Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1422: Tie Goes to the Robot

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about what GPS directions have to do with analytics-averse managers, MLB’s black and white uniforms fiasco on Players Weekend, Sam’s takeaways from his trip to see a former podcast guest’s game in the Southern California Vintage Base Ball League, a philosophy professor’s quest to establish that the tie goes […]

My favorite satellite I pay for it, why can't I? My favorite satellite I'm a paper-bit satellite. I pay for it, why can't I? Good morning, and welcome to episode 1422 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrabs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN, Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I'm going to tell you something about driving.

I know nothing about it. Exactly. So when I drive, like a lot of people, I use a GPS system, like a little thing I put in my car, and it tells me where to go. And, you know, I would say that it benefits me in a lot of different ways. One way it benefits me is that it just eases my mental load. I don't have to look up where to go, you know, if I'm going somewhere. I don't have to write down a bunch of notes. I don't have to carry a Thomas guide around with me. It just makes my life easier because it does a lot of the work that I could do,

but it saves me the time so I don't have to do it. And it also helps me because it can process information faster than I do. It can think, I can really only think like two streets ahead when it comes to precise directions, precise instructions. I have a hard time once it gets past like two or three steps. And so it does those for me and it's really great. And sometimes it even will find a route that I would not have found on my own. Sometimes there's a situation where, for instance, you can't turn left into a business. You have to go up a little ways and U-turn and then turn right into it because there's a divider.

And it knows that. I wouldn't know that. And it might help me by finding a better route. It's a great system, a lot of processing power that I otherwise don't have or, you know, would prefer not to use in my own brain. The one thing it lacks is common sense. And so every once in a while, it will just tell me to get off the freeway and then like circle around and then get back on the freeway.

It thinks that's good for some reason. circle around and then get back on the freeway it thinks that's good for some reason and sometimes i'll be driving 400 miles and i'll be like on mile 80 of like a 300 mile stretch of the freeway and it'll just say get off the freeway now because it can get me it can get me on a surface street that will save me a tenth of a mile mile, but add 40 minutes. And so in that case, usually I think, is that, I don't know, that's probably not right. Sometimes I will, I will look it up and, you know, I'll have my co-pilot, whoever I'm driving with, look it up and they'll tell me, nope, that's crazy. And sometimes I just ignore it. And sometimes I think really hard about it. You know, I, in some cases,

actually, they're, the system is correct. And I'm impressed. But generally speaking, I would say, I don't know, I would say six out of seven times that I really have to interrogate this thing, I end up realizing that it lacks common sense. And I go with with what I know with what my sense of direction and my superior experience tell me. And so given all of that, I think you would agree it's fair for me to say that 85% of my decisions go against the analytics. And that's how it's always going to be. edge cases, as we said when we were talking about Mickey Calloway, if we were talking about every time it tells you turn right in 90 feet on such and such a street, then usually you're going to do exactly what it tells you. That's not even a decision, I guess, because you are just delegating the decision to the GPS, but you're usually obeying its instructions, except for these strange cases where it malfunctions in some way. Yeah, that's right. And I would say that I am not anti-GPS.

I like it so much that I don't even think about how much I'm using it, that it is baked into the infrastructure of every decision I make when I'm driving. Although, actually, I would say that, in fact, probably 90% of the time I'm driving, I don't even use it at all. I don't even turn it on because I know where I'm going. I've been there a thousand times before. And so it's actually even a smaller subset, but yet I do still feel like if you said, all right, when, you know, how often do you go against the GPS? I feel like in the right circumstances, I could say 85% of the time. So that is, I just have been sitting on that analogy since five minutes after we hung up last time.

I just have been sitting on that analogy since five minutes after we hung up last time. And I wanted to bring it up because I think that is really truly the clearest and best way that I could describe Mickey Calloway's previous quote in the most positive way. Well, to extend the analogy, I think that if you're of a certain generation, there's kind of a cutoff. There's kind of a cutoff, like if you learn to drive and navigate in a pre-GPS era, I always have the sense that those drivers are implicitly rooting against the GPS. They want to prove the GPS wrong. Whereas I, coming of age in a generation where I'm kind of used to the GPS and I don't drive as a lifelong Manhattanite, but if I did, I would rely entirely on the GPS. And I'm always rooting for the GPS to be right. When it says something quirky, I think, no, it's satellites and it's Google and they know, just trust them. I don't know if I'd be one of those people who drives into the lake because the GPS tells you to drive into the lake, but everything short of that,

I kind of defer to the GPS and figure it's going to steer me right more often than it's going to steer me wrong. So I think there is an age-based cutoff there. And that probably applies to managers too, because if you come up in the age before analytics and you're accustomed to making all the decisions yourself, maybe you grudgingly accept that you have to put up with this now and that occasionally it will actually help you. But I think you always have that ingrained sense that I could do this myself if I really wanted to. And this is an imposition on me. Maybe that is why teams have employed younger managers who are not quite so accustomed to that.

On the other hand, Mickey Calloway is one of those younger managers and he's 44 and he still feels that way. So I'm painting with a broad brush here. There are young people who are old school and old people who are new school. Well, Ben, it will not shock you to find out that I was a late adopter to GPS technology. And so I would say that I did not learn to drive or navigate with GPS. It is a thoroughly modern and recent innovation to me. And I don't know if I root against it, but I will admit that the rare occasion when it tricks me into getting off the freeway

or into going the wrong way or into doing an unnecessary loop, which is also a thing it does. It does a lot of unnecessary loops. You probably feel superior. Well, not superior. You feel like you outsmarted it. I'm thinking

of a slightly different thing here i get really super mad and think this thing never did me any good i get really like i i don't know if i think that exactly but to me the four minutes that it cost me twice a year does exist as prominently in my mind in fact probably more prominently in my mind than the thousands and thousands of decisions that i get to outsource to it and the many many many many minutes that it saves me over the course of my year because i don't have to look anything up and because it might save me time and i cannot mentally pull up all those instances where it saved me 40 cents of preparing for a trip. But I can like I remember driving back from Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, California, in stomper summer,

and it taking me off the freeway and trying to like sort of cut across and I remember every second of that like that that to me is a a very available memory for me. So that makes me now wonder if I actually am anti-GPS. But it makes me think that, in fact, if you're thinking of Mickey Calloway being in my position, that in fact, yes, now I'm back to thinking he was being hostile. Yeah. Instead of feeling angry or superior when the GPS is wrong, instead of feeling like, take that, you robots. We humans still have something to teach you. I just feel disappointed that it wasn't infallible because that means I can't quite trust it completely the next time. And that makes me question everything. And of course, it's smart to question everything because sometimes things are based on bad data

or the computers are programmed by people who aren't good at their jobs or have some sort of bias that they bake into the code. But on the other hand, people put the GPS satellite in orbit and figured out how to triangulate your precise position. So maybe they can also figure out how to tell you where to turn. If I were a driver, though, I would put most of, if not all of my faith in the GPS. And I really like it even as a navigator because I have a lot of memories from childhood of being the backseat navigator for my mom, let's say, when she was driving me somewhere. And my mom is the type of driver who always wants to know the next 10 directions, even though she

can't possibly remember beyond the next one or two. And so she'll say, okay, what does it say we do next? And okay, after that, and how long do we go on that? And then when do we turn and what exit do we take? And by the time we actually get there, she's asked me three more times to repeat those directions. But I had many memories of trying to trace routes on maps and I wasn't very good at that. And one thing I can't do is fold a map that I have unfolded that is never going to get back in the original creases if it's in my hand. So I'm very happy not to have to operate a manual map anymore. How old were you when you were navigating for her? Oh, I don't know, probably 10. Did it ever occur to you that she was actually just giving you something to do and developing your mind? I don't think so, because I was probably

just reading. I wasn't one of those annoying backseat kids who's always screaming about something. I just wanted to be buried in a book all the time. So, yeah, but not a map. By the way, before we switch subjects, while we're dragging Mickey Calloway, I should spare a second for Rick Renteria, who went on a little sabermetric skeptic rant of his own last week when he said, I don't discount numbers, never have, never will, but I'm a balanced guy. I'm not going to appeal to the sabermetrician on a daily basis, never will,

never want to, not my intent. If they don't like it, I don't really give a shit. Most people want to go through just statistically based decisions. Okay, I'm not that guy. I trust myself and the things I do. I think there's a balance. I do things because I think it's the right thing for me to do. I know everybody has their opinion. Maybe it puts me on the outs. That's fine. But I'm going to do what I think I need to do with the guys I have. So that reminds me of my mom inevitably saying that whichever route the GPS recommends is not the right one. And she knows better, even though she does not have access to real-time traffic information. Then again, this is the same woman who never really trusted Mariano Rivera.

So maybe she's just tough to please. All right. What do you want to talk about? What do you got? Well, I suppose the story of baseball since we last spoke has not been the baseball or the baseball players, but the baseball uniforms. And we don't talk a whole lot about uniforms on this show. We don't do many uni-watch style segments. And typically, I don't care all that much about uniforms.

I don't really appreciate the nice ones on a deep, visceral level, and I don't get too upset about the not-so-nice ones. The ones on Players Weekend were notable, obviously, because they looked like no other uniforms, and there was a great outcry and backlash and gnashing of teeth, and I think that we will never see these uniforms again. And I understand all of the criticisms. There were many legitimate criticisms of these uniforms. players at some times, but the obvious complication was that they also looked exactly like umpires, and so anytime you saw an overhead shot of the field, you'd think there was an eight-man infield going on, so that was a problem. Then you had the problem of multicolored uniforms, so pitchers

couldn't wear the white caps because it might blend in with the ball, so pitchers with white uniforms had to wear black caps, and that looked kind of strange. And then the white uniforms were just a problem in general because you really couldn't read the nicknames, which was sort of the whole point of Players Weekend, and you could not quite see the numbers quite as clearly. And when you watched highlights of any team over the weekend,

you could never tell who was playing. And that was a problem, too, because all the teams look the same. And I think you kind of take it for granted that you can just at a glance see who's playing in a baseball game. And that was not something that you could not actually read those nicknames. it was this massive embarrassment for baseball and they'll never live it down, I kind of am already thinking of the far future when we will look back on this weekend and we will think fondly, probably, of these very strange uniforms that you can't conceive of anyone actually thinking were a good idea, but they'll join the pantheon of like white socks, shorts, uniforms, and Astros, rainbows, and Padres and padres yellow and brown and all of the uniforms

that just don't really look like baseball uniforms and you can't believe they actually were someday we'll be saying that about the spy versus spy white versus black uniforms from this weekend that's so that's what i told me meg on friday afternoon sent me a screen grab because the the umpires thing that this was the first screen grab where like you couldn't it looked like a shift of seven people all standing in one place and i did not know that they were doing these you know this was the day game and so i didn't know yet that this was a thing i wasn't watching that game and so i thought oh wow it is it is spy versus spy i thought it was one decision by one game, two teams in one game. Yeah. Kind of interesting. Yeah.

And then I was quite troubled in the evening when I turned it on and saw them all. I mean, the all white, like all white, all white is never, ever, ever intended. I don't think ever intended to put you at ease i think that all white all super like like totally monochromatic white uniforms in any setting is usually supposed to make you feel uncomfortable it is like uh like like in the island the movie with ewan mcgregor and scarlett johansson that's what i think of is like the classic all white where it sort of is trying to put you on alert that something creepy and like falsely utopian is going on i feel like all white like makes me think of the polyphonic spree kind of like there's just

too many hippies like or too many somethings like there's just it's too many somethings that's what it is it's all the it's too many that it's scary yeah or like the the guilty remnant from the leftovers it's yes it is that's right the guilty remnant from the leftovers. It's kind of creepy. Yes, it is. That's right. The guilty remnant. Right. That's another good one.

And so also I was struck by how much trimmer, how much slimmer the road teams all looked this weekend. It really was slimming. You would just look at the pitcher and be like, wow, he's really slim. And then you look at the batter and you go, something doesn't look quite right about him. So what I was saying was that I spent the whole weekend trying to figure out what the thinking was though. Was there a press release about like what this was supposed to represent,

what they were going for, why? Usually with something like this, it's symbolic or it's supposed to evoke something intentional. There's an idea behind the uniform choices. And I didn't know what this was trying to evoke or invoke or anything. I didn't know why. Why Players Weekend, for instance? It is weird that they would take over Players Weekend from the players. If it's the Players Weekend, then why is the commissioner or the league's pet project out instead taking all the attention and so i didn't know whose idea was i thought did the players is this the players idea and so it wasn't it really wasn't well

explained to me and so i don't know if they did explain it and i just missed the articles yeah if they did i missed it too i assumed that people just thought it would look kind of cool and different and distinctive. It was certainly distinctive. But the previous Players Weekend outfits had themes, right? There was the Little League year where they wore Little League style uniforms, and there was the year where they wore future uniforms. Or was that just one team? Was that just the Mariners that did the like not

the throwback uniforms but the the throw future ones that showed what baseball uniforms might look like someday so i like themed uniforms like that but i did not hear if there was a cause or an inspiration for these or whether it was just that someone thought they would sell like maybe if you look at them not on a baseball field, they look okay. I mean, I saw still photos of players posing in these uniforms and didn't look terrible. And maybe MLB just figured, well, these look so different from other uniforms that people will buy them because they won't look like things that are already in their wardrobes. But if that's the main point of it, then yeah, that does kind of contradict the idea of letting this be the players' time to shine. And you had the Yankees and the Dodgers, I think, petitioning the league to let them not wear those

uniforms after Friday, and they were forced to continue to wear them. So very self-defeating, did not reflect well on the sport. And yet it's over and maybe we learned a lesson and these uniforms will not come back. And now we can make jokes about them for the rest of our lives. Whenever we see someone in all black or all white, we can reminisce about that time that MLB players actually all wore white and black uniforms that one weekend. Yeah, I don't, I didn't care. But I don't know. I'm a little torn. I don't, I was just listening to your guys' discussion about, from episode 1305 or so,

about the constant banning of the shift conversation that Rob Manfred keeps, you know, tossing into the pond. And I get, every time I think about that, I just get so, so upset. Not because I care that much about the shift, but because it just seems so poorly thought out. And I really want a commissioner who is willing to try things and to say, why not? Like, I really like being willing to do weird things and go, what's the downside? Right. And yet when there's so little upside to it,

which is what banning the shift is to me, like banning the shift is just, seems like such a, I don't know, unadvanced idea. Like, why that? How is that your passion project? It just hurts me. Like that's the thing you care about.

And so the uniforms thing, I wanted to i wanted to be pro just because because why not like i i think sure why not got publicity at least like banning the shift you wouldn't even see it i mean well yeah but but why this you know like so then i really want to like it and then i spend the whole weekend thinking really this is the best you've got and so then it kind of bums me out and i didn't even know what the symbolism was tell the story yeah uh all right anyway so we've we've talked enough about that and we all we did is say what everybody else said which is boy those were sure weird pretty much all right let's see i saw joe bilheimer play baseball yeah

i saw a picture of you seeing that it was very fun. Joe was on an episode that I was not on a while ago about his 1886 league. And I've been aware of these vintage leagues for a while and I've never seen them play. But Joe was playing a couple miles from my house. I didn't even need a GPS to get there. And I went and it was really fun. Really, it was a very good time. And next time he comes to Long Beach, I'm going again. And this time I'm putting the word out and we're going to get a cheering section for Joe and his team because I think that we can make some noise. But it was really interesting. So here are a few things that were interesting to me. Well, one thing is that Joe, you should know Joe is really

good at baseball. He was he was Stephen Vogt's backup in college. And so he played way more baseball than almost everybody else he was playing against. And he just smoked everything. They play with what is essentially a dead ball. So it doesn't carry that well. But he had four hits, he had a triple and a double and two singles. And the umpire was behind the pitcher with a big top hat on. And I believe that Joe literally knocked his top hat off with a line drive. It was the closest I've ever seen to an umpire getting hit in the face with a batted ball. The umpire, like I said, he's wearing this top hat. And it's weird because so the whole experience, what was interesting about it is that they're wearing these kind of costumes sort of.

And they're going through the motions of like this being like an 1886 baseball game. So they call, for instance, they call the umpire sir. They will only address the umpire as sir. So they call, for instance, they call the umpire, sir, they will only address the umpire as sir. And yet, they're also 2019 people playing baseball that I was surprised to find this out. I'll get back to this, but they really just want to win like to them. This is mostly, you know, a baseball league that they're in, they want to play baseball. And so the disdain they feel for the umpire is very familiar they can't like do anything about it but like they like they all thought his calls were terrible and they were trying to with uh to to restrain themselves from going after the umpire and you could just see them just like they wouldn't get a call i mean it's like it's seven balls for a walk so a call's not even that big a deal uh and yet if a strike didn't go their way they would just breathe this heavy disdainful sigh and be like you sure and they wouldn't get the call and so i thought that this

game was going to be like a bunch of art students putting on their their play i thought that it was a like an art project and uh it was not that it they the uniforms like the uniforms and the equipment are all vintage they have to you know pay extra to have these things but basically like i said they're playing a game of baseball with different rules and you get the sense that mostly what they're in it for is to play a slight variant of baseball, where the rules are a little different, and there's a little bit different strategy. And it's not quite the baseball that they've been playing their whole life. So there's something very novel about it. But at the heart of it is a baseball game, like they're really trying

to win. You know, there was one guy on the other team who like the other team was mostly friends with each other like co-workers but a couple of them were not and so the one one of the ones who was not one of the co-workers was just a lot more friendly than everybody he was very outgoing and very sociable and so he's on second base and he's just making small talk to the second baseman and his third base coach keeps on going don't talk to the other team. Pay attention to the game. And like that, that was sort of surprising for me to see. Like they cared about winning. They got mad when they wouldn't get a hit.

They got mad when they wouldn't get a call. It is very hard to catch the ball. Extremely hard to catch the ball. And so like one time the center fielder caught a fly ball to straightaway center field. Just a routine fly ball anywhere else. But they have they're basically wearing the equivalent of like gardening gloves for their for their glove for their mitt. And so it's really hard to catch. And so he catches this can of corn and he lets out this scream of celebration like he just won the Masters.

Like it is the most i've seen a person celebrate on a baseball field and it was just a routine catch but it's hard to catch the ball wonder if guys used to get drilled for celebrating catches maybe but you think about it like to get an out usually requires a couple people catching a ball like a ground ball to third base the third baseman has to catch it which is ball to third base the third baseman has to catch it which is really hard and then the first baseman has to catch it which is really hard so there was a lot of offense they didn't steal as much as they should they should steal on every single pitch it is almost i don't see how you could get thrown out because no one can catch

a hard throw from the catcher but they don't steal every single pitch they used to steal a ton they did baseball in that era that was how bill Bergen was employed as a Major League catcher for so long, even though he was the worst hitter ever because he had a good arm, and that was especially valuable in that era. Yeah, there are quick pitches. You don't have to stop at all, and so that helps with the running game. It also helps against it. You're sort of trying to surprise the batter sometimes,

and that, I would say, was my favorite part of it. If I could take one thing from 1886 rules, that would be it. It would be quick pitches. You can quick pitch. You don't have to come set. You don't have to stop. You don't have to wait for the batter. You don't have to do anything. You just get the ball. And if you want, you can fling it right back in, in like a half second after you got it. So it's very fun. So anyway, that's all.'s that's all i had a really very good time and so i wouldn't if anybody's friend ever invites them to come watch their 1886 baseball game or any other game joe's joe's gonna be barnstorming out to arizona in a little bit and playing against an 1865 team i think which is totally different theators, if the spectators catch the ball, a foul ball, it's an out. That's a real rule, apparently. Anybody who catches it, anybody.

the differences between 90s baseball and 80s baseball or 70s baseball and 60s baseball or something. I know exactly how those decades differed and how the rates compared in one decade to another. But if you ask me like one decade in the 19th century versus another decade in the 19th century, I could guess maybe. Maybe I'd have an educated guess, but there were some times that were like pre-modern era baseball that were not dead ball baseball, like a lot of runs were scored at that time. And you might not realize that because it was so long ago that you just figure, oh, well, it's 19th century, it's all the same. But really there were a lot of differences between those decades. So if you're an 188686 team that's a completely different brand of baseball from an 1860 something team but it's funny that the umpires you had to be excessively polite to the umpires in this league because that was the era where you could probably

just punch an umpire after the game or that was much more common than it is today you could just brawl with those guys maybe that's why you had to be so polite in public, because there was a greater risk that players would just attack the umpires on their way off the field or ambush them later if they didn't like their calls or something. But I think relations between the two were a lot less civil at the time, right? Well, probably they were, but I don't know. If you just think about the incentives here, if you're playing baseball, you need an umpire. It's really hard to play a competitive game of baseball without an umpire, which means you have to get a steady supply of people who are willing to do the least fun part of a baseball game.

They're not getting anything out of it. They don't compete. They don't get to win at it. Back back then they wouldn't have been paid very much. I mean, an umpire these days, it's a career, you get benefits, you get, you know, you put your kids through college on an umpire salary. There's a lot of reasons that you would be willing to be an umpire, even if, you know, the, if the manager is, you know, calling you a horseshit every 12 seconds. But back then you got to convince someone to give up their afternoon to yeah be the bad guy and so i don't know probably some some pretty good manners toward him are uh at least help to uh to convince him that you know he's he's gonna have an okay time i don't know i just

made all that up i don't even know if i understood the the decorum correctly i mean a lot of the a lot of what was fun about watching uh joe play is that you're kind of figuring out what's different as you go and i didn't know i was not really prepared i hadn't done any research or anything i knew some some things vaguely and some things i didn't know and so like for instance well first of all i was sitting next to two women who were like real baseball fans, but they had just kind of stumbled onto this game that they'd been walking past the park and saw some people going to play baseball. And so they came over and they sat next to me and they were, they were very confused because the umpire would call

ball four and then everybody would just keep playing and then they'd call ball five and then they'd keep playing and they did not know that and so that that had to be like they were trying to decode that yeah the thing that i kept on i was having the hardest time with like all of a sudden okay so someone would make it the center fielder would make a catch and he'd whoop and holler and then then the umpire would say, two hands. And I'd go, that's weird. Why is the umpire yelling coaching advice to the center fielder? I had a hard time.

And then later, someone would botch one. And he'd go, no hands. And I'd think, ah. And then I figured out that hands was the word for outs back then and so they would say one hand one hand and then and then they'd say and then at the end of the inning i think they would say oh what did they say they might have said like all hands down or something and i and i wondered if that's where hands down came from probably not i'm not even sure they said hands down to be honest i might have just made that up. So did I really think?

Is that where they... I did think at some point something that the umpire said about hands that is now a familiar saying in another context. I wondered if that was it. I think it was hands down, but it might have been like all hands on deck or something. Yeah, or like a boat goes down and it's lost with all hands. Yeah, right. I don't think that's what that is, though.

No, probably not. So I think that's all I have on Joe. Yeah, sounds like a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. I'd like to go someday. Let's see. Can I talk about this philosophy professor who wrote about ties at first base? Oh, yeah.

I meant to bring that up before. Oh, okay. So Colin wrote us a couple of months ago in fact about his uncle and i finally got around to reading this his uncle was a philosophy professor named ted cohen and i'm going to bring this up because i have a reason to bring it up it's not just because i read this thing but so ted cohen in the uh early night ted cohen was a baseball fan but more than that he was a fan of the Major League Baseball rulebook. He liked he likes rulebooks.

He likes game rules as like a philosophical imperative or something like that. And so he was an he had he had read time was that in one part of the rule book, it says that in order for the runner to be safe, he must beat the throw. And then in another part, it says in order for the runner to be out, the throw must beat him. And it seems like there's only two things you can either the runner can be be there first or the ball can be there first. And so those seem like they're saying the same thing, but as Ted Cohen deduced or thought about, there's also the tie, right? There's the tie.

And of course, well, I don't know. Is there a tie? We'll get to that question. But this really bothered him because it has long been sort of said out loud, tie goes to the runner. That is a sports saying, tie goes to the runner. That is a sports saying, tie goes to the runner. But then the rule book is actually not clear on it. In the first instance, the tie would, if you say the runner has to beat the throw, then

the tie would go to the defender because the runner did not beat the throw. And if you say that the throw has to beat the runner, then the tie would go to the runner because the throw has to beat the runner, then the tie would go to the runner because the throw has to beat the runner. They said, we'll look into it. We'll take it to the next umpires meeting. And then nothing was done. And, uh, the umpire said there are no ties basically. And so he lived with this for like 10 years thinking, you know, somewhat frustrated that it hadn't been addressed. He actually, well, and so I'll get to this too. I'll give him, I'm going to get to more. Uh, I need to quit promising things. All right.

So, so then in the early 1990s, uh, Ted writes a, um, an article about his experience about this, this whole, this, um,

this contradiction in the rule book and also about the fact that he couldn't get major league baseball to do anything about it. And, and so he writes a paper that runs in some philosophy journal, I think. And then it was twice more collected in anthologies, baseball writing anthologies. And sometime between the last time that it appeared in an anthology and was discussed on the burgeoning internet, and then he died, and then Ted Cohen died. And then sometime not long after that, Major League Baseball actually did change the rule. They brought those two statements into agreement and so now in fact both parts of the

rule book say that the ball must beat the runner and so you would then read those two things and decide that in fact the tie does go to the runner now in his paper in ted's paper he quotes a physicist friend of his actually a philosopher of physics is that a physicist but this philosopher of physics told him that in fact it is possible to have a tie that i i don't believe that i do not believe it is possible to have a tie okay he has a philosopher philosopher of physics that I just said with a little bit more disdain than I meant, who says that it is possible to have a tie, but I don't think it is possible to have a tie. And so I think that in one sense, this is totally a moot point because there are no

ties in nature. If you go down far enough, there is going to be at a cellular level, something has to come before the other. There are not even discrete moments in nature. There's not even discrete moments of time. And so how can they possibly be at the exact same time? Everything is fluid and so on and so forth. So no ties. However, we know what this means.

When you say tie goes to the runner, what you're really saying is tie goes. We know what this means. When you say tie goes to the runner, what you're really saying is tie goes, in an instance where the umpire cannot determine, is not able with his own judgment to say which one came first. When he is truly baffled, truly at a loss to say one came before the other, that in that case, we might say that the tie that he perceives, even though it's not real, should go, shall go to the runner. And I think that historically,

I think that the umpire's resistance to this is probably good. I think that what we want is for umpires to make a choice. We don't want them to say it couldn't have, it was too close to call. We want them to say, well, what do you think? Like, even if you're only 51% to 49%, go with the 51. Get as close to the truth as you can. So do not ever declare a tie. However, and here I am finally to my point, Ben. I think that the way that baseball has chosen to handle replay reviews has actually now created a tie. You have a situation where a call is made on the field.

have a situation where a call is made on the field, it is challenged, and it goes to a person who is able to look with incredible detail at many, many, many angles, obviously, without a doubt, without question, undebatably has a much better view of the play than the umpire who was calling it in the first place. He can slow it down. He can rewatch. He can freeze frame. He can sync video up. He can, I mean, I don't know. He has 10,000 times the ability to make the call maybe than the man on the field had. And what Major League Baseball has decided is that if he can't decide, if it is not clear to him what the call should be, if it is not conclusive to him what the call should actually be, then he essentially declares it's a tie and the tie goes to the ruling on the field. And what I think is that they shouldn't do that. They should say in that case, they should say the tie goes to the runner. If he doesn't know, if he cannot tell, that is what

we mean by a tie. It cannot be determined with all the information in the world at our disposal. And so declare it a tie, regardless of what the umpire on the field said, then we're going to say that the runner, if this is a runner play, obviously, if this is something like maybe if it's a non-runner play, then you wouldn't do this. But if there's a runner involved, we're calling it a tie. We're saying the runner is safe. And the reason that I want to do this is one, ever since the idea of making the bases bigger came into my life, I have become really interested in little nudge things that you can do to increase base running and perhaps also increase the incentives

for base runners to be a little bit more aggressive. And so this isn't obviously going to be a ton of things, which is why it's great. But there are going to be a few plays a week throughout Major League Baseball where now there's going to be a runner on base instead of the inning is over or there is no runner on base. And so it will slightly in a very small and non-obtrusive way increase a little bit of offense and a little bit of lively base running type offense but also more probably importantly i do not believe that the umpire in the booth

well i i suspect that the umpire in the booth would have a hard time with this he would not want to give it to the runner if in his heart of hearts, he thinks the runner was out. And so I think that this would actually force him to make a call. I think right now, they're just, they're ducking the issue. These umpires in the booth are ducking the issue way too often. I'm getting tired of it. I'm tired of all these calls standing when it seems pretty clear to me that the video evidence is strongly suggestive of one decision or another, but they don't do it. They say, well, if it's not 100% conclusive. So I think that if they knew that they were rewarding a runner that they actually believed

to be out, they would say, all right, I'm not calling this one a tie. He's out. And then we would be rid of this scourge of the upheld call i'm tired of the upheld call that's really what i'm getting at yeah there are a lot of plays that i have difficulty determining when i'm watching if it's a bang bang play and i know they have additional replays and probably greater precision in chelsea when they're looking at these things but i have a tough time because it's always so difficult to tell when the ball is in the glove. And then there's always the discussion among the broadcasters of when the ball technically is in the glove.

And then it becomes that whole football discussion of how do you define a catch. And in baseball, it's like when the ball hits the back of the glove, or at least that's what announcers usually say it is, at least if the first baseman retains control of it. usually say it is, at least if the first baseman retains control of it. And it's really hard to tell when the ball hit the back of the glove because you can't necessarily see the glove move right away. Then they zoom in and it becomes all grainy and you can't really see anything. And then it's hard to, if they zoom in too far, then you can't even see what the runner's foot is doing and where he is. So there are a lot of plays where i don't envy the umpires in either situation because even i can't completely tell watching that replay and if you're right there watching it in real time granted maybe you have the advantage of the sound which is something that we don't get when we're watching the replays i

wonder whether they get that in the replay center in Chelsea because that might help you figure it out sometimes if you can hear the shoe hit the bag and then you can hear the ball hit the glove. Maybe that would help you decide sometimes. But that's something the in-person umpire has that the fan watching at home doesn't have. But I still have a pretty tough time with those.

And yet, like you, i think i do feel a little let down when there's a call stands and it's just like well we can't figure it out and he already made a call so we'll go with that yeah i hate the call stands in general as a concept just because it it's goes so against the logic of what we're doing the whole point of that the the video is that it's giving us more information and so to say that the call of the kind of lower lower level decision maker must stand even though we've created a whole new level that we consider superior so in any in any event i i'm sort of against the the concept there but when you really it i mean you you watch these replays for three minutes and each one makes you more sure that it's going to be overturned and the announcers

are saying yeah this one's going to be overturned and then it just isn't and you don't like that's the end of that and i don't know in a way i could always could always live with the umpire on the field getting it wrong in a way because what's he going to do? This is really hard. He's trying his best. When it's the one in the booth, you almost feel like he's not trying his best. He's trying part way and then going, eh, this one's hard. I'm going to let someone else do it. So it really kind of annoys me. All right. Anyway, that paper, we will post the, there is a journalistic article about Ted Cohen in Philosophy Now that we will link to. You can also hear a reading of Ted Cohen's original paper, which is called There Are

No Ties at First Base. And it's good. I was, I put it off because I really wanted to read these without skimming them on the internet. And I'm glad I did. It was a good read. Well, if we have any physicists in the audience or even professors of physics, I'd also be interested in knowing whether it is always true that there is a no tie, that one always gets to the back first, because now I've been thinking about whether there's some kind of quantum mechanics uncertainty principle or something that if it's close enough

to a tie, there's no way to determine whether it wasn't a tie. I guess if you had perfect information about everything, maybe there would be a way to know. But I guess with the knowledge that we have, maybe you could get so close to a tie that there's no way to know but i guess with the knowledge that we have maybe you could get so close to a tie that there's no way to distinguish between a tie and a non-tie let alone with video review which is not nearly the most precise instrument we have so anyone want to fill us in on that i'd be happy to hear it all right last thing i would like to talk about is lance lynn i was listening to the episode that you and jeff recorded right after lance lynn had signed and there was a little bit of confusion partly because it was lance lynn and he got a three-year deal yeah um and you weren't neither of you was high on lance lynn at the time predict a

season i did no that wasn't there and you also found it odd that the rangers of all teams would sign him because the rangers didn't seem likely to be all that competitive it seemed like they had less need for lance lynn than even the other 29 teams who i think in any case i think any team that signed lance lynn you guys would have been confused at the contract but particularly with the texas rangers and you said something along the lines of and this was you said something along the lines of, and this was, you said something along the lines of, well, maybe the Rangers see something in him that nobody else does. And it was just sort of like the tone of it was, was sort of a shrugging. Well,

almost like you were bringing in an uncertainty principle of your own, but also, you know, like that is a reasonable thing that maybe the Rangers did see something in him. Not that he was, sorry, I should say not that he was sorry i should

say not that it was something that they liked but that they had a plan for him but they saw something in his profile that they thought oh if we just do this it like if we their pitching coach saw something their analytics team saw something if we just have him throw this fastball more if we just have him move to the to this side of the pitching rubber more or if we just have him throw this fastball more, if we just have him move to the to this side of the pitching rubber more, or if we just have him do something right. And this is what you wrote a book about is the idea that teams will, in coordination with the player, be able to adjust that player's mode of playing baseball in a way that will suddenly make him not suddenly necessarily, but sometimes suddenly make him a much better baseball player. And so there was a piece of baseball research many years ago that we have cited on this podcast many times, which was that teams that sign their own free agents tend to be right. So if they sign a free agent, he tends to do better than the free agents who walk away. So you have two free agents, team signs one, team says so long

to the other, the one that they said so long to probably will slightly underperform relative to the one that they kept. And we take that to mean that teams have a lot of information about their players, they're able to use that information to make smart decisions. And so if they want a player, it says it is in fact data about the player. And if they don't want to bring back the player, that is also data about the players. Now, right. And there's related research about teams trading top prospects. And if they trade a top prospect, then the top prospect doesn't turn out as well, which you might think is also because the original team knew something about that prospect that

the acquiring team did not. Great point. Now, I have always had a suspicion that this could also be explained by the value of continuity for a player and that what we could be seeing is that when a player has to leave his environment, has to learn a whole new set of coaches and a whole new set of teammates, that that actually might have a penalty in his performance. So I've never been entirely convinced that what we are seeing is that the teams are making better decisions because they have more information, but certainly a very, very, very good hypothesis that that is the case. But then that brings me to the Aaron Sanchez question that we discussed with the Astros, where we agreed that if, say, there was a fix that Aaron Sanchez

could make that would make him suddenly a much better pitcher that a that we felt like the Astros might be the team if the Astros were acquiring him that it was probably because they had spotted something that they might be able to to to do that and so he might get better and the we also agreed that player in many cases would be more receptive to a new team than to his previous team. And so there might be some benefit change of scenery. So when you said, it's possible that the Rangers see something in Lance Lynn that they can work with or that they can fix. Well, sure enough, Lance Lynn is having a career year.

He's a significantly better pitcher than he was last year. And the Rangers got a steal. And so I wondered whether well first of all I wondered it was Matt Schwartz I think that did the original research I wondered if first of all you think in this era where there's much more mid-career adjustments in players style both pitch repertoire as pitchers and hitting mechanics as hitters, whether you think that Matt's research would replicate in 2019. I think Matt may have done an update on that original piece maybe a couple of years ago. And if I'm remembering this right, I think he found that that effect was

smaller than it had been the first time he had looked for it. So it's possible that it has already decreased, but I suppose it makes sense that it would. I mean, I don't know. On the one hand, there's nothing preventing a player's current team from optimizing him. Well, except that... His former team could have told him to throw fewer sinkers or whatever he's doing.

Yeah, but presumably they had their chance and they didn't see it. If you would think about it as a marketplace, as an economic system, you have 30 teams and maybe only one or maybe only a couple see the thing that they believe can be fixed, that this is not something that necessarily everybody sees if it was if it's something everybody sees then presumably the player would have made that the changes along the way the player himself would see them this is something where a team would like a player more than all the other teams would like that player because

they alone see this thing that can be fixed or that maybe they alone have a system in place for this particular thing so they would like the player more if they like the player more they ought to be able to bid more for the player they ought to be more willing to bid for the player and so we would expect the teams that are most likely to help a player be the most likely to sign a player if in fact if in fact you know this phenomenon exists if they are able to to spot one place and have some consistency and get to know your surroundings and feel comfortable and all that. And also that the team that already employs the player has the most information on him. Now, it's true, though, that teams today, I think, have even more information on their own players relative to what other teams had than they used to, right? At least in the minors, maybe not in the majors. But when a player is in

the minors now, teams have swing sensor data on them, and maybe they monitor their workouts and their sleep habits and their nutrition and exercise regimens, and they know all of other hand, I guess you could say that the marketplace is more balanced now when it comes to major league players, because every team has stat cast, every team has high definition video on guys. A lot of teams have like kinetrac systems set up in their parks that are capturing those players mechanics and the forces on their arms when they're throwing the ball and they're hitting mechanics and all of that. And you get that player every day and saying hi to that player every day when you're on your way to the clubhouse or whatever, because teams now have great information on major league players without even knowing them or seeing them in person all the time. So I guess you could say that, yeah, when it comes to big leaguers, there's probably greater

parity of information. Maybe you don't know the guy quite as well you don't know his personality maybe you don't have as great a sense of his off the field habits let's say but in terms of what he's throwing and how he's throwing it and where he's throwing it you can know that about a player just as well never having seen him in person than you could if you were watching him every day. So that would lead you to believe that other teams would have a leg up compared to past eras when it came to identifying players who could potentially be better if they made some sort of change. So if you look at last year's free agents, I have all of last year's basically top 60 free agents in a spreadsheet here. And Lance Lynn is one obviously huge success story for the team

that signed him. But there are others DJ LeMay who, for instance, was a free agent, and he is had a, you know, a huge breakout. Michael Brantley was a free agent and has been significantly better than he had been for for years before Robinson Chirinos is one of those. And, you know, Charlie Morton was a free agent. So, you know, there's a, there's a bunch of these guys. And so I'm just curious of these 60 free agents, 18, 45, 44 of them, 44 of them switched teams. And so would it be your hypothesis if I were to put these 44 free agents into a spreadsheet with their zips projection as well as their actual performance this year? Would it be your hypothesis that they would collectively outperform their zips projection,

collectively underperform their zips projection, or collectively nail right on the nose their zips projection? And keep in mind, these are only free agents that changed teams. So, you know, all the free agents that stayed with their team, your Hyunjin Ryu's and your CC's Sabathia, they are all exempted from the group. Right. Well, usually when you take a big enough group of players, my inclination is just to bet on the projections,

or at least that's been my inclination in the past. And when it comes to me and my own abilities to predict player performance, I typically trust the projections more than I trust myself, at least on the whole, which I guess is kind of in line with my willingness to trust the GPS. I just kind of trust the computers more so than I trust myself in a lot of areas. So that's probably what I would say here. On the other hand, I did speculate and quote some people who speculated in the book that potentially projections won't work as well anymore, public projection systems, that is, because we don't currently factor in a lot of the information that teams do. And we don't take into account these small sample changes in

performance that might reflect a real talent difference, but our projection systems just aren't really set up to adjust to that information quickly. We're still sort of in a world where we're looking at three previous seasons of performance and then slowly adjusting based on that instead of saying, oh, this guy throws harder now or he changed his swing or something. And so we're going to treat him

as if he's a new guy. I know that some projections do that to a greater degree than others, but it's possible that the projections will start failing more until we adjust and start evaluating players more like teams are valuing players right now but now i basically just bet on the projections with a large group like that yeah well obviously this is not uh this is junk this is the junk spreadsheet of uh of like all sorts of of things that you should not take any

of this to mean anything is what I'm saying. I have not in any way recreated any sort of study. This is nothing. I'm just talking on a podcast. Forget you heard this immediately after you heard it. But yes, they have almost perfectly collectively almost perfectly matched their projections. This group of hitters has basically been like, maybe 1% better than their projections. And the pitchers have been maybe a half a percent better, but it's, I mean, it is like nothing. It's a jumble of, of players who wildly overperformed and some wildly underperformed. And, um, and, and in fact, because if you overperform, you're a lot more likely to have, uh, played a full season and

have 500 plate appearances right now, or 160 innings right now. In fact, more of these players underperformed their projections than overperformed. So you have a collectively they're right on target. If you were breaking them up into like good or bad, you have more bads than goods. So there is nothing here that suggests that the teams went into the free agent market with brilliant plans all around and are currently executing those brilliant plans to incredible success. how I think. And I feel like I've been seeing that creep into more baseball writing as I think the awareness of some of the changes in player development has spread and grown among writers. I think we're all kind of acknowledging the limitations of what we know and what we can project. And we've certainly seen enough guys go from one team to another and get better and make

some change and get better. And so it's almost like a standard disclaimer that you have to attach to any prediction you make about a player's performance now. Like, oh, but he could go see a swing change coach or something this winter, or maybe he'll go to driveline and pick up a new pitch and he'll be a completely different guy next year. and it's almost like i suppose the way that we all kind of collectively became more humble maybe or or a little more willing to not defer to teams but assume that teams know something or see something when there is kind of a curious decision because we know that teams are smart and they're working with

really good information now and they have more time to devote to these problems generally than we do when we're just doing a drive-by article before we're writing about something else the next day. So I think we've all become more willing to concede that, yeah, there may be things here that we don't know, which is always kind of a dangerous thing as a writer because you don't want to just be Mr. Wishy-washy and just never take a stand and never express an opinion and just constantly say, well, there's probably something I'm not seeing here because then a reader could very fairly say, well, what am I reading you for? On the other hand, I would kind of trust a writer more who is upfront about not knowing things and the limitations of our knowledge.

So that's kind of a tricky thing that I wrestle with as I write because I don't want to be constantly inserting. But yes, of course, we don't know this and that. But I also want to acknowledge that that kind of thing does go on and yet we probably shouldn't attribute every swing in performance to something like that because there have always been swings in performance and so when it's the astros or the rays doing it then we say oh they figured something out and and this guy did something but if it's lance lynn going to the rangers and being better than he's ever been then i don't know what we say i guess we say oh, the Rangers are smart and they know how to do this too now. So it's kind of a confusing time. Within the first couple dozen episodes of this podcast, one of the very, very, very early ones,

I think the topic was, is it data when a team tells you, like, this was about Jeff Mathis, and it was a question of whether it is the fact that teams, that the Blue Jays had just signed Jeff Mathis to, I think, a multi-year deal. Is that data? Is the fact that a team likes a player data beyond what we know? And we both agreed that in both the Mathis case and in any other, that there is a certain amount of information that we presume to be unknown to us, unknowable to us, and yet known by other people. And when those other people start walking in a direction, you might want to follow them at least a little bit. You might consider it.

And so now, on the other hand, of course, somebody is going to sign Lance Lynn. So what are you going to do? Like, they all get signed. Not all of them. Well, these days, not necessarily, but usually. All right. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.

That will do it for today. Thank you for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already done so. They've signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Tony Allen, John McGovern, Skylar Thompson, James Morris, and Derek Weisner. 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 are a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my aforementioned book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, possibly including Lance Lynn. If you like the book, please leave a positive review on Amazon and Goodreads. It helps us out. Sam and I will be back with another episode in the middle of this week, so we will talk to you then. Outro Music