Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1452: Play It Again, Sam

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Meg Rowley and Sam Miller banter about Ben Lindbergh’s vacation-induced absence, an unusual umpire Wikipedia entry, and the acceptability of failure, before turning their attention to a few listener emails answered during the Jeff Sullivan era, including what would happen if Giancarlo Stanton only tried to hit home runs, how they would prefer to consume […]

I dreamt we spoke, I dreamt we spoke again. It's been so long, it's been so long, my mind fell in a blank. I dreamt we spoke, I dreamt we spoke again. Spoke again Been so long, been so long Your voice was like a ghost in my head Hello and welcome to episode 1452 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball con- Wow. Oh, jeez. Yep. We don't have it. We don't have it.

We don't have it together. Sam, it's a Fangraphs baseball podcast. It's brought to you by our Patreon supporters. And I am Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined, not as always, by Sam Miller of ESPN. And Sam, I feel like Ben's going to turn this on and go, I can never take vacation again.

Yes, he just facepalmed. Should I rerecord it so that Ben can take vacation or should we just invite him to use this as a moment to let things go? No, my multi-year project with Ben, the sort of project that is at the center of our relationship is me getting him used to failure being okay. You don't have to be perfect. You can just phone it in.

I mean, literally in this case, but you can just, sometimes you don't have to be perfect. Yeah. It's a funny thing because one of Ben's many positive attributes is his fastidiousness. And I think that we are both beneficiaries of that of that impulse and instinct especially as it regards this podcast but yeah sometimes uh it's the i don't know we're recording this the monday after the world series sometimes you're tired sometimes you're not tired and you still goof up the intro sometimes that happens so here we. It's nice to talk to you, Sam. You too.

Yeah. Yeah. So you had a fun idea for this episode since we are without Ben. And you and I have never done a solo Effectively Wild, have we? I don't think we have. Ben wouldn't let us. I pitched it at the beginning of this uh reboot effectively wild phase three yeah and uh i pitched it that we would everybody would do too and he just he just shut that down he's like well

i guess i don't need to have you back then if that's what you're going to try to do well here we are and all it took was ben going to europe to make it happen. But your idea for this podcast was that we would go through some old emails, listener emails that had come in under, I guess, effectively Wild Phase 2 and take a stab at answering them. I have selected some. You have selected some. We have not told each other which ones we selected. But I guess before we get to that, do you have any banter, Sam?

One piece of banter, I was watching the television show Better Call Saul, which occasionally has minor league baseball. The Albuquerque Isotopes are, of course, the local team, and Mike is a baseball fan. Mike? Mike? Mike? Mike. Ermentrout? Mike Ermentrout? I think it's Mike. It is, yeah. Mike?

Mike. Ermentrout? Mike Ermentrout? I think it's Mike. It is, yeah. So we've had some discussions about Better Call Saul Baseball before, but there was something interesting the other day, which I only saw because I was watching with closed captions,

which is that in the... Okay, so, well, I'll just say, whoever's doing the play-by-play is describing the action and credits some action to the umpire, Tychoner. And because I had the closed captioning on, I saw that it was actually Titchener, Todd Titchener. You know, Todd Titchener, famous umpire. And so somebody went to the trouble of getting a real umpire into this and having that extreme authenticity of, like, not just any old umpire,

but Todd Titchener. But then didn't go to the trouble of like following up on the recording to see if the voice actor hired to play the play-by-play guy pronounced it right and so i don't know if todd tichner knows that he's in this show because if you weren't watching on closed captioning you would just think oh that's odd they named the umpire something weird that i've never heard of but But Titchener is also a name that I'd never heard of. So anyway, I wanted to note that. I also then went to Todd Titchener's Wikipedia page.

And then I ended up going to a lot of Wikipedia pages. And what would you guess is in the first paragraph of an umpire's Wikipedia page? Oh, gosh. I would imagine his tenure. that's right his tenure seems like it would be there um if he has called any uh world series games fantastic meg yeah that is also on the wikipedia page world series games yeah because it's an honor right they they theoretically they're selecting the best of the best. Yes, but not not in the lead, though. I will say generally not in the lead.

That's more in the discography part. And along those lines, I don't know if I'm preempting your next guess, but along those lines, you also get no hitters and perfect games that is umpired regardless of what base he did so you have you know was a so titchener for instance was the third base umpire when dallas braden threw the 19th perfect game in mlb history on may 9 2010 but there's only one more detail that is in virtually all of these first paragraphs gosh well if it's in all of them then it wouldn't be like famous blown calls or controversies what what is it it's his uniform number really yeah which i could you name off the top of your head a single a single one meg i didn't know they had uniform numbers it seems like an opportunity to introduce a different sort of indicator to the field, right?

Because it's not like you're going to go buy a jersey, an umpire jersey. I mean, maybe you do if you're the kind of kid that no one likes. Maybe you do that. Sorry, kids that like umpires. Why do they? I guess they have to be distinguished somehow, right? Do they? Sure. Perhaps there would be some protection in them having greater anonymity even beyond just a uniform number because they don't have their names on their shirts, right? Or their little blazers. little blazers no those little blazers i think that that's the reason they have the number that's the the theoretical reason that they have their number is so they can be identified while they're wearing a mask but of course why would you ever need to identify an umpire for any reason right

whatsoever unless you were like the manager in which case you probably don't need the number because you you have a you have. You have their names right there. So it seems very odd to me that there are numbers. What I kind of was thinking about when I sat down to ponder this is it feels like Major League Baseball has always wanted to somehow make the umpires a character in the drama. They want them to be distinguishable characters, but they don't do anything.

They don't have stats. They don't have really a role to play that is both unique and also welcome. The umpires that do things that are memorable, this is a cliche, but if you notice them, it's because they did something wrong generally there isn't a particular style of umpiring that people would like to see you do and so mlb has been kind of in this position where they've always wanted to say like

well if you're on the field you're part of the drama you're part of this this play that we're doing but they don't they didn't write anything for that character and so instead of having like cool dialogue or cool actions, they just gave them this one weird quirk. They're a very one-dimensional character and their quirk is their uniform number. Yeah. So I don't know.

I don't know why they have the numbers at all but I think that it proves the point that there's nothing interesting about these umpires generally speaking, that there's room for this number in their Wikipedia page intro, that that is the second most interesting thing about them. Yeah, I think that, which, you know, that's what you want, right?

They're sort of neutral arbiters, and they're not like, they're like judges in a lot of ways, but they're unlike judges in that they are not, well, I guess judges don't set out to set new precedent in the law, but they happen into that fairly often. But that doesn't really happen for umpiring. So you don't really want to know their names because often you're going to be on the wrong side of things. It's going to be goofing something that meant a lot to a lot of people and that you know you have to worry about having someone spit in your beer when you're in that city again so yeah uh i guess that's them kind of doing doing their thing but it is sort of that is interesting that it would be not because you wouldn't it would be one of those things where if someone were reading their wikipedia entry

someone could just lie you know if someone went in to alter an umpire's Wikipedia page after a really bad call, and, you know, they were to put something rude in their name or say that they're the CEO of Butt Town or whatever, they could also change the uniform number, and no one would find that for ages, for many moons. You know, unlike the Butt Town town because that you find right away i don't know why that was the thing i reached for but there there we are it's good mayor of blank town i think is always good it's a good joke format not in my

opinion not overdone frank manikino by the way has a uh has a defaced wikipedia page oh really not not mean spiritedly but somebody as a joke for their fantasy league went in and put some things in that refer to this like fantasy league that this person is in with his or her friends i uh had to do a little research on frank manikino a couple months ago found this this seemingly bizarre details that are i don't know they were silly enough that i thought they might be fake but they were plausible enough that i thought they might be real and i googled around and i found this person bragging on their message board about his frank menachino fantasy league and so this is what is on frank menachino's wikipedia page it's at the end of playing career. He played in Italy, et cetera, et cetera,

before retiring, after hurting his back, et cetera, et cetera. And then in 2009, Menachino founded the Frank Menachino School for the Blind in order to offer blind children a broader array of opportunities scholastically, as well as the baseball field. The School for the Blind's team and Frank's All-Stars, featuring former major leaguers like Ross Glode and Aaron

Howman, have a charity baseball event every year on the second Thursday of October, which is Blind Awareness Month. All made up. And so it's not nice at all. It's implying that he can't see balls and strikes. I don't think it is. Maybe? No, I don't think it is. If you were an umpire, I would think that that's what it is. I guess that's true. But this actually has been tweaked since I first discovered. I've been watching to see if it survives. And sometime, actually, just a couple of weeks ago, it looks like, the defacer went in and tweaked this.

So previously, it said said the paragraph after that i guess actually no it looks to me like this is two in the weeds but it looks to me like somebody spotted that this was fake and deleted the fake part but did not realize that the school for the blind was also fake i believe that's what has happened here so here is the paragraph that was deleted in recent times menachino has achieved a folkloric status among fantasy baseball groups across the country with numerous leagues bearing his name or pop culture related moniker such as menachino forever the legend of frank menachino, and Frank Menachino's revenge. Some leagues have even gone a step further by awarding game-worn jerseys autographed by Menachino himself as trophies, with the winning team and years stitched on the garment

at the conclusion of each season. That was, that's dumb. Yeah, that feels like over-committing to the bit. Yeah. A little bit. I believe, my theory is that they, this is what people expected to get from this podcast when Ben left, isn't it?

My theory is that they wanted to add this to the Wikipedia page. They thought that it looked too fake on its own. And so they padded with a more plausible sounding and more newsworthy because this thing about the fantasy teams isn't even newsworthy. It would be X'd for newsworthiness alone. So they padded it with this more newsworthy sounding made up thing.

I think that that's right. All right, Meg, do you want me to keep reading about the origin story of Frank Manichino's School for the Blind? Because I do have the full origin story now. I feel like we need an update now. All right. It's just two minutes.

We should timestamp. Like when you talk about a movie on a podcast, and you're like, well, just skip ahead if you don't want spoilers. Skip ahead if this is not doing it for you. Yeah. Okay. The backstory is,

a couple of the core guys in the league and I would arbitrarily blurt out random baseball players when hanging out. You know, Ross Glode, for example. One of the teams in the league is called the Glode Warriors. Aaron Heilman, Eugenio Velez, etc. Frank was one of them, but his truly became an inside joke slash meme amongst our group. It all started when someone made a joke about Frank owning and operating a baseball Academy for blind kids.

We then purchased the advertising slot on Frank's baseball reference page and aptly named it. It only made sense for the league's inaugural year to have him in the title and was called the Frank Menachino school for the blind. Subsequent league names have been Menachino plays for keeps the menachino dynasty frank's all-stars men i know this is not interesting but somebody thought it was interesting enough to read to write it on the internet and i'm just now reading it okay menachino forever etc each year the jersey is shipped from the previous season's winner to the new season's winner and the team name is

embroidered on the jersey i am currently defending champion, and that's me rocking the jersey in the second photo. Also, our last place photo is an XXXXL Eric Gagne Dodgers t-shirt. We are mostly Giants fans. The first reply to this on Reddit slash Fantasy Baseball is, that's a great and original idea. Oh, no. Love it. It truly great and original idea. Love it. It truly is an original idea. I think that this just proves my theory, which has previously been inspired by American Idol

that, you know, it is very beautiful when parents encourage their children. It is an important part of being a part of a family, especially being a parent, to foster hopes and dreams and real self-confidence in your kids so that they can be interesting and do stuff and go out into the world and face all of the nonsense that that comes with doing that but i also think that there's value in being told no uh-huh and sometimes i think you know i hear stuff like that these people are very satisfied and i'm sorry if they are listeners and find themselves to be clever because like you know we all have goofy inside jokes but you made the decision to put yours on the internet so you clearly thought it was worthy of that. And, and, I mean, and wreck Wikipedia, which no harm, no harm done in the specific case. But Wikipedia is a genuine resource

that many people depend on in sight a lot. And every, every defaced page chips away at its reliability just a little bit. Yeah. And so I think that while I'm happy that your fantasy league seemingly brings you joy and has fostered a sense of community and humor, I think that perhaps you would have been well-served to be told no as a child a bit more often.

Meg, it sounds like you're coming out against everybody gets a trophy, which is not something that I would have thought you had a... No, that's not quite what I mean. I think that participation and showing up is often admirable. And failure is a valuable thing and confronting failure and still managing to have a good time, I think is really important to fostering genuine self-esteem. But there's a difference between showing up and doing some work that day, participating and having that participation noted by saying, hey, it's okay that you weren't the best and thinking that you're funny. Those are different.

I think they're different things. So this spurred a little bit of a memory that I had forgotten that I had done this. Should we do a stat blast? Oh yeah. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day still past.

All right. I have the song, so we don't have to sing it, but you're welcome to if you want to. No, I just pause every time I pause a very long time as though they're not as though ben's playing right as though i can't i can't help it all right so this is actually about the the idea of everybody gets a trophy which i um i liked my trophies and i didn't feel like i was not misled by them they were reminders that i had played a lot of baseball

uh i liked them i liked the ones that were had played a lot of baseball. I liked them. I liked the ones that were sturdy best. They did not convince me that I was better at baseball than I was, but I liked them. They were reminders of my teams. It never seemed like a problem to me. But what we did have, which was a true honor when I was growing up, is the game ball. And so the game ball is at the end of the game, particularly if you win the game, the coach gives the game ball to whoever had the best game

or whoever contributed the most to the victory. Now, technically speaking, most coaches would make sure that everybody on the team got one by the end of the year. So everybody got a trophy then too. But still, at least you did know for sure that that was a game that you had been noticed and that you had contributed.

It was, you know, often generally your best game. And I loved getting the game ball. To me, that was a real thrill. Not every coach did it. When a coach did, that was a good coach. And so somebody emailed us the other day and asked us, like, I don't know, something about, like, what if you, I don't even remember. It was like something about could you figure out who led their team in win probability added for the most games this year. And I went, oh, game ball. That's game ball.

And I thought that would actually be a great stat. I would love it if at the end of the game they gave the game ball to somebody. So I wondered who had the most game balls this year. And so I checked. So here's the first though, the challenge that we have to decide is do we count pitchers or do we only count hitters? Right. Cause a pitcher can, a pitcher has a lot more opportunity to collect win probability. Sure. I mean, I actually do know the answer to this, but I don't know how many, i don't i mean i actually do know the answer to this but i don't know how many i don't know if it's going to be like all pitchers do we care and so what would

you say count pitchers or don't count pitchers i think you count pitchers okay all right well then i'll go to the both tab that i have here and uh the both tab is uh i guess it's it's not very surprising justin verlander led the league in game balls this year. He had 17. What is maybe surprising is that number two is way down at 13. So Justin Verlander had a huge lead on number two. So he had 17. Steven Strasburg had 13.

Garrett Cole and Jacob deGrom had 12 each. And then tied with 12 is our first hitter, who is Mike Trout. Mike Trout led the league. The league's hitters in game balls, if we're counting. Now, most of the top of the leaderboard is pitchers. However, most game balls do not go to pitchers. In fact, about 40% go to pitchers and about 60% go to everybody else. Sometimes they go to relievers,

although to find a reliever on the game board's leaderboard, you have to go quite a ways down. Like you have to go past Homer Bailey, for instance, to get to somebody who's on the game board leaderboard. You have to go past Merrill Kelly and Reynaldo Lopez before you find your first reliever on the game boards leaderboard by the way jack flaherty is also below those people so the game board is not necessarily a reliable oh josh hater here we go josh hater had seven game balls tied with jack flaherty but worse than all those people

that i named so anyway so that's game balls justin verlander if you exclude pitchers though and you say that only the hitters can get game balls, because what this is most like is the game-winning RBI, which was obviously a hitter-only stat. This is a more refined version of the game-winning RBI, basically. And in that case, this is the weird thing. Here's the game ball paradox. Mike Trout is only 16th. Really?

Yeah. I don't know how that happened. I guess it makes sense, actually, because Mike Trout was on a team with bad pitchers and with, in particular, not very good starting pitchers. And so when he was matched up against his team's pitchers, because the game ball can only go to a person on his own, on the winning team, and so you're competing against your teammates, matched up against his pitchers, he elevated but matched up i mean he said he had more game balls by definition you have to have more game balls but he only had 14 total game

balls so that that's whatever i said it was so matt chapman is now the game ball champion interesting and um i think that makes him the mvp and bryce harper is the nl game ball champion and he's tied with Paul Goldschmidt. So it turns out those two had pretty good years. Not everybody knew it, but Paul Goldschmidt, game ball bold ink. I like it. I like it as a stat. I think we should incorporate it.

It's very hard to calculate. I mean, it's easy for a person with querying skills to calculate, i did this pretty much by hand and so it took a long time so perhaps not a a great stat should we should we answer some of these emails let's do it from many many months ago so i did not i mean i have heard their answers to these you know back at some point but I did not re-listen to the answers. Neither did I. Okay. Cause I didn't want to influence my own answer and also I didn't have time. So those two reasons, uh, one of which is probably a better one, uh, than the other are the reasons I didn't. So do you want to go first or would you like me to go first? How do you want to do this? Well, what I would first like to do is note that jordan alvarez only had one game ball this year really yeah so weird

i suppose that that's not so surprising when you consider how difficult it is to crack and that he was only up for half the year yeah that's true's true. And I'm looking at the both, the pitchers included thing. And so that makes it harder. By the way, Zach Greinke had a game ball as a hitter. And so did Steven Strasburg. Game ball as a hitter. Noah Syndergaard, of course, game ball as a hitter. All right.

Yeah. So I'll go first. I had some observations about soroka game ball as a hitter i had a few uh observations about some of the questions that they answered one is that they answered some questions that if ben read that question out loud i would say come on we're not answering that and then we would read another one so jeff was definitely more game than i am uh they for instance answered this question which we're not going to right here but basically this is a very long question too the question was basically if somebody only cared about breaking pete rose's

hits record as an owner and so he signed quote a-year-old off the street and let him hit first in the lineup every day until either the hits record is broken or the player dies of old age. Would the player break the record? And that's ridiculous. What? What? No. What? No.

Yeah. No. what no what no yeah no like i mean even even if instead of random 20 year old it was random prospect i still don't think that you would get and even if it was random top 100 prospect i don't think you'd get if you were allowed to play until you died after you were basically after you retire like let's say name a person who recently retired jim edmonds jim and no no because he was good when he retired who's who retired who's bad uh at the time oh geez i don't most of them yeah um i'm having trouble remembering some guys here oh geez i don't know who who's who's retired recently um okay so frank thomas yeah okay he's retired yeah so frank thomas retired and uh he was uh he was 40 years old yeah he was coming off a year when he hit 240 349 374 okay yeah 40 years old 240 349 374

how many hits do you think he would have if he attempted to play every day from 40 to 60 oh geez i mean how many hits let's actually forget that forget that i asked you that how many hits would he have if he attempted to play every day from 50 to 60 from 50 to 60 um gosh i don't know so over 10 years over 10 years but he is very old 200 yeah i was thinking like 160 yeah and i'm trying to be generous because i saw like edgar martinez can put on a show in batting practice or something like that. But I'm not even sure it's that. I'm not sure the number is positive.

So the idea that like longevity is going to get up. Anyway, the other thing I noticed about these is that there are questions that Ben answered that just one year later he had completely forgotten about and discussed them again. So he answered a minimum inning question. had completely forgotten about and discussed them again so he answered a minimum inning question he answered a question about bob wickman in 2005 apparently balking a runner from second to third on purpose because he had a two-run lead and he didn't want the runner on second stealing his signs and the exact thing happened with kenley jansen this year. We discussed it at length, and Ben never, never brought it up, never said Bob Wickman did that. So one other thing, this is not a response to the question,

but this has made me realize that Shohei Otani, this question was, I know it's too early to really think about, but if Otani makes the all-star team, is it as a pitcher, DH, or both? Regardless of how he makes the team, will he be used as a DH, pitcher, or both? And it just struck me reading that how astounding it is that Major League Baseball can't even manage to get Shohei Otani on an all-star team. He's 0 for 2.

What are they doing? How do you not do whatever you need to do to make sure that he is an all-star? What are they doing with that game? Yeah. All right. I'll ask you a question now okay let's say john carl this is from andrew let's say john carlos stanton was under explicit instructions to try and hit a home run and only a home run every time he came up how many would he hit assuming a healthy full season oh geez i think well let's let's let's logic our way into an answer here so let's see his last full like healthy season would have been in 2018 right i had played 158 games for the yankees 705 plate appearances he hit 38 home runs while hitting

266 and the year before that he hit 59 he hit 59 so somewhere in the middle i think he projected this year to be depending on your projection and assuming a juiced ball which at the time you know we kind of assumed something like a juice ball i think he projected for like 44 i think after 2017 when the ball was was really juiced more than it was in 2018 i think he projected low 50s and so maybe assume that now that we know the ball is relatively juiced, relatively juiced, all the way juiced right now. Max juiced. Then I would guess that Stanton's projections coming off of 2017 and 2018, his last two full seasons, would be something around 50 or high 40s. Yeah, so we released Steamer projections for 2020 today, actually, at Fangraphs.com.

And he is currently projected by steamer uh this is over 149 games and 654 plate appearances for 52 home runs okay wow that's a lot of home runs that's a lot of home runs is anybody projected to hit more uh bear with me one moment i can answer that question let's see no he leads he leads all of baseball and by a healthy margin so mike trout comes in second with 44 that is assuming like 15 more plate appearances from trout so i would say that if john carla were solely concerned with hitting home runs even with all of the issues that that would cause for him at the plate with pitchers probably very quickly catching on to that i'd still say he doesn't hit fewer than 40 right i'm glad that you said i mean i'm very glad that you immediately went to

it could quite plausibly be lower yeah because uh Because that was not my first reaction, but upon thinking about it, I thought, why am I assuming that it would be even one more as opposed to one fewer or more fewer? Right. I say, I don't think that it would be much lower, if at all lower than 40, but I don't think that he would come out and have like a 70 home run season. lower than 40 but i don't think that he would come out and have like a 70 home run season you don't you don't think that there if you dedicated yourself to it and you didn't care about how bad the rest of your offense was you don't think that he could put up a like a 170 190 480 line that involves i guess it probably would be more than 40 but that involves, I guess it probably would be more than 480, but that involves 104 hits and 74 of them are homers? No.

So what do you think, because I can't answer this question without first thinking, what would he do? What would his strategy be? Right. And also, by the way, this question does not suggest that he is going to get an electric shock or some sort of penalty or a fine if he doesn't hit a home run. I don't know if it would be different.

If basically it's binary and either he homers or he doesn't homer and everything is the same, then yeah, he can go for home runs. But if it were every home run, like every single, basically every single double or triple is going to get you, you know, putting time out, then he would have to not only try to hit home runs, but try to avoid singles, doubles, and triples. Right. And then I think it would be, then you have a game show.

Like that would be very, very stressful for him. Sure. He would be afraid to put the ball in play. I don't know if there would be a penalty for strikeouts but like he might prefer strikeouts in some counts but of course he's under explicit instructions to try to hit a home run so he can't even strike out all right so so let's uh what is his strategy here though he will well and it also it also assumes that the yankees just leave him in the lineup right i think that we're i think that we are happy to assume that well are we because you're right if he's bad if he's bad as a result of this but it assumes that it also assumes that he isn't trying to

always hit home runs right now exactly right how do we know he's not how do we know he's not he swings like he's trying to hit a home run most of the time. They always say, you know, if you try to hit a home run, you won't do it. You just have to try to hit the ball hard. And that was common accepted wisdom for most of my life, but I don't know if it still is. Is it? In the past three or four years, is that still accepted wisdom? I don't think it is.

Isn't that effectively the same thing though i mean you're hit you're trying to i know it's not the same thing but i think that the when guys say i'm just trying to hit the ball hard i think a lot of the time what they mean is i'm trying to hit a dinger oh well it's important to know whether it is or not because if it is if it's not the same if if what they are saying is that if you want to hit home runs you can't think about home runs and all i can do is be myself and in which case the optimal strategy would be to be exactly himself then there's nothing he can do about it and it would be he would hit 52 or whatever the projection was.

Sure. Or lower because now he's in his own head. Right. But if it does mean something different, if it means like, you know, you're basically trying to, you know, hit a line drive up the middle. And you recognize that one in eight of those or whatever is going to take off on you and you hit a home run and that's a good outcome. those or whatever is going to take off on you and you hit a home run and that's a good outcome and so you you go up to the plate not thinking about the home run because you trust that they will come then you might be able to make tweaks and hit home runs you know like i i just i feel like there are a lot more players right now and i don't know if this is just because i read ben's book and so on

but i feel like there is is a definite home run swing that you see these days, particularly in certain counts. But there's definitely a home run swing that you just didn't really see five or 10 years ago, which suggests that players now consider the best way to hit a home run to be to try to hit a home run. Right.

Like Cody Bellinger's not going up there with a chance to tie the game with a three-run homer going well I'm just trying to hit the ball hard somewhere like he is definitely trying to hit the ball high and far somewhere and really one particular somewhere well and I think that I think that when you look at I imagine that this question is a little bit different for depending on the hitter's approach. Like if you look at, so while you were chatting just now, I was looking at some of Stanton's graphs on Baseball Savant. where he has hit his home runs since 20... How long did I do this for? I did it since 2017 just because he didn't play much this year, so you got to look at stuff.

He has a particular, as many hitters do, he's hitting his home runs in a concentrated cluster within the strike zone. So presumably if that is his home run swing and his goal is to hit home runs, there is a, and the other outcomes that are available to him are less good as premised by the question. There could be an approach that would, at least for a time, maybe neutralize his ability to hit home runs because he likes to hit them when the ball goes to a

specific spot in the zone. And if you don't care about the other outcomes because those aren't home runs and Giancarlo doesn't care about them because they're not home runs, you could sort of sequence yourself and sort of target particular places in the strike zone in such a way to avoid home run hitting. And then Giancarlo might adjust because he's a good hitter and he has a lot of sort of raw power that he could probably tweak a bit is that way of thinking about this a very silly way to think about it no although I don't the thing the thing about it is that when John Carlo Stanton comes up to the plate as a pitcher you're already thinking I got to stay away from the home run. Right. And then they fail to do that. Well, they fail to do it sometimes. Right. And sometimes he does hit home runs, but that's already your idea is to avoid that part

of the thing. And the worse he gets, maybe the more you actually would attack him. Maybe. Although I think where Stanton would likely sabotage himself and why he could end up lower with fewer home runs is i think that the natural instinct would be to swing very to swing at every strike that you see yeah you just don't you don't want to strike out you don't want to miss your chance to put the ball in play so i think he would be swinging much earlier in the count but because of that he would not be working himself into positions of count leverage. I don't know what percentage of his home runs come in two O counts or

whatever, but I could see him having a lot of one pitch at bats thinking that that was optimal strategy, but then having it not actually produced that many home runs. Right. He also has a, for a home run hitter, he has a very low average launch angle jeff and ben

discussed this about i don't know a year ago and decided that he was not a swing change candidate because i don't remember why but it's working for him he already hits so many home runs and if he hit the ball higher or whatever it wouldn't really help him or something like that. But that would their discussion was that in real baseball, in real life baseball, there wasn't much to be gained from him trying to hit more home runs. Sure. And so if this were fake baseball where he was just trying to, you know, play a very specific thing, then that might that logic might not apply. then that might that logic might not apply there might be a way that you could change your approach to try to hit 300 and like you know when they when they do the derby you see some some some players like they really get that swing down where they're just able to hit that same spot in the bleachers over and over and over and over and over exactly they tend to cluster and so he might be able to do something like that so all right i don't feel i feel that this would make him a much worse player

yes so that's implied by the question and i agree with it i also don't think that it would lead to many more home runs no i am going to think of a number and when you have also thought of a number i have a number i can go first we'll say it at the same time okay one two three forty one five wow we were so far apart i decided at the last minute that i was gonna go up i think that my like i perhaps did not articulate this very well before but i think the reason i'm hung up is that i think that it would become very obvious to this isn't real baseball but i think that it would become very obvious to the people who are pitching to him what it is that he is trying to do i mean what they would really do is they just walk him every time they might just they might just walk up not every time but they might just walk him a lot more he can't't take a walk. So they could throw the pitch six feet outside.

If they really deduced what he was working on, he has to swing. And so they would never walk him because he would not allow them to. And they wouldn't particularly want to walk him because he would have such bad numbers. But, yeah, you are more focused on the pitchers adjusting. And I think that in a sense sense i think you're probably right in in baseball in any sport it is crucial that there are at least two things that you can do because if there's only one thing that you can do in any sport pretty much in any sport if there is only one thing you can do if you can only move to your left if you can only pass if you can only do a hockey then you're going to be very easily defended. And I feel like Giancarlo Stanton

needs to do some game theory here. If he is going to hit maximum number of home runs, he is going to have to purposefully hit a lot of non-home runs to open up the lane, the home run lane. Let me ask you this, Meg. In 2017, John Carlos Sainz was chasing 61 home runs. I think not technically a record, but I think that he valued it. I think players value it. And he was chasing that. He was on a trash team that was way out and that he appeared to have very little respect for at that point in his career as who would and do you believe that he was already doing this can we deduce based on what he did the last month playing games that didn't count for a team that didn't matter and with a sort of single-minded pursuit

that at least for him a there was there was great glory for him hitting home runs and considerably less glory if he you know hit 370 in the final month so would you expect that september and maybe even august give us a controlled experiment yeah i think i think he was perhaps he was perhaps trying then to just hit home runs i think that he and and we can give him some uh credit for trying to bring joy and happiness to to marlins fans right to give them a thing to root for and be invested in an actual race because they weren't participating in any other ones okay well i wrote about his home run chase on august 22nd of that year And so I'm going to consider that the moment when this went mainstream. Okay. When everybody was paying attention to John Carlos Sands home run

total. And so at that point in the year, he was on fire. He was, he was really hot at that point. He had had a huge August and that's why people were talking about it. But at that point in the year, he had 45 homers in 447 at bats i'm gonna do it bats because that's such a nice easily divisible thing that's one homer every 10 at bats and so he needed 16 more in a little bit more than a month and if he indeed did upon reading my article and realizing how close he was to a certain kind of history adjust his approach to try to hit home runs exclusively. It did not work. He hit 14 in the final 150 at bats, which is about one in 10.7 or something like that. So he managed to maintain his pace for the most part, but the home run rate went slightly down. Yeah. I think the combination of being more one-dimensional, you can't really be more one-dimensional,

right? You sort of are one-dimensional or you aren't because if you have more dimensions than the one, then you're not one-dimensional. But being more limited in your approach and there being a hemmed in range of acceptable outcomes is not good. I imagine you do start pressing in a way that is not useful. So the combination probably leads to you, you know, over swinging sometimes or what have you.

But also he still hit a bunch of home runs. So I think it worked out pretty okay. You want to ask a new question? Sure. Oh my God, we're going to do like two of these. We are going to do two of these. Yeah, maybe three. That makes my selection very important.

Oh, I think you will like this one. Okay, this came from Mike in episode 1312, A Puig of Their Own. Ah, that Ben. Those clever names. Mike says, hypothetical question. Say you have to spend a year in a cabin out in the wilderness somewhere

without having to worry about your day job. We are clearly both the target audiences and not the target audiences for this question. By far my most productive days at this job have been spent in a cabin. Yeah. So I get so much work done. You do. No radio or TV, only internet connection. The service provider only gives you two choices.

A, you have live streaming so you can watch all the live baseball you want, but you won't have access to the rest of the internet. So no Twitter, Reddit, Fangraphs, Baseball Reference, MLB Trade Rumors, etc. Or B, you can follow baseball as you do now, but you won't have live streaming capabilities so you can't watch any games live or after the fact. Given the choice between only watching games and only following baseball on other media, which would let you enjoy the sport more as So this doesn't say for how long? This, a year. Oh, a year.

Okay. A year. Because the shorter the period of time, the more I think you would benefit from having only the games. And the longer the period of time, the more you would cease to understand the storylines. I think that that's right. How many games a day would you watch? Oh, by the way, this doesn't say whether you can, like,

can you only watch games live? Or could you, if you wanted, it says you have live streaming, but so you can watch all the live. or could you if you wanted you know it says you have live streaming but so you can watch all the live baseball you want you can only watch a game in its entirety if you set aside three plus hours you're not going to be able to skip commercials correct you're not going to be able to watch games in the morning when you wake up from the previous night no so you have to watch the postseason as it's happening, Sam. And during... Okay, so you can... I'm confused about something.

So this only wants to know as a fan. This is asking a question as a fan? Correct. Well, Mike, I can't answer this question. I don't know. But then he also follows up with, what do you think most fans would choose? So perhaps we can key in on that as our way of entering this question.

What would most fans choose? All I think about when I watch baseball is the content. And I don't have any idea how I relate to it as a fan anymore. I mean, it's in there. It's in the swirl. It's all part of the experience, but i can no longer separate it i think that if there's a well so we have two two we basically have two different cohorts that have lived this way the first the only watching on tv and not having the internet is basically how everybody lived up until 1995.

Right. You got the next day's paper maybe. And otherwise there was really nothing in real time. You couldn't find out what the rumors were of who was going to sign where. You couldn't find out really anything except by watching the game. And so those people, and then you have the reverse, the only having the game secondhand, which is basically how people living abroad have it, where the time, the hours are so different that- Right. They can't watch it live. Right. And so like, for instance, my brother-in-law lived that way for like 12 years and came back still a baseball fan, but a significantly lesser baseball fan. And he was mostly a fan of one team, but I would say a

significantly lesser fan of the one team. And so that sort of suggests that not watching it, you quickly dry up. It becomes dead earth. whereas the game was thriving for a century without any of the ancillary stuff and i think that with almost all things it is almost impossible to imagine not having the internet or not checking your phone or not doing all these things and yet we also sort of know in our hearts that it's making us unhappy. And we don't think that much about the Internet's role in our baseball fandom possibly making us unhappy. But almost everything on the Internet makes us unhappy, doesn't it? So doesn't it probably? So this is not a fan specific thing.

And indeed, it might be very far removed from the typical fans experience but one thing about and i'm going to acknowledge before i say any of this how exhausting and unfun fans find it when media sorts complain about all the baseball in october because that's the best time and everyone is having a good time and they don't want to hear about us being tired because that's not interesting to them and they're like i'm tired and i have a less fun job, so stop complaining about stuff. And I'm sympathetic to all of that. But I will say the following, which is that one side effect of October is that I find myself as a person who's been trying to be online less because I notice it having a not good effect on my own mental health

and well-being and how much I like people. It makes me like people just less. It makes me like them less. But I have to be online more in October because we have all this stuff going on and I want people to read it and I need to engage with it. And so the idea of, well, I couldn't do my job without being online. So that's, you know, part of the rub here. But the idea of just getting to sit and watch baseball by itself sounds great yeah it just sounds great because i would still notice all the weirdo nonsense i notice about baseball that like you and three other people find interesting but uh i would still notice it and find it delightful when like the advertising is weird or that fans making a funny face or there's a beer guy whose beer marks the time.

I'd still find all that stuff delightful and I wouldn't have Twitter mentions. So that sounds good. I mean, I couldn't do this for my job because I'd get fired. But if I had the option, like for, I don't know, if I was like taking a sabbatical or something, or I don't know, I guess if baseball goes on strike, the option to watch baseball goes away with it. So that's tough luck.

But yeah, baseball without Twitter sounds great in some ways. Yeah, the things that this questioner lists, no Twitter, fantastic. No Reddit. I don't use Reddit that much. Yeah, no Twitter, fantastic. No Reddit. I don't use Reddit that much. Yeah, I don't either. MLB trade rumors, I am perfectly fine.

I almost wish that the ability to know rumors were taken from me. I don't have the discipline to actually take them from me myself. I like to be up to date, but I don't think that I would lose that much if I just turned on the, well, if I either found out about it a day or two later, or if I found out about it months later, that would be fine too. MLB Network, I don't have that. Highlights, I feel like you don't need highlights that much. Podcasts, can't really speak to that. I can't do baseball podcasts. They make me too envious. And so that leaves Fangraphs and Baseball Reference and other sites that have stats.

And the hardest thing to give up would be the stats. And I also feel like the stats are the thing that give me the least sort of browsing anxiety because they're not new. It's not like a stream of stats that are always being updated and you're like, I got to check the stats. You just, when you need them, they're there. They're not new. It's not like a stream of stats that are always being updated, and you're like, I got to check the stats. You just, when you need them, they're there. They're there permanently, and they're a reference.

It's a baseball reference. And so it would be a change to not be able to look up players' stats, and I think it would be easier if the games that you were watching had a la carte stats where you could pick which ones you saw so that you could really understand the player when he comes into the game but i could live without that yeah i think it would be very i think that i would uh enjoy the games a lot more without a second screen and um i think that i would probably watch i think i would probably watch with a lot more serenity yeah i think that's right what would most fans choose what do you think what

what would most fans choose the problem with the what would most fans choose though is that like everybody's got the thing that they use to distract them when they're on the train or when they're sitting in a waiting room or when they're just when they have 40 seconds and they pull out their phone and they absent-mindedly check the thing that they compulsively check and for me that thing is not baseball but if it were then I could see putting a really high priority on it. It was baseball for me. For me, it was baseball. But now since I do baseball for hours and hours all day, then it's really not. I know that it's always going to be there. But like when I was a non-baseball writer, I would compulsively check games all throughout

the workday to the point that it was really destructive to my career. And so at that point, I might have actually chosen to have, for instance, access to every box score in real time than to just be able to watch one game. Right. I do like that every baseball, every full-time baseball rating person who I know has a story like that where it's like, so baseball was destroying my career. So it's lucky that this one worked out because I was verging on getting fired from another

job as a result of baseball. For me, it was the guilt. It was the feeling of guilt at the end of the day. Yeah. Oh, I can relate to that. I didn't stop me from- Young kid right out of college, just spending the the day yeah oh i can relate to that i didn't stop right out of college you know just spending the whole day checking my fantasy team and going like yeah should we should we do one one more two more i have one more i have one more that might yeah might be good yeah

all right this question is not exactly the one I want to answer, but I want to pivot from it. So Christopher asked, how effective would it be if, to drum up some interest to the general public, Rob Manfred brought in a hitherto unknown phenom, young player who is essentially a five-tool star. The only qualification, though,

is this player is always wearing a mask, similar to the masks worn in lucha libre wrestling in mexico he wears it in the field at the plate and in any context where he is participating in baseball or team activities also to keep the air of mystery this baseball luchador is not available pre or post game for interviews he's just gone who is this mysterious player? The public will wonder. Would this be seen as merely a gimmick or could this genuinely make people interested just simply for the mystery of who this man in the mask is? And I wonder, Meg, if given how much criticism baseball players have for either showing personality or for not showing personality like they're either either they're scolded for having too much flair or we bemoan the fact that they're not celebrities because they're boring is there any upside in any of them being known

could they not all be the masked singer is it conceivable that baseball would be better more popular less there would be less bad conversation about it basically if they all wore these masks i think i think that the mask is less important than the lack of press availability and the reason I say that is because if you're wearing a mask first of all like imagine imagine if Juan Soto wore a mask. He's already so endearing and delightful. And then he would be wearing a colorful mask. And we would struggle to talk about anything else. And it would be to the sport's benefit because Juan Soto, I mean, as this postseason has shown, is already one of the

very best things in baseball in terms of his raw entertainment value. And he'd be wearing a mask. And there's nothing we like more than that. It's the thing we like. And so I think that if all of the players did the things on the fields that we find quirky or endearing or expressive, and they did it while wearing masks. And, you know, they could wear a variety of masks that express all sorts of things. They could take on all sorts of individual meanings, but they'd be obscured from us because they wouldn't get to. So I think that that could

be to the sports benefit because the place where baseball, I think, really goes off the rails is not realizing that players are boring, but realizing that some players are jerks, right? That's where the sport gets in trouble. You're like, I don't like that guy. That guy sounds mean. That guy sounds like a jerk. I don't like jerks who likes jerks or you know and not like a not not like alex bregman being a heel but in in a in a pitch perfect sort of way right where he is a heel but he always punches up and not down and he picks his adversaries with great aplomb and he is seemingly a nice guy in in real life but like he he's a good heel not like that we don't like it when when players reveal themselves to be jerks or small or petty we find

that upsetting and disappointing and sometimes they reveal themselves to be something much worse than a jerk and that's that's even worse so i i think the biggest problem that baseball faces is not that players are boring, but that they can sometimes be not good dudes. And I don't know that the mask thing gets around that problem. But I think if we just and I don't say this like if we just heard from them less, like I wish they'd stop talking. But sometimes I wish that they weren't on Twitter. I wish they'd stop talking, but sometimes I wish that they weren't on Twitter. Well, even though, but the ones that are not jerks, the ones that are quite nice, they're also quite plain, which is fine. That's good for life.

I encourage that for everybody. But most industries that are performative, you have to have that sort of charisma. They coach that charisma into you. And since baseball players don't have that, there's just a feeling of disappointment around them so often. And I just wonder, do you think that Mike Trout would be a bigger celebrity if he wore a mask, went by the name category five, and all we knew about him was his play that he was just this like like, suit,

like, that nobody knew who he was, but also nobody could stop him. He's the greatest masked baseball player there's ever been. Imagine him robbing a home run at the wall, but in a mask. In a mask. In a mask. In a mask. See, I feel like this makes your Juan Soto's more interesting.

Yeah. It makes your Mike Trout's more interesting. It works either way. Yeah. Now, the only problem is that then you start, like, I like to know who the jerks are. I don't like that there are the jerks, but I like to know who they are so I can sort them out. Sure. And if I did not have any interaction, then, like, it would be like.

But how would you know? Well, you would know that there are jerks, right wouldn't you wouldn't i don't know actually i'm not sure if i know this like it wasn't it's the thing with the silent film stars where everything was going really well and then like one of them like did a murder and then it became this huge scandal and nobody could deal with them anymore so you would have you would have guys who commit crime. You would have guys who run afoul of various league policies, some of which reveal them to be very dangerous or violent or intimate partners in a way that would be a trouble.

And then you would be in a position where you would say, I don't know. I think you're right. I don't know who the jerks are, but I want to buy a jersey. I don't know. I think you're right. I don't know who the jerks are, but I want to buy a jersey. I don't want to buy a jerk's jersey. And of course, we don't actually know for most of these guys, even the ones we think are good guys, like we think we know, but we don't know for sure. There are a lot of people who are good pretenders. So I guess you still have that risk, but the risk does appear heightened without the ability to judge for yourself you know

sort of what your native uh jerk detector would say about about a guy right do we watch we watch baseball for you know many reasons as we've discussed but one of the reasons is we want our team to win and your your team could be your team even if they have masks on in fact it would probably make them even feel more like your team if they have masks on because it's an extension of the uniform to their very face and identity so then you have that and then we watch it because we like to see the athletic achievement we like to see today's players do better than yesterday's players like we like to see the game get better and we like to see them. Sometimes we like to see them do actual things that we can see with our eyes are incredible and impossible.

But sometimes we just want to see them break the record that the previous generation had. And you can do that in the mask. No problem there. Although maybe you wouldn't care as much. But no, no, because I'm not to that point yet. You would care as much because all you care about is the athletic achievement. That's what we're focusing on here. The athletic achievement would still be athletic achievement. And then the third thing is that we have specific relationships with the players,

the people themselves. And I don't know what share of fandom comes from actually having a relationship with the player. You would still have a relationship with the player, just like you can have a relationship with a wrestler who is clearly playing a role, for instance, a fictional role, a character, or just like you have a relationship with an actor who is only playing, you know, other people. So I don't even know if the relationship would be would be harmed there. I don't know how important the personal relationship that you have with the players themselves is. And I don't know if it would be strengthened or harmed by putting them behind a colorful mask. I also don't know if you might have well, I don't know if it would be strengthened or harmed by putting them behind a colorful mask. I also don't know if you might have, well, I don't think, do you don't think that anybody would, any baseball players would say,

I don't want to be a baseball player if I have to wear a mask, do you? I think there would probably be a couple, but not very many. I think, especially if it was part of the culture, if you wore a mask in Little League. With a little, little cute little mask. I'm asking little league. With a little. Little cute little mask. And I don't know how you.

I don't know how you make a mask that is meant to fit on a face too big. The way that like batting helmets are. Uh-huh. Yeah. I don't know what it looks like, but I want it. I want that. Where it's like. Where it's like. Too big helmet.

The helmet's too big. Their noggins are too big they wear the hat you've got to wear your hat under it because the helmet only fits over your hat but then the hat and the helmet the bills separate and there's like an inch and a half of space you look like you got a duck on your head yeah i think that you would i mean like you said people have relationships with wrestlers who wear masks. I am a football fan and they wear helmets that obscure the better part of their faces.

So I think that, and I think that baseball, like all sports, there are a lot of ways in which a player can be expressive and many of those are through their bodies, not through their faces. And so you would still, I mean, like when we watch, you know, if you watch Francisco Lindor play shortstop, like that has a look. And if you pay attention to baseball, if his face were obscured, you could probably still look at him in the field and be like, well, that's Frankie, you know, like you have that. That is part of your sort of sensory experience of baseball.

So I think that you would still have a close relationship, but yeah, it would make it different. I wonder who would say, no, I do not care to play this. I mean, there would be times where it would be hot. You know, they play baseball in August in like, in Texas. You're wearing a mask. You're going to sit there and go, no, I don't want to do that. I think you'd get over it, though, if you got to play professional baseball. It would be quite a shift.

It would be an interesting chapter in a Ken Burns. This was the year that we all started wearing wrestling masks. Why? I don't know. I don't know. Why is it 90 feet to home? Same sort of deal. It's just happening later.

I hear radio ads for The Masked Singer. Yes. And I love how their whole marketing, basically the whole marketing strategy for this show is to name a whole bunch of famous people who are not on the show. And so then you're like, wow, that show has got so much star power.

Like it's always like one of the you're like, wow, that show's got so much star power. Like it's always like one of the panelists is like, is it Eminem? But then it's actually like Ninja. Is it Rihanna? But it's Dr. Drew. But like at that point, they're just like,

they're just throwing names at you. They're like, is it Rihanna? Is it Beyonce? Is it Barack Obama? Is it the guy from Pan at the disco and uh and none of those people are on the show but they still get to advertise them yeah somehow like they just get to advertise like turn on this show if you want to hear some famous names and i i like that they will list uh they will list a series of people and you're like, so have you ever seen the bodies that those people cart around with them all day?

Those are some different bodies they got. Yeah, yeah. Different sort of bodies. Yeah, no, it's true. I think that they should be not only because of that, it becomes too, you can't even suspend your disbelief to believe that it could be right beyonce so i think they should make them wear not just masks but like philly fanatic uniforms costumes i would watch that show i don't watch the mass singer but if

they had to perform in mascots i would watch Yes, and just all pelvic thrusting. Do the mascot pelvic thrust. We did it, Meg. We did it. I don't know if we're going to... The next episode, if we pull it off, is going to be very interesting. Yeah.

We're not going to say any more about it because we don't want to give it away. I'm going to practice my show intro. You're going to do the next show intro. I am. You shouldn't feel pressure because as we've established, it's okay to make mistakes. Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm looking forward to the next one.

I am too. I hope we pull it off. I'm confident. I mean, I don't know that I am, but it'll be fine. Yeah. All right. Bye-bye, Sam. All right.

That'll do it for today. If you'd like to see Ben and I chat baseball live with a bunch of our pals, limited tickets are still available for our Fangraphs Live event in New York City on November 21st, but they're going fast, so get yours today in the Fangraphs online store. Fangraphs members get $10 off every ticket they purchase. And don't worry, if you can't join us live, we'll be releasing the show later as an episode of Effectively Wild. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going. Jonathan Sieg, T. Knopf, Adam Hopps, Chris Pascoff, Gretchen Effenkofer, Gretchen, sorry if I didn't get your last name quite right, and Ryan P. Sullivan. Thanks to you all. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast platforms. And please keep your comments and questions for me, Sam, and Ben coming via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Sam and I will be back with another

episode a little later this week with Ben returning not long after. Until then, enjoy the first full week of the offseason and thanks for listening. Something to cushion my callous eyes I know that you hope for longer goodbyes Embracing for forever and falling in your eyes