Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1418: Clutch, Clayton, Mickey, and More

Episode Date: August 17, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Bryce Harper’s clutchness and how he’s perceived by fans, Clayton Kershaw’s resurgence, and Mickey Callaway’s comments about analytics, then answer listener emails about the same player batting twice and playing two positions, whether Byron Buxton’s defense has hidden value, career WAR vs. career counting stats, whether players could […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1418 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanCrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. I wrote an article this week about Bryce Harper and about his first season as a Philly and sort of judging it on its merits. And a few things have changed in the last few days, but not really. Yeah. Yeah. You always root in the days after an article

for the premise to hold up. And because the judgment was a little complicated, the fact that whatever happened was going to also complicate it further. And I wasn't even sure whether what I wanted. I don't know. I didn't even know what I wanted to happen to support what I wrote. But here's one of the key things that I wanted. I didn't even know what I wanted to happen to support what I wrote. But here's one

of the key things that I wrote, and I'm going to lay it out with updated stats because I actually just have a question for you about it. Bryce Harper is 89th in the majors in war this year at Baseball Reference. He is tied with Lurie Garcia. He's tied with David Fletcher. He's tied with the 50 games that Jordan Alvarez has played. He is 61st in OPS+. He is just behind Omar Narvaez and Tim Anderson and Tommy LaStella, but he is fifth in the majors in win probability added. He is in a virtual tie for third, in fact, with Cody Bellinger and Freddie Freeman. That cluster of three basically tied players is behind only Christian Jelic and Mike Trout. And so my question is very simple. It is, if you had an MVP ballot, would he be on it? And where would he be? I was going to start this episode by asking you a similar question, not quite this question, but no, I don't think he would. I think he has been extremely clutch. You wrote about it. Then he hit the grand slam, the walk-off grand slam that has been his signature moment as a Philly so far.

And Craig Edwards also wrote about his clutchness at Fangraphs on Friday. I think clutchness, I'm sure we've talked about it before in the context of award races, but it's sort of a tiebreaker for me, I think, It's sort of a tiebreaker for me, I think, more so than it is something that I would base a candidacy on or vote for someone over someone who had been way better in all situations, context independent. So what I was going to ask you was how much you think it affects the fans' perception of the player. Bryce Harper now has a 122 WRC+. He's been hitting much better recently, but if he ended here, I think that would be considered disappointing or less than what we thought he would produce in his first season as a Philly. I wonder whether he just gets a pass for that more so than he would if he had average clutchness but the same overall stats and I assume he does to a certain degree I don't know where the line is like when obviously if you produce in the playoffs and you have those moments then that can really contribute to your legacy if you do it in a single season during the regular season if it's well timed does that help because it's not something that anyone really sustains year after year yeah it's a great question that's hard to answer that it's always hard to know uh what the what the reaction to bryce harper in the stadium is unless you're there all the time because there are all there

are often references here and there to him being booed or to many players being booed but when you drill down into it you can't tell it sort of seems like maybe it was actually just two people who were booing him or and then especially in philadelphia it's hard to know like where the irony kicks in or maybe not the irony but the self-awareness kicks in in those booos i mean he it certainly seems like he was genuinely booed late in in april uh but that there's been uh yeah not a it hasn't uh despite what i would consider to be a you know below expectations season from him so far overall it doesn't seem like there's been uh a lot of like sort of rejection of him he still seems to be as far as I can tell, fairly appreciated.

People are glad he's around, certainly. Yeah, probably helps that no other Phillies are having really great seasons. Right. Which maybe makes him look better by comparison. Right, which we can talk about in a second. But the tricky thing, though, is his particular brand of clutchness this year is a lot of sort of hidden clutchness you know there are a lot of situations that are like leverage of 2.5 or something which is a you know a pretty good deal a pretty good situation but you don't think of it as being like super clutch so it might be like leading off the

sixth inning in a tie game is i don't exactly know what that is but that's like that's a decently that that probably counts as high leverage well in fact leading off the well that's a let me see let me see what i can find here leading off the seventh inning down one is basically like a right on the border between clutch and medium leverage. And so like nobody's thinking of that as clutch. Nobody has that in mind when they say he's a clutch hitter. They have a very, very, very small subset of the actual high leverage at bats that they're thinking of.

And Harper has in the last week has had two huge moments in those situations. One was a seventh inning homer against a high leverage reliever down by one to give a, you know, to turn it into a two run lead. I think everybody thinks of that, that they can recall that. And then of course, a walk off grand slam when you're trailing is another one. And so everybody will think about that. But before that, he had one really high, high impact, high visibility clutch hit in July. So that is just to say that my guess is that before a week ago, this was not part of his narrative that I don't think that if you were just a Philly fan watching him, you would

be able to recall that this particular ratio of one split to another applied to him unless you happen to be looking at leaderboards. So I don't think it probably played a great deal into his reception. But now I think it might. This last week has been pretty significant for, I think, bringing that narrative into the highlight reels. Yeah, I think so. And yeah, that's probably something that diffuses some of the fan tension.

I mean, it depends how he ends the rest of the season and how the Phillies do in the wildcard race, but I think it helps. I don't know if it counts for one clutch homer like that, that's sort of a signature homer. I don't know how many homers in garbage time that equates to when it comes to fans liking you or not, but it probably really helps when there's a moment that surfaces in their head when they think of, oh, Bryce Harper, his first season as a Philly. What did he do? Oh, he hit that big walk-off grand slam

and then he sprinted around the bases really fast. That is probably the highlight. Assuming that the Phillies don't win the World Series, that is probably the highlight that will be replayed the most from this year. That will be the... I mean, I don't even know what broadcasts are like anymore because i only see the the mlb tv broadcasts which start after the broadcasters are already talking but when i was a kid uh certainly and when i was watching on on television there would always be like uh like like the intro to the game there'd be like music and there'd be like highlights of the team playing.

And they'd be like, it's the Phillies, right? And so they're usually like the Kevin Mitchell catch, for instance, was part of that for the Giants for like three years. That was a particularly lasting highlight for broadcast introductory music footage. And I would say that the Bryce Harper video is probably the one that Phillies fans will see more than any other highlight, more than any other single play over the next year. And to bring another bit of banter into it, that sprint was like, it's hard to do anything with a trot, to be honest. It's hard to do anything with a with the trot to be honest it's hard to do much with the trot that hasn't been done and obviously people have sprinted before but to me that was an all-time trot and i will remember that trot as one of the uh great moments of this baseball season no matter what happens with the phillies and it was a beautiful

home run so now i think i think that he is i I think it would take a lot to undo that goodwill now going forward. And I don't even know if he could choke hard enough over the last two years to over the last two months to really get booed again. which is where would I put him on an MVP ballot if I would put him on an MVP ballot I find this a very hard question that I go back and forth on and that I don't think I'm consistent on necessarily year for year by year but last year I did have an MVP ballot it was the first time I voted in that particular award and there were what there were seven wasn't it that there were basically seven players who in a typical year might have won the thing and it was very hard to decide who to put where especially after you got past trout and and bets and i actually made a choice for how to incorporate win probability added which was i i had seven players who i thought were were all qualified to be on a ballot. And I replaced their offensive

value in war with win probability added in war. So that is kind of like a tiebreaker, but it's more than a tiebreaker. I prioritized the win probability added for each of those seven. But if you were not one of those seven, I didn't even look at it. So I was not going to let win probability added create a candidate. And so that is kind of, I think, in the same philosophical ballpark as tiebreaker, but a little bit more foregrounded than that. Yeah, that makes sense. So I wanted to mention that the second best pitcher by war since the start of July, the best pitcher is Jacob deGrom. The second best pitcher, this is Fangraphs War, is Clayton Kershaw. And I talked about Kershaw, I think, with Meg a couple times earlier

this year. And we were talking about how, you know, he's diminished and he's not what he was, but he's still grinding it out. And he's a good, solid, above-average starting pitcher. And it's heartening that he's been able to stay on the field after coming back from his season-opening injury. And maybe this is giving us hope that he could have a productive decline phase. And in his last seven starts, he has been something much closer to peak Clayton Kershaw. He has a 1.4 ERA with a FIP just over 2. He's striking out almost 12 batters per 9 over that period. This seems to be a different more than he had been doing recently because as his fastball velocity has diminished, his slider has come to resemble it more and more in terms of

its speed and also its movement. And so he has slowed the slider down and he's made various slider adjustments over the years and hard sliders and soft sliders, but he seems to have found a differential that works, even though he throws about 90 miles per hour right now. And that's really kind of cool. There's only so much you can do. I mean, I don't think this would work if he were throwing 80 and he said, I'll throw 72 mile per hour sliders or something. I don't think you can do this indefinitely. At a certain point, it stops working. But he has found an adjustment that has brought him back to the peak of his powers, at least for a stretch of six weeks or so, which has been fun to watch. And not that the Dodgers needed peak Kershaw back, but if they have him back, then that makes them even more imposing

heading into the playoffs. Anyway, it just sort of reinforces the fact that declines aren't always linear and that sometimes players figure something out and they get back to their former level for a little while and then they tail off again. And I was just thinking that I really don't feel at all confident in my ability to predict how players will age and decline. I mean, you can look at cohorts of players and you can try to look at comparable players and players with similar skill sets and how do they age. And maybe there are some broad takeaways from that, but really from pitcher to pitcher, it's so hard to predict or for hitter to hitter for that matter. You might look at certain players and say, oh, he has this skill set and that should hold up well, or he has a certain approach that should keep him productive late into his career. And sometimes it's true and

sometimes it's not at all true. So like Zach Greinke, for instance, he's someone I think we thought, oh, he'll age well because he's so smart about pitching and he's got all these different pitches and he's got great command and finesse. And I kind of thought the same thing about Felix Hernandez, who has been a complete disaster because he threw a ton of pitches and it looked like he would have so many ways to win. And, you know, Joey Votto, for instance, is another one who I always thought, oh, well, he'll figure out how to compensate for declining skills. And maybe he did for a while, but last year he kind of lost his power and now he's sort of lost everything to the point that he's a league average hitter. At a certain point, you just can't really compensate for the declining physical skills. So very unpredictable, but nice when a player who you think maybe has left that peak behind manages to get back up there, at least for a little while. One thing that's interesting about Kershaw is that we started to talk about his decline in 2017, even though he was second in Cy Young voting and led the league in ERA, because his fit had gotten much worse. Like he had been a elite ERA,

elite FIP guy for years and years. And then suddenly he was an elite ERA guy with a bad FIP. And it was like, uh-oh, warning flags. And then next year, 2018, he also had a good ERA, very good ERA, a little bit worse, but a very good ERA, but also the same FIP from the year before.

And that seemed, we treated that as confirmation that he was no longer the best in the game and that he wasn't as good as he had been, probably accurately so. He was also losing his fastball the whole time. He was losing his fastball, right. So the eye test, it was not passing. I'm not denying that he was getting worse, but yeah, the eye test and the fit were both failing. And then this year, he still has the declined fastball.

He still has the kind of bad fit, but we have, it feels like this process, you could argue that this process is about Clayton Kershaw figuring out how to adjust. Or you could also argue that it is simply us becoming more comfortable with the fact that whatever he is doing right now is fit beating. And that maybe this is just, maybe this that whatever he is doing right now is is fit beating and that maybe this is just uh maybe maybe maybe this is who he is he's able to do it for right now well over this most recent stretch the fit is great too so monster as well remember the year that he had 172 strikeouts and walked 11 that was pretty good that's so incredible i can't believe that he didn't win the cy young

that year it still makes me mad just because he didn't throw you know just because he only threw 149 innings i'm a i'm a i'm an innings total doesn't matter that much in cy young voting guy you might recall from that time he was so much better than anybody else and uh to me it doesn't matter if you're 50 innings short of the other players. It's not a value stat. It's a best pitcher stat. And I think he was the best pitcher. And he met whatever minimum I need to prove that.

172 strikeouts, 11 walks. One of them intentional. Yeah. By the way, Ben, by the way, his FIP over the last, I don't know what stretch you're looking at, but his FIP over any stretch recently, I guess the strikeout rate is up a little, but mostly it's just that he hasn't been allowing home runs. And that's a smallish sample. So he had five strikeouts and five walks in a game. He had nine strikeouts and three walks in a game. He had seven strikeouts and two walks in the game. So those are three of the last six. So it is not like he is doing like Max Scherzer July, June, June. Was it June? June or July?

I forget. What was his crazy month this year? June? I don't know. It's not like he's doing that thing where Scherzer struck out like 74 and walked three in a month. Yeah, that's true. His XFIP is only 3.26. Thank you.

So since we talked on our most recent episode about what we would miss if there were suddenly a strike in the middle of this season, I really have been thinking more and more about how much I'm anticipating a Dodgers-Astros World Series. series normally i don't really root for anyone to make the world series or for any specific matchup or i'm not that invested in it really and i don't want to turn off any fans of other teams who want their teams to win but it just really feels like it would be appropriate if those teams faced each other again this season and i'm not going to say the season will be a letdown if it ends up being two other playoff teams and won't make me think any less of the Dodgers and the Astros if they don't make it but boy it just feels right that they should face off again they're just so good are you generally a root for the surprise thing to happen or root for the i don't know most reflective thing to happen i don't know i i like surprises but i also like feeling like the world is somewhat predictable so

those kinds of things are kind of incompatible i guess i like mostly predictable but at least one big surprise so in the playoffs, nothing does surprise me. It's like you almost can't surprise me if a certain team beats another team because they're all really good teams and short series and all of that. So nothing really throws me for a loop when it happens in the playoffs. But this year, I think unless something changes in the next six weeks or so, I'm just going to be rooting for the most predictable thing to happen. Okay. So last thing, before we get to some emails, Jeff and I, occasionally we would take a quote and try to justify it or explain why it was more defensible than it sounds. defensible than it sounds. And I wanted to see if we could do that with the Mickey Calloway quote that got bandied about this week, the famous 85% of our decisions go against the analytics

quote, which was roundly pill-read, I think, as the latest example of Mets dysfunction. That is literally data, too. He is using analytics, analytics essentially to measure how often he varies. Well, he said, I bet 85% of our decisions go against the analytics. So he's going with his gut. Yeah. So the full quote, yeah, I bet 85% of our decisions go against the analytics. And that's how it's always going to be because that is just on paper. It doesn't take into account the person as a human being, how he performs in these big spots, all these things that is just on paper. It doesn't take into account the person as a human being, how he performs in these big spots, all these things that a manager looks at. So you're going against analytics most of the time. It can be challenging. There is a reason a lot of teams

are going on analytics because it says this guy for this spot, this guy for that spot. That doesn't always work. We all know that. you have to understand what is going on with a player lately that has come into play so it does add a little bit of a dynamic if certain struggles are there but that is what you have to deal with so we'll continue to try to make the best decisions we possibly can and hopefully we get performance from it i can defend this ben all right do it obviously he makes thousands and thousands of decisions every week that he takes for granted because he didn't need to get an opinion on them but these would all be decisions that the analytics would back up for instance he has jacob de grom start every fifth day the analytics would

definitely tell him start jacob de grom tonight if you. Don't start a pitcher that you just called up from AA. You know, don't pinch hit for Michael Conforto with Seth Lugo. Okay. The analytics would say that and he doesn't do it. He sticks with the analytics on that. Analytics are, I mean, are confirming, would confirm nearly all of the decisions he makes every day. There are basically just another way of like looking to see like, well, is the best player the best player?

Yes. And in those situations, he is not including those in his denominator, in his total pool, because they're not the edge cases. They're not the ones where you're really, you're really having to consult a second party. Now, we can say that, let's say that 1% of decisions that he has to make actually require an analytics input into. Now, I don't know what the right number of those are, but if I can pause that train of thought and just say that like there was, I remember, for instance, when I was in 2005, I remember doing my, I had just, I had just kind of discovered

Pocota or I don't even know if Pocota, Pocota was what, 2003, 2004. So I had just discovered this concept of a spreadsheet that will tell you who is going to do what this year. And so I figured out a way to turn all of those projections and individual categories into like an expected value for the particular two person league that I was in given the categories that we had. And I, so I like multiplied all these different things and turn them into points and then came up with a, you know, a column that I could sort. And at the top would be uh you know albert pool holes was number one and like so if it was the first pick i'd get like i'd get albert pools and mostly mostly like these things are going to conform to like what you already sort of think maybe somebody is 37th instead of 40th

and you go ah thank you know thank you projections you have given me just that slight insight into the player's aging curve but there were also like i don't know maybe five percent of the projections that i always think of as the pickerings you know the calvin pickering projection where it's not that it likes calvin pickering as a major league hitter or as a potential breakout it's that calvin pickering is like 14th on the spreadsheet like really outrageously high like they don't they look at that you know it saw the double a and the triple a stats it overlooked all of the the the red flags that one might see watching Calvin Pickering or thinking about minor league

equivalencies or anything else. And it just like it's a computer, it doesn't know when to stop itself. And so I'm not even exaggerating, like you get Calvin Pickering 14, you get he sought choice 18th or whatever. And I at the time, was not smart enough to realize that the five percent of cases where there's a blind spot are really going to just be crushingly bad like you have to you have to be able to spot the mistakes because the mistakes are not going to be five percent off they're going to be like eighty percent off calvin pickering is going to play 40 40 played appearances in april and get sent back down and now like you've got like the other guys got albert pools and you've got calvin pickering and that's just like no way to run a team right and so i feel like

if again i don't know what the percentage of times that you would want to overrule the analytics are. But it might just be that, that he's only talking about those cases where, you know, like edge cases where you would naturally prioritize your insights into the players, the scouting insights into the players, the clubhouse insights into the players. and you're going to the projections for another opinion. And in some cases, it is enough to overturn him like that. Those 15% presumably are actually changing his mind. So he would be open to changing his mind. The other 85%, you're going to it, you're listening to it, but you're ultimately concluding like there's a blind spot here, the projection system or that the analytics have not convinced me are stronger than my intuition.

And I would say probably also like something like defensive shifting. He, at this point, your defensive shifting is just taken for granted too. It is a taken for granted decision. It's not controversial to say, and now the second baseman is going to stand here and the shortstop is going to stand there. At the time that you introduce that program, though, you're giving the analytics tremendous decision-making power over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plays, but he's probably only counting that maybe once, if even that, because now it is now part of the infrastructure.

So all that said, it's a bad quote and it probably reflects a bad process. And I do not support Mickey Calloway in this moment. But I could see where this does not act. I could see many scenarios where this does not actually reflect the way decision making is done is only kind of his perception of it. actually reflect the way decision making is done is only kind of his perception of it. Yes. Well, I asked you for a generous reading and that's what you gave me. And I think you did a good job. Yeah, this would make me very worried if my manager said this in these exact terms. If a candidate said this in an interview, that would probably be disqualifying for me. But if you made the same point in different terms and you couched it and you said, oh, yes, analytics, very useful many of

the times, but there are times when they do disagree or miss something and I need to have the autonomy to overrule them and bring in something that I can see that the numbers can't see, of course, I would say, yes, that's true. And maybe that's an area where a manager can add value. If you express it like this, I would not think that. I would think, uh-oh, this guy is not going to be looking at any information I'm giving him and he's not going to be trusting it, which would be bad. So I think when he says, for example, that you have to understand how someone performs in big spots, is he claiming that he can detect clutchness?

Because if he can, then that's a powerful ability, but I don't know that I believe that he can. Or if he says, you know, you have to understand what's going on with a player lately, sure, if the player's dealing with something off the field, personal issues that the manager knows about that the stats don't, of course, that could come into play. Maybe if there's some mechanical issue that you know about that the players told you about, then that could be a factor. That could be a factor. But if he's just looking and saying, this guy has been hot lately or this guy has been cold lately, and he's making decisions based on that, that is exactly what I wouldn't want him to do.

So all told, if I were a Mets fan, this would not make me happy. It's not the worst thing that Mickey Calloway has said this season, but it's not great. But I think you did a good job of trying to salvage it. Thank you. Now, if I can just say one other thing about it, which is less generous, is that when you watch hot takes on the Internet, you know, professionals, but also amateurs, any hot take. A lot of times you get the sense that the person is saying it because it feels good to say it, that they they don't they haven't really thought this through that much. They just want to say it they just want to say it they they want to say it they're they're trying to kind of uh i don't know how to put this but they're

trying to reflect a particular attitude or a particular value or a vague sense of something that they want to signify without ever without having actually thought through like if you had tango tom tango would always make the case that when sports pundits would say like well actually i'd rather have david eckstein on my team than then uh who was a good angel vladimir guerrero that like it's easy to say that because you don't have any money on the line but if like they actually had to somehow bet on like which one is better, they would all bet on Vladimir Guerrero. But because there are low stakes, they just say the thing they want to say. And then you sort of start thinking, well, what exactly are you trying to communicate here about yourself?

Because the hot take itself is worthless. I mean, hot takes are all like pretty worthless. Takes are pretty worthless. Most opinions are worthless. They don't do anything. They're just in the air and then they're poof, they're gone. So really, it's about self-presentation. And so Mickey Calloway's whatever literal thing he's saying is probably beside the point. The subtext is what is Mickey Calloway trying to communicate to us? And what he's trying to communicate to us is hostility toward a certain, to somebody. It's hostility towards somebody. Now the question is, is the hostility to his actual team's analytics

department? Is his hostility to a actual large segment of the baseball world? Or is it just like the specific reporter asking the specific question? And he's just like kind of put off by that question or the questions he's always getting or maybe or maybe a one writer who knows but there's a certain hostility embedded in the answer to that i don't think that it is meant to be taken literally and that sounds like i'm being more generous ah just whatever but actually it's more troubling because uh if what he is trying to communicate is a hostility toward you know his boss like that's a problem yeah and if he is trying to communicate is a hostility toward his boss. That's a problem. And if he's trying to express hostility toward you, Ben, a person I respect a great deal and whose books I read, I would say that's troublesome too. Yeah.

Also troublesome if the Mets analytics are so bad that they're actually wrong. Oh, jeez. Yeah. There's that too. But Russell Carlton works there now. I'm sure that's not the case oh what if it's about russell yeah he's subtweeting russell we can't stand for that all right let us answer some questions andrew says last week when the yankees were playing the blue jays the yankees twitter account accidentally tweeted out their lineup where

didi gregorius was batting second and playing center field and also batting fourth and playing shortstop. This got me thinking, what if you could actually do this in real life? You would have six players in the field, but the advantage of having a star level player batting twice in the order. What candidate would be the best to try this with? Obvious candidates, Mike Trout playing left field and center field and batting second and third. Lindor playing shortstop in third base other would you spread the hitters out or have them bat back to back i haven't done the math my guess though is that the the math would be pretty strongly against this i mean yes there's i don't know is there i don't know who the worst defensive player in history is but i would bet the gap between that player's defense and an

empty space on the field um just in terms of like picking up singles that roll to him in left field and that kind of thing would probably be like 80 or so runs like just as a ballpark figure ballpark figure ballpark it's a i use the baseball term as a metaphor in baseball, but I could imagine it happening in a kind of a pull the goalie sort of a situation in baseball. The problem, one of the challenges of baseball is that if you're down by one run, well, status quo is likely to hold. Not quite as much now because it's a high offense era, but the status quo is the most likely thing in any inning. And so if you're down by one, you can't really, and there's one inning left, two innings left, three innings left. You can't really say, well, if I play right over a large enough sample, this will all even out for me and we'll come back. You only have a couple chances.

And the presumption is that in those chances, you're going to score zero runs so if you were desperate in the eighth inning maybe the seventh and you had a situation where you could say say you had the bottom of your order coming up and you really needed runs and you put mike trout in the ninth spot and also the first spot so that you're able to cluster two mike trouts together i could imagine that it would be worth it, particularly if you were the home team and you could, say, trade two innings of offense, although you're unlikely to bat around to get back around. But, well, maybe.

I mean, say you've got the ninth spot in the order coming up. You've got two innings to bat. You only have one more in the field. You get Trout, Trout trout and then you have eight more uh seven more spots in the lineup before you get trout trout again so that's only 11 batters in two innings not outrageous so maybe you get two trouts four trouts out of 11 hitters and you only have to play one half inning with uh nobody at uh you know with two outfielders or with nobody at second base the other i feel like um the shift that all of any scenario where you imagine a defense of eight infielders is a pointless scenario because there's no mechanism by which baseball eliminated this

isn't like soccer where you can or hockey where you can you sometimes you're actually forced to play a man down or even basketball that that game that game that Chuck Klosterman wrote about the first day of Grantland. Remember that? That's such a great article. Anyway, that doesn't happen in baseball. And it's really hard to imagine it does. So while I like to imagine eight-player defense for some reason, I can never find a reason to think about eight player defense because it's it doesn't it wouldn't happen however i feel like the shift and this was something that we talked about when we were with the stompers the shift has demonstrated in in a way that if you don't really need four

infielders all the time it helps to have four infielders but if you're willing to basically move all your all your players over to one side of the infield, then what you're saying is that you don't really need a third baseman against hitters. Now, you're bringing them over because you want extra defenders on his strong side, on his pull side. So clearly it favors you to have the fourth infield defender, but you don't need one. You could just play the equivalent of a straight up defense and leave third base open which you're happy to leave third base open so in the in this scenario where you would be playing with an eight man defense i think you would just leave the the

weak side infielder spot open and play an otherwise straight up defense and then you get two mike trouts so that's that's's how I'm saying this would work. Yeah. How would it work if you have two Trouts batting back to back and the first one gets the hit? I mean, do you just do a ghost runner? Oh, yeah, you would lose the clustering, wouldn't you? And you'd lose having Mike Trout on base

because Mike Trout's a very good base runner. I don't, I refuse to go to ghost runners in this scenario. Ghost runners is a whole different hypothetical. I don't think we're going to, we might live in a world where someday ghost runners were real and we might live in a world where someday this whatever scenario, someone just emailed us about Harper's wind probability added. Yep. Jeff and Brooklyn.

We've already answered uh wow listen to this fourth in the national league and win probability added nearly tied with cody bellinger and freddie freeman he did the same cheat that i did he is behind cody bellinger and freddie freeman just to be clear about that he is behind them anyway that i can imagine that the world goes so off the rails that there's ghost runners and i can imagine the world goes so off the rails that there's this thing where you can have mike trout bat twice but you lose a defender but those two the unlikelihood of both of those crazy worlds coexisting at the same time feels like you can't really get to it yeah in general i agree with your first stance on this, which is that the difference between going from a generic major league hitter to your best hitter that would be batting in his place is considerable, but still smaller than the difference between your fielder and just an empty field. So I think it would be difficult to do this in most situations.

So I think it would be difficult to do this in most situations. I wonder if his extreme win probability added is an indicator that fans would view his first season as a big success because he has come through and the team needed it. Well, Jeff's really got his finger on the pulse here. This is why I feel like I didn't know what to root for. The fact that Bryce Harper just had a huge clutch hit for the Phillies and that everybody is now looking at Bryce Harper's clutchness means that that's good. That should be great for my article. But because it was only one part of a wordier and more broader article, I can't say, oh, I just wrote about Bryce Harper's clutchness. It now makes me realize that I focused on the wrong part. I did not write what would have been the optimized article for this moment.

And so there's a certain amount of regret there. Okay. There we go. Step list? Yeah. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deistaplast.

Did you play it? Yes. Okay. All right. Did you play it? Yes. Okay. All right. Before I do the real stat blast, I want to give an update on last week's or the week before when it was about runners going on three, two counts with two outs and whether that actually does anything. And I found that it does increase offense. And I said, there are probably games in the recent past, there were probably some games that were in fact decided by the fact that the runner had a head start and two days ago in colorado jake lamb was on first base three two

count two outs in the ninth inning of a tie game and he took off with the pitch and he was because of that he was able to score jake lamb not the world's fastest man jake he was able to score. Jake Lamb, not the world's fastest man. Jake Lamb was able to score from first on a pop single and give the Diamondbacks a 7-6 lead in the ninth inning. So that was an extreme. Usually, I'm sure 99% of the effective extra runs that I found was runners on first being able to score on a double or runners on first and second and the runner on second being able to score on a single where runners on first and second and the runner on second being able to score

on a single where he otherwise might not have been but this is the uh rare case where in fact the running on the pitch was uh made it able for him to score from first on a single he did arizona in a wild card race a close wild card race that could be determined by a single win when this is all said and done goes ahead seven-6 in the ninth inning. And then they blew it in the bottom of the ninth and they lost. It's funny. I saw someone in the Facebook group when the Orioles got their walk-off win, their first walk-off win of the season against the Astros.

Someone posted, you know, yet again, Ben and Sam, they talked about something. And then lo and behold, it and Sam, they talked about something and then lo and behold, it happened right after they talked about it, which occasionally there has been almost an eerie coincidence where we talk about something and then it happens. But usually we're talking about, oh, this hasn't happened all season. It's so strange. This would be the first time ever that it hasn't happened. And then of course it's going to happen right after that. That's why we're talking about it in the first place, because it's so notable that it hasn't happened yet.

So probably giving us too much credit there, but we'll take it. All right. Well, this my actual stat blast is inspired by but not actually going to answer a question from Daniel, who who asked us about he had a he said, I had a Mike Trout question that I think has probably been answered in the past. When looking at the Mike Trout baseball reference page, you notice he sort of debuted as a Hall of Famer, so he didn't really have a big adjustment period. This leads me to believe that it doesn't matter if it's the first time

or the 10th time he faces a pitcher. I was wondering how his first time seeing a pitcher compares to mere mortals. Has there been much research into first time seeing a pitcher? So I did not answer this question. I am not going to talk about Mike Trout's first time seeing a pitcher. I'm going to answer a totally different question that has no actual consequences to it. I was just interested. I was just curious about it. And so I wanted to look at all the times that Mike Trout has faced a pitcher that he has only faced once. Now, this is again, this is in no way answering Daniel's question because he has faced hundreds

more pitchers a first time. They're not part of this sample. And many of these pitchers that he's faced once, he will go on to face a second time and they will fall out of this sample. I'm not telling you anything about what Mike Trout does. I was just curious about this group of pitchers who have had one chance, one chance only at Mike Trout and what they did with it. And so Mike Trout has faced about, he has faced about 200 pitchers in his career only once. Again, that number will be added to it will also be subtracted to uh but of those 200 or so

pitchers he is hitting 264 442 472 so his strikeout rate is about normal his walk rate is about normal although there's a slightly higher intentional walk rate he has homered seven times against pierce johnson nick kingham ryan o'rourke, Eric Swanson, Mark Worrell, Diego Castillo, and Francisco Cordero, the Francisco Cordero. Two pitchers have hit him, and so they had one chance, one chance only at Mike Trout, and they hit him like jerks, and they'll never get a chance to say they're sorry, or maybe they will uh but they never have yet uh two got him to double him to double plays so they had one chance at mike trout and they did the best thing possible they got him to make two outs in one trip eight are cowards and they just intentionally

walked him so anyway there's nothing particularly interesting about this but i'm gonna keep talking anyway i kept going among the pitchers are some of the uh some beloved people from effectively wild lore oliver drake faced him once and once only a small guy paul fry did once and once only rich hill faced him once only fry and hill both struck him out in their one trip colin poche bullpen poche, bullpen Pucci, got him to fly out to deep right. Elvis Luciano, the 19-year-old Rule 5 pick who this year skipped like seven levels to be in the major leagues, fairly disastrous, and yet all things considered not that disastrous. In fact, got him to pop out to shortstop this year. I'm pretty sure they'll face each other

again, although I don't know. Maybe they won't. Luciano might not be bad. I mean, if he, if you were betting on Luciano when he was in, uh, you know, high a this year, whether he would make the majors or not, given the actual actuarial tables of relievers in high a, uh, you might not have said, so maybe they never will again. Andrew Romine, who, uh, is one of my all time favorite interviews and also Mike Trout's former teammate, got him to fly out to center field. Anyway, so as noted, he had a fairly typical performance against these players, except a higher than normal on-base percentage. But if you remove the intentional walks, it's basically his exact on-base percentage, but a much lower than normal slugging percentage and a much lower batting average or somewhat lower batting average. I looked at a couple of other all-time greats just to see whether there was any trend at all. So like Babe Ruth hit 375, 565, 906.

So he had a 1500 OPS basically against these players, which makes sense. If you were Babe Ruth and you only faced a pitcher once, the odds are that it's because he wasn't very good, that he had a short career, that he was one of the worst pitchers in baseball and could only stay there for a very brief time. In fact, this is how different a time and era it was. Babe Ruth only faced 46 of these players one time. Trout's over 200. I don't know what he'll end up at, but I think that that number is more likely to go up than go down.

But Barry Bonds, whose career is closer in time to Trout's than Bonds, faced 210 of these players. So almost five times as many as Babe Ruth did. So that gives you a reason to think that Trout's will probably go up even more. Bonds also had a 1500 OPS against these players who largely are pretty bad. But Trout's, the fact that Trout's line is less than his career, besides this all being junk, is also indicative of the fact that the players he's faced once

are not by definition bad or barely major leaguers who are likely to disappear, but rather that he just has only faced them once so far. A lot of them are actually really good pitchers and he'll end up facing them a bunch of times. Jeremy Ocardo faced both Trout and Barry Bonds once. He struck out Bonds but walked Trout. And Mariano Rivera faced both Bonds and Trout exactly once. He also struck out bonds but walked trout and mariano rivera faced both bonds and trout exactly once he also struck out bonds and he also walked mike trout and um in retrospect i wish i could have seen those plate appearances they probably did not necessarily see i the first time a great player faces another great player it is often noticed or mentioned. But the last time is never known.

It's rarely known at the time that that's going to be the last time. And if I had known at the time that Mike Trout would face Mariano Rivera once and only once, I probably would have tuned in to see that. Mariano also faced his cousin Ruben Rivera only once. And he's single. Now I'm looking at, for some reason, now I'm talking about Mariano Rivera. And batters he only faced once. He only faced Larry Walker once.

Struck him out. He only faced Joey Votto once. Single. He only faced Yasiel Puig once. Tim Raines once. Buster Posey once. Friend of the podcast, Nate Fryman once. He's singled.

But batters overall that Mariano Rivera faced only once 155, 205, 182 with zero homers. He faced 283 of these players and they hit zero home runs against him. I don't know. None of this matters, but I do like, I was moved to look at this and I kept going because in my head, there was something romantic about the idea of players keeping score against each other, not just who's winning, who's team won, who's team won the world series, or even, you know, who made, who, who makes the most money or who has the best career stats, but that they're, they're keeping score specifically against each other and who owns who. And the smallest possible sample that you can have in that battle is one plate appearance.

And yet, I think that in small ways, they register that it means something to Jeremy Ocardo that he got Bond the one time he faced him, and that it means something to Mike Trout that he got Mariano Rivera the one time he faced him, and that it means something to Mike Trout that he got Mariano Rivera the one time he faced him. And these relationships that they have, they have many relationships with each other, but I think they're significant. And so that's why I like the one-plate appearance, guys. It is just a very clean head-to-head matchup

where a victor is clear and I think matters to them. So that's all. Well, one reason why Trout's numbers probably aren't even better against people he's only faced one time is that he didn't have the benefit of the times through the order effect and getting to see them multiple times. And I also answered Daniel's question without really answering Daniel's question, but I kind of did because I think he was wondering whether trout is just so incredible that he destroys these pitchers the first time he sees them and we didn't exactly answer because it's

just hard to look up the play appearances of every pitcher against trout the first time they ever faced him but i did relay that trout's times through the order penalty or benefit is like exactly league average he gets better the second time he faces a pitcher in a game the third time he faces a pitcher in a game to almost exactly the same degree as the typical hitter so even though he is really incredible he still benefits from familiarity just like everyone else which is kind of cool. Can I do one quick, quick one too, to answer a different question? Bobby emailed us, the Cubs have been nigh unbeatable at home and completely bad is what he wrote, completely bad on the road for most of the season. It almost feels palpable to me in the way that humans recognize patterns that aren't really there, but through 111 games, they're 21 games over 500 at

home, 12 games under on the road, blah, blah road blah blah blah blah i've heard about teams that were much better at home than on the road in the past so i guess i'm wondering how weird is a split this extreme and where is that specifically what did he ask me we got a question from noah who asked the same thing who's okay did noah ask the question of whether a team has ever been the best team like would yes okay so read the noah one the noah one sorry bobby sorry bobby all right so noah said that the cubs home record which is currently 41 and 19 is better than the best team in baseball's overall record right now their road record is uh well it's 23 and 38 377 so they're worse teams than that but essentially he said the cubs are playing like the

dodgers at home and the marlins on the road where does this rank for the difference between home and road winning percentages has a team ever had a season where they played better than the best overall team at home and worse than the worst overall team on the road. That is the, exactly. I am not that interested in where does this rank for the difference? Home road splits are weird, but has a team ever had a season where they played better than the best overall team at home and worse than the worst overall team in the road? In other words, at home, they are the best team in the world and on the road, they are the worst team in the world. I want to see if that's ever happened. It's not true the cubs by the way the cubs are are not playing like the worst team in baseball on the road they're quite a bit better uh even on the road than uh say the royals are overall but

is that has that particular set of circumstances ever happened the answer is that it has at least five times i wouldn't even rule out that it has happened more than that. But the 1987 Red Sox were the best, had a home record that would have been the best in baseball and a road record that would have been the worst in baseball if it had applied to their whole season. The 1978 Astros, 617 at home, 297 on the road. 1958 Red Sox, 2007 Brewers and the 1987 Twins, which I'm glad that theers, and the 1987 Twins, which I'm glad that the Twins, the 1987 Twins are on here because the 1987 Twins are famous for having crazy home field advantages. Like they were one of the teams that won every World Series game at home

but lost every World Series game in the road. But also the superintendent of the Metrodome admitted many years later, or claims at least admits is the word that's used but claims is probably the better word that he adjusted the air conditioning in games to help the twins so basically like the biology if they were down two runs and you're still hoping for them to have the advantage you'd want to be blowing all the air out and up as much as you can he told the star tribune i don feel guilty. It's your home field advantage. Every stadium has got one. He was there that year. That was during his tenure. And so I'm glad that they're on here for that reason. The 1996 Rockies did not quite make it, but they had a 679 winning

percentage at home, which is like basically 110 win pace over a full season and 346 on the road, which was, I think only this would have only been the second worst record in baseball but here's the great thing ben i'm gonna say those numbers again 679 winning percentage at home got it 346 winning percentage on the road got it horrible on the road incredible at home okay yeah home era 6.18 they had a home era of 6.18 and they won games at 110 win pace wow 4.97 on the road so their era was a run in a quarter better on the road than at home and yet they were they won literally half as often on the road. Okay, that's pretty strange.

All right. All right, question from Bo. After hearing your brief discussion about how Buxton and Cinderguard have about equal value, it got me thinking whether war fully encapsulates the worth of an excellent defensive player. The twins are 57 and 25 when Buxton, and 9-17 when he doesn't. They're actually now 16-23 when he doesn't. Now, obviously, a lot of this is coincidence, but watching Buxton day in and day out, I can't help but wonder if he does have a not-insignificant role in team victories.

For example, if he catches a ball that Jake Cave or Max Kepler doesn't get to, can we assert that he allows the starting pitcher to go longer in the game, thus saving the manager from going to weaker relievers? Does an elite center fielder make the entire outfield defense better because he can hide the weaknesses of his teammates or prevent the manager from even having to put a statue in the corner? Do starting pitchers pitch better when they know they don't have to strike everyone out because they have an elite outfield behind them can excellent defense improve team morale so everyone plays better or am i just looking at all this through buxton colored glasses you know if you go point by point here and this is not to answer bo's question entirely but so for instance if he catches a ball can we assert that he allows the starting pitcher to go longer in the game, thus saving the manager from going to weaker relievers? Well, the exact same thing would be true of a base hit on offense, that if you believe that allowing the starting pitcher to go longer in the game, then getting a base hit on offense would disallow the other team's starting pitcher from

going longer in the game, thus costing that manager from going to weaker relievers. I mean, that's not even necessarily a benefit, but the premise here is that it is so he's saying is it possible that defense is actually underrated but that's exactly the that's he's just describing the thing that is true of offense too it's just the flip side of a base hit can excellent defense improve team morale so everyone plays better uh can excellent offense improve team morale so everyone plays better? Can excellent offense improve team morale so everyone plays better? I mean, these are both questions that say, is there something about performance that has a subconscious effect on a team or that has an unseen effect on a team, but it's not specific to defense.

You could ask this about all things. You could ask, are pitchers underrated because they improve team morale? Is the bullpen underrated because it improves team morale uh that might be true but it's not defense specific and so there are two other examples that maybe you could make the case one is do they pitch better when they know they don't have to strike everyone out that would basically mean is buxton the equivalent of like late, late aughts Petco Park, where we kind of hypothesize that pitchers sense of confidence, knowing that the park was going to hold everything actually increased the park factor because they not only didn't give up many home runs, but they could pound the strike zone. And so like the Padres had all these no name relievers that they would sign or trade for. And suddenly they had, you know, like seven strikeouts to walk because they could pitch

with such confidence. And so that is a hypothesis that maybe defense does the same thing. And then the other is, does your defender at one position, can he be so good that it allows you to punt other positions near him? so good that it allows you to punt other positions near him and i think that is a theoretical but not activated possible benefit i don't think there are i could not think of an example of a team that to my knowledge chose their personnel their defensive personnel in one position who they signed or who they played based on their defender at a adjacent position. Somebody can email me and say, ah, no, you're not thinking about this guy. And so maybe they

are out there, but I don't think that it is a detail that is in the forefront of GM's minds when it comes to team building. So theoretically it would be a benefit, but it doesn't seem like it's one that's being taken advantage of and probably isn't yeah i don't think i buy it you could certainly have like a defender who's maybe worth more to a certain team than he is to another team but that would be reflected in his stats like if you had a fly ball staff and you had buxton then maybe he's more valuable to that team than he would be on a team with a ground ball staff or a strikeout staff. But that would just mean that he'd get more opportunities and he'd make more plays. And that would presumably be part of his defensive value.

So I don't know that I can come up with any reason why this would be underrated and other things would not. So yeah, I don't know. The twins have certainly played worse without Buxton and have kind of, you know, they've lost a lot of their lead while he's been out, but it's probably making too much of it to say that there's some special sauce of Buxton that is responsible for that. Yeah. I'm open to an argument that every player in baseball's skills are underrated. And that if I and so, so it is possible that hitters are underrated to me, it's possible that fielders are underrated to me, it's possible that starters are and it's possible that relievers are. And it's also possible, and this is how I deal with that uncertainty,

that it all cancels out that they actually are all underrated. And that, that uncertainty, that it all cancels out, that they actually are all underrated, and that because of that, you're basically just shifting the currency down a notch, and it all evens out. All right. Alex says, Sam Miller's recent article about Hall of Famers passed in war by Mike Trout made me think about counting stats versus war. Pete Rose, from his age 40 season to his retirement lost 2.5 career war, bringing his total down to 79.7 from 82.2. However, during those years he racked up 559 hits.

Is Pete Rose a more interesting or better player if he retires after his age 40 season and finishes fourth all-time in hits and 59th in career war, or first all-time in hits and 59th in career war or first all-time in hits and 64th in career war and for that matter is it worth sacrificing career war in pursuit of all-time records of hits and homers and doubles and rbis worth to the player uh no doubt about it no doubt about it p rose is 10 times the figure he is if he doesn't get the hit hit record. And if it weren't for later developments, he might be 50 times the historical figure than he would have been if he'd retired with 3550 hits. I mean, in fact, there's arguably if I were a GM and I had an aging player chasing milestones, I probably would be rooting for him and happy that I got to see it. But I would kind of probably also be dreading it and thinking, well, I don't really know

how to stand in front of this pursuit. But like when I was just reading about baseball, this was always brought up with Craig Biggio and his 3000,000-hit pursuit. It is probably not. I think Albert Pujols would be playing for... I think Albert Pujols thinks he's still pretty good at baseball, actually. So it probably doesn't apply to Albert Pujols, but it might eventually get there.

Although, no, he's going to play. He's got the contract. If he were... I don't know. I don't even know what I'm saying at this point anymore i don't even know where what i was trying to say and i don't remember what my uh detail was but with pete rose yeah back to pete rose yeah pete rose man the hit king he's not 59th in career war or 64th in career war. For one thing, war didn't exist at the time, but I mean, he had some awareness of value and what makes someone valuable to a baseball team. And I'm sure he probably thought that he was helping. I don't know. There was a period where he was a

player manager and he was penciling himself into the lineup to get hits at a point where he was not really helping the team anymore. And I think that was seen as sort of selfish even at the time. But yeah, if you're chasing an all-time record that has the prestige of the hits record, then of course, to you, it is more personally beneficial to have that record than it is to be slightly higher on the war leaderboard. And we've talked before about how war is just not a very satisfying milestone stat that because it changes all the time and improves and gets recalculated for past seasons. And because you can't see someone pass it, you can't see someone set the record in the

moment. You can sort of infer maybe that a player has gone beyond a certain number, but you can't see it the way that you can see a hit and count it, and it's very concrete and tangible. So maybe war will get to this point where we'll come to appreciate, say, a hundred war player or something, and we've talked about how Pujols was at a hundred and then dipped below a 100. And I don't know whether he's at 100 now or not. He's back to 99.9. Okay. So maybe that will come to mean something someday, but I don't know. I think it will mean much more that say Pujols is going to pass Willie Mays in career home runs. I did not realize this about Pete Rose, but so he broke the record in 1985 and then he came back in 1986 once the record was broken and he kept putting himself in the lineup.

So there was no record left for him. And so I think that that is a to me a pretty it's not conclusive, but a pretty, pretty compelling case that he genuinely believed that he was the best the most likely player to help his team for some reason he still thought that he was contributing and it wasn't a naked uh pursuit of the record at that point yeah assuming he was betting on the reds those days a million bucks that year which was the high according to this according to baseball and of course this is about like salaries uh the trajectory of salaries, but all the same, I'm going to say it. That year, 1986, hit 219, 316, 270 as a first baseman.

So a 61 OPS plus as a first baseman. And that was his highest salary of his career. Yeah. Okay. But probably because he didn't get to make anywhere near what he was worth for almost the entirety of his career. And maybe he was being paid to manage too. Oh, good point. Of course.

Of course. Yeah. So I wanted to end with this is sort of an interrelated couple questions here about managers and robot umps, things that we've talked about recently so andrew asked andrew patreon supporter said with respect to replacement level umpires the replacement level has to go way up after robo strike zones right between review and the robot strike zones don't you think any avid baseball fan could be an umpire and then we got kind of a related question from Damien who says, do we have a sense of how the average umpire's eye compares to the average player's eye? If a player stepped behind the plate to call balls and strikes, what would we expect his success rate to

be? So Damien wants to know, could a player call pitches better than an umpire. And then Andrew wants to know, if we go to robot strike zones, does that mean that almost anyone can be an umpire? Is the bar so low? So the second question, there's a company called DeServo that makes an application for basically vision and cognition training that hitters use to help identify uh pitches more quickly and they have a uh they have an application for hitters and they also have an application for umpires and so i did not i've never really thought about the challenge of being an umpire and doing this

because the the challenge for a hitter is that you have this extremely small window where you have to pick up the pitch and then forecast where it is going to go. And that's what makes hitting hard. Whereas for an umpire, you get to see it the whole way. And there is not an immediacy to your need to make that decision. Basically, part of the challenge of being a hitter is that your brain is processing reality behind reality. And so you have to be almost ahead of it. But an umpire, he can watch the whole thing. All that information can go to his brain and then he can just say what he sees. And so it seems like it would not be nearly, nearly, nearly near like it doesn't even I'm not saying it would be easy to umpire for all sorts of reasons. The difference between a half inch here and there on a pitch that's moving and that might actually be going out of your sight almost at the end with the catcher reaching for it and the hitter swinging or almost swinging or whatever.

It sounds really difficult, but it feels like an order of magnitude different than what hitting is. And it doesn't feel like it is quite the same impossible cognitive task or visual task that hitting is. So my guess is that it is not nearly the visual challenge that hitting is. That's my guess. So that would suggest that a player would be better at calling pitches if they were to umpire?

Yeah, I guess. I guess what I'm saying is that I think that all hitters, all successful major league hitters, all major league hitters in history are wild outliers among the general population as far as cognitive ability and even vision, and that all umpires are not. That umpires just made a choice at some point

that this was going to be their career, and they worked at it, and they stuck with it, and they learned the mechanics of it, but that they're not physical outliers. Yeah, I'm looking at an article here that Brian McPherson wrote for the Providence Journal in 2012, and he's quoting this guy Daniel Leiby, who was a Red Sox ophthalmology consultant, and he said that in his experience, the average major leaguer has vision that's around 2012 or has been corrected to 2012. The best you can be is 28.

And he said he's seen some baseball players who were 28. So Leiby says, if you come in and you're 2020 and you're playing major league baseball, we're not going to leave you there because that's not going to be good enough. I'm going to get you to more of the normal vision. And I think that what makes hitters so good compared to the typical person is not just the vision. It's not even primarily the vision. It's the thousands or millions of pitches they've seen and their ability to track and predict how

the pitch is going to move. But it's also the vision. The vision helps, and I think you're right. The vision would be better than the umpire's vision on the whole, and so would their ability to track pitches. So I would think that they would probably be better, which doesn't necessarily mean that I trust them more when they dispute an umpire's call in a game, because obviously they're biased, and they don't have the same view that an umpire does call in a game because obviously they're biased and they don't have the same view that an umpire does and they're doing more things they're trying to hit the ball they're trying to predict what pitch is coming all this other stuff so i don't know that i trust their judgment more but i think if they were to be the umpires that i would trust them more with a little adjustment

period so i think that's true yeah and i still hold to the opinion that i had a few months ago which is that the the catcher knows so much better than the umpire does and if you could just figure out a way uh to deal with um you know human evil uh we'd have the solution to all of this right just a minor hurdle to be overcome there. And so Andrew's question about once you take away pitch calling from umpires, does that mean just anyone can be an umpire? He says

does that mean an avid fan, an avid baseball fan could be an umpire? And I don't think you could just off the street. I mean, for one thing, a large part of being an effective umpire is projecting the air of an effective umpire and having the authority and the confidence. And I certainly wouldn't have it if I were to suddenly start umpiring in a major league game. I'd be terrified of making a mistake.

I'd feel totally out of place. You've talked about that before, right? Have I? Haven't you? Did you umpire at some level in a oh yeah i was a child though i was i was yeah okay well but that's true i mean i still am scared of everybody so yeah so so that would be a big as though I just acted as though I have gained any self-confidence in the last 30 years. And I haven't. Why did I do that?

All right. Go ahead. Yeah. So there's that. That's a big part of it. And then also like positioning and being in the right place at the right time and getting the right angle to make a call on a tag play, that kind of thing. I'm sure it's more complicated than we think it is.

And just like the speed of the game would surprise you if you were suddenly on the field and you'd be out of position you'd be overwhelmed but hang on though we're not presuming that the rest of replay review is going away right no that's true so there's like there's yeah there are basically two or three calls that an umpire on the field has final authority over, which is the grounder. A fair foul call that happens in front of the base and foul tips, I believe, are still not reviewable. Is that it? There's not a lot left, I guess.

there's not a lot left, I guess. But the way that they have it set up right now, which is that the call on the field is presumed to be correct, barring convincing video evidence, still puts a lot of pressure on the call on the field. I mean, there are so many calls on the field where it seems clear to me that if you only had the video, you would overturn it that if you only had the video you would overturn it

if you if you only had the video i should say you would go with the uh a different call than the one on the field and yet even though we can all see that the the probability is that the call on the field was wrong it stays it's very to me it is the um a very frustrating part of this whole thing although i also do sort of understand it, but you could still do a lot of damage just by basically writing a bad first draft that, um, that stands because, because that's the,

the, the bias in the, in the booth. If you did away with that presumption, if you just said that the, the person in Chelsea is going to give a final decision on this without even knowing what you called then you could really hardly do any any damage at all and as far as projecting the air of an umpire i feel like at this point in umpiring especially if you had a auto strike

zone the umpire's main role or the way that he projects authority is just pointing at the airbud like, I'm on the phone. Like, I can't. Yeah, they're telling me something. And then if like that is the authority, umpires in the next few decades, I feel like it's the main image that you're going to have when you think of an umpire is like shoulders up like, what do you want me to do? So I can do that but um but if if we're asking it so that assumes though that the replay all the replay stuff stays as is if yeah to really answer the question the question is are

um are major league umpires i think this is really the question are major league umpires significantly better than the common fan on base path umpiring bait you know non-home plate umpiring decisions and i think the answer is they are way way way better the call on particularly on force plays i am amazed at how much better they do than me when i'm watching on tv i'm amazed at how often i either have no idea or get it wrong and uh how often they get it right even when the margin is tiny uh is like a quarter of an inch and so i am in awe of i think i'm actually i'm more impressed with umpire's ability to call to call safe on tag and force plays, really, than I am with anything they do behind the plate. And even if you could get your calls corrected by replay review, no one wants an umpire who just blows every call and then gets challenged and bailed out over and over and over again.

You'd have very long and slow and embarrassing games yeah okay all right we will end there i think i mentioned this on the podcast once earlier this year so i will update you now the angels are now by one definition at least the 500th team of all time on thursday they won to go 60 and 63 on the. That was the 400th time that they have finished a game within five games of 500 since the start of 2017. And that broke the record for finishing within five games of 500 over a three-year span. The previous record was 399 games set by the 1991-93 Cubs. So the Angels now have hovered around 500 more than any other team has over any period of three seasons. And of course, they have time to extend their record over the rest of this

year. And I tweeted about this earlier and I said the Angels have had this historically 500 run despite employing the best player in baseball. And I couldn't decide whether to say despite employing or because they have employed. You look at it one way, it is sort of embarrassing that they have been basically a 500 team while they have had Mike Trout. From another perspective, though, they would not have been a 500 team without Mike Trout. So someone responded to my tweet by saying, once again, proving a player's war means absolutely nothing. As if to say that Mike Trout couldn't actually be that valuable because the Angels haven't been that good as a team. But of course, this says more about the players surrounding Mike Trout than it does about Trout himself. And in fact, since the start of

2012, the Angels are 591 and 550 in games that Trout has appeared in. That is 41 games over 500. And in games Trout has not appeared in, they are 53 and 63. That is 10 games under 500. So pretty big difference there. Small sample, sure. But this does not debunk Trout's greatness. It does reinforce that the Angels probably should have done a bit better, given that they have maybe the best player ever in his prime. So the very demoralizing news about Fernando Tatis probably being done for the year was reported after Sam and I finished speaking. I don't know what we would have said about it if we had heard it before we recorded. We probably just would have sobbed or hugged each other. It's very sad that we will be robbed of the rest of Tatis' rookie year. I guess this

probably gives Pete Alonso the NL Rookie of the Year award, but Tatis may be the most memorable player from this season, certainly the most memorable debut Alonso the NL Rookie of the Year award, but Tatis may be the most memorable player from this season. Certainly the most memorable debut, Alonso's rookie home run record aside. And if you're in the mood of reflecting on the positives instead of dwelling on the negatives here, you can check out my article at The Ringer from Friday. I wrote about the historically great and unprecedented performance of very young players in baseball this year. Not just the ultra young players, but also the pretty young players. Young hitters in general are just really great right now. It's sad to lose Tatis for the rest of this year, but we've still got Acuna,

we've still got Soto, we've still got Jordan Alvarez, we've still got so many more. And one thing in the piece that's kind of cool is I showed the typical aging patterns of players in the pre-steroid era and during the steroid of players in the pre-steroid era and during the steroid era and in the post-steroid era. And players these days are just aging differently, very differently from the steroid era, but even differently from before it. They're getting good much younger and they're tailing off earlier in their 30s. There are many reasons for that that I discuss in the article and that we've probably talked about on the podcast. Player development is partly responsible for sure,

but I will link to that if you're interested in checking it out. You can support the 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 access to some perks.

Zev Rovine, Robbie Sampson, David Egan, Robert Livingston, and Connor Devins. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you're a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

According to the New York times, Mike Tauchman is reading my book. You can read my book too. It may not make you as good as Mike Tauchman, but you'll still enjoy it. It's called the MVP machine, how baseball's new nonconformists are using data to build better players. Leave it a positive review on Amazon and Goodreads if you

don't mind, and if you feel it deserves one. Thanks for listening this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with a new episode early next week. There ain't no good guy There ain't no bad guy There's only you and me And we just disagree Ooh, ooh, ooh Oh, oh, oh