Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1423: The Futures Game

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether they would take a time machine into baseball’s future, Yu Darvish’s midseason makeover and ability to pick up new pitches, then answer listener emails about whether the warning track should be widened, players having the second halves of Hall of Fame careers, and a robot ump challenge […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1423 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Yeah, yeah, yeah article about a time machine on Wednesday and you picked your six top destinations if you had a time machine that could only take you to baseball games in the future yeah just to be clear the sixth the sixth is to get home yeah okay basically unless you're willing to to step off and live in the future then the sixth is required to go so it's uh five the frame was around five yeah did you have a lot of just missed options here I want to to hear about that. Also, I want to hear about whether you would actually take any of these trips if you could, because I'm not sure that I would. I would take the first one. The first one you picked was game four of the 2019 series, which is just a purely money-making venture. Purely money-making venture. You just go into the future. You learn some stuff.

Then you come back and you place some bets and you get rich. And maybe you can place a bet while you're there too. And you get to see some stuff, but it doesn't spoil too much. And it's just a utilitarian trip. So that one, yes. But your next pick was Mike Trout's final game. And I do not think I would want to go see Mike Trout's final game if I had the option to, because Mike Trout's career is probably the storyline

that I like best about baseball, at least the one that persists across seasons right now. And that would sort of spoil it for me. I would not want to see how it ends. It's interesting that you described the first trip as utilitarian, because utilitarianism, of course, is the philosophy that you should do that, which benefits the greatest number of people and increases the amount of cumulative happiness in the world by as much as you can. And this is a purely theft-oriented trip. Like, that one is for no reason other than to steal from people who don't know that you

know the outcome of the game basically well but yes it is you can do for humanity there is utility your your conditions here that you can only go to baseball games so you can't go to the future and find out how to save everyone's life and cure all the diseases and fix all the world's problems unless you happen to see them in the middle of a baseball game yeah let's just agree that we all want to go into the future to find out how to bet on baseball games so that we can donate that money to good causes all right you would not see to me the the one no-brainer though the easiest one for me is trout's final game that one i have i'm working it, inventing a time machine now

because it seems like such a good idea. And that's, it's going to be a one destination. That's all I want to see is Mike Trout's final game. Why don't you want to see it? It's the ultimate spoiler that would ruin the next 10 years baseball for me. Spoilers are a fiction, Ben. Spoilers very rarely actually ruin a good story. I mean, I saw another podcaster make this point not long ago, but like the end of War and Peace is Napoleon loses. And that is like legitimately a crucial plot point that has existed for hundreds of years and that had existed by like 50 or 60 years

by the time Tolstoy wrote that book. And it has zero consequence to your enjoyment of the the book I mean I I don't feel like it would cost me any first of all I don't think it would cost me any particular pleasure in seeing Mike Trout do whatever he's going to do so if you just game it out he's either gonna have an all-time great career like he's gonna break a record or something and then now you get to focus on that you are like the whole point of I'm already focused how much more could we focus on it we talk about it every day you couldn't i think that you would enjoy it more if you knew that it was definitely going to be something that would

break records and that hundreds of years from now it might still be important basically there are two reasons we watch sports right one is for the suspense and the other is to see just the achievement just to see the like the best in the world at a certain task do that thing and like you can watch like i've watched usain bolt run a nine five five or whatever he ran the whole point of watching that race is not that you don't know how it ends i would rather watch a highlight of that race than see him run now when i know he's not gonna break the record anyway i don't know am i to break the record. Anyway, I don't know. Am I convincing? I'm not convincing you, but I don't, the spoiler does not bother me. But what

really does bother me is the thought that I might not find out that like, that I could die before his career ends. Um, and that I will never know how good trout was. And I think that to some degree it would be, depending on what the outcome is, I feel like if it's a good outcome, I'd want to know so that I can kind of really enjoy it and revel in and know I'm watching something that is, you know, that great, as great as I hope it is. And if it turns out to be a disappointment, then I want to appreciate these years even more.

And you can say that we do appreciate them. We talk about him constantly. But do I really appreciate him enough? Maybe I don't. slow motion and see how it looks compared to other people attempting to do that or not even attempting to do it because no one else can. It's a physical feat that is so remarkable and physics defying that you just want to watch it over and over again. Whereas Mike Trout is just playing baseball and he's playing baseball better than anyone else plays baseball. But for the most part, he's not having incredibly acrobatic feats. I mean, every now and then he does but he just kind of gets more hits than everyone else does and he's just better overall so I enjoy

watching him play but even among great players I don't think he is the most riveting player we have and so a big part of my enjoyment of watching Mike trout is thinking how good is he gonna be is he really this good can he continue to be this great does that mean he'll be the best player ever and if I knew now with certainty that he would be not saying I'd stop paying attention to him but I just constantly be doing the math in my head like okay I know he ends up here so he's just counting down to these final numbers that I know that he will have. And it's true that it would be sort of sad if we died before we found out how Mike Trout ended his career, but I doubt that would be my last thought on this earth. bus or something and my life's flashing before my eyes is that my last thought no how how good is mike trout gonna be oh i almost knew and now i'll never know probably not so to me this is a spoiler that would actually impair my enjoyment of the thing i think you're right that spoilers are overblown and if a thing is good then for the most part you should probably like it even if you know how it ends unless it's so ultra dependent on the plot twist that the plot twist is the whole enjoyment that you derive from it and i'd still enjoy mike trott's career but not nearly as much because right now it's just like i'm watching him walk a tightrope or something and just wondering if he can make it all the way to the end except without the anxiety of worrying that the person's going to fall off and die.

Biles where when you watch it, you have this sort of sense of anxiety that, you know, she's not going to, well, in this case, he's not going to, he's not going to land it, that this, that he's going to like fall or that the one time that you watch, you know, this sport every few years, you're going to see a big letdown. Like baseball is not, you don't watch Mike Trout biting your fingernails for the most part. If he grounds out, it doesn't materially influence his chances of, say, breaking the all-time war record or breaking the all-time home run record. You want him to have good years. You watch over the course of the year. But already, I would say there's not a lot of extra benefit of the suspense. But when I die, if I'm on my deathbed, I think that, in fact, how will Mike Trout's career end would be one of the things I think of.

So there's this line in Fever Pitch, the Nick Hornby novel about soccer, where he talks to the character. I can't remember. It's fiction? It's not fiction. It's nonfiction. It's a memoir right it's his memoir of loving soccer i'm pretty sure that that's right i don't know when you said fever pitch my mind went in a different direction yes uh you were thinking of jimmy fallon but this is

the book and so he talks about how uh one of the things that that makes him very anxious about death or that makes him very sad to think about dying is that in fact like there's going to be soccer seasons football seasons that he doesn't get to see and like so here's the here's one of the quote the whole point about death metaphorically speaking is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded it really i think is frustrating to me to think that like when i die all these things that I'm invested in are going to keep going without me and I'm not going to see how they end. I would really like to know how they end.

I would die a lot happier if I knew how everything I'm invested in ends. And that goes for everything from a television show that I'm three seasons into to my, you know, my daughter's life and like happiness on the kind of more profound level but

that definitely does apply to baseball i i think nick hornby says specifically like his great fear is that he's going to die in the middle of a season that he doesn't want to die mid-season if he's going to die at least let him see who won the you know English Premier League that year or whatever and I do feel that way about things that I care about in baseball less so about seasons these days but storylines and careers and things like that and Mike Trout is the ultimate storyline that I'm invested in and I have been invested in since he was in Arizona in rookie ball when I started covering him I went to his first high a game did you know that. Did you know that? No. Did you know that I actually, he hit a batting practice home run into the woods behind the wall in Rancho Cucamonga.

And I went out and I got that ball and I had that ball for a really long time. I don't know where it is now. I think my nephew played with it. And so anyway, Mike Trout, I want to see, I want to know. I do want to know. It is important to me that I want to know, I do want to know It is important to me that I know Yeah, I'm going to chance it, I guess I would chance that I'm going to live long enough

To see how his career ends Or that if I die it will be so sudden That I will not have time to worry about Mike Trout's career So the odds are in my favor That one of those things will probably happen So I'm not going to spoil it, I think. I'm just enjoying it too much seeing it in the moment. And the other ones you picked, I don't know.

I have a hard time deciding whether I would go into the future to see anything in baseball. One of the ones you mentioned is just to go to, like, 2099 just to see if baseball is still being played and what it looks like. And that one I think is a little risky because if there were no baseball, then I think I would actually care less about current baseball. I understand that baseball will one day end, everything ends. So I understand that on some level, but I think that seeing it happen, seeing no one care about this thing in the not incredibly distant future, it's one thing if you go into the year 7019, which is another one of your choices, and there's no baseball then, okay, that's fine. But if there's no baseball- But wait, why? Why? What's the difference there?

Well, I mean, who knows? Society and civilization could be so unimaginably different then that it wouldn't bother me as much if there's no baseball. So I feel like this... I've been thinking about this with regards to how people relate to climate change and to the potential for true, you know, catastrophe on a human wide scale sometime in the future. And I feel like most people, if it were, if they thought that it was going to happen in a way that would really affect them, then that would seem real. And then to their kids, if they thought that the consequences were going to be to their kids, then I think they would take that really seriously. But people have been able to push it a few

generations down in their mind and think, well, that doesn't matter to anybody I know. But I mean, of course, if you want your children, you get so much happiness out of your children's happiness. And so you would not want them to go through worldwide catastrophe, right? But they are going to draw so much happiness from their children. And so they're equally going to not want their children to go through the pain and unhappiness of worldwide catastrophe. And then they are going to, and so like the, the, the, the happiness doesn't actually disperse in any meaningful way. It is all with people they love. And I don't feel like there's necessarily any real dilution through the generations.

And so if you are saying that the finiteness of the sport would not bother you if it were some thousands of years from now, but it would in 80. Where's the line? Where does it stop being part of your baseball? When does it stop being the lineage of your baseball? I don't know. But if we're going to the year 7,000, I mean, I assume that almost nothing that we think about or care about right now will actually exist or matter then. So that just doesn't bother me so much. That's just so far in the future that who knows, we'll be on different planets and we'll be beings of pure energy. And I don't know what we'll be at that point if we're here, which hopefully we will be. But I think if you told me that it was going to end in 80 years, then I'd think, well, what am I wasting my time with this for?

Which I already think sometimes. Wait, let me ask you this. What if it were six years? It was going to end in six years. Would you feel like you cared more? Is there a point where, is this a bell curve? Yes, I think it is. Yeah, if you told me this was the last season then i'd be

watching every game probably which doesn't really make sense probably well it does in a sense because you're hoarding this finite resource but whereas 80 years you're not going to be consuming any of those games yes anymore okay yeah so yeah if it were to end in the very near future i mean that would concern me obviously because i don't think we're going to lose interest in baseball in five years as a society. So if baseball ends, then that probably portends other terrible things happening. But I think, yes, I would try to appreciate baseball in the short term. 30? 30. I guess that's getting to the point where conceivably it could just have become unpopular. That's the thing that I think gets me. If it ends because we reach a higher plane of existence or something, fine. If it ends

because there is a global catastrophe, that's bad, but I don't feel bad about baseball's part in that because everything will be disrupted but if it ends because we just collectively decided that we didn't care about this thing anymore then that would make me feel like i'm wasting my time on something that within my own lifetime people would look back on and and say why did we even watch that or not even look back on because it's so meaningless so well the hard thing especially is the hard thing especially is that you are a chronicler of this thing. That too, yeah. Right.

If it's alive in hundreds of years, then I'll feel like people of that time might look back and see something I wrote the way that I look on newspapers.com and I make fun of what someone wrote in 1920 or whatever use it as an example in an article I'm writing so that would make me feel good that something I wrote survived or at least that I'm covering something people will still care about in a long time and that it will be part of a historical record that is still of importance to some people at that point and so it would be pretty demoralizing to me if I went forward in the future and just realized, oh, this thing that I spent all this time on, it's just insignificant now. And I probably realigned my priorities. Ben, it's insignificant now.

Well, of course it is. But it's insignificant because everything is insignificant, I guess, in all the ways that we distract ourselves. But if it's insignificant compared to even the insignificant things that we do as diversions along the way, then that would really make me feel bad. I have twice in the past couple of days had the dispiriting experience of trying to read an old article of mine and having all the videos and or screen grabs be dead yeah and you have just put in my head the the possibility of anybody in 80 years reading anything i wrote i've never thought that i've never thought about it like i know it's not that i've rejected the notion but i've never thought about it and then i you put it in and i thought oh that would be really great that would be nice and then i realized it's just going to be dead links all around yeah it'll just be like that the the image

where the image doesn't load yes you can see it's just a little icon as it is all the stuff so the score all the annotated box scores got purged about three years ago. Most of the stuff at the register got lost in the redesign, so the text is still there, but none of the images are, none of the links are. And so, yeah, I'm going to be really heartbroken when someday BP,

like old BP articles, don't load anymore. A bunch of your Granlin pieces, right, don't load now? No, I think they do. They do now. They were offline briefly and everyone was worried but they came back oh yeah anyway the future reading this made me think that i do not want a baseball time machine that only goes to the future i want the one that goes to the past that'd be great and i'd take one that can go anywhere in the future but i don't think i want a baseball one i don't know that that would bring me joy did you have any rejected choices that you almost selected no not

really there wasn't that much i wanted to see that everything i wanted to see sort of fit into these these categories of like well i'd like to see what humanity is like 5 000 years from now i would like to see whether jeff and i's prediction about baseball having 80 years left turns out to be about right. And if it does or doesn't, what sorts of changes were made to try to forestall that? I would like to see the Trout one. That's an easy one.

And then the other two were very specific. So otherwise, not really. Like it's only Trout, for instance. I don't have that much eagerness to see Kershaw's last start, for instance, partly because I don't really have a desire to see Kershaw be bad. Great. I'm going to say something out of context again.

I don't want to see Kershaw be bad. I am somewhat curious, though. Like, I have a curiosity about Aaron, who my kind, I wasn't alive during his career, so I might be misreading this, but my sort of sense just from consuming a lot of, you know, baseball biographies of the time period and reading articles on newspapers.com from the time period and all of that and just seeing what seeing what you know everybody's kind of legacies are individually is that like hank aaron he was not like a celebrity at the same level that like mantle and maze were at the time my sense is and i think if people knew that they were watching the all-time home run champ the home run run king. Throughout that time, it would have been like, obviously he would have been the biggest star in the game right there with Mays and Mantle.

But because he was just sort of plugging along hitting 40 home runs a year, it snuck up on everybody. And that was part of the reason that I wrote that piece about Cody Bellinger when he was two months into his career. Just pretend that you're, go with it. Until it his career, like just, just pretend that you're, you know, go with it until it's been disproven. Just assume everything you're seeing is the,

is going to go down as the greatest thing you ever saw and, and let yourself be, let yourself hope a little bit. And I don't know, maybe, maybe I don't need to see Mike Trout's final numbers to feel like something incredible is happening and everybody already does. But to me, knowing just how great it gets does not ruin the experience of watching it

it focuses the experience of watching it anyway so Hank Aaron and then yeah I don't know no I didn't I didn't you know how it goes Ben you you you think of the ones that you want to write and then you don't keep thinking. Yeah. Send it in. Yeah. Well, we're doing emails. I have one other thing to say. Do you have anything?

No, nothing at all. Okay. Well, I just wanted to mention that Hugh Darvish learned a new pitch and learned it very quickly. And Hugh Darvish really, since he appeared on the scene, he's been known as someone who throws a ton of pitches. That's been part of his appeal is that you can make the gif overlays of Darvish throwing pitches, and it looks like it's five different pitchers. So no one in baseball needed a new pitch, probably less than Hugh Darvish. And yet Hugh Darvish just learned a knuckle curve from Craig Kimbrell in a week, evidently Yu Darvish asked Kimbrell about his curveball grip I'm reading from Jordan Bastion's MLB.com story about this

About a week ago, began toying around with the pitch and is already using it in games to collect strikeouts He walked up to me the other day and he was like, hey, I've been working on that Kimbrell said on Wednesday at Citi Field I was like, cool I didn't know he was going to go out and throw it i thought that was pretty cool so he has thrown evidently 10 different pitch types this season it's always difficult to classify these things but he now has three different curve balls he's got the slow curve and he's got the regular curve and now he's got the knuckle curve and these all come in at different speeds of course and then he has what the two seam he's got the four seam he's got a slider a change up splitter he has the three curves he's got the

cutter and a hard cutter i guess that's two different i i don't know whether because this is the thing that we know about you darvish we're making distinctions for him that we would not for other people. I mean, maybe other people throw multiple kinds of curves and we're just saying because it's Yu Darvish and he's known a really remarkable turnaround this season just forget about the pitch types he has just suddenly morphed into Greg Maddox where I think he had the highest walk rate in baseball in the first few months of the season and then since July 1st he has the lowest walk rate in baseball and he just went like a record number of consecutive starts without a walk, and he just finally walked a guy, and he's looked like a different pitcher. But the ability to pick up pitches is something that really fascinates me because if you told me that a pitcher had that ability, that he could just steal one of the best closers of all times pitch in a week

and start throwing it in games. And he already had 10 pitches. I think, oh, he's probably the best pitcher in baseball, right? But he's not the best pitcher in baseball. He's been a very good pitcher. And of course, he's had injury issues. And that may be part of why he started slow this year. And I know he started some new visualization techniques, too, that he credits for some of his success, where he'll go over the guys he's going to face ahead of time and picture striking them all out. So that would be about the most valuable thing that you

could do but maybe i'm overrating it maybe it's just better to or just as good to have three very good pitches as it is to have 10 serviceable pitches i assume all those pitches are good i mean maybe they're not all good if you just start throwing a new pitch and it's a terrible pitch, then that doesn't really add to your luster. Anyone can throw a bad new type of pitch. But with Darvish, it seems like at least when you watch them that they all move a lot and they're all pretty pitches. Yeah.

I also am always fascinated and mystified by pitchers adding pitches, especially when like this, they just, they, they learn it. And then four days later, they're throwing it in major league games. Yeah.

And I have never been able to figure out whether that's because like, they are just that gifted at picking up pitches. Like that is just something that they are that good at. That's their particular genius. Or if it was that they that their particular throwing style, their particular hand size, their particular grip and release point and everything else was all ready for this pitch all along

and they had just never been introduced to that grip or the right instruction. But I agree. I mean, I don't know. You did a book about learning how to throw new pitches. And it was the in a lot of ways, it was the most in depth I'd ever seen anybody go on the process of learning a new pitch. It doesn't feel like there's any universal rule, though, like some pitchers are incredible, and they never learn something so simple as a change up and then other pitchers yeah like they just like they they're 36 and then they learn a pitch and suddenly they're really good and you think did you never try that pitch before was it the grit is it that only kimbrough's grip worked had darvish tried this with 30 other pitchers who throw you know

knuckle curves and just all their grips were slightly different and it didn't work. The other thing about it is that you'll hear pitchers sometimes talk about how throwing one pitch hurts their throwing of a different pitch. Sometimes the pitches can bleed into each other a little bit and their slider gets weaker when they're throwing their curve or a cutter sort of a thing or that it just becomes a little bit harder to to repeat each pitch. If you have too many pitches, too many different kind of motions or release points or whatever it is. And so maybe Darvish's genius is that he has this like particular cognitive ability to hold 10 different 10 different physical acts in his mind and keep them separate from each

other. Yeah. Or it could be just that he has some facility with his hands and he's able to visualize things and he just has some tactile skill that most people don't have where he picks up things very quickly. And that's not to say that someone else couldn't learn it, but we've learned things at different paces. And some people learn things, certain things more quickly than others. And then because they learn it more quickly and it's easier for them to pick

up, maybe they stick with it more so than the other person who has to kind of get over the hump to feel comfortable with it. And it could just be that he is more aggressive, like his threshold for what constitutes a workable major league pitch is lower than most other pitchers. Maybe other pitchers would pick up this pitch in four days and throw it, but just not feel comfortable with it, even if it were a pitch that they could use. They would just think, well, I've gotten this far with these other pitches and boy, I'm right in the middle of comfortable with it even if it were a pitch that they could use they would just think well i've gotten this far with these other pitches and boy i'm right in the middle of my major league career and not only that darvish is in the middle of an incredible run right now and you'd think most

pitchers would not add a new pitch to the mix in the middle of the kind of streak he's having they would think i don't want to mess with success right now. And yet he is tweaking things and trying things he's never tried before, even in the middle of maybe his best run of pitching ever. So I don't know what that says about him, whether it's just that he is more willing to try things than most pitchers. And because you hear all the time about pitchers

who mess around with things on the side and they throw things in the bullpen but they just don't take it out to the mound when the game begins and darvish does and so i don't know whether that's because he actually is able to develop new pitches more quickly than anyone else or whether he's just more willing to try things this is just so weird to think that like these pitchers are in the majors and one of their pitches is good because they've spent 30 years refining it, throwing it constantly, constantly managing it and tweaking it and working on it and being coached at it and refining it. And then their other pitch they picked up like while playing catch on accident

or like a new teammate happened to show up and it's like you should throw my pitch and they're like okay how many i don't did you say this how many how many of these pitches is darvish throwing well 10 10 a start well i think and imagine imagine if you could just like start throwing a pitch at a major league level in major league games like that. Oh, you mean how many of the knuckle curve did he throw? Yeah. Sorry. Yes.

How many of the knuckle curve did he throw? I'm not sure. I'll see if I can figure that out. There's only eight pitches listed at Brooks. And so that means that some of these are being presumably lumped together. So, yeah. By the way, you said that he had, what did you say? He had a record for walkless starts or something like that.

Yeah. Just to clarify, he had the record for starts without a walk while striking out eight or more batters. Ah, okay. He was the first pitcher since at least 1893. So he definitely had a fun fact. The record for starts without a walk, not counting opener Diego Castillo last year,

is Bill Fisher with 11 in 1962. Greg Maddox had two stretches of nine and a stretch of six. Darvish is tied for 38th, which does include a couple of openers, actually. So he's tied for slightly better than 38th with five in a row, which is really good because you're right. Considering that he that has been the thing that he struggled with his whole career, really. Right. Yeah. Well, he's kind of incredible.

So I want to take my time machine three years into the future to see a UDarvish start and see how many pitches he's thrown then. I think I've realized why I want to see Trout's last game too. This is another thing. This might be the thing. I don't want to watch Trout decline. I dread the years where, I said this many years ago, but like, the thing that really keeps me up is that in a few years, it's gonna hurt to watch him run. And I don't think I can, I just don't want to spend six years watching Mike Trout lumber, you know, even if he's good, even if he's like

a really dynamite player, I'm a little scared to see him decline. But I do want to see him be old i want to see him like at full maturity um because he's just been he was so young when i you know when we started watching him and in a way he's been such like being a kid being kid-like has been um a constant to his personality even now even as he's reaching kind of his his you know possible peak years and um and i'm curious to see like what's mike trout like when he's 40 what's what they get like what's he look like when he plays and i think one game is probably enough for like i can handle one game but i'm sort of dreading like the three four or five years where he's sort of slow and yeah and there are days where you you just feel like there's there's uh there's it's a mere remnant and so this lets you skip past the decline and appreciate the

the retirement speech yeah i guess that's true knowing where it ends up maybe when you but then does it make it more painful almost to to see it happen knowing where it's going to end because you can't tell yourself well he's just having a down year or something you've seen the end you've seen what it looked like and you know that there's nowhere to go but down and so maybe it would be almost more painful to watch the decline knowing where it ends maybe maybe but maybe not i have a little note written uh at the desk i'm at this is my one piece of like wisdom that i'm i try to always look at and i notice it about once every two years because that's the nature of notes that you put on your desk but the note says the glass

is already broken and it is important to remember that like the destruction of a thing that the that the you know deterioration of a thing is baked into the thing and that you you can't hold on to it forever you can't you can't delude yourself into thinking uh that you know you're gonna have this this thing that you value forever and ever and ever you have to be prepared to lose it because that is the nature of the thing. And I am not prepared for that with Mike Trout. I, I cannot like my, my brain is in denial. I see the Mike Trout that, that we have right now. And I think that's forever. But if you saw the final thing, then I think that it would really, it would reinforce to you. It would really convince you in a a in a way that is healthy for us that that no there is an end and that's okay we don't have to cling to it we can we can appreciate the this

this time that we have watching you all right we should answer a few emails i suppose stat blast okay step last They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTA+. is today still lost? The glass is already broken, by the way, is from Achan Cha, a Thai meditation master. He says, you see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it has a lovely ring to it but when i put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters

i say of course when i understand that the glass is already broken every moment with it is precious all right stat blast ben since 1961 there have been something like 1600 players who have debuted and gone on to bat at least 2000 times in their career which is to say had had lengthy careers what would you guess is the most common career stolen base total. The most common. Not the average, not the median, the mode. 1431 of these players, by the way. I'll say 33. 33. All right.

I thought that the answer would be zero. And that's what this stat blast is about because a couple of days ago, Wilson Ramos entered a tie game in the 10th inning. Game still tied, bottom of the 10th, runner on, he singled. There were runners on first and third. His run was worthless, of course, because the runner on third would end the game if he scored. But because there was only one out, I think, he had some slight value as a base runner because he could be turned into an out. But because his run

was meaningless, the defense did not hold him on. Wilson Ramos took off on the first pitch, reached second base without a throw. The announcers got into a discussion of whether this would be a defensive indifference or a stolen base. They thought it would be defensive indifference because the defense was not holding him on and his run didn't count but uh officially it went down as a steal because the defense chose to not contest the play but they were not indifferent to it they could now no longer turn a double play there was a strategic advantage to wilson ramos in this close in this tie game so he got a steal wilson ramos got a steal that was his first stolen base of his career and so wilson ramos went from being very high on the list of most played appearances with no steals to being very high on the list of uh career uh

career played appearances with one steal and i thought well which one is actually i don't know rarer i it seemed to me that zero was probably the most likely career number to land on because it made sense. It just did to me. That's what it did. It seemed to me that zero, you were more likely to have zero than to get one and stop on one or get two and stop on two or get three and stop on three. And then they would get progressively rarer with each number that you go up.

So I looked to see what the most common number of stolen bases for a career is. And you're not right. What did you say? 37, 33. You're not correct, but you're much more correct than I am. There were 12 players who had exactly 12 stolen bases in their career. Only two got shut out entirely. Two with zero. The most common is a tie six and seven are the two most common with 27 each. And actually, I'm sorry, I didn't notice this. Strangely enough, the most common is 20 with 28 players. So one more than six and seven, but it does, it sort of kind of reaches its peak in the high single digits for the most part. So it builds up to the high single digits and then kind of tapers off a little bit. But zero turns out to be actually quite common.

So Wilson Ramos did in fact run himself out of history a little bit. Wilson Ramos was at that point the longest career with no stolen bases. He was a record holder, although I'm only going since expansion. So I don't know, maybe there was someone before him in fake baseball. He, so he was a historic, but now he is merely second in most career plate appearances with one stolen base. Steve Balboni is the champ and Wilson Ramos will pass him if not this year, early next year, assuming he does not get a second stolen base. So his stolen base, of course, was very, well, actually, just very quickly, the two players with zero are Johnny Estrada and Chris Schneider.

Does that combination mean anything to you? Catchers. Yeah, but they were teammates. They shared the catching position in Arizona in 2006. So the only two players in the last 60 years to go an entire career without stealing a base were in many meetings together. It probably didn't come up.

This was early in Snyder's career, later in Estrada's, but this is one of those things that the players have no idea that anybody's going to talk about this because they don't even know that they've done a thing. Estrada never attempted a steal. He is the only player in history to never attempt a steal with that many. And in fact, only four players in this time period have gone a career without a caught stealing. The others are Jan Gomes, who had three steals, Wellington Castillo, who had five, and a 1960s catcher named Bob Tillman, who had one, but Estrada never attempted one, so zero stolen bases, zero caught stealing.

Snyder was caught three times. One was on a botched squeeze. One was as the back runner on a double steal. steal. And then one was in a tie game where there was a lousy hitter up with two outs, singles hitter up, and he tried to go and get into scoring position and he failed. But you'll notice that the other two were flukes, just like Wilson Ramos' was a fluke. So Snyder's was a fluke, the botched squeeze, and the back runner on a double steal. So I wondered if these other players like Ramos, who had one stolen base base were all flukes as well. And the answer is not really.

So Steven Vogt had one stolen base. It was a very straightforward stolen base. It was the fourth inning. He was on first base. There were two outs. Game was tied. He took off. He made it.

Stolen base. Nothing weird about that. Daryl Ward had one. Very straightforward. Mark Hill, straightforward. L. Ron Hendricks, straightforward. And Bob Tillman, the aforementioned, was also very straightforward, although his was a steal of third.

So that is five of one, two, three, five of 10 players with very normal single stolen bases. And then we have Ramos, total fluke. Steve Balboni was the trail runner in a double steal, and they did not throw after him and so he got a stolen base that he you know barely deserved mention on and then the last two others Ryan Hannigan's was a lot like the Ramos play except that his team had already taken the lead this was the top of the whatever extra inning it was and there were runners on first and third and

Hannigan took off and the defense just ignored him. And Mike Redman was essentially the same as the Hannigan play. It was first and third, except his team was already up and they just ignored him. The last one is Charlie O'Brien. I have actually written

about Charlie O'Brien before because I love Charlie O'Brien's single stolen base. Unlike all these other people, Charlie O'Brien had one stolen base, but he was caught 10 times he went one for 11 in his career he just kept going for it so his stolen base is very amusing to me because was basically meaningless his team had taken a lead and was up by three runs in the bottom of

the eighth inning and mike maddox the pitcher, was actually batting. And so this was just kind of like the Reds had blown the game. They were frustrated. And O'Brien's on first base. And Rob Dibble was the pitcher. And O'Brien just took off. And that was it. They didn't, I don't know.

I don't even know. Is that a fluke? I guess it's probably a fluke because the defense didn't care about him. But on the other hand, it didn't really accomplish anything. It's just a weird stolen base that he had so that he could have one. So those are the one stolen base players of which Wilson Ramos is now one. Okay, good one. All right, question from Dave.

In a Gleeman and the Geek episode, Aaron Gleeman interviewed Senior Vice President and General Manager Thad Levine. He asked Levine if there were any plans to keep Byron Buxton from injuring himself. Levine mentioned two things, one of which I found interesting. He said that they, presumably the Twins front office, have talked about adding extra padding to their walls and extending the width of the warning track at Target Field. The padding thing is boring, but extending the width of the warning track? Now I'm listening. An ESPN article by Doug Glanville from 2012 called The Warning Track is Useless mentions that the warning track has no size restrictions and argues that, well, the warning track is

useless. Without regulations, I can't help but wonder, cue bad Jerry Seinfeld impression, why not make the whole outfield out of the warning track? A completely dirt outfield would surely increase your home field advantage. You could stock up on ground ball pitchers and fly ball hitters and really lean into it, unless outfielders sprinting and sliding on dirt would just hurt all of them. So what do you all think? Do you have any hot warning track takes? Is it useless or could it help save Byron Buxton from injuring himself did you read this doug lanville article i have it open but no i have not yet i read it and yeah his point is kind of two or threefold one is that because it's

not standardized you don't really have a sense of like how much warning you're getting the other is that in the moment when you're running on a full sprint i guess uh well i'll finish this thought when you're running on a full sprint you don't have time to to even adjust like you don't even notice sometimes that you have changed uh he also notes that they're not all the same material and so you don't even like some of them you notice more than others, but it's very, because it's not standardized, it doesn't really give you much extra predictability. He talks about how they do these little drills in spring training where a coach will like throw a ball over your head.

And then I'll quote Doug, we would run back, count the number of steps we had before the wall smacked us in the face, and then store that number in our muscle memories. The idea being that when I'm in a game, if I measure that I could take three steps before hitting the wall. If I measured that I could take three steps before hitting the wall, I would say to myself, one, two, three wall. But as he points out, like you're running different speeds. Besides the fact that the warning tracks aren't standardized, you're, you're running at different speeds. You're running at different angles angles and so there's just not really going to be any consistency between like what you do in that drill or even what you've done in previous games and what you do in the next one and the third thing i think he says that uh i think i

remember this is that like some players the warning track just freaks them out like instead of like giving them a little bit of control to get to the wall they basically overreact to it and then that can cause other problems i i think that i remember that uh being in here so i uh was i was interested in reading all of those details. I thought, oh, wow, that makes it, that makes outfield much harder, even than I realized. I was surprised that the conclusion was so far as they're basically worthless. I would still have thought, not having done it myself, I would have still thought that you would notice that you're running on a, I would think that you would sort of notice that you're running on dirt now instead of grass and that it would give you a little bit of a heads up but doug was pretty adamant in this article

like basically worthless like he keeps saying like pretty much worthless yeah well wikipedia says that the average width of a warning track in mlb is 15 feet it also says citation needed but if we take that at face value that's i mean if you're an outfielder running at full speed would you have it seems like you wouldn't really have time to adjust because what is that like a stride maybe so it seems like you just wouldn't even be able to moderate your speed at all if if you were going full out at the start of it by the time you send the signal to your feet to slow down you've hit the wall already it seems like but i would think that outfielders have some sense of where they are in relation to the wall usually that they don't rely solely on the warning track to tell them because again they wouldn't leave

enough time for them to do anything about it and so you could make the warning track to tell them because, again, it wouldn't leave enough time for them to do anything about it. And so you could make the warning track wider. I guess you could do that. That's the obvious solution. If it's too narrow right now to adjust anything, then make it wider. I don't know that. Would that actually change or is this just kind of an ingrained outfielder behavior that some guys prioritize making that catch more than they prioritize preserving their body and that even having the warning track there might not necessarily change that behavior i i don't know i don't know with buxton whether it's that he doesn't realize that the wall is so close and that he's going so fast or whether he just

kind of doesn't care so there's probably a bit of both there. Yeah, Doug also talks about how you don't really watch the ball while you're running. You put your head down and then run to the spot you think the ball is. And so you do get a chance, presumably, to kind of see with your own eyes where the wall is. You don't see, I don't know, it doesn't feel to me like they're, considering how many outfielders play how many balls that are at or over the wall. It doesn't feel like there are very many injuries that are actually wall related. There are a few for sure, but not that many.

And a lot of the ones that there are, it isn't about not knowing where the wall is, but about sort of like, you know, you you plant against the wall or. but about sort of like, you know, you plant against the wall or yeah, like you say, you maybe go too aggressively into the wall, but knowingly, knowing that it's there because you feel like that's what you have to do to catch the ball. It's very, very rare that I can pull up in my memory examples of players just like running into a wall, like frying pan, you know, style. So maybe it just isn't that necessary. Maybe the problem, as is often the case with a lot of injuries is that uh the demands on these players from their teammates their fans and on themselves

and the incentives for them to you know to out to out grit their opponents because that's such a big part of winning this ultra competitive super high skilled high intensity game forces them to do things that are likely to lead to injury okay question from luis i was thinking about those charlie manual phillies teams and remembered raul abanez was said to have had the second half of a hall of fame career is nelson cruz the current raul Abanez Who are some other contenders And this is something Is this something we said It sounds like something we talked about At one point but Abanez

Now that I look at it Age 30 on he was worth About 20 wins above replacement Which is well maybe that's The second half of a Hall of Fame career It could be if your 20s are really good But it's Maybe a little less impressive than I was thinking based on second half of Hall of Fame career. It's not like Adrian Beltre after 30 or something who was probably way more than that.

So Banyas was great, obviously, after that age, and he really didn't have a good season until he was 31 or I guess you know he had his first like above replacement level season when he was 29 and then he was just kind of average for a while and he just kept chugging along so it was really that he didn't decline after that point more so than he turned into a superstar. So that's the deal with the Banyas. I guess the best comp, Cruz, is obviously a very good one. Cruz is 38, and he's been worth almost 30 wins above replacement in his 30s. So I guess he just turned 39. So that's very impressive.

And I remember writing a story about Nelson Cruz and how he just kept chugging along at Grantland. So that was at least four years ago and he is still chugging along. So Nelson Cruz is a good one. I think a good one is Ben Zobrist. Yeah, a little too early though. Well, like he was he it depends where you want to draw the line he was a mvp candidate at 28 and that was the first time he'd been good at

all yes that's right yeah that was completely out of nowhere really and he yeah he only had 500 career plate appearances at that point and and the 227 that half of those had come at 27 when he was very good but had just kind of come up and just been discovered. So Zobris doesn't really fit the same curve, probably. Well, I mean, second half as a hall of famer because he's he's only at like 45 career war but uh 33 of that came at 30 or later so i see i see what you're saying now yes okay yes ben zobrist all right well then in that case let me revise ben zobrist too good yeah i guess that's yeah so who else so i think that

there's maybe a pretty good case here for edwin incarnacion yeah yeah that's a good one i'm gonna look up to see what the average hall of fame career is from 30 on so hall of famer so we've got the problem is that this is going to rope in a bunch of like managers like miller huggins is going to be in here all right yeah okay this is a pretty good list actually all right so we've got about 150 ish players in here so the 75th is 27.6 war so abanis is not quite there no he's not far off but he is not quite there but zobrist is and uh let's see here robinson cano so kinsler i mean yeah i mean no had the first half of a career too and carnacion is 23.2 and he's only 36 so he's he could just about get there yeah uh cruz was like what was cruz at 29.4 yeah so

cruz is a hall of famer from 30 on you know hall of fame 30s so to answer this question yes ian kinsler well kinsler was a stud in his 20s though yeah that's true he's just kind of close to a hall of famer yeah exactly so to answer the question yes nelson cruz is the answer and edwin incarnacion could also be the answer but raul labanez was actually never the answer yeah okay all right maybe one more here this is from zach if we want to preserve framing from robot umpires why not just give each team a limited number of challenges per game. I was actually just talking to someone about this idea earlier today. Let's say nine per team and one each per extra inning. If the electronic strike zone can call pitches quickly, then there's no reason that it should

take a long time to overturn calls. Let's say you give the teams 10 seconds to challenge the pitch, and then it takes another 10 to 15 seconds to see if the call was correct. If that time frame can happen, it would allow some of the more egregious calls to be overridden, but still keep most of the borderline ones and also allow catchers to be able to frame pitches and keep their impact on the game. What am I missing from this? Tennis is somewhat similar to this, and it has worked out pretty well. You know, this is a problem that some people have with the current system, which is anytime you give the team a limited number of challenges, you're basically saying that you're acknowledging that there are a whole bunch of bad calls, but you're limiting how much you want to keep it how it is you're not saying this is tradition this is uh the human element or even

that we think that these umpires which i think is i've kind of increasingly come to believe that home plate umpires actually are calling the strike zone that the players want that their inexactness is in many ways a feature so you're not making any of those arguments you're going yep we know they suck but we're only really willing to fix some of the problem and i think that then you just everybody goes well wait a minute why not 10 why not 11 and it becomes very hard to make a logical argument for why there should be any limitation other than of course the pace of play which is resolved by robot umps and so inevitably this ends up in robot umps yeah i guess if you're going to have a challenge system with replay then it's consistent at least to have another

challenge system but it's funny when the replay review system was instituted we talked a lot about challenges and there was a lot of resistance to the idea of challenges as opposed to just getting the calls right and having someone who is watching the replay overrule the empire. No one's going to know if any call is actually going to stand. So do you just wait for a while after every play? Do you just keep playing and then suddenly someone on a headset interjects and says, nope, go back. So that would be kind of awkward. I don't know exactly how that would work, but I agree with you that philosophically speaking, if we're going to try to get the calls right, then we should try to get all the calls right. So I am not really pro-RobotUmp, but if we are going to go with RobotUmp, then yeah.

I guess the only thing is that if there is some kind of malfunction or the system is miscalibrated and it's very clearly wrong, you'd have to give the umpire authority to overrule it. I suppose that would probably just take care of it and you wouldn't really need a challenge system for that because the umpire would know. I guess it would take some gumption to overrule the robot ump if you are the human ump, but if it were one of these really clear situations where something is just going haywire, then presumably the umpire could step in and say something about it. So I don't know. I guess I like it in that I like preserving framing and some elements of the human ump system, and this would get rid of the very bad calls. But there aren't that many obviously terrible calls these days it's a lot of borderline

ones and you'd probably you'd use all your challenges is the thing right that's true you would yeah yeah and if you give them 10 challenges it's like umpires at least currently according to how we define the strike zone right now i think umpires get about 88.5% of calls correct. That's according to a baseball prospectus definition that I used recently. Sometimes it varies to low 90s or something, but you're not getting 100 called pitches per game, but you're getting, I said what the average was on a recent episode, I think it was 60-something or 70-something. So you'd be getting several pitches rung per game on average, more than that. So you would be using most of your challenges in every single game.

And at that point, it kind of defeats the purpose. Yeah, and then some will say, well, then it adds an element of strategy. Do you want to use them now or do you hold them for later in the game when there might be higher leverage i'm pretty i don't know i'm not that eager to have that calculus going on but i think that probably it would be hard to tell your pitcher that you had the ability to get him the strikeout that he thought he deserved but you were saving it for extra innings yeah so i think that you would end up they would use them for yeah the first more or less the first nine

that they could use probably yeah maybe eight maybe they'd use eight and then save one for but then you you know man and then you'd use your nine which you'd be perfectly justified in using your nine because those are probably nine bad calls that you could overturn and then the the ninth inning would come along and you wouldn't have them and a game would still turn on a missed call and everybody would be even more upset because why aren't there more challenges? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't like it. I don't think. I don't know. I implement it and then I'm going to travel into the future and see how it's working. All right. So I will travel into the future and talk to you next week when it arrives. But that is it for today.

All right. You know, it occurs to me belatedly that of Sam's five future destinations for his time machine, four were dates and only one, Mike Trout's final game was an event. So if events count, if you can tell the time machine

that you want to go see a certain thing instead of going to a certain day, then that does open up a range of possibilities. You could machine that you want to go see a certain thing instead of going to a certain day, then that does open up a range of possibilities. You could tell it you want to go see the first 21 strikeout game, the first five homer game, the most improbable comeback that will ever happen, and so on. That would be a bit more tempting for me, but I think I probably still wouldn't go. Do I want to see the first 21 strikeout game? Yes. But I don't really want to see it if I know I'm going to see it,

because half the fun is the suspense as you're watching, not knowing whether it's going to happen. Plus you lose the suspense of all the other 21 strikeout game contenders that come along before someone actually does it when you're doing the math and looking at the pitch count and the strikeouts. So that sort of saps some of the fun from all the attempts that fall short. So I still don't think I want a baseball time machine, but if I could choose an event rather than a date, that would affect my choices. Actually, you know, one I think I would go to is the first MLB game for the first woman player. I don't think there'd be any downside to seeing that in advance, and that would be really cool to be present for, and it'd be fun to cover the story of that player as she came up, and to know that you should pay attention to her because she's going to be a trailblazer. Anyway, I'm not going to try to tell Sam what the rules

of time travel are. He's the one with the time machine. 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 get themselves access to some perks. Doug Nazarian, Eric Zaborzin, Tony Allen, Jonathan Baker, and Paul Radke. 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. on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

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It'll be me and Meg, and we will talk to you then. I need you more than I ever have Because the future's here And we can't go back Say na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na-na-na