Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1444: Ball Don’t Lie

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss the Nationals’ sweep of the Cardinals, why the Nationals are good and fun, Stephen Strasburg and the history of no. 1 draft pick pitchers, Gerrit Cole’s performance in ALCS Game 3, how Wednesday’s rainout affects the Yankees and Astros, and the Angels’ opioid problem and hiring of Joe Maddon […]

In a town, we got more. I was found, we got the studio. Now we're sober. Calling up Washington. Calling up Washington. Calling up Washington Calling up Washington Hello and welcome to episode 1444 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. You don't sound well. Nope. As people can probably tell, the postseason is taking its toll. I have come down with a cold, and I'm going to try to gut through it. So apologies to everyone for inflicting my stuffiness on your ears today. But it won't be as much of my voice as usual, because we will be talking to Rob Arthur later in the episode.

Rob, of course, wrote for Baseball Perspectives the study that brought a ton of attention to the baseball. And he showed very convincingly that the difference in how the ball is carrying and how home runs are being hit this postseason, it's not just the weather, it's not just better pitching. It is the ball. It's the drag of the ball. And that controversy has continued to roil in the last few days. Jeff Passan, the latest to write about it, now for ESPN. So we'll get into all of that with Rob and why it's happening and what we can expect to see next. But we've got a bit of baseball to talk about. So ALCS Game 4 is rained out. So we're actually going to get an episode

up before another game is played for once. But we did have ALCS game three and we had NLCS game four. And just after we said that you should never predict a postseason sweep, the Nationals swept the Cardinals. And now we know one of the World Series teams. And now the Mariners are the only MLB franchise never to have made a World Series teams. And now the Mariners are the only MLB franchise never to have made a World Series. Sorry, Meg. Yeah, I mean, this is bad news for the Cardinals. But I think everybody wants to see the Nationals in the World Series a lot more than they want to see the Cardinals in the World Series. It's very hard to feel that sad about the outcome here from an entertainment perspective. I mean, right now, the Nationals, the only thing more entertaining than the Nationals starting rotation is watching the Nationals bullpen get through games, either

through unexpected performances or through unexpected, you know, bullpen appearances by starters, or just by Sean Doolittle and Dan Hudson, two favorites. I would say two favorites of many baseball readers. Doolittle for his general temperament and the words he says and writes. And Hudson for his starring role in Jeff Passan's book from a few years ago, The Arm. And so it's been, I don't know, that's been good. They're a good team. They're a really good team and it's very exciting to see them there. And I wrote before the year about how with the Nationals going into the season,

so Bryce Harper had obviously left, and they had missed the playoffs last year. And if they missed the playoffs this year, then it would be sort of like, oh, well, that was the end of that era. We had that era where we got really bad. We lost 100 games two years in a row. We drafted the two best draft prospects in baseball history and that started this new era of Washington baseball you know first era I guess of Washington baseball for the Nationals fans and they were both kind of like

they were both kind of great but there was also a an era of disappointment over the whole over that whole era because they never won a division series and so then harper leaves and and in one sense it was like well that story is done that's too bad like we had this story it did not really get the team anywhere they didn't even get to the lcs let alone win a world series that story ended up being kind of a dud but if they won this year then with strasburg there then it would not be seen as Harper having left. The story would just be the good years, the Strasburg years. Instead of the Strasburg-Harper years, they would always be remembered as the Strasburg years.

And here we are. Strasburg has become almost maybe over the course of two months has gone from definitely unlikely to making the Hall of Fame to maybe making the Hall of Fame. And the Nationals all of a sudden look like they have this. Now it's instead of like a seven year run of disappointment, they have a decade run that might culminate in a World Series and keep going beyond that. And so that's awesome for them. Yeah, it's a really entertaining team. There are just a lot of entertaining personalities and players on this team. Obviously, there's the rotation, there's St really entertaining team. There are just a lot of entertaining personalities and players on this team. Obviously, there's the rotation. There's Strasburg and all the storylines that you were just talking about.

And then Max Scherzer has maybe the best pitcher in baseball, unless it's Garrett Cole now. And then Anibal Sanchez, who is really entertaining in his own way. Patrick Corbin is good. You talked about the two guys in the bullpen. And then you've got Anthony Rendon, and you've got even Ryan Zimmerman, who's kind of had some big plays and some big hits. And he had the no-hitter saving catch, which was really incredible. But he has the weight of being an original gnat and living through the dark days for that franchise. And he's still around, getting to see this success in his twilight years so that's a nice storyline you've got nlcs mvp howie kendrick the hitting machine

and juan soto who i think is probably the biggest beneficiary of the postseason so far when it comes to gaining national attention and raising his profile he's obviously had a lot of big plays but i think people have gotten to know him much more for his quirks as a player and his expressiveness and the pitch taking routine, which is just the greatest thing, even though the Cardinals didn't agree. So it's just a really fun team. And I don't think it deserves to be in the super team conversation necessarily, but we have to acknowledge that they do have the best record in baseball since whenever it is late May. So I've seen some people saying, how are the Nationals this good? And it's like, well, we thought they'd be good and they've been really good for months now. So that's not so surprising. The surprising thing was that they

started as slow as they did. But at this point, they are really firing on all cylinders. They've used Strasburg and Scherzer for, I don't know, it was more than half of their playoff innings coming into game four. Maybe now it's not, but it's close to that, which is a pretty good way to get by with not so great a bullpen. So yeah, just a really fun team. And obviously, the story of just winning a postseason series for the first time, winning a pennant, getting back to the World Series in DC, there's a lot going for it.

So I don't know that they're as good a team as whichever team comes out of the AL series. But in terms of entertainment and things to root for, they are right up there, if not above. Ben, you said Anibal Sanchez is entertaining in his own way are are you would you just are you willing to say that about every player are you saying he's not entertaining i just couldn't identify the thing that you're thinking of when you say that about animals i mean anibal sanchez does not jump off the page to me no i think his career trajectory is pretty cool because he had a terrible three years in Detroit where I certainly wrote him off.

I think a lot of people wrote him off. And he has found a way to survive and thrive even to a certain extent with a different pitch mix and a different approach to pitching. So I always like it when a guy can go from being a harder thrower, not that he was like extreme flamethrower even at his peak, but he threw a lot harder than he did now. And he went through that rough patch when he realized, okay, I need to pitch differently with the diminished stuff that I have. And then he found a way to succeed with what he has. So I like that. And obviously the no hitter was fun coming into the series. I wouldn't have said that he was someone I was particularly looking forward to pitch,

but that game was fun. All right, so the Nationals won 93 games. The Cardinals only won 92. The Nationals actually had the second-best run differential in the National League. They were well ahead of the Braves as well as ahead of the Cardinals and the Cubs in the first. Given that, it sort of feels unfair to the Dodgers

that they had to face the Nationals in the first round instead of getting to pick, either to face the team with the worst record, which was the Cardinals, or to pick which team they wanted. Maybe they would have picked the Nationals anyway because the Nationals had to use their two aces to get through the wildcard game.

I do not know what their calculus would have been in making that decision, but does it seem like making the wild card the last seed is appropriate because it penalizes them by giving them the hardest opponent in the first round and also does give the team with the best record an opponent who has just had to play a wild card game that has presumably used their ace? card game that has presumably used their ace or do you think that the the team that wins the most games should get to pick which one they want and if they do get to pick which one they want do you think that they would want that choice or do you think that by picking a team they would be by definition giving that team bulletin board material and be worried that they could not pick any team without firing them up and therefore having that uh that attack on their opponent be absorbed into their opponent's suit and then fired back at them. Yeah, good point. Yeah, I think it's probably appropriate.

Wait, which is? Appropriate the way they do it? Yeah, the way they do it. And I do think, yeah, right, that would be, I don't know what the motivation boost is. There's really no way to quantify that. But that would be an interesting wrinkle. It'd be something fun for us to talk about and analyze at that time of year, which team should they pick? That'd be a fun thing to do. But yes, inevitably, you would annoy the other team, even if you have to pick someone. So it's not that huge an insult, or in some years, it wouldn't be. But be but yes of course teams would use that for motivation for whatever that's worth which i have no idea so i want to talk about first overall

picks so um a few years ago i wrote about about the median first overall pick which at the time the median first overall pick was not a very good player because historically it took like 20 some years before teams got good at drafting, I guess. And so the first overall picks through basically the mid eighties, uh, had produced, uh, no hall of famers, no even real superstars. The, the only, the best one who I guess was, was a superstar, but not for very long was Daryl Strawberry who had 42 career war and before that Harold Baines who I guess is a hall of famer but when I wrote this article I did not have to worry about that coming coming to pass and then in in 1987 the Mariners drafted Ken Griffey Jr. and since then it's been a very different thing you have a lot of truly transcendent superstars who have not, it's not

the norm, but a bunch that have been taken first overall. That's in fact, one of the reasons that I think 1988 is a good time to start the modern era, because I think in addition to many other things that I would note about ballplayer leaps and performance and so on, I think that the prospect, the sort of prospect industry really takes off around 1990 when I think we start getting top 100 lists from Baseball America published. And that's when it seems to me that anecdotally, at least the draft started to get a lot more efficient. And so the industry as a whole became more competent around that point, I think. So 1987, Ken Griffey Jr. And then you had Chipper Jones in 1990. You had Alex Rodriguez in 1993. Adrian Gonzalez in 2000 is tied with Daryl Strawberry.

So before Griffey, Adrian Gonzalez would have been the best, tied for the best overall number one pick in history. Joe Maurer was 2001. He's a borderline Hall of Famer. Justin Upton in 2005, I believe, will pass Daryl Strawberry. Bryce Harper, 2010, will will pass Daryl Strawberry. Bryce Harper, 2010, will certainly pass Daryl Strawberry. Carlos Correa, 2012, will pass Daryl Strawberry. But I have not named any pitchers up until much more recently. There still were not any great first overall pitchers. So until in the first 40 years of the draft, the first four decades of the draft,

the best pitcher who had ever been taken first overall was Andy Bennis, maker of one all-star game. And there were a lot of, I mean, the most famous number one overall picks from the pitching perspective were probably like Bennis, Ben McDonald, and then the flops. Like, you know, you're guys who never made it at all. You're Brian Taylors. Although maybe just Brian Brian Taylor at that point, maybe he was the, the one famous flop, Matt Bush, maybe, I don't know, would have been up there. So, although not a pitcher at the time, anyway, I'm getting off track. Of course, the reason I'm bringing this up is because yesterday, Steven Strasburg, first overall pick had a, another great post-season start. He has a now, like I said, a sort of a

growing Hall of Fame case, although, you know, a lot of work to do, but a 1.1 career ERA in the postseason now in 50-some, 40-some, 50-some innings. And then Garrett Cole the day before, who might be the best pitcher in baseball, both of them are going to crush Andy Benes. In fact, Strasburg's already well past Andy Benennis, and Garrett Cole will pass him in a year or two. And so partly just bringing this up, but partly also wondering which of those two, Strasburg or Cole, do you think will finish as the greatest number one overall pick? Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention David Price has also come in the last, since the

point I set in the first four decades. And so right now, David Price is the best number one overall pitcher, but Strasburg will pass him probably too. And so will Cole probably. So at the end of all of this, who will go down as the best number one overall pitcher taken? Will it be Strasburg? Or will it be? And where would you, I don't know, what would you put as their Hall of Fame chances at this point? Well, Cole seems like a more recent arrival. I mean, he is a more recent arrival, but he is only two years younger than Steven Strasburg. And Strasburg, because he got an earlier start, because he has had the postseason track record, because Cole started his career with the Pirates and didn't get much of a playoff appearance, although he pitched for them in the postseason in 2013, 2015, I guess, but of course they didn't go far. So I think you'd probably have to give the edge to Strasburg at this point. Just based on what he has accomplished so far, I don't know who projects better in the future. I guess probably Cole,

because he throws harder and seems to have even nastier stuff. But again, in two years, we might not be saying that. So I think I would probably say Strasburg. And Strasburg has, I don't know, something like the shutdown and his debut, like all that stuff adds to this aura around Strasburg. Like if you are someone who thinks that the Hall of Fame is for famous people, he is, I think, a more famous person. He was a bigger prospect. They were both big prospects, but

Strasburg was like the biggest pitching prospect. So I think I would give him an edge, but you'd probably have to say the chances are decent for both of them, right? I guess Cole just probably hasn't compiled quite enough that you can say that with confidence because he's only like what a third of the way there career wise something like that so if he were to get hurt in the next few years or something that would be that whereas Strasburg is closer to having that case already yeah on the other hand Cole has you know the the two best and maybe the three best seasons that either of them have had and i mean the season that he just had suggests that he could much more easily win three cy youngs than that strasburg is likely to win three seconds but he has not won three seconds and he might not win this one he might

not win any of them so cole is further away but strasburg is also closer to the end. Like, so the window of Strasburg possibilities is simply less ambitious because he's already 31 years old. But he is sort of seems to be kind of peaking. I mean, I think that he really peaked in the second half of 2017. And so maybe he's not peaking, but he's kind of peaking right now. Like this year, he will have kind of peaking right now. Like he, this year he will have probably his highest Cy Young finish. He is, um, he is having one of the great post seasons ever. And I think that there's something very fitting and satisfying and enjoyable about the fact that Steven Strasburg, the greatest pitching prospect of all time, the greatest

college, maybe the greatest college pitcher of all time, maybe the greatest young pitcher of all time, the greatest college, maybe the greatest college pitcher of all time, maybe the greatest young pitcher of all time is peaking in his 30s. It wasn't until he was 31 that he really fully actualized. And you get used to the notion that pitching prospects are born great and just start flaming out right away and that you have to hold them tight and anticipate their sudden demise. But Strasburg's not doing that at all. He is, in fact, the superstar prospect who, if he makes the Hall of Fame, is going to make the Hall of Fame with his old years, with the case that he makes as an old man.

So I sort of hope he does. I sort of hope that it takes 19 years before we see Strasburg's Best like I hope he is like a Dominant late 30s pitcher Yeah we got an email from Paul Patreon supporter who asked us about Strasburg and he said when you guys had Your top 5 of the decade episode a couple

Months back neither you nor I Following along had Steven Strasburg As a serious contender Would you put him there now? And if not, what kind of World Series would he need? The top four pitchers are clear, but he's had far better rates in fewer innings than Bumgarner in the regular season, and actually better playoff rates in fewer innings and better rates, especially peripherals, in the regular season than Granke or Felix, plus playoff dominance that neither has. Note, I'm not weighing playoffs more heavily,

just mentally adding them as additional games and boosting the stats due to opponent strength. I still don't think Strasburg can crack that list, just he didn't get there at the beginning of the decade, and there have been such great pitchers, as he mentioned, the top four or so are pretty locked in. And Strasburg is eighth in fan graphs war in the decade among pitchers. He's 10th in baseball reference war. And I just don't know, even if you add in this postseason track record, even if he has a great World Series, I don't know that he gets there on a value perspective. But you could say that in terms of his influence and his profile, that he qualifies because the shutdown was big.

The shutdown was big just in terms of, I guess, acknowledging the difference in how pitchers are used and setting that precedent, I think. And also, he was such a big prospect. I think it got people more interested in prospects. His debut was a must-watch event, and now he is compiling this postseason track record. So you can make a case just not really based on war. Yeah, I mean, I was the one who argued Bumgarner, and if you're going to argue Strasburg, you have to argue it from the Bumgarner angle, because he's not, for total value innings and workload, he's not anywhere close to your grankies and so i argued bum garner on the

basis of the postseason on i mean i think it's fair to say that postseason is like much much much much more valuable than regular season if in certain circumstances and i'm willing to give a lot more credit for that and i think that bum garner still has the edge on that just because that Bumgarner still has the edge on that just because it's not one postseason it's not a single postseason that Bumgarner was a major postseason narrative for like over the span of seven years over the span of three world titles he was a 21 year old throwing eight shutout innings in the world series one year he threw seven shutout innings in the world series the next time and then he had one of the great postseasons of all time and then he had the complete game in the World Series one year. He threw seven shutout innings in the World Series the next time. And then he had one of the great postseasons of all time. And then he had the complete game in the wildcard game in 2016,

which against Noah Syndergaard, which was that the last complete game in postseason history? Or was there one after that? Anyway, close. And so I told, I replied to this email by saying that I, even though I argued for Bumgarner as one of the five, I could see, I could see arguing for Strasburg over Bumgarner, but I would not though then put him over Granke. In a way, it makes me reconsider the Bumgarner argument because Bumgarner no longer

looks quite like a postseason unicorn anymore. And so I'm now pulling Bumgarner back out of the top five and replacing him not with Strasburg, but with Granke. But yeah, I think Strasburg is right there, you know, more or less with Bumgarner, not nearly as many innings, but better. And not nearly the postseason narrative, but in some ways, the better decade long narrative. Right. And we're gonna to get maybe a matchup of Cole and Strasburg in the World Series, as you mentioned, as well as Anthony Rendon, who I

may have just skipped over when I was talking about entertaining nationals before, but those three in a World Series would also be pretty compelling because, of course, those are potentially the three best free agents of this upcoming offseason by far and not that a free agent can do that much to increase his valuation

in a single series even the world series but getting to see those three guys on display shortly before they become available to the highest bidder. That's something I can't really remember happening, that the best free agents of a winter by far would be facing off against each other in a World Series. So that would be pretty interesting too. And Cole pitched game three in the ALCS, which we haven't talked about yet. And this was the shakiest that he had looked. This was the most vulnerable we've seen Cole in these playoffs, and he did not allow a run. Even so, he walked five guys and gave up four hits in seven innings, which is what passes for Cole being hittable or reach-on-baseable this month. But even so, he did not allow a run, and it's just really hard to imagine the Astros losing when he's on the mound.

Now, because we haven't seen that since July, it's now 16 consecutive Astros games started by Cole that the team has won. And even given a bunch of base runners, the Yankees could not convert. And maybe that was partly because of the ball. We'll talk about that with Rob. But this was a slightly different looking Cole than we had seen in previous rounds when he looked completely untouchable. Here he looked touchable, but was still not touched. That's the second most base runners he allowed in a start this year.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you could sort of say the same about the Astros not capitalizing on all of their opportunities against Luis Severino, who was probably lucky to allow only two runs in his four and Kamely for very few pitches. It was just, what, Green threw eight pitches, Kamely threw seven pitches, Adovino threw seven pitches, Britton threw 11 pitches, and maybe he was thinking about potential bullpen game in game four, and I guess we should talk about what the implications are for this series, if any, of game four getting rained out, which means that we will have to see what, four games played without an off day, if necessary. Is that right? Is it four?

So yeah, you lose the off day, which I suppose helps out the Astros, right? Because the Yankees are the more bullpen reliant team. They were planning on going all bullpen game in Game 4, and so even though they can now use Tanaka in Game 4, they could use that off-day probably more than the Astros could. That is true. On the other hand, the—yeah, no, that's just all the way true. And the, yeah, no, that's just all the way true. Okay. All right. Boone, I think, hasn't used a reliever on back-to-back-to-back days all year. And now the team is going to be playing on back-to-back-to-back-to-back days.

So maybe those late workloads during the regular season preserved pitcher's arms and now he can work them harder than he has all year. But on the other hand, they are not conditioned to do that. So we will see how hard he will all year. But on the other hand, they are not conditioned to do that. So we will see how hard he will push them. That's going to be a big storyline if this even goes to a game six or seven. So the Astros already have the edge in the series. They're the better team. They have the lead. But weather does not really cooperate with the Yankees here. Yeah, I guess it depends. Presumably, I mean, it depends on how these games go, what these games end up looking like. But it seems like assuming that they're close games, game seven is going to come down to J-Hap against Jose or Keity. Is that right? games that like the reason i say because they're close games is because i'm assuming that if games say five and six are close that neither team is gonna have enough bullpen left over to just say all right we're going straight bullpen game for game seven and so they would start a starter and

then try to figure it out from there now you would have it would be all obviously it'd be all hands on deck probably for that game. I think, well, Cole would be on regular rest in game seven, I think, right? So he'd be on short rest in game six if they wanted to use him then. So then they would not be facing up against each other, but there would still presumably be, again, assuming that bullpens get used heavily in the other games, there would still be ankiddy start and there would still be a hap start and so i guess it depends which of them you like more and does it do are there people who have opinions about orkiddy and hap as they relate to each other has anybody written that one yet i've not seen that column that's out there for you if you want it so yeah probably though it benefits the the astros who already benefited from everything else that's happened.

Yeah. All right. Anything else about these series? Mm-mm. Okay. Should we do just a few minutes on the Angels? Because there's been big Angels news of various varieties this week. Some terrible, some perhaps neutral, good.

I don't know, depending on your opinion of Joe Madden. So Joe Madden, we've seen many managerial vacancies, many managers let go or fired or their contracts expired this offseason. Now we have a hiring, the Angels hired Joe Madden, which seemed like it was almost certainly going to happen once they got rid of Brad Ausmus, who it seems like they may have jettisoned Osmus precisely because they wanted to hire Madden, which is similar to what the Cubs did when they changed managers after one year and let go of Rick Renteria because Madden had become available. Angels seemingly sort of did the same thing. And Madden, of course, has a history with the Angels.

He was with the organization for more than 30 years in various roles. He technically has managed the Angels before. He was an interim guy who finished out the 96 and 99 seasons as their manager, but he was a big league coach. And then he left to be a manager in Tampa Bay. But this is a homecoming for him. manager in Tampa Bay, but this is a homecoming for him. And I would say that he's not walking into a particularly enviable situation other than his history in Anaheim because of multiple things going on with this team. First, there's the roster stuff. There's the problem of the Angels not being good, not being a winning team for the past few years, not having enough pitching to contend this past year and seemingly next year too. I don't know how much Madden can do to fix that situation. And then, of course, there is the ongoing opioid

story here where we found out this week that Tyler Skaggs was being supplied opioids by Eric Kay, who is the longtime Angels PR person. So he's been there for 20-plus years, and that was a tragic, unexpected development in the story. We had heard from Skaggs' family that there was a possibility that someone in the Angels was supplying Skaggs with these drugs. And now we know who it was, and Kay came out and said so. And he claims that other people in the Angels organization knew that other Angels players were taking these things. Other players have now been interviewed about these drugs, and we're potentially going to get opioid testing implemented in baseball as a result of this, because I'm sure baseball does not want another drug scandal

on its hands like cocaine in the 80s, like steroids in the 90s. This could be the new one, and of course they will not want that to snowball and turn into something that is a league wide story. It's bad enough to have it a single team story. So a lot going on here. I think Madden's reputation has suffered somewhat in multiple ways. I think tactically speaking, his reputation suffered with the Cubs. Ironically, perhaps most of all in the year when he won the World Series. And then I think his reputation as sort of the face of the organization has slipped a little because of how he handled the Addison Russell situation and just seemed to sort of shrug it off and not seem overly concerned about it. So I don't know whether players lost faith in him or whether he lost the clubhouse or any of that, but his reputation has lost some of its luster, and this is not an easy situation to walk into.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it is. It's completely shocking. Like, wow. I mean, it's totally shocking. I cannot describe how shocked I am. As for the more frivolous part of this, the hiring of Madden, yeah, when Socia was there, it was an odd dynamic because you had basically you had three competing power sources in the organization. You had the owner because Artie Moreno was in some ways and at some times a more active and authoritative owner than a lot of franchises have. And then you have the front office, which is the natural source of decision-making power in an organization. And then you had the manager, Mike Socha, who predated the front office and who was very involved and who asserted himself in a lot of ways and who didn't always get along

with the front offices that he had. And so that was a sort of a strange dynamic where I think that it led to some breakdowns in decision making. It led to some bad investments. It led to some times where the different sources of power in that franchise were not in the same place. And so when Brad Osmus was there, I think that settled that down a lot because now you had the manager and the front office were on the same page.

Presumably, Joe Madden brings a little bit of the power to reassert the manager as an independent entity again, which having gone through the social years, that might seem like a risky thing to do or maybe a dangerous thing to do but on the other hand madden is one would assume based on the organizations he's worked with in the front offices that he's worked with that he would not be quite so adversarial with some of the modern front office techniques and so that might that might not be something that one needs to worry about with madden i don't know maybe they will end up fusing the power of the two and it'll be like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and everything will be great. So I don't know.

It would be interesting to see. It's interesting to go from Ausmus who had gone directly from the front office into the dugout and who was, it felt like, designed to be an extension of the front office to then bringing in somebody who brings a lot of power to tell you

no, if he wants to just on account of his prestige, his history, and presumably his contract. Yeah. And Ausmus was sort of a surprising hiring in the sense that he was not really known as a very progressive manager or someone who is integrating a ton of data into what he was doing in Detroit. But then he was in that front office role with the Angels for a year, and reportedly he got along very well with Epler. And so it made sense from that perspective. And I don't know whether the fact that that only lasted one year was an indictment of how he did or whether Epler was surprised by how that season played out in some way or whether it really was just, hey, we could go get Joe Maddon and we still think Joe Maddon is a big upgrade.

I don't know which it was, but obviously it doesn't happen often that you move on from a manager in a single season. You know, a couple of weeks ago we were talking about I had a kind of a stub of a thought about how managers don't seem to be that outward facing that they're not. They aren't really like a really active representation of the brand or of the sport in the city or anything like that. And I didn't really know what I was saying. I didn't really have fully developed thought yet at all. I still don't. But I was walking around that day and what really came to me was thinking about how they had gone from Mike Socha to Brad Ausmus. And Brad Ausmus, like you say, he managed in a very what we would consider 2019 way. They were in some ways the most active use of openers this year.

and he uh they went from being a team that historically has been all about like small ball and moving runners around to a team that essentially like never sacrificed bunted i think they had like six four they had four sacrifice bunts this year um and yet it's not like in southern california they that switch was highlighted in a major way. Like, I don't think that the average sort of involved baseball fan would have realized something like fairly significant had changed in the dugout. They weren't like representing that this is a new thing, a new style of play, that this is a strategy, that this is very intentional. I don't think that like most of my Angels fans, friends, most of my Angel fan friends were even aware that they don't bunt anymore and that that's intentional.

And that's sort of what I mean by it seeming strange to me that managers don't kind of, why they're not like more, I don't know, just having more of a public conversation with the fans, you know, through the media or whatever. But like a more open conversation about like, this is how I view baseball. This is how I view winning. And I'm not trying to get out of this conversation without telling you anything other than like the same, the same cliches about, you know, those, well, all the cliches. All right. Those, well, all the cliches. All right, so let's take a quick break,

and we'll be right back with Rob Arthur to talk about the de-juiced postseason ball. I'm a rolling stone That's what I was when I first left home I took every secret that I'd ever known And headed for the wall Like a wrecking ball All right, so we have Rob Arthur with us, Rob Arthur of Baseball Perspectives,

and the author of a recent article that was, I think, the first kind of official confirmation that the postseason baseball has been behaving differently than the regular season baseball did just a couple weeks ago. Hello, Rob. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. All right, good. I have some questions about this because I want to understand what we're talking about before we talk about what should happen or what, I don't know what it, but anyway, so the way that you do this, one of the ways that you have demonstrated that the ball

is behaving differently, and there are different ways that different people have, have done this, right? So you can actually cut open the ball or you can look at like uh home run rates based on exit velocities and launch angles and you can do other things but what one of the things that you have done is that you measure the drag of the ball by looking at the velocity that the pitch is measured at when it comes out of the pitcher's hand by on stat cast and then the velocity that it is at when it reaches home plate on stat cast. And by seeing whether it basically loses more velocity on the way to the plate, you can deduce the effect of drag on those baseballs. Is that correct?

Yep. Nailed it. All right. You can go, Rob. Thank you. So, okay. So here's a question that I have. Here's the main question i have

can you look at this for every individual pitch and deduce whether every individual ball has a certain amount of drag yes i can and it is actually important for like predicting whether a given pitch is going to be a home run now the thing about it is individual balls from ball to ball are quite different in terms of drag. There's a lot of variation, just probably from the manufacturing process. And then there's also some noise in the pitch measurements. So I don't want to say or claim that it's perfectly accurate. So when you're getting a drag measurement for only a single pitch, there's a larger error bar around it. When you're getting a drag measurement on 100 fastballs, that error bar goes down a lot. So you can measure it for every single pitch, and you can get a measurement for that pitch that is informative about whether it's going to go for

a hit or not. But it's still a lot noisier than if you're taking entire games worth. And can you measure the drag on a pitch that is hit for a home run? Or does the pitch need to be to reach the catcher or to actually cross home plate for it to have a second speed reading? No, they all get second speed readings. So I'm not sure if they record that home plate measurement is actually like right before home plate or when it is or whether they extrapolate the last like two feet. But even the pitches that get that turn into batted balls they still get a home plate reading and you say that there's variance from ball to ball significant did you say it's significant variance from ball to ball in the manufacturing process like how how widely

do they vary from one pitch to the other i mean i, I don't know. You're not going to have an answer for this. I'm just trying to put a scale on it. Are we talking that a batted ball might have 30 feet of extra travel depending on whether the batter hits the 1-1 pitch or the 3-1 pitch later in the at-bat after a ball has been removed from play? I think that's probably in the right area. I mean, we know that there was a study, I think, around 2000. Wait, wait, 30 feet? 30 feet is in the right area?

Yeah, I mean, we know that, I was going to say that they have this. I was trying to exaggerate. No, no. They measured the variation from ball to ball in terms of coefficient of restitution, which is the bounciness of the ball, right? And so that determines how fast the ball is going to come off the bat and how much of that energy it keeps. And they found that the variation from ball to ball for just the bounciness of the ball was 50 feet. So nobody's ever measured air resistance on the ball, the ones that are coming right off the assembly line, right? So

nobody's ever measured the variation from ball to ball right off the assembly line. So we don't know if it's 50 feet or 30 feet or possibly even more, but I would expect it's in that same vicinity just based on the drag measurements that we do have. They fluctuate pretty wildly between one pitch to the next pitch. So I would guess that 30 feet is a decent guess, yeah. And part of the reason that MLB acquired a controlling interest in Rawlings, according to MLB itself, was to try to tighten those standards, right? So that you didn't get balls that were within the allowable range, but one would go 50 feet farther than the last one. They wanted to tighten those specifications so that they would behave

somewhat more like each other. And that may have inadvertently caused some of the changes in the ball that we've seen, although not these latest changes. There was speculation that the regular season changes this year were because MLB had tightened those specifications, had maybe made some aspect of the manufacturing process more rigorous, and that that had then inadvertently reduced the drag on the ball? Yeah, I think that's probably the best hypothesis for why we've seen all these fluctuations in the last few years in terms of the air resistance on the baseball that we didn't see from 2008 to 2015,

really. And you can actually see MLB is clearly making changes to make the baseballs more consistent. So the ball-to-ball variation in drag coefficient has dropped a lot in the last three years. So whatever they're doing, it is working. It's making the baseballs more similar to one another in terms of drag coefficient. It just also seems to be making the batches more different from one another. And the result of that is that every year we seem to get a different baseball with totally different aerodynamic characteristics. And then this year, of course, we got from the regular season to the postseason, a totally different baseball in terms of the aerodynamics. So they are making improvements. And I know that was one of their

stated purposes in buying Rawlings. But the improvements to consistency can also change the sort of average characteristics of the ball. And that I think is something that they weren't paying enough attention to before 2016. And just because we get this question a lot, I'll ask you to answer it. What is the effect on pitches and on offense independent of the ball carrying better just in terms of the speed of the pitch and maybe the movement of the pitch? Does that significantly affect anything? Just the batter's ability even to make contact or good contact with the ball based on the drag of the ball? Yeah, so in terms of speed there, so the way that we're measuring right is based on the amount of speed that's lost

from the release point to the plate. So there is a really tiny, tiny difference in speed there in the loss of speed. So we're talking about maybe like a tenth of a mile per hour, a couple tenths of a mile per hour when it gets to home plate. It would be faster if it has lower air resistance and slower if it has more air resistance. That's not really going to be a major factor for batters, at least based on the statistical analyses that I've done. You're only talking about adding a few milliseconds. So for these guys who are accustomed to the difference between like a 70 mile per hour pitch and 105 mile per hour pitch, you know, a 10th of a mile per hour is not a big deal. In terms of the movement, that is a lot trickier to answer. So we know that air resistance changes and air resistance is

usually connected to stuff that's on the surface of the ball, characteristics of the ball that are really like on the outside. So things like seam height affect air resistance, the width of the seams, the surface roughness of the ball, those are all factors and those might change how pitchers grip the ball and that in turn might change how much spin they're able to impart to the ball. In the past, though, it's been really tough to figure out how those characteristics related to the air resistance on the baseball, and then to actually try and figure out when you have a ball with different air resistance, is it actually causing different pitchers to throw pitches with different movement?

The reason is that from year to year, there are slight tweaks to the tracking system that MLB uses to measure break. And the tracking system tends to struggle a little bit more with measuring that. And these tweaks, which are sort of in the same vein as what we were talking about before, they're really improvements, but they make it hard to compare from year to year. If a guy added, let's say, one inch to his curveball break, is that because of the tracking system or is that because the new baseballs have slightly higher seams or something? So what's made this change different, where we're going from the regular season to the postseason, is that as far as we can tell, there are no changes to the tracking system. the tracking system. And what I found is that actually it looks like with the new ball that is more air resistant, it seems to be reducing the movement of a few different pitch types. So that may have been unfolding in previous years. We just couldn't detect it. And I'm not sure why this would be. It would sort of depend on the specific physical aspects of the

ball that came out in October that are different. And we don't know what those are yet. I know that Meredith Wills is studying the ball and she'll probably be able to say, okay, it's seam height or okay, it's seam width or whatever it is. But at this point, I don't have like a mechanical explanation for why higher air resistance balls would also have less movement. But again, the difference in movement is so minuscule, we're talking about like half an inch at most on curveball break, that it's not likely to have made a big difference for batters. These are the types of things that you can measure with this tracking system really finely, but they aren't big enough essentially for batters to notice most of the time.

At least that's my hypothesis at this point are the are the baseballs in a single game more consistent than the baseballs on say a single day in different games like i'm trying to figure out in in the in the idea of batches like they're making baseballs in batches there seems to be some difference coming out of different batches, like they're making baseballs in batches. There seems to be some difference coming out of different batches. Do the balls that they play with in Arizona at, you know, 610, are those coming from the same batch that the balls that they're playing with in Detroit earlier in the day come from? Do you see more consistency within a game than you do within a say within a week yep definitely um so the way that it works is that each stadium seems to buy their their balls independently for a set

amount of time we don't know you know when they get new shipments and we don't know how many balls they buy when they buy but we do know that they all seem to get kind of a different group of shipments so at different time periods. So the balls in Arizona are going to look more similar in terms of air resistance to the balls the following day and the preceding day than they would in Detroit. So each stadium seems to vary kind of independently. And then from day to day and from week to week, they're also going to be more similar on that day to tomorrow than they will be in seven days and then they will be in 30 days. So that's where this batch variation issue really comes in. If you look at the balls on a given day, they're much more

consistent than if you project that forward to a week from then or two weeks from then or three weeks from then. So that really does indicate, I think, that it's likely a batch issue. And that's still not easy to pin down from that point, right? Because there's a lot of things that go into different batches, right? Like different rubbers, different hides and different organic materials and things like that. It's hard to know which of these different ingredients or which of these different labor processes or machines is actually introducing the batch to batch variation. But it does look like there's quite a bit of batch to batch variation. And so the way that you measure this is fairly well, okay, like to measure the coefficient of

restitution of a baseball, as I understand it is, you know, somewhat labor intensive. And I mean, it would be impossible to measure like every baseball that they put into play or anything like that but theoretically wouldn't it be pretty easy to measure the drag of a ball the way that that you do just by putting baseballs in a pitching machine before they're released and then like just seeing what the drag is on each pitch? Yep, 100%. So there are much more accurate ways of doing it, like a wind tunnel, which I believe was one of the recommendations of the Home Run Committee is that the MLB actually get a wind tunnel and start measuring these baseballs in a wind tunnel. And if you do it that way, you control for a lot of things like atmospheric factors

that you can't control under the test that you mentioned, where you launch a baseball out of a pitching machine. But launching a baseball out of a pitching machine with the StatCast system operational is a very simple, cheap way that they could figure out if they were having any problems before the game. And the fact that they haven't even taken that minimal step, forget about buying a wind tunnel or doing any of the much fancier analyses that you could do to figure out what the issues are. The fact that they haven't even really seemed to pay attention to the drag measurements that are coming off of the StatCast system from week to week in the regular season is, I think, telling about where their priorities are with this

issue. They really haven't invested much effort in determining what the coefficient with what the drag coefficient is and trying to see whether they might be beginning to have a problem so that's i think disappointing as a baseball fan so how would we all feel if like major league baseball were testing the batch with the specific supply of balls for each game before each game in a fairly simple way, like we've just described. And then saying before the game how the ball is going to play. Like, I mean, I don't know if it's possible to say, well, we're only going to use a consistent ball.

All the balls are going to behave the same way. We've cracked this nut. Maybe that's impossible. Maybe they would love to do that, but they haven't been able to. If they sort of just advertise like this is going to be one of those games with a wild ball, like would it just be like in the NFL where there's wind and snow and we're like, oh, wow, it's going to be a snow game? Or is that like, would that just call attention? I don't know. I was going to say, would that just call attention to the inconsistency? But it seems like everybody's already talking about the inconsistency.

And since we don't have any sort of sophisticated understanding of how much it's coming into play and when from day to day, we all have a very kind of almost exaggerated sense of like every ball that is now hit to the warning track. We all like, you know, the tweets are just automatic. Like that would have been gone so is it is my idea that i don't know if i'm endorsing in any way but that they test the ball but then like issue some sort of pre-game report on that day's balls a would it be satisfying b is there enough consistency within a single game's supply of balls that that would even be useful? Or would there still be so much variation that we would still have doubts about every single ball that's hit?

I think that would be really fun, personally. I think that if you can't figure out what the manufacturing variations are that are leading to this, and you can't seem to eliminate the problem in production, although you probably should be able to, if you can't do that, then yeah, at least let's be transparent about it it would definitely be interesting to see all the scrambling that teams would have to do or maybe they wouldn't do but i think it would be interesting to see would they alter their strategies if they knew that it was a low drag day like would they you know change their starting pitcher at the last second or pull them out after an inning because they they know they need to get to someone else who's better able to control their fly ball rate. I think that would at least tell us that they're

paying attention to this issue. And it might add an additional kind of tweak that would be interesting to see. I guess if they were doing that, though, I mean, a simpler way to kind of eliminate this as an issue would be, okay, we're going to test a dozen balls before the game starts. And if they have above like a certain drag level or below a certain drag level that is unacceptable, that is, you know, really game breaking, then we will just go open up another batch of baseballs and use those instead and keep going until we find one that is within the level that is how we want baseball to be in 2019 or 2020. That would just be a really simple way to control the drag in a way that they haven't done so far.

Yeah, I mean, we did fine for more than a century without anyone knowing drag or measuring drag, and baseball was still fun and entertaining, and there were occasional weird spikes or decreases in home run rate. And maybe in retrospect, we can say, oh, yeah, maybe that was the drag and just no one knew it because they weren't doing those tests and the technology wasn't available. But for the most part, from year to year and game to game, there's some variation, but it's an acceptable level of variation. It doesn't feel like you're watching two different games with completely different offensive environments. And it's just in these last four years or so, because you have the PitchFX data going back to 2008, way before StatCast was available. And so you've looked at the drag in those years, and it wasn't fluctuating as wildly as it has in these last few years here.

And obviously, this is extreme, because this is the highest home run rate ever this year. And now we've gone back to maybe what it was a few years ago in the postseason. And you've compared the week to week variation during 2019. And you found that this latest variation from the end of the regular season to the postseason is much larger than any variation within the 2019 regular season. So if it were just a modest variation from week to week or month to month or season to season, I don't think anyone would mind or notice. It's just at the point where you can see it. Everyone was noticing this even before you supplied the data that confirmed it. But when you can tell

that, oh boy, that wouldn't have been a home run last year, or this is a home run, and now it's not, I think if it gets to that point, then you have to do something. I'm not saying it has to be identical balls that behave identically. I don't think we need to hold MLB to that standard. But this has gotten just way beyond what we've ever had before. Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is a relatively recent problem. I think one of MLB's kind of lines that they have given to various reporters and press people has been, oh, well, if we just had this data from 20 years ago, maybe we would see all kinds of fluctuations going on back then. But that really doesn't explain why home runs went to a pretty low level in 2014 to the highest level ever twice in three years.

And then they jump back down again. These fluctuations are really out of the ordinary. So this is not just a problem from having this new data available to measure it, although that does help to clarify that the ball itself is the issue. has helped to clarify that the ball itself is the issue. Yeah, and I don't know whether we've gone to the point where it's confirmation bias now in the other direction, where we're seeing phantom home runs that wouldn't have actually been home runs. But regardless, now we're at the point where during games,

it's like reputable writers with very large audiences are just constantly questioning the validity of the results. So like during ALCS game three on Tuesday, it was like, you know, the Yankees and the Astros were trading balls that seemed like they would have been home runs in a previous year. So you had Jeff Passan tweet, regular season ball, Yankees lead 3-2, actual ball, Astros lead 2-0. And then you had Lindsay Adler tweet about a dd gregorius ball that she thought would have gone out a few weeks ago and then there was a martin maldonado

ball on the other side that looked like it would have been out so this is just a pretty undesirable state of affairs when everyone's watching the games now and thinking about this constantly like whether we're thinking it too much and more often than we should, that's just the reality now. And you'd think MLB wouldn't want that, but they don't seem to be taking any steps to prevent or defuse that. Yeah, I agree. It's really odd. And I do think we've gotten to this point of blaming every deep fly on the D-Juice ball,

and that's not actually accurate. There aren't that many baseballs that have been hit that are like 100% certain shots that have been diffused by the de-juiced ball or haven't gone over because of the de-juiced ball. It's really more of an effect on the 20% to 70% chance baseballs that some of the time they go over the fence normally and some of the time they don't. And it just happens to be the case now with the ball the way that it is that a lot

more of them are not this month. But I agree with you that it can't be good for MLB to have their, you know, the playoffs, the most exciting part of the year, the highest stakes part of the year, be dominated by this kind of talk. And I think it's unfortunate that they haven't kind of been more transparent and opened up some of the data that we know that they have, that they collect on the ball to the public. I mean, that would at least indicate that they are trying to figure out what this is. There's been a lot of denial and a lot of wishy-washy statements and a lot of technically accurate but misleading statements from them about the ball going back to when Ben and I were first writing about it in 2016. And I think that they've just kept up with that strategy.

And unfortunately, the evidence has become overwhelming. It's been accumulating in the last few years. And now I just think there's no denying that there's something different about this baseball. And for them to continue to sort of stick to that line that, well, we're not sure, maybe there's something, but we can't say for sure. This is coming off of their own tracking systems. This is not data that I invented. This is your own data showing that there's something different about the baseball. And if you were a little bit more open about that difference and a little bit more responsible about having tried to eliminate the difference earlier when the Home Run Committee told you that you should, then we wouldn't be in this situation at all.

So home runs are down a little bit in the postseason from the regular season, but they're not down all that much. They are at basically what 2017 levels were. Now that's, who knows? These are home run hitting teams. So maybe they should be hitting more home runs. Just glancing at it, it looks like some years in the postseason, home runs go up and some years it goes down. And so who can really know? But I'm curious about all the things that are not home runs. I have moved from thinking about the dead ball on every fly ball to the warning track

to now thinking about the dead ball on every single batted ball. So if a ball drops in front of the left fielder i think ah that would have been an out if it had had a little less drag and like michael taylor would have just caught that ball chest high to end the lds if it had been a regular ball or or whatever it does the ball does the drag more or less affect all batted balls, you know, kind of uniformly where like a ball that's at 400 feet is going to have obviously more, uh, drag, more time for the drag to affect it than a ball that's at 200 feet. But like, if it were say, you know, to throw out a fake number, if it were to say travel an extra 5% or 5% less far now than it did two weeks ago, is that 5% sort of more or less

true on all batted balls? No, it varies. So that's one of the reasons that, for example, we see this difference from in pitches. We can measure it, but it isn't really a major factor in the pitch. But when you get a ball traveling 400 feet with higher velocity, then drag becomes a much larger factor. So the higher velocity that the ball starts off with, the bigger the effect of drag is. And then if it's in the air for longer, like you mentioned, then that's going to be a much bigger effect as well. So it's not as simple as like 5% distance off of everything. It really matters how high it's going, how much time it's spending in the air, and how hot it came off the bat, essentially. It does affect liners, though, too.

I mean, liners are higher exit velocity, right? So those are also getting impacted. It's just a lot harder to come up with some universal way that it's affecting liners because it's going to make some drop, like you mentioned. It's going to make some drop early and fall for hits, and others that would have gone over outfielders' heads are instead going to fall into the gloves so it's it's a little bit trickier to say like okay the effect of drag is gonna

increase doubles by this much and decrease singles it's more like depends on every individual combination of exit velocity and launch and so when mike schilt the cardinals manager said that the cardinals analytics team estimated that there was 4.5 less feet of carry, I'm assuming on deep fly balls. That number seems lower than I would have taken away from your work at Baseball Perspectives on this topic. What do you think of the 4.5 number as like kind of an estimate? I think it's on the low side, but I think that they have better data to measure this than I do. So if they say it's on the low side, I would tend to shade my estimate a little lower. So what I found, or the sort of rough rule of thumb is that for every 0.01 points of drag coefficient, it to increase a little bit. And so we're at like almost 0.02 points. So I would say it's closer to 10 feet based on what I have measured. But like I said, they have actual fly ball trajectories that aren't available to the public.

That's part of the complete StatCast data set. And when you have that complete data, it gets a lot easier to measure drag because you're essentially seeing where the ball is, whatever it is, 60 times a second. And so every single time step that passes every whatever 60th of a second, you can say, okay, the ball should have moved two feet forward and it actually moved 1.8 feet. That means that the drag coefficient is this. And so that data set is just a lot more powerful than I can match with the pitch data. So I would tend to agree. I would tend to, like I said,

shade my estimate towards that based on what they've said. They may also have been, it's hard to say, like Schilt provided this four and a half feet kind of out of nowhere. He didn't explain like what kind of trajectory it was. There's sort of a default fly ball trajectory that Alan Nathan uses that I

assume they were referring to when they said the four and a half feet. That's the one that I use when I write about it. And that's the one that other people have kind of used when they've written. So I'm assuming that's what it was, but it could be a totally different trajectory or it could be just the baseballs that St. Louis has in their stadium, for example, they might've been talking about. And that could be different than the ones that the Yankees are playing with. So it's just really hard to tell. I know also that some teams have really granular, really accurate data on like

the temperature and even the wind on a given play. And so when you have that, that is another factor that helps you refine these measurements and get them to be more accurate. So my assumption based on what they said is they're talking about four and a half feet the same way that I'm talking about 10 feet, in which case my 10 feet is probably a little too high. But it's just so hard to know for sure

where that statistic comes from or what it's referring to that it's referring to. It's definitely enough feet to matter at this point. If it was one foot or two feet, sure, that's going to influence home runs by a couple percent, but it's just not a big deal. But when you get to five feet, for example, that's a 10% increase in home runs or decrease in home runs depending on the change. And so that's enough to where it

really starts to influence the game and some of the long fly balls that you see. So obviously, this has given rise to a new round of conspiracy theories. And you and I have tended to downplay that and have said, we don't know that we don't have any evidence that this is intentional. If anything, it seems like there's more evidence on the unintentional side. Partly it's that MLB has consistently denied doing anything intentionally, and it would like it would be really hard to keep that secret forever, given the number of people who'd need to know. But also, I suppose it's just that as far as we know, they don't know any better than we do about why the drag is varying the way it has. And so if that's the case, then it would be hard to intentionally do anything to say,

I want it to behave like this, because you would need to know the qualities of the ball that are actually dictating that difference. So is that still your latest thinking? Have you swayed at all? Or could you, I guess, lay out the best case for each side? Sure. So I'll lay out the best case for intentionality first. So when I first got this data, this struck me as like the most clear evidence of intentionality of any of the changes in drag that I've seen. The reason is that it was very sudden and sharp at a particular defined point in the season, right? At the beginning of the playoffs and not before that, there was this massive change in the baseballs. And then it's not like a gradual drift upwards. It's not like they were still

using some of the old balls or that the new balls had some of the old balls characteristics. They were just like a totally different group of performance, or in terms of performance, I should say, just immediately. So there was no slow transition into them. It was just a totally different batch, essentially, or at least based on the data that I have. So that made me think, along with the fact that you might expect MLB to want slightly less active baseballs in the postseason, just because scoring affects time of game and game times are already quite long because we've seen this past season. And so maybe MLB would prefer that game times get a little shorter and there'd be a little bit less offense and more tense pitchers duels and fewer blowouts where one team hits, you know,

four home runs or five home runs. So it seemed like they had reason to prefer a less active ball. And then there was a very clear evidence of a switch. So like you said, the problem with this theory is that MLB doesn't seem to know what's different about the baseballs that makes them more or less aerodynamically active. So how on earth would they have even controlled whether the baseball was more or less aerodynamic? more or less aerodynamic. The only thing that I could think of to explain it was maybe they grabbed a palette of baseballs from 2016 that they had laying around, or maybe even 2018, and then they took them out and they stamped the postseason logo on them and put them into play this year. Since they know what the performance of those baseballs was, they could at least know that it was going to be less homer-prone than the ones that they were using this season in 2019. But the data doesn't really fit that. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier in the podcast is that MLB has seemed to make these continuous iterative manufacturing improvements. And it's resulted in the baseballs becoming a lot more consistent in terms of their

aerodynamics from pitch to pitch than they were before. And so I thought maybe if these baseballs are old 2016 baseballs, you'll be able to see it because they won't be consistent the way, they will be very inconsistent, I should say, the way that they were in 2016. But that's not the case. These postseason baseballs are actually extremely consistent in their increased drag. So it does fit with the idea that they were manufactured recently with all the improvements or changes that they were manufactured recently with all the improvements or changes that they've made to improve the consistency. So that kind of swayed

me away from intentionality. Of course, you can never really rule it out. Maybe they are evil geniuses back there and they know exactly how to tune the drag on the ball, but a lot of their public statements and their seeming surprise every time we get a new batch of baseballs and it is different aerodynamically than the last batch indicates to me that they don't really know what's going on and they don't have any control over what's going on. And to make the case for the other side, I think that's always been the most likely kind of hypothesis to explain this. They're as confused as the rest of us. And they, for whatever reason, they have never taken the time to figure out whether there are particular aspects of the

assembly line that influenced the drag on the baseball. And so this was just never really on their mind until recently. And at that point, they were sort of taken aback and haven't really been able to implement any changes to the assembly line since then. And I think that that fits with, it doesn't fit as cleanly with a sudden change. But until we figure out exactly what aspect of baseball has changed, what physical aspect, I should say, it's really hard to indict them for not knowing that the baseball is different. You know, it might be something really, really subtle. It could be something like the surface characteristics of the baseball have slightly more friction.

And, you know, they may not have ever measured that. They may not have thought to. Now, I still think it's kind of damning if it's unintentional, because they can't just say that they didn't think about this before because they were warned that they should think about this, right? The home run committee released their report and they said, this is obviously a really important aspect of how baseballs travel and it is influencing the game to a great degree. Here's what you need to do if you want to be able to at least measure this and at least see if something has gone wrong on the assembly line or something has changed on the assembly line. And it looks like they never, never took those steps.

But there's no indication that they have data laying around that would have told them that these baseballs were even going to be different in advance. So I think when I see situations where it could be a conspiracy theory or incompetence, I tend to lean towards incompetence. I think, what's the name of that? Hanlon's razor, I think, is the name of that principle. Just that, you know, there are a lot more incompetent people than there are evil geniuses out there in the world. And so I still think that that is probably the most likely explanation for what we're seeing now. Yeah, I mean, it would be troubling, but I think we could all accept that the manufacturing of this very precise sphere has proven to be beyond the bounds of our technological abilities in 2019. It's hard to control it for some reason or another. It just seems weird that we are

continually finding out about these dramatic changes from Rob Arthur instead of from the league. And when they're asked about it, the response is always downplaying or defensive instead of from the league. And when they're asked about it, the response is always downplaying or defensive instead of being like, yeah, I know, it's crazy, huh? Like I would really respect the, yeah, I know it's crazy, huh? Response to this. Like it seems like jump into the mysticism around the sphere the way that we all do.

So let me ask the, I'm gonna ask the dumbest question here just to get it out of the way. In the statement that they gave to Ben, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The only difference is the postseason stamp that is placed on the ball. Can we rule out the postseason stamp as a factor or is it conceivable that the postseason stamp matters? So I talked to a material scientist about this, actually, and the consensus was, assuming the stamp is just ink that they put on the baseball, which is the most likely explanation, ink itself is not going to be enough to change the coefficient of the drag materially.

patch on the baseball, you know, from fabric or something, which players would have noticed, it's really not enough to explain why the balls have become less aerodynamic. Plus, there have been stamps on postseason balls before, and the postseason ball hasn't changed this much. Yeah, my next question was going to be whether the attributes of a nine could be different than the attributes of an eight, a stamped nine. So how possible is it? How plausible is it? I know that we can't, apparently we can't predict one way or the other, but how possible is it that the balls that they use tonight or tomorrow will actually be dramatically different

than the balls they use yesterday? That this could be completely reversed with like a new bucket of balls that they got from somewhere. Wow, that would be really wild. I think it's implausible at this point. And I would really wonder if they were doing something intentionally. Just because I, the way that they worded the statement, it sounds like they produce a batch of baseballs and then they select some of that batch to be used in the postseason. So I am assuming and hoping that all the postseason balls all come from one batch or one manufacturing run or whatever term they use to describe that. If, however, they do half the postseason baseballs in April and then half of them in June after producing a whole bunch in between and making some changes to the assembly line, that would be truly, truly crazy. But it could result in, yeah, a totally different baseball in the World Series than we saw in the League and Division Series.

It's hard to rule it out unless they would actually, like we've been talking about, open up a little bit about their manufacturing. So yeah, it could happen. And that would be nuts. How quickly would you know? How quickly would you tell us? That's a better question.

How quickly would you know with enough confidence that you could publish or at least tweet? I think I would probably tweet it out quicker because it seems quite relevant. So I think probably after probably tweet it out quicker because it seems like quite relevant. So I think probably after a game, maybe two games, if the drag on the balls really did go back to the like regular season 2019 levels, you would be able to tell within, I think by the end of like a game or two, you would be able to have a pretty high probability that it was different. And I would, yeah, I would definitely tell you after that. Yeah. And I know from looking at what people have tweeted at you that you've gotten lots

of people saying small sample, small sample, which is the right impulse, I think. But in this case, sample size concerns are not as acute because as you said, we can measure the drag of every single pitch and every game has hundreds of pitches, maybe not all fastballs, which is what you look at, but still lots of fastballs in every game. And so because you have a lot of pitches and because you have pretty good measurements of each individual pitch, this is pretty telling with small samples. It's like fastball velocity or something, not quite to that extent, but if Max Scherzer comes out throwing 96 miles per hour, we don't say small sample. He might actually be throwing 89. Some things actually can be measured quickly. So my last question related to that one, and this

is something Michael Bauman wrote about earlier this week for The Ringer, but if we get these current postseason balls next spring, next regular season, and at this point there's no telling who knows what kind of balls they'll be using by that point, but if this was a trial run or something, or they decide that they like these latest balls, and they're going to try to keep these, then what would you expect scoring and offense to look like next season? Oh, it's going to be so bad. Michael Bowman's piece is really good for that reason. There's different trends that have been unfolding right in baseball in the last few years, one of which is fastball velocity continues to rise, pitchers continue to get better, and they're using, I think, a lot of the player development tools and a lot of the new data more effectively than hitters have to date. fly balls go so much further now than they used to. So if they do go to a ball that is much more dead or less aerodynamic than the 2019, 2018, 2017 versions, then I think offense will just

absolutely crater. And there's no reason to suspect that strikeouts aren't going to continue to rise again. So we would go to immediately, I think, to a kind of a dead ball era. The tricky part about this, though, is you never know when some front office is going to figure out how to train their hitters just as well as their pitchers have been training recently with the new data. So maybe there will be some counter trend to this in the future, and maybe it'll start next season. But if assuming the current trends continue the way they have, except for the baseball, which reverts, then we would really be headed for a time of almost very, very little offense in baseball. All right. Well, we will continue to monitor the latest developments because who knows which turn the story will take next. So you can follow Rob on Twitter and be the

first to know when the balls change again. He is at NoLittlePlans with underscores between each of those words, and he writes at Baseball Perspectus and a bunch of other places. Thank you very much, Rob. Thank you. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening, and thanks for suffering through my cold voice, my deep, resonant, cold voice. I should note that there are rumors circulating on Twitter that MLB, in fact, did know about the baseball change and informed its partners in Las Vegas

about the forthcoming change before the postseason started, presumably to set more accurate lines, let's say. MLB does have partnerships with various gambling companies to provide data, and it's not impossible to think that if they knew this was coming or if this was intentional, that they would have tipped off those partners beforehand. All of those rumors are unsubstantiated as of yet. There's smoke, doesn't mean there's fire, could be bogus. But if you know it's not bogus, and there are actually tweets about this that

preceded the start of the postseason, people predicting this, let's say on October 1st, before the games began, I would be interested in hearing what you know and what you heard. So I will just say that my DMs are open. You can reach me in various ways if you want to be baseball deep throat. And also I want to shout out a really cool piece of research that was published at Baseball Prospectus this week by Gerald Schiffman. It's about shadows and their effect on offense. If you've watched any postseason baseball, and some regular season baseball as well, you have surely heard announcers going on and on about shadows between the pitcher's mound and home plate and the effect that that can

have on hitters. It's always been sort of taken for granted that that would impair offense, that it would be harder to pick up pitches if they are going from light to dark back to light again or vice versa and i have wanted to look into this for years people have been emailing us to ask about it it's been on my to-do list but that is where it stayed because it's very difficult to do a study on this well you have to figure out a way to tell what the shadows are what the light conditions are and then also what the offensive performance during those times is and what it should be expected to be based on the talent of the pitchers and the hitters. It's very involved. So I've always said someday I'll try to look into that. But Gerald beat me to it and I'm glad he did because I think he did it better than I would have. He got time

stamps from the StatCast data. He got the angle of the sun along the horizon and the angle of the sun above the horizon and the orientation of the ballpark and the predicted performance of the pitchers and the hitters and the handedness and on and on. And he put it all into a model and he tried to look for any evidence that the shadows make it harder to hit. And he could not find any evidence. He didn't find any effect on strikeouts or walks or anything. I don't think we can necessarily say that that debunks or refutes the idea that shadows might have some effect on offense. This is one of those things where you hear it from so many people in the game over such a long period that you have to have a pretty high bar for debunking. But we can certainly say that it failed to detect any evidence that that's true, failed to corroborate the

assertion. It could be that there are ways in which the study should be improved. Maybe Gerald will do a follow-up if he gets some feedback on it and thinks of reasons why he may have failed to find a real effect, but definitely makes me more skeptical. I was somewhat skeptical before, and it makes me even more skeptical that there is some huge effect, because you'd think if there were really something big there, then Gerald's investigation would have turned it up, even if it wasn't perfectly crafted. So we will see, but I applaud him for making the effort and doing a really good job taking a great first pass at it. Let the Kids Play and We Play Loud and how those campaigns came to be, how MLB has revamped its marketing efforts and attempts to create new stars, and how it's running into the usual troubles when it comes to unwritten rules and obstacles between baseball players and national or international fame. So I will link to that if you're interested in checking it out. You can support the podcast

on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Aaron Danielson, Chuck Phillips, Michael Hank, Janet Green, and Zach Trout. No relation, I assume. 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. And you can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's Nudon Conformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Please rate and review it if you like it on Amazon and Goodreads.

And we will be back with one more episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. I wanna know Who must tell me that you're no good baby Who must tell me that you're no good baby Who must tell me that you're no good baby I wanna know Who must tell me that you're no good baby Who must tell me that you're no good baby Who must tell me that you're no good baby

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