Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1402: Justin Time

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game, Justin Verlander’s and Rob Manfred’s comments about the juiced ball, the recent rapid turnover among elite hitters, and an instance of premature celebration featuring Fernando Rodney, then answer listener emails about Verlander’s on-pace-to-be-historic strand rate, whether we should have recognized […]

Ooh, baby, you couldn't have done the worst thing to me If you'd have taken an hour and run it right through me I could have been a finer thing Flying in a righter direction with no other thing Featuring my love and affection Come on, get up, get underway Bring your love Hello and welcome to episode 1402 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and I'm joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hello, Ben. So I guess Monday's derby made a pretty convincing case for your derby as a standalone sport hypothesis. Well, I don't know. We'll see. Well received.

It was a good derby. The million dollars really seemed to change some things. I don't know. Maybe not. But it seemed like it changed some things with the players. They seemed really interested in it. I don't know. It's hard to know.

They always wanted to win. But it felt like Pete Alonzo had a little million dollars kind of going through his head during some of that. Yeah. So that's, that's important. I, there was a, you know, there was a period, I mean, the reason that there's a million dollars is because there was this contradiction where the Derby was, uh, was, was very popular, getting very popular, creating some incredible moments. But at the same time, a lot of players were increasingly not wanting to do it. And some players were just explicit, like Joey Gallo said, like, why would I do that? Like, there's just no reason to do a derby and potentially risk,

potentially risk affecting my swing or my health for this fake event. He homered in Cleveland anyway. or my health for this fake event. He homered in Cleveland anyway. And so then they create a million dollar prize to give incentive to players to do it. And it sort of brings it more in line where now the interest that fans have is a little bit more aligned

with the interest that players have and the incentives that players have to participate in it. And so that seemed pretty important to the next stage of Derby if it is going to have a next stage. And so, yeah, I think the only thing to do now is make it $5 million. of homers hit. I guess there's really no consternation about the juiced ball when it comes to the home run derby. I don't think anyone really minds that maybe there were more homers hit because of the ball. I think we all want to see homers in the home run derby, and I don't think anyone cares about whether it cheapens the accomplishment or anything because whatever,

it's an exhibition anyway. So I think that worked out really well, although it maybe heightened my anticipation for next year's derby, but it didn't really make me think, gee, I wish there were a lot of Derbys between now and then that I could watch just all the time. I still kind of feel like it's a once a year thing for me that I enjoy and don't really need much more of. much more of yeah the great thing about derby being separate from baseball if they diverge a little bit is that you're no you're not tied by any of the infrastructure of the sport so i talked about how you don't need to have the field the way the field is but you also don't need to have the ball the way the ball is you could have i mean if you wanted to you could play derby with a ball that is like tighter than a golf ball you could could have them hit 900 foot home runs if you wanted to do that. It's all, it's all like the rules of the sport

are totally different. And so you don't need to have a ball that has any kind of connection to the ball that, you know, Triz Speaker was hitting. You can just put anything out there you want and see how far it flies. Yeah, and I know you were advocating for putting some prospects in the derby and future derbies.

And I think that would be interesting from an economic perspective. Obviously, they would have the most to gain. They'd presumably be the most motivated. But I have heard from a couple of people in recent days who attended minor league home run derbies and were not wowed by the event, maybe in part because it's not such a production.

It's not such a production, it's not just a spectacle, but I think also because minor league hitters just aren't as good, aren't as strong, and maybe just don't hit as many diggers. So I think someone may have emailed us or tweeted at us or something to say that if prospects were put in the derby, they would stand out for not being as good. I mean, if you would put like Vlad in there last year or something, maybe he still would have done what he did. But I think if you took a lot of prospects, a lot of minor leaguers in there and put them with the major leaguers, there would be kind of a boy among men sort of effect where maybe they just, A, the pressure, B, just not being as good and as strong i think there's just less power

in the minors in general probably you would i don't think that a team of prospects would beat a team of major leaguers but vlad is 20 ronald acuna is 21 and i think fernando tatis would do very well in it as well he i just just wrote this sentence a couple of minutes ago, has the 11th hardest, well, not the 11th, only 10 players in baseball have hit a ball harder than Fernando Tatis has this year. And he's only 20 as well. So yes, it probably, if you're talking about guys in low A,

that's probably true, but a lot of prospects are 22, 23 in AA. And I think if you're picking the best, if you're picking the 80-grade power guys in the minors, I mean, if there's anything that keeps coming up in our conversations, it's about how 21-year-olds are not any longer physically different than 27-year-olds in a noticeable way. So I think there's room there to find a competitive derby player in the prospect land. I enjoyed looking at Baseball Savant's home run derby page where

they show you where all the home runs went and you can see the trajectories. And normally when I see like, you know, every each row hit and the spray chart for that or something, I don't really know what to do with that because it just looks like a jumble. It's a big mess. It's thousands of hits. And of course, they go everywhere. But I kind of like looking at the home run derby, which is perhaps not so surprising. But if you look at Alonzo's and Acuna's, they sort of sprayed their homers all over the park. Maybe they pulled more than they hit in any other direction, but they were hitting them out everywhere, which doesn't mean they're better or anything. It doesn't matter where the ball goes out. But I feel like maybe it gives you just the clearest distillation of where these guys' power tends to be to. Because when you look at spray charts in games, there are a whole lot of other factors there.

And if you look at enough batted balls, then you can get a sense for how a guy tends to hit them. But there's weather and there's pitchers, and you can't always plan exactly how you're going to hit a pitch. You miss hit a lot of pitches. Whereas in the derby, I would think that where your balls go or kind of where your swing plane naturally leads them to go because it's not like you're getting fooled in the derby or hitting them off the end of the bat or having trouble catching up to the pitches or something. into the bad or having trouble catching up to the pitches or something you're just kind of hitting them the way that you naturally hit and there are really stark disparities between some of those guys so that's kind of cool to look at yeah i thought that aaron judge's derby in 2017 is is the most impressive that i've ever seen and part of what made it so impressive was that he just eventually realized that he was going to kind of get more out of it if he just hit his natural power to like right center field and so he was just hitting these massive homers to right field over and over and matt trueblood wrote in his newsletter about how the most uh impressive

thing to him and the thing that made him most excited to watch one of these players in the second half was acuna going to right field so much and with so much kind of just natural effortless power it didn't look like right it didn't look like he was trying to crank the longest home run in the competition exactly so much as he was just like well as Matt put it uh it was like he his talent broke the boundaries of the competition in a way he didn't show the same supernal pure power that Guerrero showed this year. He didn't consistently crank balls out of the park the way so many of the boring left-handed wall scrape artists have over the years.

He almost didn't seem to be trying to hit homers at all. He just reacted and the ball jumped off his bat. Yeah. So that was fun. And I think it was clearly the highlight of the week. I guess we're firmly in territory now where the Home Run Derby is like the NBA dunk competition and it kind of overshadows the game.

The All-Star game was fine. I enjoy the players being mic'd up and getting to hear them during the action in real time. That's kind of cool, but the game itself, whatever, it was fine. I like seeing them not wear helmets. I don't know why,

but to me, these guys are much more interesting to watch when they've got hair. in our previous conversation. I don't know if it was something either of us was even aware of. But it is a pretty good comp in that it's almost like a separate parallel sport that will be on the golf channel sometimes, but it's just about hitting the golf ball really far. And it has functioned as a thing, like it exists. There's a circuit, there's a tour, I guess. But on the other hand, I didn't even know it existed. So it's a pretty niche product. So I don't know whether that argues for or against the possibility of derby as a sport on its own, right? Yeah, I don't either. It's so much less dynamic than a

home run derby can be. And so its limitations, the fact that it's not a cultural phenomenon, So its limitations, the fact that it's not a cultural phenomenon, doesn't seem to me to rule out that something like Derby could be. And the fact that despite it being much more repetitive, much less dynamic, that it has any hold at all seems rather impressive and goes to Peska's theory that we want to see the longest thing we can see. Thing we can see So also this week in Cleveland Justin Verlander made some Headlines by coming out and Accusing MLB of intentionally Juicing the balls he then Received a stern talking to

From some MLB officials and Sounded a little more contrite Afterward but he's been one of the Most outspoken players when it Comes to the construction of the baseball Rob Manfred responded And denied that MLB had done anything intentionally, although he did not deny that the ball is different. But I have been really fascinated by why Verlander is so bothered by this. I think a lot of people have, because obviously he's going to be a Hall of Famer. He has

done just fine. It's not like the new ball has derailed his career or something. He's been one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. And so I've been trying to puzzle out why this upsets him so much or why it upsets pitchers in general, just because as we spoke to Ross Stripling about, they all have to deal with the same ball and it's kind of consistent conditions, at least within the season. But I think Zach Kreiser kind of got to the heart of it in his BP article on Wednesday, which I enjoyed, which was about Verlander and about why pitchers might be bothered by this. what a pitcher's stat line looks like and how his season goes, home runs. So that's becoming a bigger component now that that is just accounting for more run scoring in general. That kind of dictates how a pitcher's day goes. And Verlander has given up a ton of home runs this year.

So he's having a good season, but he's probably thinking, I could be having an amazing season if I weren't giving up all of these homers. And obviously we know that there is a lot of variance in whether balls in the air become home runs. Maybe there's less variance now that so many balls in the air become home runs. But as Zach pointed out, like the difference between Verlander and Ryu, for instance, a lot of it is home run prevention this year. And we know that that's not as consistent from season to season as some things that Verlander does really well, like striking out batters, missing bats. So you can kind of see why that would bother Verlander, even though he is Justin Verlander and a Cy Young contender and a future Hall of Famer and all the rest of it. It still has to be frustrating to give up as many homers as he has

and to know that at least some of those would not have been out under different conditions. So this goes to a question that you and I talked about on Gchat a couple years ago when I wrote about how MLB should change the ball. They should change the ball as often as they want to. They should change it very publicly, though, that the scandal is only if you're caught doing it secretly. And then it's a sort of a slightly, I don't know, I don't know where you'd rank the controversies,

but the number one controversy would be, oh, if we found out that MLB had secretly changed the ball for some business interests and lied about it. That's the number one controversy. And then number two or number three would be MLB chose what to do publicly and in doing so had to make a choice about whether to prioritize the pitching half of their labor pool or the hitting half, as well as the kind of different aesthetic that some fans like more and some fans like less. And then a third controversy, which I think would maybe be in

the middle in and which seems to maybe be the most likely here is that they just don't have any control over their equipment. And the game is sort of like chaotic because there's they don't have that like strict control over what they're putting into the field. And you at the time told me that you thought that it would be more controversial. I was allowing if MLB was regularly changing it and seemed to be picking one hitters over pitchers, right? That you thought that there'd be a real backlash, that if they dead in the ball, there'd be a real backlash from hitters. If they enlivened it, it'd be a real backlash from pitchers. But if you think as Verlander thinks that there's some bad faith going on here, that MLB is lying to us, then

that's really frustrating. I mean, I could see if just being annoyed that you're being lied to, it's always annoying to be lied to, right? So I assume that he starts with that premise that he just, he doesn't believe them and it just grinds at him every time he sees MLB kind of downplay what they're doing. So I don't know. I feel like he would maybe even feel that way if he hadn't allowed 26 home runs this year. Yeah, maybe so. I don't know if he'd be as vocal about it. Obviously, there's a lot of backlash to whatever has happened already without MLB coming out and saying, we are making this change.

Manfred did say that if he were to change it, he would say that he was going to do that, which implies that he would have done that if he had issued that order in the past, which he denies doing. And I believe him, I think, just if only because he'd be putting his job in such jeopardy if he had done this and was denying it and sticking to this stance for so long. I think, just if only because he'd be putting his job in such jeopardy if he had done this and was denying it and sticking to this stance for so long. I mean, that would be the end of his commissionership if it ever came out. And it seems like there's a good chance that it would come out if it had happened. That's exactly what happened to the MPB commissioner several years ago. So I can't see him repeating that mistake, but I don't know, maybe I'm giving

him too much credit, but that's kind of where I land. But as Meg has pointed out on Twitter, it doesn't really reflect that well on MLB that they bought the ball company and they are overseeing that process now and they still don't know what's going on, or at least that's the public stance. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it seems that just if you're thinking of this from Rob Manfred's interests, the very risky thing would be to do it secretly. And we have seen other leagues and other levels change their balls openly and in recent years. And that is not generally a scandal that that is seen as like, well, you know, it's a little bit uncomfortable.

Some fans will always complain about any change. Some players will always complain about any change. Some players will always complain about any change. But it is not as though like college baseball, for instance, had to deal with a huge scandal when they openly changed their equipment to tweak offense. Yeah. And I do think that Manfred hasn't handled the whole thing particularly well because he's kind of changed his story a couple times. And in fairness to him, the information has changed. We've learned more also. But even when he was denying that the ball was playing any part in this, it was pretty clear, I think, to a lot of us that the ball must be playing some part in this.

And he just dismissed that possibility. And he just dismissed that possibility. And then even once MLB's commission of scientists found that the ball was responsible, he sometimes didn't seem to fully acknowledge that. And also in the past, he said that fans like homers and that they've done surveys and they found that that's what's popular. And so he's kind of, I think, rejected the idea that this was a problem. He's kind of, I think, rejected the idea that this was a problem, whereas now he seems to be saying that they are concerned about how many homers there are and that owners don't want there to be this many homers, which seems kind of inconsistent. Because if fans like homers, then why wouldn't MLB be fine with more homers unless now we've finally reached the point where fans don't like this many homers? I don't know. reach the point where fans don't like this many homers i don't know it's well yeah or the conspiracy could be that owners don't want to do it but rob manfred thinks it's good for the sport largely and so he has to do it secretly so that the owners don't know that he's doing the thing

that he believes is actually good for them like he's serving them in his own kind of cromwellian way right yeah well it has led to some destabilization, certainly among individual players. I wrote something for The Ringer today that is about the turnover among elite hitters and how it's been abnormally high over the last few years. There are 32 guys this year who qualified for the batting title and have a 130 or higher WRC plus at the All-Star break.

Who's number 32? I need to know. 32? Yeah. Do you know? I think the five guys who just missed the cut were like Tommy La Stella, Domingo Santana, Jorge Polanco, Acuna, I think. So Acuna, I think. So that's more than half of the guys in that group of elite hitters at the half never had been in that group of elite hitters in any previous full season. So like those 17 guys, they had never finished a season before in that group. So they've never finished the season before with a WRC plus over 130 or in the top 32?

Or is that the same? Does it not matter? Is it the same? new, our first timers who've never finished a season in that group before. Now we're at more than half. And in 2017, it was like almost 60%. And over the past four or five seasons, it's been consistently very high, which I think is a confluence of factors. I think it's some, you know, data-driven player development, swing change sort of stuff. I think it's partly the ball affecting different players in different ways and helping some guys who maybe had like warning track power get to consistent over the fence power. And then I think it's just the general youth movement in baseball because there's just so much young talent

and guys who are coming up every year as like fully formed great hitters like Pete Alonzo, for instance. And there doesn't seem to be the same adjustment period when they get to the majors. And so you see a lot of turnover and, you know, so now you don't see Joey Votto in that group. You don't see Paul Goldschmidt in that group. You don't see Miguel Cabrera in that group. It's Pete Alonso and it's Glaber Torres and it's, you know, newish guys. And so I think that is not necessarily a bug. Maybe it's a feature. It's cool to have all these good young guys coming up and surprising us every year. But it's also, I think it makes it more difficult to kind of have those consistent stars like, you know, Mike Trout with his eight all-star selections was the hitter with the most all-star appearances in this game which doesn't seem like a whole lot i'm looking at this i think nine of these 32 players have never qualified for a batting title at all like they've never had 502 played appearances right so that's

nine of those 17 so it's partly that players are like Cattell Marte's are got much better, but a lot of them are just some of them are brand new. These nine represent a lot of different career paths. There's late bloomers like Max Muncy. And there's also like brand new players, young players. And there's a bunch of guys who had 480 plate appearances in a season before this, but never 502. Yeah, it's a mix of things. I mean, some of those guys were good last year, like Juan Soto didn't quite qualify last year. Oh, so that's another one. All right, so add one more. But he's part of this, though. I mean, Soto is part of what I'm talking about. He's the youth movement. He's the guy who comes up at 19 and rakes.

And Muncie's breakout is maybe because of some swing changes he made or you know josh bell went to see a swing coach this past winter and and he made mechanical changes and so it's a it's a bunch of things like the only guy on there who is like older and had been good before but not quite good enough is yasmini grandel i think who he got to like 125 last year and so he's basically the same guy but carlos santana is carlos santana one of them no he's at oh he's at 130s yeah i think he's been there before all right so you know it's it's recent arrivals or it's guys who did something unexpected and i think that's partly the ball it's partly youth movement i think it's you know probably a good thing, if anything, but it's notable because I've had that feeling

like when I've looked at the leaderboard and I've thought, that guy is there. And that must be kind of disorienting if you're someone who follows the sport in a more casual manner or just follows your own team and isn't so hyper aware of the league and the top prospects who are coming every year because the first half now is it's now like this process of who are these guys and how is this guy suddenly so good. So it's interesting. Anyway. I found another.

Raphael Devers had also never had 502 plate appearances. Yeah. That's another one. He had 490. So that's – what is that, 10? 10 of the 17? Yeah, but he's 22 also. We're not arguing. We're not arguing your point. I think we're maybe proving your point.

Yeah. Okay. Last thing, we talked last time about Max Scherzer forgetting what inning it was, and we were saying, or I was saying at least, that I couldn't remember another player doing that and celebrating prematurely. remember another player doing that and celebrating prematurely. And in the Facebook group, Ryan Blake pointed out another fairly recent example that actually sounds vaguely familiar to me now that Ryan mentioned it. He writes, in 2014, Fernando Rodney came into the game in the eighth inning with one on and one out and the Mariners up 5-4 on the Angels. He set down both batters he faced to finish the inning inning then shot his iconic arrow directly at the angels dugout as if he thought the game was over the angels rallied in the ninth of course trout walked to lead off the inning before pool holes doubled him home

the two then mimicked rodney and shot arrows of their own rodney eventually gave up a walk-off signal to grant green from the tacoma news tribune he woke up our dugout, Green said. He did it with Trout Pujols, Josh Hamilton coming up. You don't want to get them fired up or more wanting to get a hit than they normally do. Rodney was an all-star in 2014 and led the league in saves, so his teammates seemed fairly willing to forgive. I think it was just one of those things, Mike Zanino said, forgetting what time of the game it was we played so many innings the last three days that I think everyone was losing track and then Ryan says his favorite part is that Mike Trout said Rodney is Rodney which is similar to that's Max that's Rod yeah but anyway this was a case where a player did sort of the same thing and was actually in the game at the time, which makes it more egregious. Plus he blew the game, which makes his teammates probably less inclined to say, you know, oh, he's just quirky, but they kind of forgave him because he was having a good season. And I guess there were

extenuating circumstances. They played a lot of innings. There were a bunch of extra inning games, I think, in that series. So that was maybe part of it. There were so many extra inning games in that series. He forgot how many innings are in a baseball game. Right. I did series so that was maybe part of it there were so many extra inning games in that series he forgot how many innings are in a baseball game right um i did not know that was the backstory of that of the of trout shooting the arrow yeah uh so that's interesting to know i also don't feel like rodney typically fires the arrow at the other dugout i don't know if he does yeah usually it's like in the air yeah so in the air in the air. So it may not. I mean, maybe it wasn't him celebrating the end. Maybe he was mad at the Angels for some reason.

But I don't know. That is his typical game ending thing. So Rodney said in this article, he said, I did that for the fans, Rodney insisted, regarding his arrow at the end of the eighth. When I came on, they booeded me it's part of the game so he seemed to be maintaining that he hadn't forgotten what inning it was and that he was just uh sticking it to the fans who were booing him but i don't know sunino was catching and he seemed to think that rodney forgot so he was an extremely unpopular angel yeah he's uh he's kind of been a popular in a lot of places i guess because he's just had the reputation as someone who blows a lot of games or like makes every save interesting

which i don't know if that's deserved or not he does have a lot of saves he's been good for a very long time now i think he's just been around so long and he's like the oldest player so everyone likes the oldest player because they want him to stick around to make them feel younger yeah yeah he basically got closer money from tony regans uh despite having been not that great before and uh this was tony regans was quite unpopular at the time as well uh this move was made around the same time as the vernon wells move it was there was a series of of not great moves made around that time. And then Rodney came in, and he was exactly what he had been with the Tigers, but sometimes he had to, which just wasn't a great two years for him.

In the second year, I think he got hurt and was really bad, and then he turned his career around after that. Really, he didn't really have a good year until he was 35. Yeah, it's a weird career. Yeah, he didn't really have a good year until he was 35. Yeah, it's a weird career. Yeah, he always seemed like he was good because he had great stuff and was sometimes in high leverage. But yeah, it wasn't until he was 35 that he actually had a good year. So anyway. All right. Emails? Yeah, real quick, though, I just want to say one thing. Did you listen to Hang Up and Listen yet this week? No, not not yet there's a discussion about the nba uh with ethan strauss

about 80 of my nba coverage comes from ethan strauss appearing on hang up and listen so in in my mind he is the voice of nba coverage he's the commissioner of nba coverage just because he's on hang up a lot yeah he said something that I don't think we need to talk about, but at some point it'll probably, I'll probably refer back to it when we're talking about something else he was talking about. So the NBA is the good sport, right? Like the, all the sports are struggling right now, but not the NBA, the NBA is doing well. Isn't that your vibe? Yeah. Like the NBA is ascendant. It's culturally, it's culturally relevant. They's culturally relevant they have all they have the key demo they have all the they have the commissioner that everybody likes they're on

the forefront of everything and i had the impression that the nba is doing great and uh ethan said the opposite he said the nba i will quote him i don don't think the NBA is in a good place right now. I think it's in a bad place. He talked about tanking ratings this year. He talked about how it's only popular on Twitter. And I was very surprised to hear that. Someday when we're having a discussion about whether baseball is in a good place, I'm just going to refer back to this because otherwise I'll probably start talking about how they you know the nba is the positive example that they should follow and it might just be that all sports all sport like the concept of sport is in a bad place right now i don't know yeah well i have

heard about the ratings and i mean ratings are down for everything just everywhere because a people are cutting their cords but also just I think there are so many competing entertainment options. There's so much content out there, so much scripted TV, so many streaming networks that I think, of course, everything is suffering in that respect if you compare it to its previous popularity. And yeah, I mean, I think maybe some of our perception is warped a bit by Twitter and by the internet, which really loves the NBA. So that's probably part of it. But I don't know. Maybe when you're close to a sport as we are to baseball, as Ethan is to basketball, you

also really accentuate some of the negatives or you can see things that seem worrisome that other people might kind of discount and and they might be right to discount them maybe we make too much of them i don't know which it is in the mba's case all right since we were just bantering about verlander let's answer an email or two about verlander because i've got a couple darren says i was just searching fangrass and decided to look at some single season records since 1920. I went to pitching and then left on base percentage, otherwise known as strand rate, and noticed that Justin Verlander right now has the highest single season left on base percentage at 90.7%. He would beat 1977 John Candelaria's 88.8% back in 1977.

Basically, is this a cool record that Justin Verlander is currently breaking? I think the answer is that it's not, but I like it. I like the idea of treating left on base percentage not as a flukish thing that represents a pitcher getting lucky and that can't be repeated. represents a pitcher getting lucky and that can't be repeated i like to think that well yeah pitch some pitchers maybe can do a better job when there are men on base pitch differently get a little tougher save their best pitches for those moments make their best location in those moments and so i kind of like it i like that it's justin verlander now if zach davies was doing this i would i would not like it. It would not be fun. As like another accomplishment in Justin Verlander's incredible Hall of Fame career in which he has succeeded in both a consistent way but also in ever-changing ways, I like it.

I'm pro-caring about this in a positive way, even though normally I would speak of it as a almost negative indicator for a pitcher. Yeah. Well, I'm not going to care about it yet because we've got 45% of the season left and it's unlikely that he will actually end up breaking this record. And I don't know that he has a long track record of being great at stranding runners. He was last year. He was very good at that last year too, 85.3%. And I guess in recent years, actually, he has been very good at this, which is maybe just, it's correlated to just how good you are, right? I mean, there is a large luck component, but it also has to do with just whether you're good at getting outs and getting strikeouts, because obviously if you're good at getting outs, then you're more likely to strand runners once they've reached base. So I think that's part of it. I was sort of surprised to see that the league-wide rate really hasn't moved much in the last couple years. It's about 72%, and Verlander's career rate is like 75%, but in recent years, he's been more high 70s and even mid 80s last year. So it's sort of interesting if it represents some skill, like if he figured out how to strand runners, like sometimes

you'll see these big splits with runners on base or with the bases empty, and often it's just random and small sample, but sometimes it's like, you know, guy pitching out of the stretch or something as opposed to full windup, although I think fewer guys are even changing what they do with runners on base now than they used to. So if there's something to it, then I kind of care. If it's just random and fluky and he happened to get some outs when guys were on base,

eh, I don't know. I don't care that much. Right, yeah, that's why it has to be Verlander for me to care because I can buy almost anything from Verlander at this point. I think even if it was young Verlander, I wouldn't really care. There's a feeling that Verlander is now both awesome and wise. Yeah. You know, he talks about the juiced ball and stuff.

He just feels like Justin Verlander is coming into his own as a person. And so it fits my narrative. It fits my preferred narrative of who Justin Verlander is at this stage in his career and his life. Also, I think there's a little bit of back 15 years or so ago, Levon Hernandez was, it seemed to me, talked about a lot in baseball prospectus-ish places because of this idea that he was pitching in the way that Chrissy Mathewson used to pitch, where he would take it easy for a lot of the game, but then he had another gear when he needed to, and that that was the secret to his ability to throw 150

pitches in a start when nobody else was really doing that to throw a ton of innings and to also be you know effective despite kind of having like not not seemingly great stuff all the time and so the theory was like you save your energy you don't throw every pitch the best you can and yeah maybe you'll give up a few extra hits but you've got it in the tank when you need to and i don't throw every pitch the best you can. And yeah, maybe you'll give up a few extra hits, but you've got it in the tank when you need to. And I don't think there are a lot of pitchers since Levon Hernandez. I don't even know if that really accurately described Levon Hernandez,

but for whom that was a deliberate visible intention. And so if Justin Verlander is doing that, which I don't know if he is, maybe it is why he's allowing so many solo home runs though. And maybe that's not a great strategy in retrospect but uh the anything that you a lot of these split stats most almost all of these split stats they're just flukes right like a player is a player and if you cut the sample in half or you cut it into quarters you you're going to get crazier extremes. And usually it doesn't mean anything. And what you're hoping to find in a split stat or the story that you want to tell is

a player who is doing something on purpose. We want to see intention. So I am able to tell myself that this is Justin Verlander doing a thing if he keeps doing it, if he maintains it. Like you say, it's not that exciting right now because he's only done it for half a year. But if he sets some sort of whatever we're calling this fun fact record this year and he keeps doing this for a couple years, I will enjoy it. Okay. And the other Verlander question is from Jake M.

He says, as a lifelong Tigers fan, the disbanding and decline of their early 2010s powerhouse was painful. Their rotation was a ridiculous list of current and future Cy Young winners whose breakup hurts to look back on, wondering what could have been. But the perceived gradual decay of Justin Verlander in 2013-2014 and then the injury-ridden 2015 season was especially upsetting. Looking back at that time, I assumed Verlander had lost his stuff and was pleasantly surprised when he bounced back to full form after 2016 and was dealt away from the rebuilding Tigers to help Houston win the World Series.

In retrospect, are there any advanced statistical predictors that could have shown Verlander was just having injury-related down years rather than losing his stuff? Or are there predictors that show Verlander really hadn't lost his stuff at all and we Tigers fans were overreacting to an uptick in losses. Can these predictors be validated in analyzing pitchers we perceive as losing their stuff like Felix Hernandez, Matt Harvey, Jordan Zimmerman, etc.? There's two stages of—I think there's two different periods of Verlander's lesser years with the Tigers.

The first half, he was clearly physically compromised, and his velocity was down and he talked about how difficult it was for him out there and and it really did seem like his career might be ending and then he got core surgery and got healthy again and then his last two years with the tigers well his last year i guess his era wasn't anything special but well no i guess his dra wasn't either well his his, well, no, I guess his DRA wasn't either. Well, his last—you mean right before he was traded? Yeah, right before he was traded.

Why do I remember that he had a really good DRA? No, he did. He fixed himself mid-season before he was traded, so I think people think of him as someone the Astros fixed, and to some extent I think they helped him, and they put the high speed Cameras on him and he adjusted his slider and all that But after he started the

Season very poorly pitching for the Tigers his last 11 starts Before he was traded from July 8th to August 30th he Threw 74 innings struck out 84 walk 20 2.31 ERA 598 OPS allowed so He was basically like prime Verlander for his last,

you know, third of a season with the Tigers before the Astros acquired him. Okay. So the question of whether, what is the phrase that he used that, is there something that would have shown that it was just an injury related bump or something? Yeah. Well, he was wondering, could we have told that it was just an injury related bump or something yeah well he was wondering could we have told that it was just injury related and is it also possible that like he was okay but people underestimated how well he was pitching which i think it's not that one right because he was actually pitching worse and yeah he had lost like you know a couple ticks on his fastball and it seemed like he was actually losing his stuff.

And so then is it better if it's injury-related? If a 33-year-old is suddenly bad for two years in a row, would it ease your mind to know that he merely has an injury for two years that makes him worse? It probably would. an injury for two years that makes him worse? It probably would. I mean, it's not a good sign when a pitcher has an injury either, but at least you theoretically can recover from that, whereas you probably can't recover from just general wear or aging-related decline. So, I mean, the fact that his fastball has come back the way it has and has stayed so fast at this advanced age is very unusual. So I kind of don't blame people for thinking Verlander was, you know, on the way out, was headed downhill because that's the age. I mean, you tend to lose your fastball speed at almost every age, but you really lose it at that age and it rarely comes back.

I mean, there's studies out there about what happens when a pitcher loses a tick or two, and it's a pretty low percentage that they ever recover it. And so I don't see how you could have expected in, you know, whatever he was 32, 33 year old Verlander at that point, losing a couple of miles per hour off his fastball to gain that back and then some to throw as hard as he ever was now that he's 36 years old. I mean, he's the outlier, I think. And we didn't know that he was hurt, which I guess the lesson is maybe you account more for the possibility that a pitcher is hurt and hiding an injury because he was, right? Like he was not speaking publicly about the core problem until after the fact, right?

So I don't think we knew. I mean, maybe we knew something was going on, but didn't know how serious it was and how much it was hampering him. So maybe you keep that in the back of your mind, you know, okay, there could be some underlying issue here that if addressed will bring him back to full effectiveness, but usually that's not going to be the case. circled that and put a little note in my tickler file for just this topic, because I also have always thought it was a little bit less clear that he fixed himself after the trade, as opposed to having fixed himself before the trade. I think just looking at it, I don't know, I think it's probably fair to say that he would be a good pitcher right now if he had stayed in Detroit, or if he'd been traded to any other organization, but that he probably would not have done this extremely rare thing of reaching new heights in his mid-late 30s, which he has done.

Last year was arguably his best year, certainly one of his three or four best years. And this year, he's right about the same the same level although the home runs are weird and so probably it's fair to give both uh the astros a lot of credit for that uh while also not making it seem like the tigers had just like let this jackson pollock painting gather dust in their um in their attic like they they also had a good pitcher who was pitching well and probably would have kept pitching well. Right. Snap last? Yeah, sure. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways

Here's to days to past I love that song. Yeah? Yeah, I really love that song. You seem skeptical at first. No, I don't love the concept here. I see. But I do, I like the song a lot, and I hope that you. I see. But I do.

I like the song a lot, and I hope that you'll tell Jesse. But I have a question. I love a lot of things about this song. I think that it's got a great little, it's got a great tune. I like the, how, is it DRA or ERA minus? I think it's DRA minus. It's ERA minus? Yeah.

All right. So I like how it goes, the ERA minus or DR OPS plus, I like the minus plus little thing in there. I like the, the way that amazing ways like is it starts this like great, like end movement of the song, but it is also a holdover from the previous sentence. So like the way that it is like ending the previous sentence while starting this flourish kind of ties the two parts of the song together. And there's just a lot of information in this very short song. So the thing that I really like about it though

is that it perfectly accurately describes exactly what we do in this stat blast. It is you take a data set, sort it by something like E minus or ops plus tease out an interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it that's what we do i wouldn't have been able to put it that succinctly without having the restrictions of musical bars or whatever they are and she did it and i just think that's amazing my question is did you tell her what we do with the stat blast? Like,

are these your words and she put them to music? No, I did not write the lyrics. Man, it's very perceptive. Holy cow. Yeah. I may have described the concept. I mean, she listens to the podcast sometimes, but I definitely did not pick out the words. So yeah, good job, Jesse. It's so good. All right. So this is a question about Shohei Otani. It is from Eric who writes, imagine you could set up an OOTP style baseball simulator and have Otani face Otani a season's worth of times, 700 plate appearances or so.

What would Otani's batting line be? What would Otani's ERA, K percentage, et cetera, be? And this is, I think this is a fun question that we have all not been thinking enough about. It feels like, I don't feel like I've read this article or heard this done yet. It seems like you would. Who would win, Otani or Otani? So I just use log five to figure this out. And so log five is of course a method that Bill James developed to figure out how often a team of one quality would beat a team of another quality if you know their winning percentages. And later it was adapted to also handle batter

pitcher matchups. And so the way that I do log five for batter pitcher matchups is first I take their strikeout percentages and figure out how often they would strike out. And then I take their walk rates and figure out among all the non strikeouts, since it seems to me that the strikeout comes first and preempts any other outcome, how often they would walk. And since those preempt any other outcome, I then figure out the home run rate for all non-strikeouts and all non-walks. And then I figure out the BABIP for all non-strikeouts, walks, or home runs. And then once I have the number of expected hits, I just use the batter's normal breakdown of singles, doubles, and triples, because that doesn't really feel to me like it needs to be needs to be log five. It can just be a representation of the batters,

spray, tendencies, and speed and power. So I did this for Otani versus Otani. And I don't know, it's actually turned, it's kind of easy because if you look at each of these categories and they're all in each of them, one of the shohei otani's is fairly average and so what uh log five will normally do is like if you say you strike out 40 of the time and the league average is 22 of the time and then you're facing a pitcher who strikes out 40 of batters which is also way more than average then you're going to end up with a much higher strikeout rate and so this is a way of handling like players who are on different sides of league averages

or far away from league averages. But in this case, because like, for instance, Shohei Otani's walk rate as a hitter is essentially the same as the league's walk rate, then Shohei Otani as a pitcher is going to have pretty much the same walk rate. And Shohei Otani as a pitcher allows a league average home run rate.

So Shohei Otani, the hitter a league average home run rate. So Shohei Otani, the hitter, will hit about a normal amount of home runs, a Shohei Otani-ish level of home runs. Strikeouts, Otani as a hitter is pretty close to the league average as a strikeout hitter. And so the pitcher will strike out roughly the same number. BABIP, they're both extreme, which is not surprising because Shohei Otani, the pitcher, has a very small sample. And that's the one that the true talent is least likely to show through in 200 plate appearances as a pitcher. So Shohei Otani, the hitter, has a much higher BABIP than the average, but Shohei Otani, the pitcher, allows a much lower BABIP than average. I used only Otani's stats against right-handed pitching

because Shohei Otani is a right-handed pitcher but i did use all of shohei otani the pitchers stats against everybody partly because he has not that much platoon split partly because it's a reverse platoon split and i figured that that was likely to be misleading more than revealing and partly because 200 plate appearances did wait i forget what my first one did i already say this small sample 200 plate appearances. Wait, I forget what my first one was. Did I already say this? Small sample, 200 plate appearances. I need all of them. So I used all of those.

So if they were to face each other 600 times, if Shohei Otani only faced Shohei Otani, then the batter would strike out 191 times, which is pretty high, not surprising. He would walk 63 times. He would hit 41 homers. And this would be his slash line. He would hit 252, 330, 533. So that would be a pretty good batter. That's basically Chris Davis. WOBA, it's a WOBA of 357. The 1999 Yankees had a WOBA of 358. They scored 900 runs and the league allowed a 5.30 ERA against them.

That all sounds about right. So I believe that Shohei Otani, the hitter, would bat 252, 330, 533 with 40 home runs. I believe that Shohei Otani, the pitcher, would have a 5.30 ERA and a ton of strikeouts. And so now you have those numbers. Do they seem plausible to you? Yeah. So it's essentially saying that Shohei Otani, the hitter, makes Shohei Otani, the pitcher, look worse than the other way around. That is right.

Which makes sense because Otani's stats as a hitter thus far are superior to his stats as a pitcher thus far, presumably. It's partly that. It's also partly that this is almost always what happens when you do log five between good pitchers and good hitters, the good hitters always look like they are still good. And I, one time I did a whole log five article about like good matchups, like fun matchups. I forget who I had, but like, uh, Tony Gwynn against Greg Maddox was one of them. And Barry Bonds against who knows who was one of them. And anytime you had a great, even an elite hitter, even Barry Bonds against Pedro Martinez, which it probably was, that's what it was.

It was 2004 Bonds against 1998 or 99, I think, Pedro. And Bonds still has like crazy numbers, like lead the league in OPS numbers. And that, at the time time I thought, wow, is that a, is that a bug? Is this, does this break down when you're talking about great hitters? And then I started looking at all these players stats against each other. And you know, you have a lot of instances where hall of famers faced hall of famers a couple hundred times and the hitters numbers are always really good. Like they not as good they get worse they drop 100 points but they are still good and i think that that's just how it goes there's more i think there's more variation between the best hitter in the lineup and the bottom of the lineup than

there is between the best pitcher in a rotation usually and the bottom of a rotation or the the the bullpen and so when you take out all the bad hitters in the lineup then and you make a pitcher face a great hitter every time it's just impossible to get to get him out that much so for instance i did mike trout against felix hernandez because at the time mike trout Trout had actually hit Felix Hernandez for like an absurd line, like he had a 1300 career OPS against Felix Hernandez in 40 plate appearances. And so if you do log five, it's not nearly that extreme. But Mike Trout would turn Felix Hernandez into Randy Wolfe, who at the time that was a lot worse. And Felix Hernandez would turn Mike Trout into Matt Holliday who at the time was still an all-star and so Greg Maddox and Tony Gwynn and Bartolo Colon as a hitter versus Craig Kimbrell that's crazy what an idea Sam uh and Barry Bonds against Pedro and those are the ones I did anyway

if you play this if you actually go into the to the world and you look and you look at like, well, how did Stan Musial do against Warren Spahn? They faced each other like 400 times. I'm going to look that up for you right now. Stan Musial faced Warren Spahn 353 times. He hit 318, 415, 566, which is a 981 OPS. And you see that a lot, actually, turns out. So I think log five is actually working here. You see that a lot, actually, it turns out.

So I think log 5 is actually working here. Yeah. Maybe it's also because pitchers have only so much control over what happens to balls in play, but batters have a lot of it. So, for instance, Rob Arthur wrote something for 538 in 2015. He found that a baseball's exit velocity is five parts hitter, one part pitcher. exit velocity is five parts hitter, one part pitcher. And Mike Fast had done an earlier article, I think based on hit effects that also found that the batter has more influence on the quality of contact than the pitcher. So maybe that plays into it too, because you're still going to get the pitcher allowing the same BABIP that he usually does. But if he's facing a hitter with like a 330 BABIP or something, then that's what he's going to allow in that matchup, and it isn't going to suppress the batter's natural BABIP that much.

That's a good point. Well, I think also the difference between a great pitcher and a bad pitcher in home runs allowed has historically been fairly small. Like, you know, if you look at Justin Verlander, who's been a great pitcher throughout his career, his home run rate has always been pretty average, pretty normal. Whereas if you take a great hitter, his home run rate is going to be a lot higher than the average, the league average. That's what makes him a great hitter. And those home runs stay. And so like Shohei Otani is facing a really good pitcher in Shoheihtani, but the home runs stay. And if you're hitting 41 home runs, you're just not going to be bad. Right. Yeah. Okay. Let's see if we can get a couple more in here. Russ says in the fifth inning of today's game between the Nationals and the

Royals, the Nats number eight hitter hit a ground ball to second recording the second out and advancing the runner from first to second. Next to hit was Nats pitcher Patrick Corbin, who has an 88 batting average for the season. As Corbin took the plate, the Nats commentator casually referred to the runner on second as being in scoring position. This got me thinking. With the pitcher at the plate and two outs, the runner, Brian Dozier, was almost certainly not in a position to score. In fact, his odds of scoring would have to be considerably higher if he were at first base with a home run hitter like Anthony Rendon or Juan Soto at bat. A little googling led me to the baseball perspective stat called the number, the percentage of a team's runs that score through home runs, sorting all team seasons by

number. It seems that there are 11 teams all time that have scored more than 50% of their runs via home run. Six of those are 2019 teams. All the other teams in the top 20 are from 2010 or later. And that's true. The league-wide Guillen number has skyrocketed recently. He continues, even expecting these numbers might regress a bit, there appears to be a clear trend toward run scoring independent of what base a runner occupies. Is the concept of being in scoring position losing relevance as it becomes more important simply to get runners on base?

Or I guess just to hit homers. are fewer singles more homers so does that mean that we should do away with the concept of scoring position wow six of 11 yeah this year man the baseball is nuts yep this is a great question i think that the point was always well So when we say, why do we say someone is in scoring position? Why do we say it? Why do we feel the need to say it? I think it's because you can score on a single and a single is the most common type of hit, I guess. Well, but why do we need to say it?

I'm not like, I'm building up something. Okay. We need to say it because what we're trying to capture is that like the state of the game is more exciting now yeah suspense yeah suspense the stakes are higher the margin is lower i think that's mainly what it is is that the margin is lower so if you're the pitcher you now know that you can no longer make a mistake and i think that russ is right that the range of what a mistake is is much higher in a home run era.

And the idea that you can like leave your TV because no runs are going to be scored in the next minute because nobody's on base is not, it was never true. There've always been home runs. It's even less true now. And with a runner on first as well, like I don't know that a pitcher really would even consider a runner on second and a runner on first as well, like I don't know that a pitcher really would even

consider a runner on second and a runner on first to be dramatically different any longer. Now, one of the differences is that if you're a pitcher, to get beat on a home run usually requires getting beat on a home run. Whereas getting beat on a single, you often beat the batter. Like it's very common that a single is a flare, a broken bat, a blooper, something stupid. And so there's still that idea of, of like danger, danger. Like it's, uh, you not only as a pitcher have to be on top of your game, but you have to be even a little bit better on top than on top of your game because you need to eliminate the chance

of luck, the eliminate the likelihood of like, you can't just say it's me against the batter and whoever wins wins because you have to do more than win you have to now dominate this situation and so i do think that having a runner on second elevates the stakes and lowers the margins but i feel like what scoring position should really be is neither of these things it it should be when there's a runner on third with less than two outs and maybe even i would say a runner on second and nobody out because then you don't need a hit at all like you've now reached the point where there are three outs and you must traverse four bases in an inning to score. And if you get on first base with nobody out,

well, you can't trade an out for a base and expect to score. You have to somehow beat that math some way. And so you need to steal a base or go on a wild pitch or go first to third or something like that. Well, first to third would require a hit. But the point is that you need to break the stalemate of like base for out base for out because otherwise the defense is going to win the inning is going to end before you get there so i think if you get ahead of that math if you're two outs from home with three outs to go or one out from home with two outs to go i would maybe

consider that to be scoring position still. It's a different thing. It's a different scenario that the way that you can play the game has changed. And now if you want, you can bunt. You can just bunt outs until you score. And there isn't really a term for that. Surprisingly, there isn't a term for that. Like it's very wordy to have to say runner on third less than two outs. We've never come up with a phrase for that.

Why is it? Why has baseball not come up with a term for that? that's that's uh yeah we don't really have that i guess it's like a sack fly situation maybe i don't know yeah also wordy yeah so anyway it's not like i'm gonna it's not like we're gonna take scoring position and redefine it as being that but i would say that russ's point that it is mostly outdated is true it is also still a not unsubstantial subset of offensive situations that probably deserves its own name scoring position maybe is no longer maybe what it is is that we still need a term for that we still can use a term for you can score on a single but this is no longer the most precise term. Right. Yeah. It's never been technically true, obviously, because you can score from any base at any time and you can fail to score from second on a single at times, but it's kind of a handy

shorthand and it's nice to vary up the terms and not have to just say runner on second, runner on third, etc. And it has historical weight. We all know what this means when we hear it. So it's sort of a synonym, but it enables us to describe a situation very quickly and clearly. And it doesn't really reflect reality as closely as it used to. It's true. reflect reality as closely as it used to. It's true. But I don't know what we would adjust it to. And I don't know that we necessarily need to. But when you hear that, I think you should be conscious of the fact that maybe it should generate less suspense in you, less excitement in you

than it once would have because scoring position is less likely to score than it once was. Yeah. And we have talked about how part of the strain that this era causes for pitchers is that they now have to treat every pitch as though there's a runner in scoring position up and down the lineup in any situation, really even in any count, you now must be very careful about not making the wrong mistake because that's a run. And that was one of the reasons that was speculated for why there were so many more mound visits before the league limited them. Because pitchers were, A, needed to be in a lot better communication with their catchers.

They needed to plan, like almost, they had to plan every pitch because you couldn't make, you couldn't get away with a mistake like levon hernandez used to be able to get away with a mistake with nobody on base and the number seven hitter up and you also were just more exhausted like this strain of throwing your best pitch over and over and over because everybody's in de facto scoring position all the time that takes a lot out of you. So in practice, yes, scoring position as a concept to pitchers is clearly now omnipresent. The phrase itself, well, a lot of phrases that start out literal become kind of idioms after a while.

Right. Okay, I've got about five more minutes. Let's do one more from Paul who says, I was watching MLB TV the other day, just flipping through games, and I heard a commentator make an interesting remark. I honestly don't remember the game or even really the context of this quote, but it must have been in regard to a recently called up prospect. He said, it's hard to make it to the majors.

It's even harder to stay there. Is that really the case? I think depending on who you're talking about, it is extremely difficult to even make one appearance in a Major League Baseball game. I know zero people personally who've ever played Major League Baseball. Seems pretty hard to me to just get there. Yeah. So this seems like a simple math problem. And so my first thought was, yes, this emailer is correct because out of 7 billion people this year, only

a thousand or, you know, some hundreds will make the majors, but then out of a thousand major leaguers, many hundreds will stay in the majors. And so it seems much easier to stay in the majors. But I realized that I was, I was committing some sort of fallacy because also 7 billion people will not stay in the majors. Uh, they, they, of those 7 billion people will not stay in the majors. Of those 7 billion people, more are likely to make the majors than stay in the majors. It requires a higher level of play to stay in the majors. or like clubby aspect of baseball, whereby once you have major leaguer on your bio, you look like a major leaguer and teams are going to treat you like a major leaguer. And until you have that,

you are always just unproven AAA guy that nobody will trust. And this is very different. However, like with the Stompers, if you had, you know know once we knew you you were just kind of there until the end of the year like we had a really hard time getting rid of you even if you were terrible and didn't actually have a work visa but we wanted to bring someone in even if you had hit 600 in a pretty good college program

and our spreadsheet said that you were going to be a superstar. Nobody trusted you. It was a very uphill climb and everybody wanted their friend there. They did not want new guy from Mississippi. So there's that aspect of it. But no, I think that it is harder to stay in the majors than to make the majors. Um, I think that my chances of making the majors are slightly higher than my chances of

staying in the majors. Yeah. I went through the same process and reached the same conclusion. It's just, if you assume that baseball is a meritocracy and that you have to continually justify your position on the roster. You have to be a major league quality player to be on it the first day, and you also have to be a major league quality player to be on it the 2000th day. Then obviously the more days, I think, that you are supposed to deserve a roster spot, the harder it is to deserve one that many times, right? To stay deserving of one. That's the way I was thinking of it. So I think it's true from that perspective. And of course, it's not true from the perspective. Well, I guess it's not

really true from any perspective, but it seems like it's true from the first perspective. And yet, even so, I think it's not true, but it's probably not true at all in any way. So I think. Look, it seems like a very simple math. Like this is a very simple logic question. All players that stay in the majors make the majors, but not all the players that make the majors stay in the majors.

However, if let's say hypothetically, when you made the majors, someday they just cut it off. They said we're not taking any more. And you're like it's easier, for instance. Could you argue that it's easier to stay on the Supreme Court than to make the Supreme Court? Yeah, probably. Right. Because it's a lifetime appointment.

Yeah. Or if you're talking about life expectancy, maybe like it's harder harder to, if you say like, I want to live to 85 or something, that's not easy. Most people don't do that. But if you live to 81, then you're very likely to live to 85. if you make it to a certain point, it's pretty easy not to die. And it's hard not to die for 85 years, but it's relatively easier not to die for four years, even though you're in your 80s at that point. To be, yes, it is, yes. Look, it's easier to turn, well, I don't know.

I don't want to get there. But you want to be an actuary. That's your dream career, get there but you want to be an actuary that's your dream career right i do want to be an actuary that or exterminator one of the two maybe they're related so all right i think we've we should ask oliver drake this question yeah probably so i have heard i feel like i just got my i feel like like I just joined the club. Made an Oliver Drake reference. Yeah. I do think there has been kind of a cachet to being a big leaguer in the past. And that even at the majors, I mean, it was definitely true for the Stompers. But even in the majors, I think there was something to the idea of he's a big leaguer.

He's proven that he belongs. And there's much more uncertainty when you're going to trust a rookie who hasn't proved it. And I think maybe there's still that perception, but I think it's probably reduced now, A, because we understand that minor league performance is very predictive of major league performance because so many minor leaguers have transitioned to the majors with almost no problem because we have better data now to accurately assess whether someone is a major league quality player based on their performance. So I think the reputation aspect of it plays less of a part today. But I think in the past, it's been a big thing. All right, we will end there.

All right. All right. There's one more question I wanted to answer quickly because Sam already answered it via Patreon. This is from John, a Patreon supporter. He says, my five-year-old son is walking around the house singing Take Me Out to the Ball Game with the wrong words. One, two, three strikes, you're out of the old ball game.

This now has me thinking, how different would baseball be if the penalty for striking out was immediate ejection? First thought is that we'd see everybody turn into slap-hitting contact guys to avoid being ejected, so there would be fewer home runs except for late in games when your team is trailing and you can risk an ejection for the shot at a home run. How would the pitchers respond? How would you go for strikeouts against batters who are up there with the guillotine over their necks? GMs would have to adapt their roster construction as well because you never know when several of your hitters will be ejected in the

first few innings. Can we get an independent league to experiment with this rule? Who knows, maybe we can. We have an independent league experimenting with stealing first base now. Anything's possible. But as Sam responded to this question, if anything, baseball's problem is that its stars are on the screen too infrequently. This seems like a ratings disaster. By the first inning, your two most famous players might already be out of the game. That is true. It would be like the All-Star game where all the good guys are gone by the middle of the game, which doesn't really make for that great a spectator experience, I don't think. So that's part of it. Another thing is that while we talk a lot about strikeouts being boring and anti-spectator, I think it's important to remember

that weak contact is also pretty boring. Slow rollers to second base, sacrifice bunts, these things are boring. These are arguably more boring than no contact at all. And I don't think I would want to watch a sport where everyone was solely concerned with making contact. And obviously this wouldn't work very well with 25 man rosters. So you'd have to change the roster rules somehow to account for the fact that you need a full bench to replace the guys who strike out. This would be a problem in a lot of ways. So John, I am glad that your five-year-old son and his misinterpretation of the lyrics is not governing how the game is actually played.

But thank you for the question. You can go get my book about baseball's player development revolution. It is called The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. If you read it and you like it, please leave us an Amazon review and a Goodreads review. Those things do help us out. You can also support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged their support and qualified for some perks, such as my mentioning them right now, Jonathan Bohal, Danielle, Brian, Great Bay, and Alan Kramer. Thanks to all of you. You can

join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. And you can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with one more episode later this week. It will actually be a third Sam episode, because he and Meg swapped episodes, because Sam will be away next week.

So, we will talk to you soon. Unless I kill it first instead. And when they come for me I'm gone There's just the accolades Sitting up on my shelf I'm a man now And I'm stinging it to myself

Stinging it to myself Stinging it to myself