules could each round if there's no reason you need a pitcher it could be off the pitching machine and each round could you could jack up the velocity until they're having to hit dingers on 135 miles an hour right be pretty well then it would be too hard you think it'd be too hard you think there wouldn't be dingers you think if the whole point is that i'm selling the availability of dingers to a dinger thirsty audience and then i'm trying to take away their dingers to to promote drama i agree it's tricky.

But I don't know. Doesn't every sport have that? We watch horses run for two minutes. Horses. I don't know anything about horses. Yeah. They run. That's what they do.

They're horses. They're all horses. Well, that's declined dramatically in popularity. So and we only watch it like once a year or maybe three times a year for two minutes and that's it. You probably didn't play the July 4th Google Doodle last week because you were probably not in a place to play it. I did not. Yeah, so there was a baseball-themed Google Doodle for July 4th and it's like a backyard baseball barbecue type game. I think you can probably still go play it. And it was basically

derby more or less. It was like you take swings and there are various food items and the peanuts are the fielders. And basically you're just taking swings. And for some reason you hit the ball like 800 feet. And the whole thing is derby basically because the peanuts, I guess they don't have hands. And so they can't field the ball even when it's hit right at them. So even if you hit a ball right at a peanut, it's just a single or a double or whatever. And the whole thing is just kind of timing your swing to see if you can hit homers 800 feet. And that's just about it. And so you rack up runs essentially.

And, you know, you score 30 runs or whatever and there are three strikes and the strikes carry over across the batters. It's a very strange game. It doesn't really resemble real baseball. But once you start getting up into the high run totals, they do make it harder and they have like this one guy who comes in throwing a fastball that's very difficult to hit and that's tough to time because the other balls are very easy to hit and at that point it becomes less fun i think because you're

not hitting diggers 800 feet and the whole thing is just dinger hitting because there's no fielding there's no base running or anything and so i played the game a few times and then i got tired of it because that was kind of all it was it It was, am I clicking the mouse at the right time to hit this ball or not? That is basically derby for me. It was fun once. I'd play it a few times a year, but I wouldn't devote a lot of my time to it. fun fact from my Mike Trout Hall of Famers past in June article, which most people know this fun fact, but it still blows my mind and I wish it were on the YouTube. It's not on YouTube. I cannot find it. But in 1990, Ryan Sandberg won the home run derby with a total of three home runs. He out homered the other seven combined. Yes. The whole home run derby. Now this wasn't on TV, Yes. The whole Home Run Derby.

Now, this wasn't on TV, mercifully, but the whole Home Run Derby, the whole afternoon had five dingers. Yeah. You said it was at Wrigley and the wind was blowing in, right? That is the lore around this performance. That's not a good derby. I have only one question about this article where you trace the future history of the Home Run Derby more than 100 years into the future. How did you decide that Aaron Judge's great-great-grandson would be named Han Judge? I don't know. Is Star Wars so popular in the future that kids are just getting named Hans?

Did you cut that out of nowhere? Yeah. How many Star Wars feature films do you think there will be in 100 years? There will be more than 100, right? No, I don't think so. I think there will be dozens, but I don't think they're... Because they've cut back on them already. I think you'll get one every three years, maybe two years. Wait, you're counting these little spinoff ones, the Star Wars stories?

Yeah. Okay. There are like parallel Spider-Man series going on sometimes. I just feel like we're at a point now where intellectual property does not shrink. Well, Star Wars, they actually have dialed it back a bit. I think they realized that they went a little too far with

the Solo movie. I thought Solo was the best one yet. I thought it was great. Yeah. But audiences did not agree, at least to the same extent. One other thing we didn't mention about the Home Run Derby, we didn't mention one of the most entertaining parts which you also wrote an article about which is the kids shagging flies yeah so that's another thing that's great about the home run derby that i wrote i wrote an article i wrote an article two years ago about who would who would catch more fly balls. Yeah. Did 25 home run derby kids, Shaggers, or Byron Buxton.

Right. And I concluded it was Buxton. Yeah. They're very poor at this. Not only do they not space out, which is a bad strategy, they should space out. I mean, really, it's crazy because they're all in a group. It's like when you're picking your final four in a big pool with like 600 people.

It just doesn't do to pick chalk. You got to zig if you're going to win. And if you watch the Home Run Derby tonight, you will see a fair number of balls are going to be pop-ups to right field and there's not going to be anyone standing there. And the truth is, even if it's hit right at you, if you're to be anyone standing there um and the truth is even if it's hit right at you if you're playing in a pack of nine and it's hit right at you and you somehow are in position to catch it shagging kid you're still probably going to drop it and then there's eight people who are going to pick it up before you do so go get a lonely place where you can

fail without anybody competing with you that's basically what my life's mission is. Go somewhere alone where no one will see you fail and no one will compete against you. Anyway, Byron Buxton has more range as well. All that stuff. Yeah, all right. Enjoy the home run derby, everyone. Enjoy it before it's the biggest sport in America. They should all, I mean, you should be able to shag.

Like you ought to be, there should be a lot more people shagging. You ought to be able to shag like you ought to be there should be a lot more people shagging you ought to be able to shag in my opinion just like everybody it should be a rock concert it should be like going to see like a like pearl jam and it can't be more dangerous than being in a big pit of people jumping around that's pretty dangerous bosh pit yeah and they let them do it it's a safety hazard the one time i went to cpgb my friend was doing like a battle of the bands there and i went to see him and he went to the mosh pit after he was done and he got kicked in the face and just like completely knocked to the

floor was that will woods it was not different but look no ben look here's the thing these guys are going to go out there and they're going to hit like you know say say they're going to hit 500 balls and 250 of them are going to land in the bleachers and 250 of them are going to land in the field and for the 250 that land in the bleachers they're going to pack in as many people as they possibly can and those people are going to fight for those 250 balls but then for the 250 on the field they're like nope only the son of corporate sponsors that's it why not let more people down there why not fill it up just like you with the bleachers if it's safe in the bleachers it's safe in left field okay maybe shagging flies at the home run derby will be the next dominant sport could be okay that yeah could

be oh my gosh i do like uh teach sunday school and kindergartners love three flies up that is the sport that's gonna take over the world seriously 100 years from now the four big sports are gonna be soccer derby ultimate frisbee three flies up okay all right you heard it here first and last. All right. I wanted to read one more listener response to something Sam and I recently spoke about. It's kind of mathy, so I figured I'd stick it here. This is from Ryan. He says, The listener email from episode 1399 got me thinking about whether strong, weak, or median link players were most important for a team.

I realized it would be pretty easy to assemble into a spreadsheet to answer with data. I went to Baseball Reference and pulled the top 10 position players listed along with the top four starters and the closer. I did fudge it a handful of times when one person should clearly belong ahead of another. I then took their Baseball Reference war and I identified the top player, the bottom player, and the median player. Then I ran four regressions, one for each and then three measures together as explanatory variables for total wins in 2018. Sam's intuition, I think both of our intuitions, was correct that the median link is the most important. The R-squared for the best player war was 0.35, for the worst player war was 0.19, and for the median player war was 0.65. I also calculated effect sizes for the multivariate specification.

A 1 standard deviation increase in the best player war corresponds to a 0.35 standard deviation increase in team wins. A 1 standard deviation increase in worst player war corresponds to a 0.2 standard deviation increase in wins. And a 1 standard deviation in median player war corresponds to a 0.62 standard deviation increase in team wins. That was a lot of mentions of standard deviation and multivariate regressions. The point Ryan is conveying there is that the data does seem to support the idea that baseball is a median link sport.

Of course, I don't think he repeated the analysis to see how other sports stack up, but that passes the sniff test for me. You can go get my book. It's called The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. If you've gotten it, if you've read it, if you've liked it, please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. It helps us out. Tell a friend, give it as a gift, and a good word of mouth is appreciated. You can also support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves some perks. Jay Augsburger, Justin Compton, Dustin, John Schultz, and Chris Campin. Thanks to all of you.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can contact me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Outro Music