Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1435: What We Love About Baseball

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the diminishing roles (and salaries) of MLB managers, then answer listener emails about whether it’s better for teams to be balanced than unbalanced and how to decide whether to upgrade on offense or defense, how consistently good a player has to be to make the Hall of Fame […]

There's a fan graphs podcast called Effectively Wild that our buddy Ben Lindbergh has hosted for a while. Let's see if Carson can be that this half inning. It's outside it's three and one lot of arm side here.

Carson on the misses. Three one. That's drilled to right field and deep by Ramirez and gone to Grand Slam for by Ramirez and gone. It's a grand slam for Jose Ramirez. And the Indians have taken a 4-0 lead. His first at bat in a month is a four-banger. It was a small mistake.

Sometimes that's all it takes. I'm staring at my wrist Hoping that the time is right When the planets will align There'll be no planets to align Just the carcass of the sun The little painted model spinning senseless Through the endless black sky

Hello and welcome to episode 1435 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and with me is Sam Laird of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. Going to do some emails today. Anything you want to banter about beforehand? I just want to correct myself. I said that there had been one pitcher complete game this year with a one run margin of victory and one in 2017. Both of those things are true, but I said that Jimmy Nelson threw the one this year. Jimmy Nelson threw the one in 2017. The one this year was our old friend Noah Syndergaard true win. Oh, right. Of course. We should have known that. So yeah, that was the one this year. Okay. So I just wanted to mention because Ned Yost is retiring and I always enjoyed Ned Yost.

I'll miss Ned Yost. Reportedly, rumoredly, he may be replaced by Mike Matheny, which is... I mean, I'm not saying... I know what that means to you. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know that that will definitely happen. But Matheny has been working in the royals for an officer as a special assistant or something. And so he was sort of the heir apparent and he has been linked to that job, although nothing has been announced. And that just it seems like sort of something that the royals would do.

It seems like sort of something that the Royals would do. I don't know what the motivation would be other than I guess Mike Matheny is like the square-jawed leader of men type and the Royals seem to like that sort of thing. Although in St. Louis, the knock against him was that he didn't really trust young players or wasn't great at integrating young players into his plans. And that's kind of exactly what you want out of a manager who is taking over a rebuilding team. So I don't know if it's a great fit in that respect, but our ability to evaluate managers and who would be a good fit where is always very limited. So I hesitate to criticize any hiring or firing over much. But I also wanted to bring up managers because Don Mattingly was not fired and not let

go he was retained by the Marlins but according to Ken Rosenthal he is taking a pay cut to stay with the Marlins and maybe that's just the Marlins being the cheap Marlins and as Ken notes it's pretty rare for a veteran manager to take a pay cut to stay with the same team but ken makes this into a trend and he ties some things together in his column and he notes that we're sort of seeing the extinction of the high paid manager or at least right now we are because we're seeing some guys who did have pretty big contracts by managerial standards phased out leaving the, and it seems like teams are more and more hiring younger guys and less experienced guys. There's a preference for that, and those guys are probably also going to make less money. But as he mentions, Bruce Bochy, Mike Socia, and Joe Madden were the

three most expensive managers in 2018, each earning $6 million, according to USA Today. Bochy is leaving the Giants after this season. Socia stepped down from the Angels after last season. And Madden, if he does not return to the Cubs, might not find a team willing to pay him at his current rate. And he notes that former managers Joe Girardi and Buck Showalter also would be hard-pressed to match the reported $4 million they made in the final years of their contracts with the Yankees and Orioles, respectively, if they again are hired. the final years of their contracts with the Yankees and Orioles respectively if they again are hired. And so he's saying that essentially we don't have managers making a lot of money anymore and we don't really have great figures for this. Usually sometimes managerial salaries get reported as do general managerial salaries, but not always. There isn't really a database of them that we can easily access and analyze, but it's odd and rare to see

any salaries going down in baseball, although I guess not as rare as it once was because the average major league salary has stagnated or actually decreased slightly in consecutive seasons now. But I guess this is partly a reflection of the changing of the guard and a new generation of managers coming in, and maybe in 10 years, some of those guys will be making more money. But also, it does seem like it's probably a reflection of the job and how it's changed. And if you take away authority from managers, then presumably you also take away some of their leverage and their bargaining power and also some of their salary. So I guess it makes sense. If you could look at executive salaries plotted against manager salaries, I assume that you would see that

those things are diverging or the trend lines are going in opposite directions or one is increasing and the other is not. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right that part of this could in retrospect ultimately be explained by just, you know, the circumstances that a lot of experienced managers happen to leave, retire, quit around the same time. And it just, I mean, it's pretty much true in all jobs that in order to jump salary levels, you usually need some time to build experience, some time to build a resume, and it takes time to move up the salary scale usually. Now, the question is whether front offices think that managers are largely interchangeable. If they do, then this will probably continue. This trend of

lowering salaries across the board for managers would probably continue. But if they think that some managers genuinely are adding a great deal of value, I think that money will find a way into those managers. Paychecks, I don't, I mean, we're still talking about figures that on the scale that Major League Baseball teams run on are pretty small, right? assume that that don mattingly's pay cut uh is is minuscule compared to what they spend on players and so yeah if they maybe not in the marlins case but in most teams cases yes if they um if they really do think there's value i mean it's it is hard for teams to i mean this is one of those stories of the last few years is that it's hard for teams to find places to spend their money because they don't want

to spend it on free agents. And there are such strict limitations on how they can spend it on other places. They can't just simply decide, well, I'm going to spend a lot more on the draft or I'm going to spend a lot more on international free agents. And you can spend it more on player development, but you're kind of just limited there. Like there's not that much you can do. And so if there was a manager out there that I think there was a consensus

was adding wins to his team, I think that he would probably get paid. So that's the unknown. Is this mainly a story about GMs admitting that they don't think that managers do that much, or at least that that is the conventional wisdom among front offices right now. Or is this just sort of a fluke of a bunch of young managers happening to be ascendant right now and being five or 10 years away from really getting those big salaries? Yeah. And as Ken notes, manager salaries do not count against the team's luxury tax threshold.

So if a team is trying to keep its payroll down rightly or wrongly because of that, they wouldn't have to do it with their manager. So if there were a manager out there who you thought was really worth a ton to you, then you could feel free to pay him whatever you think he's worth or whatever it takes to get him without having it count against that total. Or whatever it takes to get him without having it count against that total. And yet, Ken continues, the best, managers earn less than some middle-inning relievers, even though they have to do all these other things. They have to lead the whole roster. They have to be the public face of the franchise. They have to talk to the press. And you could say, well, that's a lot more than a middle-inning reliever has to do. A middle-inning reliever doesn't have to do any of those things. And yet a middle-inning reliever has to get out and pitch innings.

None of these people are being paid for the amount of labor that they do. They're being paid for the scarcity of their skill set, right? I mean, all of them are paid far, far, far, far more than many, many, many more difficult jobs in the world. Yes. They're paid because somebody decides that that skill set is very rare and very valuable to the team. And it would not matter if the manager's job consisted entirely of filling out one lineup card and then going back into a hibernation chamber if somebody thought that that lineup card was so difficult to fill out and that the number of people that could do it were so few in the world, they would then get paid a lot. So I don't think it's about the labor so much as what you think it's worth. And the public facingness of it, I think to some degree, managers, yes, they are the public face. Yes, they do have to talk

to the media. There is an aspect of projecting confidence and being, you know, kind of taking pressure off the rest of the team by giving, you know, reporters the access that they need to file their stories and to avoid distractions and all of that sort of thing. But it's sort of surprising how little managers actually do to be the public face. I don't know what they would do. I don't know what they necessarily could do. But they you know, they do their media availabilities. And that's pretty much it. Like you don't see a lot of like, really ambitious public faces out there. You don't I don't know, is there any manager who's taken on the role of like star manager uh really like where i don't know i don't even know what you would do i mean it's baseball yeah mike trout can't be famous

then what are the odds that a manager could be so yeah i don't i don't know if there is anything but yeah that's all that's all i'm saying is it's a that that that part of the job is kind of more of a of an annoyance than anything where you see a lot of value. Like, I don't think that Ned Yost added or subtracted much value as a public face compared to all the other managers. As long as you're not actively in scandals. I think that maybe there are occasionally managers who become beloved in their organizations. You know, I think Joe Maddon might have been one, maybe is one, although less so today than a few months ago.

And Bruce Bochy was one and Mike Socio was one. And so those kind of made sense. But for the most part, managers are just managers. There used to be famous managers, of course. Casey Stengel and Lee DeRocher and Tommy Lasorda. But there used to be famous baseball players, too. So I guess it goes hand in hand with that. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

All right. Should we do some emails? Emails, sure. All right. So this one is from Ronak, who says, I was talking to a friend, a Phillies fan, about how the Phillies could improve this coming offseason given their disappointing season. about how the Phillies could improve this coming offseason given their disappointing season, and when the idea of signing either free agents Anthony Rendon or Garrett Cole came up, my friend said he would definitely prefer for the Phillies to try to sign Cole because the Phillies are in need of pitching more than hitting. Does it matter how one team distributes its total projected war for a season into hitting war and pitching war?

Let's say Anthony Rendon and Garrett Cole both put up exactly seven war next year. Is there a certain point at which the Phillies adding Rendon to a team with good hitting and bad pitching actually adds less value than adding Garrett Cole? I also wondered if in the history of World Series winning teams, there had been any teams with a very imbalanced distribution between their hitting and pitching war. So I have seen studies on this, I think. I forget what the studies about team balance say when it comes to offense versus defense. Obviously, there are some teams that are successful that are skewed one way or another. I remember a 538 article from several years ago that looked at how the war is distributed among the best players on the team. Like, is it a

Stars and Scrubs team or is it kind of a balanced team? And that article found that it didn't really make much difference, but that's not quite what Ronak is asking here. He's asking more about the different facets of team performance and whether it matters. i think that if i remember this right it's uh it's actually a little bit better to have uh pitching more good pitching than good hitting yeah or good defense run prevention well it was that a run saved is more likely to change the outcome of a of a game if it's a low scoring game if you're playing a lot of low scoring games so then if you're playing high scoring games and so there's that there's that element of it there's i don't know that you i've always felt like you would prefer to be if

given the the premise that the war is the total war is going to be held constant i've always felt that you prefer to have a an imbalanced war because then it's clearer where you want to improve. It's easier to isolate to identify those things that you can improve. It's easier to improve with less work because you're not trying to upgrade, say a part of your team that's already average or close to it, but that is already disastrous and could easily be upgraded with one of the many seemingly abundant baseball players in the world or maybe on your own staff. And so I've always felt that imbalance ideally is better. I've always felt that imbalance is also better for an individual player because if you know that a player is particularly weak in a situation,

then you can maybe help him avoid that situation. And if he is particularly weak in a situation, then you can maybe help him avoid that situation. And if he's particularly strong in that situation, in a situation, you can maybe funnel him into that situation a little bit more often. But there is, and this all kind of plays into what we talked about a few months ago, where baseball is, what is it, a weak, not a weak link sport? Is that what it was? Yeah, we decided it was, what, a median link sport or something? Yeah, where you can't, the other team can't say, ah, there's their weakness. We're going to drive at that weakness over and over and over again.

Like you can't, you're not any more exposed because you have a weakness that can be identified. The team, for the most part, can't do much. But there is a little bit of a chaining effect on some of these things where if, for instance, you have very bad starting pitching, it might affect your relief pitching because your relief pitching is going to be overburdened. It's going to have to pitch more than it's able to. You're going to have more games where your best relievers are unavailable because they've had to pick up slack the previous three days. And if you have really poor relief

pitching, you might see the same thing where now your starters are being asked to go deeper into games than their peers on other teams are able to go. And then that can maybe be a weakening factor because they have to pace themselves more. They might get hit harder when they're a little bit more tired. The strain of the innings over the course of a season might eventually wear them down. They might be more prone to injury. And so I would say that having particularly weak pitching seems like it is possibly a recipe for kind of full-on collapse. So I don't think that I would say that imbalance

with the weakness coming on the pitching end is just as good as balance. Now, I don't know if I would say that imbalance with weak hitting would necessarily be worse than a balanced team. I don't know that I can think of a reason that that would lead you to be more likely to collapse or anything like that. Yeah. If you're looking at any one team and you're saying, how should we upgrade?

Should we sign the pitcher or the position player? Then that becomes a much easier thing because you don't have to look at it in abstract terms like is a run saved better than a run added? You can just look at it as, well, is this an upgrade over the player that we currently have or is it not? And usually with a starting pitcher like Garrett Cole, just about every team is going to have replacement level fifth starter or someone who you can slot in Garrett Cole and that will be a big upgrade over that guy. Whereas some teams will have an abyss at third base where you could put in Anthony Rendon and it would be a big gain, but other teams won't. Now, in the Phillies' case, I guess they kind of are that team because

this year, if you look at war at third base, the Nationals, powered by Rendon, have the most war from their third baseman, and the Phillies have the 25th most so they could use better third baseman so in their case they would probably get a lot better getting either of those guys I guess you could say that if they could steal Rendon away from Washington and keep him from resigning there then that would be extra beneficial for them as a division rival but you know usually you're just looking at those individual positions and your best alternative at that spot because you don't really have to look at war, a generic war. You can look at that player's war above your replacement for that player. And in some cases that would be

very different depending on the team. You mentioned the Phillies third base situation. And so Mikel Franco debuted in 2014 and he lost his rookie status in 2015. So he was not eligible for the Phillies top prospect list that year. But I was looking at Phillies top prospect lists from that era today because I was just sort of poking around trying to figure out exactly how this rebuild has gone south on them. And their top tens from that era are like really depressing. So this is their top 10 for 2016.

The state of the system was this. This is from Jeff Paternostro and the BP Prospect team. The state of the system, long a laughing stock for prioritizing athletes who couldn't hit. The Phillies are now as loaded at the top of the system as any team in baseball. Here's that loaded top of the system as any team in baseball. Here's that loaded top of the system. J.P. Crawford, Nick Williams, Jake Thompson, Franklin Colombe, Roman Quinn, Cornelius Randolph, Mark Appel, Jorge Alfaro, Andrew Knapp, and Ben Lively.

That's three years ago. Actually, no, that's before 2016. So that's four years, four full years since that has happened. And there is not, right? There's not one player on that list who would be starting on a good team. Yeah, probably not. So yeah, wow. That's pretty rough. All right.

Question from Scott in Singapore who wants to know about Mr. Tenth Place. Inspired by the Mike Trout Black Ink watch, I think it goes without saying that someone who finished first in every major statistical category for the duration of their career would be an unparalleled Hall of Famer. The same is almost certainly true for someone finishing second. How far down the list would you have to go

before that player was no longer a consensus all-time great? Does the reliability of finishing eighth in every category every single year for, say, 15-ish seasons result in a noteworthy career how about 15th consistency and compiling has to count for something but at some point the figures being compiled just don't add up to anything exciting 15 seasons i mean you'd have to i would think you'd be like 35th or so would be would still get you there if you're doing this for 15 seasons.

Yeah. I mean, just looking at the 10th best player in baseball over the past few years has been a six-war guy, and the 10th best guy even in an individual league has been a five-war guy. So obviously, if you do that for 15 seasons, you won't have the highest peak ever. But even if you just have a five war year every year, that's going to be a pretty good peak. And you're certainly going to have the career war. So yeah, you're definitely there. So that's five though. I think you'd have to go down. So that is higher than I said.

I said 35. I said 35th. And so this year, five war is going to be about 20th. And when you put it that way, you do need just about, I mean, you need about 75 war, especially if you're not going to have any of the black ink or any of the MVP, top MVP finishes. And so now I think maybe 20th. That's higher than I expected, but I think you to think of like who Mr. 10th place or 20th place would actually be. Maybe someone like Carlos Beltran, let's say, who just glancing at his baseball reference page, he has no bold ink except for the one year where he some silver sloggers won some gold gloves made some all-star teams but was never really the league leader in anything significant and i'd have to do some digging to see like where he typically ranked on various leaderboards but he'd probably be a decent bet for like a mr 10th place or mr 12th place or or something like that because he was very good for quite a long time, but he ended up around 70 war or so. And he's a Hall of Famer for me, but I don't know that he's

a shoe-in for most people, although he does have the playoff heroics, which in his case may get him in. So do we need to talk about Harold Baines though? What place is he? Yeah. I mean, Harold Baines is, I'm looking at his, so he led the league in one category one time. He led the league in slugging once. He had three top 10 finishes in batting average, one in on-base percentage, one in slugging, one in hits, one in doubles,

one in plate appearances, incredibly, one in home runs. These are 10th place, top 10 finishes, one in home runs, none in RBIs, none in plate appearances, incredibly. One in home runs. These are 10th place, top 10 finishes. One in home runs, none in RBIs. None in RBIs. None in RBIs. Three in triples, though. And seems like none in runs and none in war.

One in win probability added. So this is definitely somebody who is like well outside mr 10th place yeah his war over let's say his best 15 ish seasons his war was uh an average of about 2.5 per year yeah and so that would put him what what would that put him? 40th, 50th, 60th this year? Yeah, probably. 2.5 war this year would be tied for 75th, tied with Marcelo Zuna and Edwin Encarnacion, which sounds about right.

But I was listening to your guys' discussion about Harold Baines on episode 1308, I think, 1309. People talk about whether you're a small hall guy or a big hall guy, whether you believe that the Hall of Fame should be very inclusive and include as many great players as you can, or whether you think that it should maintain the standards that you have and no worse than that. And I think that the Hall of Fame actually made this choice for you because the way that the Hall of Fame voting works is that you only need to be a Hall of Famer among one voting group one time. You don't have to be consistently seen as a Hall of Famer. There's no like I in Poly, in a Polysci in college. I don't know if this is actually true about the United States, but this is what my professor told me.

He said that the way that the framers built the United States government, that they designed it, was to have lots of veto points. And so this was a way of sort of cooling, of keeping things from happening, because they thought there was more, again, I don't know if this is true, but this is what the teacher professor told me, that there was more of a concern that mobs would do too many things than that they would do too few. And so they created all these veto points where it was very easy to stop things from happening. And the Hall of Fame is the exact

opposite. Instead of having lots of veto points, you have lots of opportunities for one group to say yes one time, and then that's all you need. Then now you're a law, right? And there's no way of getting, once you're a law, there's no way of getting you out. And so Harold Baines, for instance, it's not just that they asked the writers to vote. They asked the writers to vote 15 times. And he, I mean, he didn't get 15 ballots because he wasn't even over 5% for the whole time. But he had 15 times where the voters got to shuffle themselves, take some people out, put some people in, reconsider things, convince each other, 15 tries. And then after that,

there was a veterans committee, which is a whole new thing. this time there were what 16 people and so so then even though every time the writers voted they said no they got they said well let's get a new group in here and if that group a lot of whom have ties to harold yeah there's that too but even if that group had said no they would have later done a new group and then a new group and then a new group like they keep on like the veterans committees keep on reassembling in new group and then a new group and then a new group like they keep on like the veterans committees keep on reassembling in new forms and so what they're basically saying with that structure is we believe it's a big hall we do not want to put an emphasis on vetoing we want to put an emphasis on any time we can gather any group of people who will say yes that to us is a

hall of famer and so harold baines hall of famer. 10th place or Mr. 20th place or Mr. 30th place, eventually would get in. Like, eventually, on a long enough timeline, Ben, our chances of making the Hall of Fame. We'll put them all in. Yes, Adam Jones said. I feel like Adam Jones is actually capturing the spirit of the hall of fame better than anybody else eventually they all get in yeah so i think that the uh i think that mr 10th place would seem less appealing to a lot of people and then he would in in a in a different way he would

seem more appealing to some other people because they would just remember him for so long and there would be something about the consistency that would be held up as somehow more important than what other player, how other players accumulated their stats. And eventually he would run into a voting pool that said yes. Okay. One more thing I meant to mention about the lopsided teams. We could look that up if we were more industrious to see what the most lopsided playoff teams or World Series teams or whatever were. But I think you'd very rarely see a team that was terrible at any aspect of the game that had a lot of success. Unless you separate pitching and defense and then maybe you'd get some lousy defensive teams in there that had some success. But on the whole, you might see some teams that are second in one thing and 17th in the other thing, but you're not going to see a whole lot of teams that are so bad at one thing and so great at the other thing that it carries them and propels them to success. To be a very good team, you generally have to be at least decent, at least mediocre at everything, and then you can be really good at one thing and that can pull you

up but it's tough to be so good at one aspect of the sport that it can make up for being truly terrible at another aspect it's we're on a different uh we're on a new we went back a question yeah we did oh cool all right that's usually your thing but i did it this time that is true that is probably true across the board because it's hard to be good, like super good at baseball while being terrible at some part of it as a team particularly. But if we expanded the conversation beyond simply like offense, defense, pitching, and maybe relief pitching, if you really drill down, there are things that every team is bad at and things that every team is is bad at yeah things that

every team is particularly good at and so for instance last year i mentioned this a couple of weeks ago and then i wrote about it uh last year the a's were a really really good offensive team broadly speaking and they were the worst team in baseball by far offensively against high velocity and so that's an example of something where they're not balanced. If you keep on breaking the game into different skills, they had an imbalance. And then the question is, is that imbalance something that can be a real liability? And over the course of a long season, usually not. Over the course of a postseason, very well, possibly. So anyway, I did write about that by

the way do you want to know what i found the dodgers and astros high velocity i read it yeah okay yeah i figured well we could talk about it when we talk about the playoffs but all right we'll talk about it then all right because i do want to get to it because i don't know what i think of it and you may not know what you think of it either yeah but all right so we'll tease that but we'll get to it a little later on do you have a stat blast i do all right they'll take a data set sorted by something like a r a minus or obs plus and then they'll tease out All right. So this is more in the finding a new way to express what we already know kind of mode. But also there's some questions here.

So and I have a theory. This actually inspired a big theory that i have now so so in 2014 there were 44 players who qualified for the batting title which is to say they had 3.1 played appearances per team game 44 of them who qualified for the batting title with single digit home run total, nine or fewer, 44. This year, there's going to be five. Five. Yeah. Five. There are not six baseball players in the world who are going to hit fewer than 10 home runs this year in a full season.

There are only five. And so we have talked about, it has been noted that one of the strange or one of the defining things about this home run boom is that it is not a handful of players chasing 73 home runs. Rather, it's every player hitting a few more. Every single player is hitting more home runs than they would have. Just to give you an example, one of the players who had fewer than 10 home runs last year was Malik Smith, who had two. And this year, and he had two the year before, and he had three the year before that. This year, Malik Smith is one of the five, but he has six. So even he has doubled

his home runs. And I think that one player is going to have two or has two currently, and that's Yolmer Sanchez. And no other player, amazingly, no other player is going to have fewer than five. So it's hard to not hit home runs. In fact, only one player is even going to have five. Malik Smith with six is third from the bottom and six, you know, that's six. So I was wondering though, just broadly speaking, how each quartile of home run hitters has moved in this season compared to recent seasons and compared to 2014, which was the low point. And so I took the qualifying hitters, just the qualifying hitters for every season of this decade. And then I broke them qualifying hitters, just the qualifying hitters for every

season of this decade. And then I broke them up into quartiles and then I got their average number of home runs for each quartile. And so just to compare 2019 to 2014, the top quartile this year is going to average or is averaging 38 homers in 2014. It was 28. So that's from 28 to 38. That's 10. The third quartile or the second quartile is gone from 18 to 29. And so that's 11. The third quartile has gone from 11 to 21. And so that's 10. And the bottom quartile has gone from 5 to 12 so that's 7 and so in one way of looking at it you can say that across the board every quartile has added you know about 10 home runs in another you can say that the top quartile has has improved their home run hitting by 25%, and the bottom has more than doubled. So in one way of looking at it,

it's been consistent gains across the board in absolute gains. And in another, it's been far, far, far greater for the low home run. So that's a fact. That's one fact. Let's see. I guess that's the main fact. So I have that. So I have, I i know like we've

talked about this i still ben can't really appreciate or accept or explain why power hitters like the far why the top power hitters are not gaining more than they were and why nobody is chasing 70 this year let alone or 60 i 60, I should say, let alone 70. And I think I have a little bit of a theory, which maybe this will not seem profound. Maybe you've already had this theory. But one of the things that like Mark McGuire used to say in defense of his own home run hitting was, well, steroids can't help you hit the ball, right? He would like, maybe it made him stronger, but steroids can't help you hit the ball, right? He would, like, maybe it made him stronger, but steroids can't help you hit the ball.

And that was a way of holding on to his accomplishment in a way. And you hear that from other people as well. And you hear that sometimes with Barry Bonds, although Barry Bonds' defense was more that he was great even before the steroids, but you sometimes hear it with Barry Bonds, too. Like, they couldn't help him hit the ball. And he was such a great hitter. Even if you take away the home runs or reduce them some, he was still an amazing hitter.

And what I think is that I don't know how much PEDs made PED users stronger. I don't know how much it mattered. if it made them let's say if it made them six percent stronger then we would expect their home runs to go up by about as much as we see the top quartile of home run hitters these days going up and since it went up way more i feel like that is proof that steroids do make it easier to hit that the fact that even giving sluggers this extra five or so percent of carry that hitters have this year does not turn them into 60 or 70 home run hitters that whatever they were taking in the 90s must have done something else right it can't just be that it made them stronger because the ball would have to carry so much more.

Like, how am I put? To get Pete Alonzo to 73 home runs, for instance, right now, you would have to have the ball be juiced like 70% more. Like, it would have to go so much farther on average. Because what we've seen is that there were not. so much farther on average. Because what we've seen is that there were not, there is not this huge pool of warning track fly balls that everybody, that sluggers are hitting, that they can just tap into with a little extra strength,

and all of a sudden those extra 30 fly balls become home runs. There just aren't that many that are coming close but not getting out. There's enough that league-wide we see this huge spike, and we see that like Malik Smith has a couple every year, and also Aaron Judge has a couple extra year, and everybody's home runs go up a couple extra year when you give them 10 extra feet of carry right but it's not like there's a big enough pool of those fly balls that need 10 extra feet of carry that if you just make players a little stronger they're going to hit 70 home runs and And so in order to get them to 70,

something else has to be happening. And I think that what that something else is, if we attribute it to steroids, which I don't know, that's always been a little bit, I'm not sure about that. But if you do, if you attribute it to steroids, then you almost have to say that it is not about the ball traveling farther it is uh mostly about it somehow being easier to hit so whether that's i don't know quickness on your swing or i've seen suggestions that there's some improvement in visual acuity i don't know if that's yeah but okay there you go it's something in the ability to square the ball up though more than it's the ability to get extra

carry so yeah that's my theory my theory is that steroids made it easier to hit yeah that's reasonable i mean i definitely think that as much as i downplay steroids as like a magic wonder drug in most cases clearly it wasn't turning everyone into berry ponds. I think it would also be very odd if that period of seemingly pretty rampant steroid use and some confirmed or strongly suspected users who also happened to be setting single season home run records, it would be kind of odd. It would be quite a coincidence if those things just overlapped For no real reason it just Happened that way that this was That era in baseball and it was Also the era when people were hitting 60 And 70 with some regularity

So that's a bit too Much for me to think is Just something that happened To happen and also if you look At the ages of those players and the Way that they declined or didn't, that just adds to it. So I am sympathetic to that argument, I think. And it helped. I think that probably the ball was a bit juiced in that era too. And the home run rate

was pretty high league-wide, as high as it's ever been before the past few years, that had to help. But that wasn't all of it. It was also those real outliers were just outlying by more than they have in any other era. And there is an argument, I know Craig Edwards wrote about this for Fangraphs in July, that essentially there are only so many hitters at any one time who have the potential to hit 60 or 70, even if all of the conditions align, and that you need those guys to be healthy because you only have so many shots at it. And he kind of made the case that this year, if you look at the best candidates to do that, to really take advantage of these conditions and mash a ton of homers those guys based on their previous home run hitting just weren't available were hurt this year we're having

down years for whatever reason you know it's like john carlos stanton missed most of the season and aaron judge missed a big chunk of the season and gary sanchez was hurt some of the time and and carnasioan was hurt and joey gallo was hurt and chris davis was hurt some of the time, and Encarnacion was hurt, and Joey Gallo was hurt, and Chris Davis was hurt and ineffective. And so all these guys who you would have picked as the most likely candidates just didn't, for no particular reason, just didn't have the best shot to do that. Whereas the guys who you wouldn't have expected, the Jorge Soler's and the Eugenio Suarez's steroids help keep you healthy and on the field and this year maybe a lot of those guys weren't available and didn't do it and probably some truth to that like it's possible that had stanton or judge had a fully healthy season you never know maybe one of those guys really goes off and we're not even talking about this because they did hit 60 or 65 or something.

But I think it has to be more than that. And so I am somewhat persuaded by your argument. I was generally not that convinced that the PED with expansion, maybe the new ballpark with pitcher injuries. And the fact, though, that this particular home run era has made me believe, and particularly the distribution of home runs within this home run era, has made me more convinced that it was the steroids. Because when you introduce an environmental factor, which we have seen in this case with the ball, what you see, at least in this case, is that it affects everybody. Like we said, the bottom quartile is going to go up by as much as the top quartile is going to go up. And there are not 30 or 40 extra home runs for some players to capture.

And so if you see what you did in the 90s, where it was individuals who were just outlandishly ahead of everybody else, it does make you feel like a lot more likely that it was something that only affected them individually, which in the most likely explanation is something that they were taking. And so probably, I think we've talked about this early on. In fact, I think it was episode 100 maybe or episode 99 or something like that. I asked you your opinion about it, and we both agreed that it was hard to shake the suspicion. It made a lot of sense.

It's hard to imagine that Barry Bonds really couldn't attribute some of that power to the drugs he was using. But on the other hand, we were not convinced just because of the research that had been done on it, because the quest to find a real correlation had not found anything. And I think I still kind of believe that as of three or four years ago. But seeing what happens, what has been happening right uh with the ball has it just looks so different it's just such a different effect on the league as a whole than what we saw in the 90s that i just don't feel like it could be the same the same phenomenon yeah i think it's probably the

same phenomenon overlapping a bit in that the league wide level was higher than for some of the same reasons that the league-wide level is higher now. But those outliers and those record-setting seasons, I think, was probably other things going on that aren't going on to the same extent now. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So should we take the last 20 minutes or so here to take a stab at Claire's question about

why we love baseball? Or should we—we both want to answer that, I think, but we're, we're scared to answer it. I'm not scared. It's just hard. It's a big question.

I'm scared to start. I'm scared to start because I'm worried that I'm not going to actually come to a satisfactory end. Yeah. By the way, in 2000, which was the peak of the home run era, there were 26 players who qualified for the batting title and had single digit home runs.

So again, 26 that year, the peak of the previous home run era, 26 single digit home run hitters, only five this year. All right. So I guess let's try it. We can revisit our affection for baseball changes over time and we appreciate it in different ways. for baseball changes over time and we appreciate it in different ways so we can always answer this again or take a second run at it if we don't feel like the first try really

captures it but Claire wants to know she says I sometimes struggle to capture in a succinct way just why I love baseball so much and it's got me wondering how you people are able to articulate it without rambling endlessly which we may or may not be.

I guess we'll find out. Why do you love baseball? And what do you think is the most lovable or compelling thing about this current baseball era? All right. So I'm going to give four reasons that I've thought of off the top of my head. Four things that I think are just crucial to the love of baseball that I've thought of off the top of my head. Four things that I think are just crucial to the love of baseball that I personally developed. Now, I know that these four things are not

universal to everybody, that some people will not have the same experience with them. And so they can't be definitive because there are a lot of people who love baseball who will not relate to these things at all. But they're the first four things I thought of. And I might think of 15 more by the end of this. But the first one is that when I see somebody field a ball, I in the core of my brain know how good it feels to field a ball, like how the sensation of actually catching a ball is a satisfying thing. That sensation of a ball landing in your glove cleanly is itself physically pleasing. It is like, did you know why we like potato chips?

Why we like crunchy things? I think I've read about that. It has something to do with something in your eardrum that like it, I don't know, the thing in your eardrum gets this pleasing feeling from the crunch. And I get a pleasing feeling when I catch a ball cleanly or when I hit a ball cleanly. And I also love to throw things.

I want to throw things all the time. I mean, I don't ever, but I still sometimes just rear back, not holding anything, And I just do a throwing motion and running is also fun. So all the four basic activities of baseball are just physically pleasing to me. And I did them millions of times when I was growing up and watching people do them somehow has a physical echo in me. And so that's one thing. I don't know if I would have loved baseball if I had not been allowed to play it. If they did not, if this was just a thing that people did on other planets and I just watched it and never saw it, I don't know. But that's one thing. Baseball was a huge part of my upbringing.

It was what we listened to on road trips. It was what we talked about. It was what we did when we were doing work around the house. We would have the rare games where there would be a baseball game on TV because they weren't always on TV. In the middle of the evening, like the five o'clock games, we would have a baseball dinner and we would go eat in the family room and watch a baseball game while we ate. All those things are just such a part of my, my upbringing and my family. And the fact that my parents still follow the game and that we have, you know, the shared experience of being baseball fans

makes it very hard, would make it very hard to turn away, even if I, if I, for some reason wanted to. So that's the second one, shared culture. Okay. Third one is that it is entertainment during my most boring times. So I, because I, particularly because I listen to it on the radio. So it is there when I'm in the car and it is very welcome. It's, it's always a bummer when I'm in a, in traffic and there's no game on. It's there when I'm in the car and it is very welcome. It's, it's always a bummer when I'm in traffic and there's no game on, uh, it's there when I'm, when I'm weeding, it's there when I'm walking, it's there on long car trips. And so, um, just as a, as a relief, as a thing that brings relief and that you notice when it's not there, I have largely positive experiences of just baseball being on instead of being off. And the fourth thing is that particularly, I think like there's a lot of talk about the routine, the day-to-day aspect of it. But what I think really drives it home is that they stop for six

months and you crave it, you long for it. And so you never really get over, by the end of a season, you are kind of a little bit like okay that was probably enough baseball uh but then they stop and then you lie fallow and you just long for it and it is like uh it has a cycle that is designed to make you both obsess about it when it's there because it's all the time it becomes all consuming in your life because there's a game every day that you have to pay attention to if you're a fan of a particular team. And then also in a way that you obsess about it when it's gone because it goes away for

so long. And in particular, it goes away during those months where you're already kind of like bored and stuck inside and feeling sad and all that. And so the fact that it shows up as it does, I don't, I'm kind of making things up the way that like George Will does and over-romanticizing certain aspects that are maybe arbitrary, but it feels significant to me

that it shows up in the spring and is there for all the fun months and then goes away, leaves you, and you just long for it. I mean, you long for it when you're in the middle of January. So I think those are the first four things I thought of. Okay.

Those are all good things. And I identify with all of them. The first thing I'd say is that these kind of ebb and flow over time. The degree to which I identify one of them, or I would say this is the number one reason, like my ranking of reasons for why I love it has definitely changed over time. So when I was a kid and I played baseball more than I do now, that was a bigger part of my love for baseball at that time. I still enjoy doing that, but I don't do it as often. I don't do it in any serious way.

And so it's not part of my day-to-day interaction with baseball, although obviously it's still a big part of why I became enamored of baseball. So it's still a part of it, but not as much part of the day-to-day tapestry. And when it comes to the actual watching of it, that's still a big part, still a bigger part than the playing of it. But I think even that has probably decreased over time on a minute per minute, hour per hour basis. There are many other forms of entertainment that can compete with baseball, maybe not in total time because baseball is just always on for so much of the year. It's kind of this constant. But if I had to fill an hour here or there, I could do that just as satisfying a way, if not more satisfying, by reading a book or playing a video game or watching a movie or TV show or whatever.

And those are just things that I can do without getting off my couch. So I could more than fill, I think, all the hours in my day with non-baseball things and never be bored, probably. So when the winter comes, I do miss it, at least after a while, after you kind of decompress. And as you said, especially in October when you're covering baseball, it can get kind of hectic and you're watching so much baseball that you're happy to have the break and that at a certain point you start to miss it. But I don't just stare out the window and wait for spring it worked for rogers hornsby but hornsby was not great company most of the time i do lots of other stuff and i have no trouble filling my time so it's not even that

i don't think as much as it was when i was a kid let's say and i was rooting for one team really hard and it was really the centerpiece of every third day or so in my year, if not more, was, okay, when's the game on? I'm going to be plopped down in front of the couch watching that thing from first pitch to last pitch. So it's not quite that same relationship anymore. So putting the smaller stuff aside, the little things I like about baseball, like the fact that people of all shapes and sizes can play it at the highest level or the playing surfaces are all different shapes and configurations. That stuff is great and endears it to me. But bigger picture, I think over time, the primary reason why I love it is that it's just kind of like this hothouse for human ingenuity.

This hothouse for human ingenuity. It's this semi-controlled setting where you can analyze things and you can do it in a way that is hard to do with all of life. But you can do it in baseball because there's some constraints and there are only so many teams and so many players. And it feels like something you can kind of get your arms around in a way that you can't with a lot of things in life. And so baseball has inspired so much great writing, so much great thinking and analysis and research and just kind of questing after the answers to things, which is something that really draws me to it. It's an area of inquiry where there's so much information about everything that you actually do have a hope of setting out to answer certain questions and getting conclusive answers to them, which is very satisfying. But you can't answer everything, and there are still some unknowns and still some mysteries and maybe still some unknowable things.

So there remains some intrigue. So I like that. some intrigue. So I like that. I like that it's a great means of telling stories, not just about the game, but about people and life just kind of through the lens of baseball. And there's so much history associated with it. I love baseball history, all the players and stories and personalities associated with it. So I guess what I'm saying is even if you took away, even if I couldn't watch it anymore, even if I couldn't watch it anymore, even if I couldn't play it anymore, I'd still miss it quite a bit. And I would miss playing it and I'd miss watching it, but I'd still be interested in it just almost like as an intellectual exercise,

just as something where you can see strategy and tactics and you can talk about people's intentions and their stories and how did they get to that point in their lives how did they reach this pinnacle of human achievement and just all of the stat stuff which is sort of simplifying it but i think baseball is sort of a science but it's kind of a manageable science where you don't need as much training and expertise as you do to be on the cutting edge of other sciences. I mean, sure, if you want to be doing the nitty gritty research in baseball these days, you basically have to be qualified to be a scientist in other fields too. But you can feel like you're getting at greater truths in baseball in a way that I think is tough to do now in some other scientific field.

So I love it in that way, too, because there are just so many interesting questions you can ask and potentially answer about it that I really haven't found any other area of life or human endeavor where you can pose those questions and answer them in quite the same way. And I think that's what really hooks me. So if I had never come to cover it in this way, maybe I would still be appreciating it the way that I was 12 and the way that a lot of people do their whole lives, which is a great way to appreciate it, which is I root for this team and I watch baseball. I kind of consume baseball through this team. I've kind of lost that because of going into covering baseball to an extent, but I've gained this other dimension that I think brings me even greater satisfaction, perhaps, but in a very different way. Yeah. When you said that your reasons have shifted since you were a child i feel like the ones i

listed are are all the reasons from when i was a child for the most part and they the the main reason that i love it today is because i loved it as a child i just never there's there's like there's almost total continuity i've never stopped loving it i never like left for three years and a lot of it is that i'm always invested in the characters. I'm always invested in the teams. And if I went away for 20 years and came back and it was all new players, I don't know if I would like it. I don't know if I would want to invest again, but that doesn't happen. I've never gotten there. But yes, what you said at the end is it definitely captures what continues to keep me fascinated

with it as an adult. And another thing that I think that I've thought of, and in fact, I just wrote about today and, uh, it's coincidental because I've been, uh, I've been thinking about this for a long time and I finally wrote it down. I wrote about this year's wildcard race and I sort of, uh, I, I also compared it to, to, uh to Philip K. Dick and how he wrote The Man in the High Castle, which is that he used the I Ching. I hope I'm pronouncing the, I'm not pronouncing the tone of that right. I'm sorry. where you essentially get these like, you get essentially random numbers, apparently random numbers, and then you use them to, well, in Philip K. Dick's case, he used them to dictate his character's actions. So instead of deciding whether the character was going to do X or Y, he would roll these coins and let the Qing decide whether he was going to go left or right. And so I'm going to just read something that came at the end of this article,

which is, The storyteller always runs into a problem. We're all so attuned to time-worn tropes and steady beats of cause and effect that it is difficult for the storyteller, having laid out the structure of a plot, to truly surprise us. If he says A and B happened, we anticipate that A and B will lead to C. And if C doesn't happen, if the storyteller veers into a wild and out of nowhere why scenario, we see that as a contrivance. The audience doesn't necessarily

want the predictable, but it also won't accept the outlandish. In either case, the plot shows all the fingerprints of authorship instead of feeling natural and spontaneous. It doesn't have any of the real chaos that seems to define life. That's where the Yi Qing benefited Philip K. Dick's story. His plot points were occurring by chance, by fate, not by the heavy hand of an author trying to either follow or subvert a trope. It might have risked boredom, but it gained genuine unpredictability. This too is why a baseball season is the best storytelling device in the world. It follows no predictable narrative. It also follows no purposefully unpredictable narrative. It is wildly no purposefully unpredictable narrative. It is wildly outlandishly out of control while still being definitively indisputably real.

And I really like the way that you watch a baseball game and you can turn off your narrative muscles, your sense of like trying to follow along with the author because you know that there's no intent at all, that like what happens is actually going to be entirely like accidental or out of any author's control. And so because of that, it's a story unlike any story that you can turn on and watch on, you know, in film or in literature. You're never questioning why the author did something because there is no author, if that makes sense. And for that reason, it feels just a lot more unpredictable. And at the end of it, I think a lot more satisfying.

Yeah. And another nice thing about it, and I guess this is true of a lot of things, is that you can kind of figure out what your values are or what society's values are by looking at baseball and how you think of certain baseball things like what should players be paid and is this unwritten rule appropriate or not is this baseball behavior something that should actually be the prevailing behavior or should things change and so you can kind of use baseball to figure out and and those things change over time as the values of the country and the world change in some very obvious ways like integration let's say but also in much less serious ways but but still like social norms and niceties and all of that kind of play out in baseball as they do in lots of other things.

Like, when I watch The Bachelor, for instance, one reason to watch The Bachelor is that you can kind of all collectively decide who is behaving in an appropriate way. Like, this person has no social skills. This person is going beyond the bounds of what we think is right and how you should interact with other people and we can all condemn this action and celebrate this person's more virtuous action and you can do that in baseball too except there's this very long history and you can see how certain things have become more acceptable over time something like i don't know, headhunting, let's say, is more prevalent perhaps in the past. And these days it kind of gets you condemned if you admit to doing that or it's very clear that you do that. So I like that too. It's kind of the whole idea that like baseball and all of history and human behavior are linked.

And I found it to be very influential when I took a college class that was like baseball in American society or something. And it was kind of about the history of baseball, but it's the thing that we've chosen to devote a lot of time to that I really like when you can look back and see people 100 years ago, 150 years ago, complaining about exactly the same things that we complain about today. things that we complain about today. And that has been pretty influential on me because I think of that now in all areas of life when there's some complaint about something, I think, well, is this exactly the same as what the previous generation was saying at that time about something slightly different? And is this just something that we repeat over and over and over again? And because baseball has been so well documented and it goes back such a long way, it enables us to see those things, I think, very clearly. And I value that in it too. Studying baseball history and sabermetrics has really shaped the way I think about a lot of things in life, not just baseball. Yeah. If they did not record everything, I would not like it at all. I think if it weren't for the

record of the past i wouldn't i wouldn't have that much attachment to it it really is the the feeling that you can watch a game spend you know x amount of time watching a game but then you can spend like many times x going back and like looking at old games and what has happened in previous things and where it fits into the history and all that it's probably the single most important thing that baseball has for going for me particularly specifically is its its archive yeah i think that's true so i'll probably think of three other reasons as soon as we stop recording and this is all very highfalutin and abstract and on a certain level i just like watching say a montage montage of Garrett Cole's strikeout pitches because they move in really ridiculous ways

and it's fun to follow them. So I enjoy it on that sort of fundamental, visceral level too. Oh man, Ben, if you had to give up either, if they were either going to quit playing baseball starting right now, or they were going to erase everything that had ever happened,

I'm not sure what I would pick. That's a tough one. starting right now, or they were going to erase everything that had ever happened. I'm not sure what I would pick. That's a tough one. Yeah. Someone asked me the other day, like, if you had to go without baseball or, say, music for the rest of your life, what would you choose? And there's no good answer. I don't want to be without either of those things. There's a good answer.

Well, yeah. I mean, ultimately, I decided I wanted music, but you could probably come up with a closer call that would be even more agonizing. And yeah, that one that you just said, that is a pretty good one because, gosh, I mean, it seems like if we just said that we want all the stuff that's already happened, most of which we can't even go back and watch, I guess in that case, maybe they'd open up the archives and we could actually go back and watch old games, but it wouldn't be as fun to do that. What would we do with all the time that we currently devote to baseball?

And yet, if you took away all of that stuff, then would the new baseball even mean anything to you? So that is quite a conundrum. Maybe we'll talk about it later on. All right. We'll have a whole offseason without baseball to reminisce about why we love baseball. Okay. So we will end there and we will be back with another episode a little later this week.

Well, you heard at the beginning of the episode, Jason Benetti speaking on the White Sox broadcast and calling Jose Ramirez's first home run back off the injured list. After recovering from surgery for a broken hamate bone, Ramirez went on to hit a three-run homer later in the game, drove in seven runs, not a bad comeback. Sometimes with hamate injuries, you worry about the power coming back quickly, and obviously not really a problem for Ramirez in his first game back. This continues what seems to be a trend of guys who seem to be done for the season coming back before the end of the regular season even, which is kind of cool and dramatic in the thick of a playoff race.

Obviously, you hope guys aren't rushing themselves back and running the risk of hurting themselves further or coming back when they aren't actually ready and prepared to help their teams. But in some of these cases, they certainly seem to be. We talked about it with Baez and Rizzo. Now it happened with Jose Ramirez, and it also happened with another guy that we had recently all but written off, Rich Hill, Dick Mountain himself, back on the mound on Tuesday, pitching more or less on one leg, wearing a knee brace, looking uncomfortable, but getting results. Struck out a couple guys in his first inning,

then they let him bat. He wasn't supposed to swing, according to Dave Roberts, but he did, and he doubled, a stand-up double, with one really functional knee. Then he went back out for another inning and struck out the side. Rich Hill, just the best. It's tough when he and Ross Stripling are fighting for a rotation spot because they're both friends of the podcast, or idols of the podcast even. I don't know whether Hill has the stamina, the durability to actually start games in the playoffs. Not that the distinction between starting and relieving

means much anymore. But if he can get out and hit doubles, then he'll have a spot in October, even if he doesn't look very comfortable doing it. You can support the podcast

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to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks, including a couple of Patreon-exclusive livestreams we will do during the playoffs next month. Dave Sachs, Andre Beausoleil, Barry Gilpin, Jeff Snyder, and Zach Wentkos. 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 podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Your ratings and reviews for the book are appreciated as well. It'll be me and Meg next time, so we will talk to you then. I can't agree on my own But between you and me It's easy to see

That I could never, ever, ever I could never leave you alone Alone Alone