Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1420: Have Mercy

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, and the most compelling playoff races remaining, introduce the new Effectively Wild listener email archive, then answer emails about whether a team in a three-team race suffers or benefits when its opponents play each other, whether home runs hit off of position players should […]

I'll be drunk, but for too long And I'll be from this savage hall This red dresser hour Is too much to endorse It's this part it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, it's baseball, supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer with Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Ben. Yes. Hey. That's it. Okay. I was talking to my pal, Zach Cram from The Ringer, who just listened to our most recent episode and our discussion about players who might one day dethrone Mike Trout as the best player in baseball. And he raised the suggestion of Shohei Otani as a possible candidate who we did not really consider in our discussion.

But there is some merit to that suggestion in that I was saying that I didn't think any current player could displace Trout because no one has been as good as he is and he's been historically great. But Otani is historically great in his own way. He's a kind of player we haven't seen in a century. And you could conceivably construct an Otani season where he could be better than Trout if he maxes out his potential as both a pitcher and a hitter. So do you consider him a candidate? You know, I was trying to remember when we talked about this when the last time i got a question about it was and in fact it was somebody a few months ago who asked whether otani was the

oh no this was a different thing this was whether otani was the most likely person other than trout to maybe break the all-time uh single season war record and i i answered as i will now answer that otani as a two-way player doesn't uh it does it doesn't it's not that big of an advantage it like the two roles cannibalize each other so much that um it is arguably if things work out right probably better than having him only be a one-win player but you're not going to get you're not going to turn a six-win player into a 12-win player like if you got a six win hitter and a six win pitcher and you somehow merge them into one athlete you would not get 12 wins you'd get like 7.6 or something like that and so otani is not

either one of those things i mean like otani's great but he's like a top 40 hitter and like a top 15 pitcher or maybe uh if you're kind of being maybe generous um on some of that i mean he's like a top 40 hitter and like a top 15 pitcher, maybe, if you're kind of being maybe generous on some of that. I mean, he's been a top 15 hitter since the start of last season, I think. Well, sorry, not a top 15 position player, though. True. Because he's just a DH. But he could be, probably, if he did that full time. But yes, not as a two-way player.

Right, exactly. So, I mean, he's not... There aren't 11 war DHs anyway, but if there were 11 war DHs, he wouldn't be one of them. He's just not that good. So your thinking is imaginative and maybe along the right lines for the right kind of potential contender for

the throne, but it's not Otani. Yeah. I just wrote an article about Otani that is up at the ringer if you're listening to this on Wednesday, basically because every time Otani does well at one thing, when he is not currently doing well at the other thing, people start suggesting that he should focus on the thing that he is currently doing the best at. So last spring, when he was not hitting at all and people kind of expected that he would be a better pitcher anyway, people were saying, well, he's not going to be a good hitter. He should just focus on pitching. he got hurt and stopped pitching. And when he's had particular success as a hitter, there have been calls that have surfaced for him to stop pitching and just focus on hitting. So I kind of anticipated that we might get another round of those right now because he is currently hitting well. He has an 11-game hitting streak right now. He's kind of come out of a funk.

And whenever that has happened in the past, we've started to see those suggestions. And I don't think that either the Angels or Otani is seriously considering having him not be a two-way player right now. But I kind of wanted to head off the next call for that and just make a plea to let him be both and let him pitch at least until he proves that he can't do it. Because I haven't seen anything so far to suggest that he can't do it because I haven't seen anything so far to suggest that he can't. And if you make the argument that he would be better as one or the other, you're really talking about a pretty slim margin of how much he would be better by. And to me, it's just not worth it. I mean, if the Angels decide that they really need that one win or whatever, fine, but I'm not going to suggest that they should do that because just in the interest of fun and potentially the best story in baseball i think they should let him do his

thing until he proves that he can't so that's my column there you go 30 he's 35th by the way this year in ops plus so even even not accounting for the position but of course he was better the year before michael juntenin also responded to that conversation and said something that I will agree with that I think, I wish I had said. He points out that, well, I'll read it. I felt like Sam never married his two points, which seems to me the most likely way Trout has surpassed. At some point, Trout won't be a defensive asset.

He'll either move down below average in center field or preemptively be moved to a corner to save the wear on his body. I'm going to focus on that latter part, or at least I do focus on that latter part when I read his email. He will be the same, but now he'll be a 7-8 win player instead of a 9-10 win player, and that's when he'll get surpassed by a great young player who is still at a premium position. It will be really subtle. You'll get a 9-win season or an 8.5 for a year or two, and then you'll turn around and realize that Trout's still got a 190 OPS plus, but he's lost two or three wins worth of positional value, and someone playing ultra elite defense like Betts Bellinger or playing an ultra premium

position well like Tatis will have a starting advantage of three to four wins, and non-sabermetric commentators won't even notice, and probably will complain and argue and insist that Trout remains the best player in the league because his batting line will be the same, but his batting line with the defensive value of Juan Soto, as you guys mentioned just an episode or two ago, is not someone who can lead MLB in war. I think that's probably right. I think that probably Trout, well, not necessarily probably, but maybe the most likely scenario is that Trout does not seem to be in any sort of decline. He might still be winning MVP awards or leading the league in offense, but he will be moved off center field and that will make a big difference.

And I think that gets to 32-33, in fact fact i think that's about when that'll probably happen right and that would be kind of funny because things will come full circle that'd be the cabrera candidate exactly right war will be saying he's not as good as the people who are looking at the traditional stats say he is he never did seem to like war that much and maybe he's just he's just anticipating that he knows that war is going to turn on him he is he knows who his real friends are it turns on everyone eventually well we probably shouldn't talk about trout exclusively again this episode but he did hit his 42nd home run on tuesday which is a new career high and I believe I saw a tweet that with that home run, he presumably passed Derek Jeter in career war. So I'm already anticipating your next installment of the which

Hall of Famers did Mike Chow pass this month series, because that'll be a fun entry. He's not actually in the Hall of Fame, Derek Jeter. Oh, that's true. So you can't do it. But I am going to do it. In fact, I just talked about this with my editor today. I am going to do it. And it's a little bit of a slow month for passing Hall of Famers, although he's having such a monster month. I thought it was going to only be one, but it probably will be four. That's one of those times when I will be sorry that ESPN no longer has a comment section

because I used to occasionally dip into there, read the comments on the Sam Miller articles just to see. You inspired a lot of discussion. I'll say that. I love Jeets, but I wrote in the last month's one, basically, I made the case that Barry Larkin was better than him. And that the only difference between them was that Barry Larkin was a little better and Derek Jeter was in New York. Right, yeah. So we're going to do some emails. Before we do, I wanted to ask you what you think the most compelling playoff race is right now. Because I've been trying to decide what I think it is.

We basically got four choices. I guess we've got the AL Central division race, two-team race between Minnesota and Cleveland. the AL Central division race, two-team race between Minnesota and Cleveland. You've got the AL wildcard race, which is kind of a two-team race in the sense that it's Rays and A's right now with the Red Sox six games back, and that's probably too far to get back in it. Not necessarily, but they did just lose Chris Sale. On the other hand, you do have Cleveland, who is only one game up on Tampa Bay. So there's. And Minnesota.

Yes. So it's kind of a two-team race, kind of a three-team race, kind of a four-team race. Yes. Then there's the NL Central race, which is a three-team race. But, well, I'll save what I want to say about the NL Central race. And then there's, of course, the NL Wildcard race, which involves some of the teams in the NL Central race, but also some other teams, the Mets and the Phillies. And I guess you could say that the NL East is kind of a race, the Nationals are maybe within striking distance of the Braves, but let's put that aside for now. So we've got these four main choices.

What's your gut pick? Because I would have said AL central until recently and i actually did say al central fairly recently and maybe i'll stick with that but i've been thinking about why that is and arguing myself out of it well i have a hard time separating the nl central and the nl wild card just because the leader of the central has been dipping down into the it has been changing so much that the wildcard race is also like it's a whole new group of teams every day it seems like because one of them's out of it like above it and so I had there's just a group of teams that are all to me in the same race and I know that technically that's not true the Mets

and the Phillies can't win the NL central but but it just feels like someone's going to win it, so why not them? I would say that I think that the NL Central race, if I have to isolate one or the other, is the one. I like the rivalry aspect of it. I like that it's the Cardinals and the Cubs, and I like that it's the Cubs and the Brewers, and I just feel like these sort of central cities are really clicking in terms of rivalry.

There's a lot of travel back and forth, it seems like, between the fans. And I've written off, I mean, I wrote off the Cardinals earlier in the year. And so there's been surprises, there's been topsy-turvy, and it's just a giant jumble. What do you want to say about it, though? Yeah, the NL Central Race should be.

I feel like I should say it's the most compelling, but I think what's holding it back for me is that none of the teams is very good, which shouldn't matter, really. It's just a race to see who finishes first, and so who cares if the team is actually good or not, but I think that's what keeps drawing me back to the NL Central race, because both of those teams are good or at least more successful. Maybe that's superficial because they've gotten to play the other three teams in the AL Central and those teams are really lousy. So maybe if you equalized that and accounted for the AL Central teams beating up on each other, the difference actually wouldn't be that great. The difference actually wouldn't be that great, but I'm looking at the Brewers and they're three games over.500 as we speak, and the Cubs and the Cardinals are eight or nine. Again, it doesn't really matter. It shouldn't really matter, but something about the fact that there's a lot of mediocrity there, at least in terms of wins and losses, kind of turns me off a little bit. But just root against then.

Root for the teams that you especially want to lose. I don't really have a rooting interest. I don't care who wins so much. It's also, you're right about the rivalries adding to it, but I do like the AL Central narrative as well because you had the Twins as the surprise team. I think the Tw twins are an exciting team in a lot of ways this year and they got off to that great start and they built up a double digit lead and we started to write off cleveland and we were kind of dancing on their graves in a

way because we were saying well it comes back to bite them the fact that they didn't invest in the team over the winter and maybe there was some early gloating there among people who had suggested that that was going to hurt them in the end. And as it turns out, they have kind of come roaring back and they erased that lead and took the lead briefly. And so that I think is kind of compelling to me, just that there was one team that was way out front, and it was the team that no one expected to be, and then that lead has been almost entirely erased now. So I kind of like that, whereas the NL Central has just been jockeying for position all year, more or less, or no team falling behind by quite as much. Again, don't know if that matters, because we've got six

weeks left in the season and maybe it shouldn't really matter how we got here. What matters is the home stretch, but that has kind of been on my mind. And Cleveland has gotten here. You could say that this justifies their decision not to do that much over the winter because it turns out that they are pretty good.

You could also say that it doesn't, that they really need every win right now. And so it is coming back to haunt them. You could also say that even though they have proven to be pretty good, it's largely not with the players that we thought would be good for them this year, or at least some of them have been non-entities and injured. So I don't know. That to me, I think, is kind of the best in that sense. And A's Rays is interesting too. So I kind of- That one is a distant last for me. Yeah.

I don't know why. They're too far away from each other and their names sound the same. That's a good reason. Yeah. Well, I think it's also maybe just that neither is in contention for a division, which means best case scenario is that you end up in the wildcard game another the A's raise race is more of a do or die thing because if you believe that making the wildcard game counts as the playoffs one of those teams will make it and one of them will not most likely I have not had the mediocrity aversion as far as the NL Central nor in a wildcard that you have I think think just because I'm, I don't know, I'm not,

there's three teams in particular that are really truly chasing glory right now. The Astros, the Dodgers, and the Yankees. Those are the teams that are like just pushing the game like into new places and they're just so good and they're so dominant. And then you've got the Twins who have had a fantastic season and they're chasing a reward. And Cleveland has come on so strong, and they're on a 95-win pace,

and Atlanta's going to win division, and those teams are chasing rewards. Those teams are trying to reach a level of success. And then I feel like all the other teams in baseball are just trying to avoid failure. They're trying to avoid this feeling of just failure, that this year was a waste that they didn't get there that they they either didn't do enough or they did the wrong stuff and they're going to go home miserable and uh you know the urgency is there like it

i don't have to necessarily think that these are like historically great teams or that i think that they have like a long postseason future ahead of them or anything like that to feel like there are stakes. And the stakes are highest to me in the NL. So it doesn't bother me that they're mediocre. If they win 84 games and they don't make the playoffs, they're going to be really sad. Yeah. I don't know. That seems like so banal. I don't know why I would say that and think that that's going to convince anybody, but that is why I watch. Like, there's people who are going to be sad.

Well, that sort of makes sense. I'm pretty compelled by the race for excellence. Right. There's also people that are going to be happy. Right. And it's weird. I've never really thought about there being a distinction that in some races I'm rooting, or not even rooting rooting that I'm watching because I'm going to see people maybe be happy. And there are other cases where I'm kind of more

focused on the fact that there's going to be people who are sad, not, not rooting either way, but that like they're different, they're different stakes aren't there. Well, it's sort of strange because I am riveted by the Yankees and the Astros and the Dodgers, but those are the teams that are not in races at all. They've already sewn up their divisions. And so that, in a way, is the least compelling thing. There's almost no reason to watch them over the next six weeks except to see how they stack up in the playoffs and whether everyone's healthy and who's going to play what role

for them in the playoffs and whether everyone's healthy and who's going to play what role for them in the playoffs. And then you've got October. And as we've said, it would be a lot of fun to see an Astros-Dodgers rematch. It's the clash of the Titans and all that. But it's not as if a single matchup between those two teams will actually settle which one was the best team it won't really prove anything so in a way there is more at stake for the teams that are kind of on the cusp and on the bubble as you're saying so yeah that that makes sense to me i guess i get it i uh there's an email that we got that is uh somewhat related to this pennant race so now's a good time for me to read it. This is from John and John, and he didn't send it to you. He only sent it to me because I was talking to John,

but he says, do you think teams in a three team division or wildcard race benefit or suffer when the other two teams in the race play each other? It may be an easy answer, but I can't seem to decide whether the guaranteed win and loss, the safe choice is better than gambling and risking two wins for a chance at seeing two losses from your opponents when the opponents are playing teams outside of this race thoughts this would be a fun i don't know this probably would be a decent

article idea for somebody who wants to take a a stab at the math uh and the game theory although i don't know if it's game theory or not. But so I have not done the math. I don't have an exact answer. I'm just I'm kind of curious to know, though, like what your feeling is if you have a team and it's been a long time since you rooted. And when you did root, the Yankees were very, very, very rarely in a three team race. And so I don't even know if you have this experience. I have had it many, many times in my life.

I don't even know if you have this experience. I have had it many, many times in my life. And I'm curious to know whether on those days you feel good or bad when you see your team's opponents are facing each other. As I recall, I felt deflated. I felt bad when that happened because, I guess, because there wasn't the potential to make a big gain on everyone, which doesn't really make sense, probably. You should care about what the likeliest outcome is. But there wasn't that potential to steal a march on all of your opponents on that day. And so it felt like the potential gain was smaller, which it was. But on the other hand, I guess the minimum gain is maybe bigger if you win. You felt deflated, though.

I did, yeah, and I don't know whether I should have or not. Well, I have two things that I thought of while thinking through the logic of this, and one of them is that it really depends. I mean, this is pretty obvious. I think many people have already thought this through, but it really depends where in the season you are. If it's the last day of the season, for instance, and you're tied with the other two teams, you don't want them to play each other because then you know that there's going to be a team that wins. Like you're just certain of it. There's a hundred percent certainty that somebody is going to gain and you are so near the conclusion of the season. You might even be one game behind them.

And that would that would clinch, right? So as you get closer to the conclusion of it, there's the potential, I think, for for that to to really harm you. But the further back in the season you go, I think that it gets really easy to say, you know, logically that you want them playing each other because you're a contender. Presumably, that means that you're going to need to win more're a contender. Presumably that means that you're going to need to win more than 50% of your games. And so is anybody who's going to beat you. And if you can guarantee 50% winning percentage for those two teams on that day,

then mathematically that's going to, that's going to help you in the long run. It's going to, it's going to, but I think even more than that, there's another step here, which is, okay, so you're a contender and you have two other teams that are contenders. So what do we know about you and your two other teams? Almost certainly is that you're probably winning teams. You have winning records. And we know that the league as a whole does not have a winning record. It has 500. winning record. It has 500. And so if they're not playing each other, the odds are that they're going to be playing losing teams. The odds are better that they will be playing losing teams than that they will be playing winning teams because of the 12 remaining teams, probably only four or five of them are winning and seven or eight of them are losing. And so you want them to be playing each other because it keeps them from the more likely possibility that they're going to get a chance to beat up on specifically bad teams.

So I think you have to be happy and you just take the 50-50. Unless it's the last weekend of the season. I think if it's the last weekend of the season, then you don't like it. And maybe if it's the last week and a half of the season, then you don't like it either. I think in that case, knowing... Well, one of them, they're not probably going to split over the course of those multiple games. One is probably going to win two or maybe three and puts a lot of pressure on you. I think that's right. Yeah. Okay. Well,

I'm going to ask you to email me that email from John because we now have an Effectively Wild email database, courtesy of listener Adam Mayle, who has done a lot of great work and put a lot of time into the Effectively Wild wiki. We now have synopses for every episode we've ever done. And having completed that project, Adam has pasted all of the emails that were in those individual episode recaps into a giant spreadsheet, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode and is permanently linked in the Effectively Wild Facebook group. So if you've not listened to all 1,419 previous episodes of this podcast and you don't know whether we have already answered something, you can open up that document

if you feel like it. And you can search for keywords to see if we've talked about that thing or that person. And maybe you can spare everyone a duplicate question. Or maybe you can get immediate gratification because we have already answered the question that you want to ask. So thanks very much to Adam. It's a very useful resource because very few of our listeners probably have listened to every single thing that we've ever said. Shame on them. Super cool. Yep. Okay, question from Lucas. Now that position players are being used to pitch in blowout games often, should home runs by players that are hit off of position players be valued less than home runs hit off of actual pitchers?

And by valued less, I assume he means like in a value stat or like in war or if we were mentally assigning, you know, player status based on his statistics. I actually assumed that he meant they would count less but i don't know i think i think the first one well i mean if they're pitching in blowouts they can count as zero who cares well they should they should quit keeping score when the position player comes in they should go home they should actually just forfeit well we can talk about that because that's come up this week but i was just listening to an episode of the podcast with joe posnanski and former effectively wild guest host ellen adair and joe proposed that as a way of curbing the home run barrage that we're seeing right now mlb should decree that runs scored via non-home run means should count for two runs and home runs runs should count for one run

and that would give players incentive say if you've got you know runners on second and third or something a single would be worth more than a home run in that situation which is a different question but related potentially so i was thinking that that might be what Lucas is asking here, but maybe your way of looking at it is better. And this comes down to, I guess, whether war should be adjusted for the quality of competition, which baseball prospectuses warp is, right? But the others are not now. Although I think that pitchers are on baseball reference yes i think that's right yeah i yeah if you can do it i think so i mean there's two problems here one of which i think is very small and the other i think is a little bit more significant

i mean this whole issue is quite small because they're not, we're not talking about a lot of home runs or a lot of distortion here. But one is that if you're facing a, you know, more of these pitchers than, than your peers, then you're going to probably look better just because you get more chances against these non-major league pitchers. But the other thing is that some people might just be a lot better at hitting position players than other people that like, this is not the skill that they are selected for. And you could imagine that, uh, of the pool of 5,000, say the 5,000 best baseball players in the world, some of them are going to be like, I wouldn't necessarily say that the

800 best hitters against position players pitching are the 800 hitters who are going to be in the major leagues this year. And I wouldn't necessarily say that the 100 best or the 100 best hitters overall, it's a different skill. And that doesn't matter. I mean, there's all sorts of individual discrete skills that some players have over others, except that this isn't real baseball, it doesn't count for it doesn't matter, you know, like these are these are games that are decided the act of the position player pitching is itself a sort of concession and so having a player differentiated by his superiority in a skill that would never exist in a moment that actually mattered is arguably useful for separating out when you're

talking about something like player value. I mean, it is the exact opposite of win probability added, right? Where it is with zero wins are added, no matter how many home runs you hit against position players, zero wins are added. Now, with all that said, what do you think? Has anybody faced a position player five times this year? Probably not. I don't think so. So at this point, it's not really in any way necessary. And I don't really see a point where it becomes necessary. And then also there is the phenomenon that I have argued might exist whereby when the position player comes into pitch, it serves as a nudge to the hitters to quit trying. And so they don't actually pad their stats all that much or as much as I think they could if they really wanted to.

So it's probably a fairly moot issue. Yeah, I really haven't been paying attention to position players pitching this year because I think it's past the point where it was a fun novelty. Every now and then you'll get someone who either throws so well that you notice or he just throws so poorly or so slow or whatever that you notice that too. But for the most part, they just wash over me and I don't even see people getting excited about them anymore. this year. Jay Jaffe just wrote about it for FanGraphs on Tuesday, and he noted that we have already reached the single season record. I think there have been about 80 position player pitchers this year. Last year had been a record, and I think there were fewer than 70. And I think we discussed it on the podcast last year because there was a big leap from 2017 to 2018. Now there's another leap, but I don't even care anymore. But this came to the fore this week because the Yankees lost 19-5 and Mike Ford, who is not a pitcher, pitched the last couple innings for the Yankees.

And Sweeney Murdy asked Aaron Boone whether there should be a mercy rule in baseball for games like this rather than make us go through the motions of having a position player pitch. And Boone entertained the notion. He said, I think there would be a lot of benefit to that. He said, I think you'd probably eliminate a lot of the unwritten rules of people running or swinging at 3-0 pitches in the quote-unquote wrong scores and just be like, hey, if you get to this point after seven innings or whatever, there might be something to that, some merit to that, and worth exploring because it's not fun to have to put in a position player in that kind of situation, even though I think for Ford and some of the guys, it is fun. And he went on for a little while longer. So this started a debate about mercy rules in baseball. And you could say that a team could

just forfeit if they wanted to. But I think if teams actually did start forfeiting in blowout situations, then you'd probably get a rule or something preventing that from happening just because it would be sort of a slippery slope thing or there'd be concern about that because if you can just forfeit when you're down in a game, then can you just forfeit an entire game that doesn't matter to the standings because it helps your team? I guess especially if you're on the road and you're costing that other team the gate. So I think that would probably be seen as a danger. But is there something to the idea of a mercy rule?

And Lucas Apostolaris wrote about this for Baseball Prospectus, and he looked at what would have happened if MLB were to implement the rule that the World Baseball Classic uses, which I think is a 10-run difference at the completion of at least seven full innings. And he looked back in the BP database, which goes back to, I think, 1921 for big league games, and he found that there would be only two games in all of that time that actually resulted in comebacks that would have been canceled out by this mercy rule. So you're losing essentially nothing, no comebacks in this situation. So is there still a downside to it? No, I'm strongly pro-mercy rule. Yeah? Yeah. Well, so someone pointed out in the comments of the article that people who would be hand-wringing about losing the once every few decades comeback or the possibility of a comeback. That's essentially

like the people who said that when we got rid of actually throwing intentional balls for intentional walks that we were robbing ourselves of the opportunity to see a player once in a great while hit one of the intentional pitches for a single or something the way that Miguel Cabrera did. And that was so rare that it wasn't even worth considering. And I guess you could say the same about the comebacks. The only thing that gives me pause about this is that you do have to pay to go to a baseball game and you have to pay quite a lot these days. And it's a whole outing and an excursion and maybe it's a family thing or maybe you're with your friends and you pay for a nine inning game at least. And is it fair to then end it after seven innings if people are still sitting there and having fun? Half the fun of the baseball game is just sitting in the stands and enjoying that fun time. So would you feel cheated if the game were to end a couple innings earlier than scheduled?

Do you feel cheated if the pitcher works quickly and you get out in two hours and 20 minutes? No, I don't think so. But it's an innings thing. You sign up for innings and you know going in that it could be a five-hour game or it could be a two-hour game, but you still get the same number of innings.

Maybe you feel cheated if you don't. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I think that most people, people's unit of time management is by the inning. I feel like, you know, blowouts generally take, take a while. There's a lot of offense. You're certainly seeing, you're seeing more plate appearances than you would see in a typical game. You're probably seeing as long a game as you would see in a typical game. And to be honest, we as consumers, we've been getting free innings all our lives. They never charged us for it. And the players come to us and say, these blowout innings suck. Save us from them.

And we won't even give them a couple of mercy rules a year i feel like i'm i'd give them that and you know so take your party outside so you can you can do your you can hang out with your friends outside i don't know no i don't think it would be an issue i don't think it would be an issue either look i think that if you win if you're the home team and you win then you cheer like the umpire comes out and does a little thingy i don't even know what would the what would the it's a mercy rule sign be like it'd be like a guy like like i don't know like faking a heart attack or something like they're dead now i'm i'm not sure what the sign would be is what i'm saying ben but he comes out he does the sign home team

cheers we did it we won yeah if they lost then you get to boo your team because this situation just got even worse they they played so poorly they cost you your frolic time or whatever whatever you were doing in the stands that you paid for they cost you two innings of being at the ballpark and you just boo them so i don't know didn't know i'm not worried about losing a couple of innings i wouldn't do i wouldn't do i wouldn't risk doing some sort of like too creative by half mercy rule where it's like by win probability where you end up in like the top of the second and they're like well i guess we done. We set the limit at 100%. I wouldn't say that it has to be like, you know,

through six and with a certain lead. And I think everybody would be perfectly fine with it. There's more baseball tomorrow. Yeah. Well, Lucas also calculated how often this would happen. And he found that it would be this year going into Tuesday, there had been 1,865 games. 118 of them would have met the criteria for a mercy rule.

So that's 6.3% of total games, which is not nothing. And that's a lot more than would have been in any season. I think just eyeballing his graph since at least the 50s, if not earlier, we're in a very blowout heavy era, obviously, right now, because you've got all the homers, you've got all the scoring. When scoring is up, you tend to have more blowouts. And maybe also we're in an era of lopsided teams, and you've got great teams, and you've got terrible teams, and you've got teams that are willing to put in position player pitchers, which maybe exacerbates the situation. And so all of these things are conspiring to produce more blowouts and more mercy rules if we had mercy rules. I guess you could say that having them would be most disruptive or most different from how things have been.

But things are already different from how they've been because we're getting lots of blowouts. So in the future, if things change, if the ball goes back to the way it was, then you would not see quite so many blowouts and quite so many mercy rules. Probably would make traffic worse coming out of the stadium. That might be a downside. Yeah. make traffic worse coming out of the stadium. That might be a downside. Yeah. And I guess I was kind of concerned trolling with my maybe people will hate losing out on a couple more innings because people already vote with their feet and with their remote controls, right? Because I think most people in those situations leave the ballpark and change the channel. I don't know what the percentages are,

but just eyeballing ballparks in blowouts, there usually aren't a lot of people left. I often feel an obligation to consume the product that is for me, that I've paid for, not in baseball specifically all the time, but in anything, you know? Like if you ask me, hey, you want to go see a terrible movie? I would say no, but I have often been in terrible movies and I didn't get up and walk out. You know what I mean? And one probably should. One probably, like ask Marilyn, you know marilyn von sant from the parade magazine yeah there you go the member yeah she uh i remember reading that uh and our her her answer

to a question 25 years ago saying that you should just get up and walk out of that movie the cost the money you paid is a sunk cost but your time is not we don't do that. A lot of us don't do that. And I think a lot of the people that stay would, again, I think if their team lost, they would boo. They would feel okay booing. But I think they would probably actually enjoy a higher quality of life if they were given permission to leave by a mercy rule. I think probably a lot of people that stay also have kids, and they would be very grateful if a club official came out and said, okay, it's over.

You can take your kids home now. So will anyone think of the children then if we have mercy rules? What if the children are upset? No, because children are equally happy in every situation. Their moods are totally arbitrary, equally happy in every situation. Their moods are totally arbitrary, but they do not like losing sort of like self-sovereignty. If you go and take a thing from a child, they become very unhappy. But if when they're not looking, you take the same thing from the child, they never notice nor care because their moods are like dictated by like chemicals and arbitrariness.

And so, no, no one will think of the children. They don't deserve to be thought of in this way. Okay. By the way, seeing Lucas say that 6% of games this year would be mercy ruled reminds me that Adam Mayle calculated that 6% of our email answers have been Mike Trout related in the history of the podcast. I don't know if that's lower or higher than I would have thought. I guess we've probably raised the percentage in this episode because we answered a Mike Trout related email. Okay. Stab blast.

All right. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. this statast was inspired by a question from Matt who says, While going down a baseball reference rabbit hole, I ended up on the page for 1981 awards voting. On there, I was struck by something on the AL Rookie of the Year results. Shooty Babbitt.

Yeah. Sorry, i've said his name wrong every time i've i've searched it this week shooty babbit not babbit no shooty babbit and also shooty not scooty i've googled scooty babbit so many times that when i try typing in any url that starts with s, I get Scooty Babbitt. Scooty Babbitt is already an alt type name. You don't need to make it even better than it is. Scooty Babbitt finished fifth in the voting despite putting up a 615 OPS.

I had never heard of him before. Neither did I. I was so happy to discover this career. I have heard. I have definitely heard the name, which is ironic. I know given the bit i just did about the name but i had heard the name but i didn't know anything about him as a player i had never heard of him before and clicked his page only to learn that 1981 was the only season in which babbitt played in the majors it doesn't seem to be the case that he suffered some catastrophic injury as he played

in the minors the next season it just seems to be that he wasn't good enough to ever make it back even if it was just one voter that saw something that literally no one else saw. And by the way, it wasn't. Just so you know, I'll get to that. It seems wild that someone theoretically good enough to get rookie of the year votes could also disappear that quick without ever getting another cup of coffee at some point. there anyone who's had a shorter career but still received award votes if not is there a weirder career arc than that so i did uh i did a bunch of looking around in this and i will first talk about uh shooty shooty babbit and why he didn't play now he wasn't as noted he wasn't a particularly distinguished player that year uh but he was above replacement level he was 22 years old so he was he was young and he was above replacement level um and so you would think yes that he would he would get another chance i you know i i can't tell he was really really really bad basically in the second half and he lost his job entirely in september when the a's were independent races i think he started one game in september and and he lost his job entirely in september when the a's were independent races

i think he started one game in september and then he was left he basically he did not play a postseason game that year uh he had been entirely replaced after a you know a long slump but i i think there's more to it i i think that billy martin his manager hated him the i don't have like confirmation of this but reading between the lines lines, Billy Martin is credited with a quote that appears in Rob Nyer's Big Book of Baseball lineups, which is, if you ever see Shooty Babbitt play second base for me again, I want you to shooty me. It's not a very good line. It's very mean. It's very mean, but not that great a line either. No.

I feel like given the material, there's a better pun in there. But, you know, it's hard to say. He only made six errors in something like 55 games, which is not, you know, notably bad for a second baseman. He ranks as a plus one, a positive defender at second base by whatever we use for 1981 defense, which is a, you is a foggy thing to try to measure 30, 40 years later. But it's not obvious that he was bad, but Billy Martin didn't

care for his defense. But also, I don't know. I think he just didn't like him. I read an article from the Oklahoman, I think the Daily Oklahoman the next year after Babbitt had been released from the A's. So he goes to AAA the next year and he was he was good in AAA. Pretty good. He he was hitting 290. He had a 350 on base percentage. He had 11 steals in 40 games or whatever. And then he got released. And so then he he hooks on with another team in Oklahoma. The Oklahoman writes a profile of him and Babbitt, sorry, I cannot.

I'm just reading Babbitt. It's hard to know how much to read into this but Babbitt fell from Billy Martin's grace in the season's second half. By October, there was no place for Shooty Babbitt in Billy Ball. Quote, I didn't even play in the playoffs. All of a sudden, I was no place for Shooty Babbitt in Billy ball quote. I didn't even play in the playoffs. All of a sudden I was in his doghouse and that was it. Maybe he just means

doghouse. Like he wasn't playing. He doesn't know, but I don't know. And then he, he says, he then later in the article, he sort of talks about like, I don't know. He seems to be kind of saying that like, well, Billy Martin is not doing a very good job managing this year. He says to tell you the truth. So the A's had gone from a playoff team to a bad team, a losing team the next year. And he says, to tell the truth, the talent's not any worse. I just don't feel there's as much harmony there as there was before. Last year, it was more like a big happy family. But this year, there's more pressure.

The exciting type of baseball we played, which at the time was known as Billy Ball. They're not playing that way anymore. And so I don't know he was kind of criticizing maybe billy martin running the team or something i don't know it's again there's nothing here it's just like the between the the glee that martin took in making fun of the guys and then you know shooty himself seeming to be kind of shocked and and not that not that pleased with the A's organization or proud of the A's organization. He says it came as a big surprise. He didn't know any of this was coming as far as getting released. And so I don't know.

I'm not sure. So that's why Babbitt, I think, probably didn't play the next start the majors starting the majors the next year. And then, you know, he just never really got a chance. He had some up years and down years in the minors, but he wasn't really ever that great. It was kind of a surprise that he made the team the previous year. And then, you know, he just never really got a chance. He had some up years, some down years in the minors, but he wasn't really ever that great. It was kind of a surprise that he made the team the previous year. He was, I think,

their opening day second baseman. That was kind of a surprise. So that's how Shooty Babbitt, who would go on to have an extremely long career in baseball as a scout. He's back with the A's now as a scout.

Yes. So he doesn't hold a grudge against the organization. No, he seems he's from there, too. He's from Berkeley the A's now as a scout. Yes. So he doesn't hold a grudge against the organization. No, he seems, he's from there too. He's from Berkeley, I believe. Now, as to how he got his votes at all, he started hot. So I think that helps, especially in an era where there weren't a lot of stats available. I don't even know how they looked up stats in 1981 when they had to vote yeah i assume that you had like the year's final stats in the paper that day

the last day of the season you could look at or maybe you'd see him in the press the press box you'd see him but and it was 81 so weird split season and shorter schedule and maybe small samples things were happening yeah so he was pretty good for like the first month and a half. It'd be easy to think, ah, Shooty Babbitt, this guy who's got a great name, started the year on the opening day roster, he's playing well. And then you just kind of don't update as you go. So that's one possibility.

Another possibility is that this was actually only the second year of multiplayer ballots. Before that, you only had a first place vote. And so player the writers who would have voted for rookie of the year i don't know is it possible that they just weren't they didn't know what to do with second and third place yet and they were trying different things with it like they were just picking a guy they liked out there i saw him he played well who cares it's only third I don't know. The truth is it's not. It's probably neither of those things. The truth is, should he babbit kind of deserved that vote? Believe it or not, he had point three war. It's hard to really say he deserved that vote. But

there's a real bias toward voting for hitters in rookie of the year voting traditionally. And there were not any good rookie hitters in the American League that year. So Dave Righetti won the award. He's a pitcher. Bobby Ojeda finished third. He's a pitcher. Mike Witt tied with Shooty Babbitt.

He's a pitcher. And a guy named Brad Havens also got a vote. He was a pitcher, and they were all probably better than Babbitt. But if you're giving a bonus to the hitters for some reason, as voters seemingly do, if you think Babbitt's competing against the other hitters to some degree, well, the league leading rookie war that year was Sal Butera, who is Drew's father. And he had one war as a rookie hitter. And he didn't even actually get a vote. He was a catcher, right? He didn't get a vote. He had one war as a rookie hitter, and he didn't even actually get a vote. He was a catcher, right?

He didn't get a vote. He had a much longer career than Schuette, but he was below replacement level in his career, so arguably shouldn't have. But, you know, he had one war as a rookie, but they wouldn't have known that. They would have seen his counting stats and his stats overall. He had zero home runs. He hit.240,.325,.293, which is a.618 OPS, which is a lot like Schuette's. He only played 618 ops which is a lot like shooties he only played 62 games which is a lot like shooties he didn't steal any bases it would have been really hard

to vote for that line either and so you can see why nobody voted for him and then you have george bell george bell got votes he had 0.2 war he had a 606 ops as a as a george bell i don't know if he was a dh or a left fielder or right fielder or what but he was a george bell he got he got votes with that line and five home runs a guy named dave angle on the twins uh got votes he had five home runs and he hit 258 295 407 and he had 0.8 war and gary ward got votes he had five home runs and he hit 258 295 407 and he had 0.8 war and gary ward got votes he had 0.5 war and so shooty babbitt with his 0.3 war is you know kind of kind of there he actually played a little less than the others and so um you know maybe he uh on a per game basis he was right there with all the others i don't think it's actually that

outrageous that he got votes, other than the fact that probably it should have been all pitchers, any good ballot. But he did get more than one vote. He finished with four points, which is either two second place finishes or no, which is a second and a third, I believe. I think that's a second place and a third place if they still use the point system that I'm familiar with. I believe. I think that's a second place and a third place if they still use the point system that I'm familiar with. Now, has it ever been done before or since? No, no other player has ever gotten Rookie of the Year votes, been named on a ballot at all, andabbitt and who never played again. So the best rookie year ever for a player who never played again was Tony Barron. He did not get Rookie of the Year votes, but in 1997, he was basically a league average hitter and had outrageous defensive metrics as a right fielder. And so it ends up being 1.8 war in 57 games, which, you know, you do the math.

That's like an all-star level performance. But he was 30 years old, and the next year he was sent to AAA instead because he was replaced by another rookie from 1997 who got the right field job in Philadelphia instead, a kid named Bob Abreu, still known by Bob at the time. And Tony Barron crushed Diddy. Nah, he hit fine in AAA, and then he called it a career. instead a kid named bob abreu still going by bob at the time and uh tony baron crushed did he now he hit fine in triple a and then he called it a career the best pitcher ever for a rookie year

who went on to never play in the majors again was a guy named tom kramer who pitched for cleveland for Cleveland in 1992, I think. And he went seven and three as a swing man, had like a ERA of about league average. And that was also 1.7 war, or I shouldn't say also because Tony Barron was 1.8, but he was 1.7 war. And the next year he was in AAA where he was pitching pretty well, presumably, I think probably would have expected a September call-up, but that was the year of the strike.

There were no September call-ups. And so he didn't get a call-up that year. And then, um, the next year he was, uh, he left as a minor league free agent, I believe, and bounced around a little bit, three organizations, but never got another chance. So Tom Kramer is the other one who did that. The closest for a person who actually got rookie of the year votes was Kevin McGlinchey. Kevin McGlinchey, who would go on to throw only eight more innings in his career. He was a 22-year-old in Atlanta as a reliever when he had a 2.82 ERA in 70 innings, finished sixth in

rookie of the year voting. And then the next year had a 2.16 ERA in only eight innings. And I don't know, never heard him again. Went down to the minors, played in the minors for the rest of his life. He was only 23. I don't know. That's probably a story. And then probably the closest for a hitter is another guy who was affected by the strike, Troy Neal. Do you know the Troy Neal story? Don't think so. The Troy Neal story, Ben, is going to get a little dark.

So Troy Neal, 27 years old with Oakland in 1993, hit really well. He was a DH first baseman, left-handed hitter, big, big, strong, big, strong guy. policeman left-handed hitter hitter big big strong big strong guy and he debuted at age 26 but in his age 27 season he hit 19 homers he had a 131 ops plus and he finished seventh in rookie of the year voting the next year he basically did exactly the same thing he had an 832 ops a 122 ops plus a bunch of homers and then the season gets canceled by the strike. And so that's the end of his season. And so then he goes in the offseason with all the uncertainty and not knowing when they're going to play or what's going to happen.

He goes and gets a deal to play in Japan. And the A's sell his contract. He goes over there. He hits really well. He, you know, he's good. He's good. He has some good seasons. I think he leads, I think he leads his team to a championship and everything like that.

So then he comes back to the majors where Troy Neal is going to get another shot at the big leagues. And then I think I've got this timeline right. I read a bunch of articles and his Wikipedia page. I think I got his timeline right. In 1998, he gets divorced. page i think i got his timeline right in 1998 he gets divorced he gets a judge orders him to pay child support and he instead flees the country and goes back to japan to avoid paying child support and he stays there for a while when he comes back he is arrested he as uh he is on texas's 10 most wanted list for deadbeat dads that's all

capitalized because that's an official title for a thing they do he owed over 220 000 in unpaid child support he fled i don't know if he fled he left again to play in korea where according to an article in japan times he was released by his team after he and his wife were reportedly the cause of a fight in seoul that left one person in the hospital and his teammate in jail for three weeks his teammate was mike farmer the victim in the fight said he wanted to be compensated and farmer agreed to pay half but neil chose not to pay anything instead deciding to allow his teammate to remain in prison uh that's according to japan times another paragraph in that article in japan times is neil made enough money during his stay in japan to buy a private

island in the pacific that he says he wants to turn into a hedonistic community for wealthy men there's a lot of really weird things going on here. Anyway, he finally- Not enough to pay child support though. No, he finally came- Enough to buy an island, but- He did buy the island. He claims it lost money for, it was about a thousand miles off the coast of Australia. So then one day later on, he's flying, he flies from Australia to Los Angeles. He gets arrested and is charged and And he pleads guilty to fleeing the country to avoid paying child support. Greg Abbott, who was then the attorney general and now

I believe is the Texas governor, quote, this is the most egregious child support evader in Texas history. He said Neal's owed amount is more than the combined total of the top 10 deadbeat parents in Texas. And here's a quote from his attorney, quote, he's willing to work at McDonald's if he needs to coach Little League, whatever he needs to do to get his child support paid. How much do they think Little League coaches get paid? Not enough to erase the Mike Trout of deadbeat dad's dead, I don't think. And so then he falls out of the news, and I don't know any updates since then. But Troy Neal, another name in this stat blast.

Well, I don't feel so sorry for him that he had a short pickling career. No, at first I was like, oh, the strike, another victim of the strike. And then I kept reading. Wow. Well, that could be a book. If someone wants to write it, I'd read it. Yeah. Woo!

My goodness. That tired me out. Did not like that. Well, I'm glad you answered that because I was wondering about Shooty Babbitt But I didn't think that was where it was going Okay Boy alright Question from

James Really enjoyed Meg and Ben's discussion about Bobby Wallace from Sam's July Trout Tracker article The article was great I had never heard of Wallace And while I agree with Sam that Trout is a better player than Wallace according to war, I wonder if Wallace, who essentially invented modern throwing, should get a war dividend for all the put-outs and

assists that have been made possible by his invention. Does the invention of throwing a baseball or any other fundamental baseball function add more value than being the current best-ever player player should we give credit to the pioneers as if they hold the patent and if we did what would wallace's war be i tell you some people think that we use war too much but i would say that this is this is going too far you don't need to use war to measure a player's fame or status in the history of the game. So I would say that, yes, if you are voting for the Hall of Fame and you want to give credit for innovation as part of that case or as part of historical significance, or if you're trying to decide who's ballplayer biography you want to write or something of that nature or if you're beckett if you're the publisher of beckett baseball card monthly and you feel like goose in the card value a little bit because he's famous for inventing the running

throw then i say sure but you get no you get no extra credit for war yeah i mean for one thing inventing modern throwing it which is a very cool accomplishment but I don't think you would get war for it because everyone does that now. And so you get, I guess, all the positives of people throwing better. You also, though, get the negatives of, I mean, it's a zero-sum game, and it's not like,

if you only taught your team to throw really well and no one else did it, then I'd be open. And you told them to keep it a secret to never do it in public yeah just hide hide your hands somehow when you throw only in practice we're the best practice team in baseball if you could somehow do that i'd be open to the argument but once everyone adopts it then i don't see how you could award war for it. The one thing, like a more serious example of that kind of thing is if a player does teach his teammates to do something better, if he's essentially an extra

coach the way that JD Martinez was with the Red Sox last year when he made a bunch of players better. Or if you talk to Shane Bieber and Mike Clevenger, they say that Trevor Bauer made them better. Although other people will say that Trevor Bauer should lose war for his clubhouse presence. So it depends who you talk to. But that kind of situation where a player directly makes one of his teammates better in a very demonstrable way, certainly that's value. But again, I think it's beyond the scope of war because there's just no way to account for that. We have to accept, I think, what war is. And we're trying to determine the player's direct actions on the field and the and players have always been added and subtracted because of those things. And we can't quantify it. And war is an attempt to quantify it.

And I think it's beyond the purview of the stat. If in some horrible future world we can quantify, not because that would be necessarily on its face horrible, but the world where you can quantify a player's contribution in this way to other people is almost certainly a hellscape. Would you say that it would be suitable for war or would you rather keep your performance and your contribution to another's performance separate? Right. Well, last year, I think Ken Rosenthal wrote an article where he suggested that Martinez should get extra MVP consideration because of that knowledge that he imparted to other players that made the Red Sox better. I think it was Ken. Maybe because other people said, well, it's about value. It's about the value that you produce on the field. But that is value that you produce on the field indirectly. But it's the value that players on the team are producing that they would not have produced if you had not been on the team.

So I'm OK with giving a player an award for that. Now, it would probably still be a tiebreaker sort of situation for me because I wouldn't know how to credit it. I wouldn't know whether it only happened because of that player and how to apportion credit to that player and to the coaches and to the player who made the change himself. And it's just impossible really to put a number on it even if you know it happened.

But if you want to make the case to me that so and so is more valuable because he taught his teammates something i am very sympathetic to that case and so yeah i think if i could quantify it i guess i would put it in war okay yeah i would put it in an mvp consideration yeah i don't think yeah maybe not war. I mean, the problem with putting it in war is that then you are forced by the logic of war to remove it from the player who actually got the hits. That's true. Right. And I don't think I want to do that. Don't like that. Yeah. Okay. Quick baseball definition question.

Very quick. Okay. This is from K.A. He says, during the Royals-Tigers game today, good for you watching a Royals-Tigers game, there was a pitch down the middle that the batter swung at and fouled off. The announcer called it a good swing. Is it a good swing if you hit a ball down the middle foul?

I've always wanted to do a study of foul balls straight back to see if hitters really are on it. Okay, there you go. Jeff didn't buy it. I don't buy it either. wanted to to do a study of uh foul balls straight back yes if i talked about that once yeah okay there you go jeff didn't buy it i don't buy it either you're not gonna get the same pitch you're not even gonna get the same you're not gonna get the same pitch yeah like well this isn't necessarily straight back you just you fouled it off maybe it's straight back but right okay so good swing is it a good swing if you foul it off? I think that we kind of know what it means.

It means that you've kind of timed the guy a bit. Right. Not all the way, but you're stepping into it well. You're balanced. You just feel like you saw the pitch well. I think that it's probably right that this isn't the most accurate way to describe it because a good swing produces good baseball hits and so maybe if you could go back to the beginning you might stop the first person who said that and say well let's get more specific yeah um but i get what it

means and i don't have a problem with it A good swing doesn't always produce a good outcome because it is a process versus results thing. I think the question is, though, can you have a good process if it's a very hittable pitch and you still don't do something good with it? Because this is a ball that's right down the middle. Right down the middle. Can it be good? If this is a pitch that really every big leaguer is expected to be able to hit well, then can you actually put a good swing? I mean, there are degrees of good swing. I mean, you could time it well and just miss it high or low or something, which is a better swing, I suppose, than being way out in front of it or way behind it.

So maybe that's what it's trying to say. But can it truly be a good swing if it's a pitch that you really are expected to hit? And maybe it comes down to maybe it's a credit to the pitcher because the pitcher has messed up your timing or something on the previous pitch or he sequenced his pitches in such a way that yes it's a ball down the middle but it's still hard to hit because of what came before it on the other hand though i don't know if that solves the dilemma of whether it can actually be good because that means that you have been screwed up somehow by that previous pitch so okay so ben the pitch is coming in and then some time passes and then the pitch is, then the play is dead.

Okay. In that time, in that intervening time, is all of that the swing or are there different parts? Are there different segments of what the batter is doing? Some of which are the swing, but others of which are not. Well, I think the swing is the physical motion. So you could have a, you could have a nice perfect swing like you you took a perfect swing but you know you just you were i don't know the problem is that i was gonna say but you you know you were a little late on it

or you were looking for a change up and it turned out to be a fastball but in fact usually what they mean by good swing is is the opposite like you were on it yeah you just missed it and so in fact it was in some subtle way your swing did not get there like your swing failed you in a very subtle way if if what they're trying to convey is like he saw that one well but the reverse is certainly possible where maybe he didn't see it well but it was a good swing he took a perfect swing if he'd hit it would have been good but then what's the value there what is the value in saying that if he'd hit it well, but it was a good swing. He took a perfect swing. If he'd hit it, it would have been good. But then what's the value there? What is the value in saying that if he'd hit it,

like if he'd hit a pitch that will never again be repeated, that the universe would be different? Because there are players who have good-looking swings and who are not actually good hitters. They have maybe picturesque swings or something, but maybe they're not good at picking up pitches. So the physical act of swinging is itself good but it's coupled with poor pitch recognition and so you're not a

good hitter but you still have a good swing yeah i think we got we should we should get rid of this one yeah i i'm convinced there's it's not doing anything i think we should get rid of it yeah find a new find a new term if what you want to say is he just missed anything. I think we should get rid of it. Yeah. Find a new term. If what you want to say is he just missed it, I think we all know what that means. Yeah. If you want to say he's not fooled up there, we all know it. I mean, I think that would be more compelling. Okay.

You can keep bad swing, maybe. Oh, yeah, sure. But good swing. There's a ceiling on how good the swing can be if you're fouling off a pitch right down the middle. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, I'm going to close with one more quick one from Jamie, Patreon supporter. Sam already answered this one via email.

The question is, Jose Quintana just won his fourth game in four starts in four series versus the Pirates. The Cubs and the Pirates have two more series remaining this season. Under the current schedule format, divisional opponents typically play six series versus one another each year. Under this format, has any starting pitcher ever won six starts versus one opponent? And Sam said, six times in the division era. Most recently, Andy Pettit in 2003 and Bartol Cologne in 2004. Five pitchers in that time have managed to start seven times against an opponent, including Jose Quintana. Plot twist. Last year against the Brewers, he went four and one.

So thanks to Sam in absentia. And thanks to Adam Mayle, I know that the record for most emails answered in one episode was set in episode 1077 when we answered 15 emails. We did not do that today. Adam also noted that 53 of our emails have had the word hypothetical in them, although many, many more of them have been hypothetical questions that did not say hypothetical. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already signed up, pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going, and gotten themselves access to some perks. Thank you. to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming

via email at podcastandfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. If you like it, please leave us a positive review on Amazon and Goodreads. We'll be back with one more episode later this week. It will be me and Meg, and we will talk to you then. with me Where did he go? What will I do?

Hello, why did he run? Run away from me The sky is blue The sea is warm and clear and cold and thin I'm calling out to you and fighting Make a new man out of you You can come for a while

Come with a friend Forget about where to start All over again Let the real you through Here is what we do