Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1457: The Sign-Stealing Spiral

Episode Date: November 16, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the first stirrings on the free-agent market, the latest developments in the Astros sign-stealing scandal, where MLB investigation’s might lead, what the appropriate punishments would be, the psychology of sign-stealing, whether pitchers should call pitches, fighting technology with technology, Mike Trout’s MVP award win, a fixable flaw in […]

🎵 Music 🎵 🎵 Music 🎵 If you saw a baby, then you're free by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. Yeah, you can't say always anymore. Gotta strike that from the intros, I guess. Yeah, I have to be a bit more precise. I love that I had one intro that I was responsible for while you were gone and I messed it up. Just botched it. Yep, it happens. It happens. meetings week and some things are at least starting to be discussed and it's awards week so there's stuff going on we're not in true deep freeze territory yet but this has obviously been a more eventful week than most yes it has been eventful we've actually had free agents signings yeah how about that which is wild uh smith and ones that don't make us very angry which is wild. Will Smith. And ones that don't make us very angry,

which is refreshing. Seems like not likely the start of a trend. Probably not. Probably not. Given all the other conversations and quotes that are out there. But yeah, Scott Boris did say that he's gotten more interest or he sensed teams being more eager to make moves early in the offseason, which I don't know. Maybe that's because he happens to have the three best free agents available. That might be part of it. But maybe if it's part of some larger thing, then great. I mean, we're getting rumors from teams like the Rangers, who you wouldn't necessarily think would be at the front of the line, except they have their new ballpark opening, opening which may be part of it wanting to put a more competitive product on the field but yeah i guess fewer bears are hibernating i don't know yeah oh man i can't i will admit and i i will

say this also in case i end up doubling up on some stuff that you guys talked about with the signs i listened to the beginning part of your last episode with Sam and then I had to do other things and so I didn't finish it. And I am devastated that we likely can't figure a way to have you not hear actual Boris quotes from winter meetings. I mean, it's possible. I'm pretty much a Star Wars writer right now. So I'm not monitoring the news as closely. Mandalorian head over here. Yeah. So if we figure out what day it is, I mean, it's, it's probably predictable, right? You'll be at the winter meetings. So if you can give me a heads up, Hey, it's, it's Boris quote day. Yeah. Then I will just turn off my wifi for a while. I'll, I'll bang on a trash can and see, see if it reaches, reaches you.

Would that be three bags for Boris? How any i don't know anyway i think i think it might be better to do i mean just given the distance i should uh i should let off i should let off smoke like they do when they name a new pope you know and can tell from the color of the smoke so should we start with science stealing it's kind of what we spent the whole last episode on, but there sort of thing that I would typically find just delightful and enthralling. But I'm not able to find this one charming. So it's just one more thing that the Astros have taken away from me. Yeah, there's something like time, I think, makes things a little more palatable. Like you can look back at sign stealing schemes from several decades ago, and it seems kind

of quaint. And it's like, oh, gamesmanship, you know, it's part of the game. But when it's happening right now, and it's happening in the way that it's happening, But when it's happening right now and it's happening in the way that it's happening and it's happening with the Astros specifically, it's pretty hard to find any kind of pleasure in the story at all. Yeah. And we've I mean, as you alluded to, we've had some some development. Should we cover the developments? Yes.

Let's. We'll cover developments so the the first which i think um we both just enjoyed a great deal is that rob arthur who i am noticing and i don't think i had ever noticed before is bylined as robert arthur at bp rob fancy so formal putting on ears yeah has a a piece out at baseball prospectus today which will link to where he was able to identify the basically the audio footprint of the trash can banging and was then able to go back through to some games where we had heard that there was sign stealing going on so he starts with the outing that danny farquhar had in a September game and is able to identify that same basic noise pattern and use it as a just a further bit of forensic evidence that that there were clear and audible differences in the noise between you know fastballs and non-fastball pitches or i should say the noise that preceded those pitches and that it was a a pretty significant and obvious difference um he does note that it is difficult to

isolate that same pattern once you get to october because the ballpark is just inherently louder although he does have some sort of less strong i don't want to call it weak evidence but less strong evidence that it may have persisted into October, which if it were proved to be true, would run counter to what we seem to have learned from the astros themselves. So, man. Yeah, it was a really clever idea. We had Rob on the podcast years ago because he did something similar with bat cracks and looking at the signature of the noises that bats make just to see if it really does sound different when some

people make contact so yeah he extended it to the astro science dealing and he concluded that basically the astros started early and often in games that as early as as the third pitch in a game, they would pick up the pattern and start relaying these signs. And also that it was never wrong, really. They never incorrectly gave a signal, which you could imagine that a lot of the benefit of getting the pitch ahead of time might be wiped out if you were to get incorrect calls sometimes because it would just kind of confuse you and then it'd be in your head and you might have less confidence just even if you were burned by it once or something. You might think, well, I can't trust this anymore. But he didn't seem to uncover any evidence that they ever banged twice when it was a fastball or whatever, you know, it was always the correct call.

He didn't extend that to try to divine some sort of advantage from it or show that there was a benefit that the Astros hit better because of this, but he did show that this was happening consistently and seemingly accurately, at least during the regular season. So you can hear it, obviously, if you look at the videos, but Rob did it in a rigorous way that we don't all have to spend many hours watching 2017 regular season games to see. Yeah, I read this and it struck me, I think the point that you brought up and that he made that it just was never wrong. I hadn't, I had wondered how much the accuracy of it might inspire different hitters to sort of take to it compared to others. It struck me as being a bit like the shift,

right? Where there are some pitchers who just can't stand the shift because they remember the one time that, you know, a ball put in play leaks through to score a run because there isn't a defender where there normally would be one and i i guess this is sort of the hitting equivalent the the cheating equivalent of the shift where you really need it to be right because if it is wrong even just the one time you're going to be much less likely to to buy in and i doubt we will ever get a good tick tock of how the whatever Astros staff were involved in sort of this on the field level, the process they went through to get hitters to buy into the sign stealing. I doubt we'll ever know. We won't get an accurate rendering of that moment of trying to incorporate data into one's game plan as it were.

one's game plan as it were. But I wish we would because I'd be fascinated to know sort of what the reaction was by guys on the team and how, where they're, to the extent that they were maybe reticent to do this, where that reticence broke down, whether it was, hey, this feels like cheating and that feels wrong to me, or hey, this doesn't sound like it's going to work or what. I would love to know. We'll never know, but I want to know. Yeah, I'd like to know, too. It was reported that it was instigated maybe by one player and one coach, and then it was suggested in a follow-up report that that was Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora. So if it started with two people, then yeah, does it go well? Beltran or whoever tips off someone else and says, hey, we've got the system.

You want in on this? Because you would need multiple people in on it at all times because Korra's got to be in the dugout during the game. And Beltran, let's say Beltran is hitting, there has to be someone who is watching the video feed and maybe another someone banging the trash can. I guess that could be the same person. But you've got to have multiple people in on it. And then there's got to be some conscientious objector here, right? I mean, it's not like everyone on the Astros is rotten to the core, although it seemed like it at times,

but we know the worst of some people in the front office, and it doesn't mean that everyone, it's not like they specifically recruited players for low character or something. We're going to go get all the people who will be on board with sign stealing, I don't think. So then is there like a peer pressure that comes about because you don't want to be like the self-righteous person in the clubhouse who's like, oh, you're all doing this, but I'm above it. Like, even if you're in the right, if you're the only person who's saying that, then maybe

you get ostracized because of that, or you don't want to make your teammates think that you're going to rat them out or something. Even if you're not, you wouldn't even want them to think that. And so, yeah. And I don't know if that may be the fact that Fiers finally came forward about this. Maybe that means he was uncomfortable about it at the time. I don't know. But you would have to think that there were some people who were not thrilled.

The enthusiasm levels must have varied widely. And then if you do object to it, do you stand up and make a dramatic speech and say, this is wrong and I won't stand for it? Or do you kind of go along with it but not use it? It's like you don't want to rock the boat, but you just go up to the plate and you don't listen. And can you even not listen? If you're not actively listening for the trash can bangs, can you tune them out? Can you forget that you know that or not? So, yeah, I would love to know all of these things. I would love to know all those things, and I doubt we ever will. But I wonder then if you have – if you are one of those guys who – if we take them sort of at their word that this seems to have, or based on the reports, that this seems to have ceased once they reached October, which, you know, I think Rob does a good job of sort of calling into question how likely that is just from a logical perspective. But

are you then in the highest leverage at bats that you have ever had more calm because your conscience is clear. What an odd understanding of leverage, right? Gosh. Yeah. The playoffs thing, A, maybe they stopped the banging because by that point, the Red Sox had been caught doing their Apple Watch thing. So maybe they figured more scrutiny, we can't risk this anymore. Or maybe they just thought this is so obvious, like I can't believe that we've gotten away with it this long and we don't want to risk it when we've got a full house and maybe more people paying attention to these games. Or maybe it's that you can't hear the banging as clearly because you've got a full house and everyone's screaming. Or, I don't know, maybe you just came up with an alternate system, which it sounds like they may have, or there may be a hybrid system. So Carson Smith, the Red Sox reliever, he tweeted that the bullpen catcher was relaying in signs for specific batters in specific ways. And he said it was also sketchy when the security guards and Crawford box scorekeepers kept constantly checking on our bullpen and looking up at the TV that coincidentally wasn't working for that series. To be clear, the TV in the bullpen, many parks have pen TVs, will send you a game feed but is delayed by five seconds or so.

None approved by MLB give you a true live feed. And then Trevor Ploffe chimed in. We're getting reporting from Trevor Plouffe, of all people. Trevor Plouffe says, anybody curious to know how Astros relayed signs in the 2017 World Series when banging a trash can couldn't be heard? A very reliable source.

Just let me know. And he says that according to Carson Smith and also Plouof's source, the Astros had someone watching a live feed and then relaying the pitch calls via earpiece to the bullpen catcher, hands up on the fence for a fastball and hands down on the fence for off speed. So maybe they switched to this more subtle system, perhaps. I don't know. switch to this more subtle system perhaps. I don't know. It's just if you were doing this all year and if you felt like it was partly responsible for your success, whether it was or not,

then could you actually wean yourself off it at the most important time of the year? I mean, at that point, you're used to it and maybe you'd feel less confident if it were suddenly taken away from you in these moments. And if you've gotten away with it for months and months, then I don't know. Maybe you'd be worried because the Red Sox got caught and the Yankees got fined too. So we know that at least three teams were doing something illegal that year with signed stealing. But I don't know. It's very possible it'd be a pretty high bar to convince me that they just stopped cold turkey at the time when they needed to win

games the most. Yeah, it strikes me as very unlikely that you would either have a moral code with sufficient texture to differentiate between those events as being distinct from one another in terms of crossing a line that is unacceptable to you. And it also seems unlikely that aided as they seem to have been by technology that they wouldn't be able to find a way to overcome the noise problem and use other means to communicate what they need to in a situation like that. So it seems I agree, I would need to be I would need to be convinced and it would take some doing that this was a categorically different moment in the season, either in terms of their moral understanding of it or the bird the technological burdens that were present in one case and not the other.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the kind of disturbing parts of this whole thing is that you can't really prove that it's not happening ever. And so once you establish that it was happening in certain places at certain times, then you start to think, well, it must be happening all the time or or it must still be happening in that place at least there's no way to totally get it out of your head because yeah you can't conclusively demonstrate that a team is not doing this so that becomes a problem too where it just

kind of casts doubt on everything and maybe you're too inclined to believe that everyone is doing this just because it it seems like it would be possible to pull it off and i know that the rules have gotten much stricter and it's harder to do this now and it seems like teams have really adjusted and we've been aware of teams behaving differently when they're playing the astros specifically for a while now not only the astros but switching signs going to greater lengths to cover when they're playing the Astros, specifically for a while now, not only the Astros, but switching signs, going to greater lengths to cover what they're doing. And the Nationals were certainly doing that in the playoffs, not just against the Astros,

but they had Sean Doolittle told the Athletic that they had cards, they had five sets of signs that they could rotate through. So if there was a guy on second base for more than one hitter, they'd go to a different set of signs. They would just change signs like batter to batter. And if you're doing that, then I don't know that your signs can be stolen. Even if there is a camera trained on you, if you're varying it up that often, then I don't want to say it's unbreakable, but it would be difficult to break. So it's possible that the combination of stricter rules and more monitoring

and teams taking it upon themselves to take measures against this because they knew that things were going on, they had a sense that this was happening, may have gotten the worst of this out of the game already. But again, it's really hard to know that that's the case. And it's always easy to think if someone could be breaking the rules, then probably someone is. Yeah. And I think that it is unlikely. I don't know if there is a meaningful difference of degree. So I don't know one way or the other if there is. So I'll preface what I'm about to say with that. I find it very unlikely that the Astros are the only team that are engaged in this sort of baseball is going to have we're going to have

some doubt about the degree to which their gains are sort of earned under the right circumstances and in the right way which is a real shame given some of the players that they have on their roster who i would love to be able to enjoy without having a little nagging voice in the back of my head saying yeah right and you know this is a team that saw a rookie of the year and a Cy Young win in the same week and I guarantee you that will not be what I remember of this week in Astros history this won't be the thing that that's not it. That won't be what I remember. I will remember this bit of business. And it's probably telling based on some of the other issues that have emerged from that club, whether you want to attribute some of it to just envy that they've been so successful or outright distaste at some of the unsavory cultural aspects

of their organization. I wonder if there will come a time when they're perhaps feeling a bit less defensive where there can be some honest reflection on the part of the org to say, other people were likely doing this, but we're the one that a lot of folks were happy to go on the record about. That is probably not a positive indicator for the organization. So yeah, Astros, man, what a time they seem to be having. I will be curious to see what kind of can of worms the MLB investigation opens up because they're going to be talking to Cora. He's obviously been with Boston. They won a World Series the year after the Astros.

They're going to be talking to Carl Speltron, who is now embarking on his Mets career with this hanging over him. And not that saying, well, this team was doing it or that team was doing it excuses anything the Astros were doing, but you could totally imagine people involved in this and caught up in it using that as a defense or trying to say this is less up in it using that as a defense or trying to say, this is less bad because it was just rampant. And what could we do? You weren't policing it enough. And we were just trying to keep up with our competitors. And in that process, very much like

when the Yankees reported the Red Sox for their Apple Watch scheme. And then the Yankees also got busted for something they were doing with bullpen phones. So I wonder how deep this goes. Like you might start an investigation with the Astros and you might want to make an example of the Astros. But in the process of trying to punish the Astros, you might come across all this other information. And then what do you do with that? the Astros, you might come across all this other information, and then what do you do with that? And at what point does it just become too much that you can't punish anyone because you're punishing everyone? I mean, we're far from that point, obviously. We don't have that kind of evidence about many teams, but still, I wonder what that opens up. And that's one of the reasons

I still think that you can't vacate a title retroactively just because, I mean, for a bunch of reasons. But one reason is that, well, what if it goes further than this one team? And then you're talking about multiple titles. What if you find out the Red Sox were doing it the year after? And are you just wiping away entire years of Major League Baseball history? And then, you know, are you awarding a title to someone who also was doing something? So it gets so messy that I think you kind of just, when it comes to results that are already on the books, you just kind of have to let people perceive whatever stain on that that they will, you know, not an actual asterisk, but people from now on will be talking about Astros sign stealing whenever they talk about this 2017 Astros team. So that is something that taints their title, you know, whether it enhanced their performance or not. This is retroactively now a big part of the story of that team, and that's not going to go away. I don't think that's sufficient. I think you also have to punish them if you can prove things conclusively, and I'm very curious to see what that will be. So will it just be draft picks

and a fine? I don't know that there is a mechanism for a gigantic fine. I think the $2 million fine that the league levied against the Cardinals with the hacking scandal against the Astros, I think that may have been the most that they had the authority to do. away unlimited amounts of money from teams and draft picks you can do and they should do and i don't know i guess there are other mechanisms but i wonder whether if you can pin this on beltran or cora or aj hinge or any other specific people involved do you come down on them and do you say you're suspended and how long are you suspended? What's the precedent for that? I'm very curious about that because on the one hand, maybe you really want to make an example of someone. And if you could tie it to someone in the front office, for instance, maybe you do a kind of Kapolella thing where you just ban them entirely. I don't know. From what I've read, just speaking more generally about crime and policing and punishment, I get the sense that the best deterrent is not necessarily

draconian punishments, but the perception that you're going to get caught. I think that the perception that you're going to get caught is more effective than the actual punishment, because even if the punishment is strict, if you're pretty sure you can get away with it, you might still try it. So that keeps coming back to, can you actually prevent this given that technology is so pervasive? I don't know the answer to that. don't know the answer to that. Obviously, they've taken some steps that seem likely to help, but can that prevent someone just sitting out in the stands with a camera that is small and unobtrusive and is feeding back to a clubhouse screen that someone is holding somewhere? I don't know. Unless you have observers everywhere, it just seems very difficult to completely prevent this from ever happening. So I just kind of keep thinking,

well, sign stealing has always been part of the game. Now teams are getting better at sign stealing, or at least the Astras are using technology. And so now we have to get better. Teams have to get better at preventing the sign stealing. It's like an an arms race basically and so maybe you do that with technology whether it's headsets or you know some kind of watch or whatever or maybe it's the systems that teams and players already seem to have adopted and just

trying to encrypt their signs more effectively i i was on MLB Now with John Smoltz on Thursday, and we were talking about this. And you might expect Smoltz to be like, well, back in my day, we didn't have cameras or whatever. And so this is terrible, and there's no way to counter it or whatever. But he kind of seemed to think that players could prevent this, that they could just take measures.

He was saying, like like from the way he was talking about it it sounded like he kind of treated opposing parks as like enemy territory and just like going in there he was always vigilant and always on the alert for anything and that you can camouflage these things if you are always thinking about it well Well, and we saw some of that, you know, in this postseason, right? Like where the Nationals talked about their advanced scouts helping Strasburg to sort of, I mean, it's a little different than sign stealing, but like that there was a, you know, that there was pitch tipping potentially going on and some of the stuff you're able to diagnose in real time and then adjust for.

So it seems like there is something to that. I just am, I guess I'm a bit surprised and it's probably because it's been, we've been in the early going of this. And so MLB is still in the investigation phase. They're not even to the solutions phase, but it just seems like we have to get headsets soon, right? I mean, it seems to accomplish two things that Manfred is very keen on, the first of which is reducing time of game,

because that's the problem with any player-driven solution to this is that you're invariably going to add time to any particular at-bat as a pitcher tries to and a catcher tried to counter the potential for sign stealing. So anytime you have to cycle through multiple signs or change them up or look at your little armband or whatever, you're going to add time, which might not be a ton of time, but over the course of an entire game where you have a lot of pitches, it can add up.

And so it seems like it is the most effective means of countering this because you just remove signs as an issue entirely and it might trim out some time of game which isn't time of game that anyone's going to miss yeah and so it just seems like that as a way of addressing this particular problem in a practical way seems like a likely solution i think you're right that you have to feel confident you're going to get caught for punishment to be a deterrent. I don't think that that is the understanding of criminal justice that Major League Baseball necessarily has, right?

And I'm fully appreciating all of the ways in which what went on in Atlanta is different than this situation, both in terms of its conclusions and what we even know right now. I think that the league seems to believe that lifetime bans are an effective deterrent for a certain class of behavior, whether they think this rises to that or not remains to be seen. And I think a lot of that will probably be determined by how cooperative the Astros end up being with their investigation, because it seems like part of what ended up being copies undoing was his unwillingness to cooperate with the league. So I don't think we know any of that stuff yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a both practical solution and then a

message that is sent. And the severity of that message i think is going to depend on a lot of stuff we don't know yet but it seems unlikely that they will look at the astros role in this even if they uncover concrete signs that a lot of other folks were involved in a lot of other things and and be satisfied with that because they historically have not been. They like their pounds of flesh. That's so gross. And also if it's not – if you can't pin it on a front office person and you can only identify players or managers, I guess managers are in a different category. But players, for instance, discipline would probably have to be collectively bargained, right? Like when the Red Sox had meetings about their Apple Watch scenario, I maybe they would not strenuously defend the players who were found to be guilty of this. But maybe they would just because they don't want to

have a precedent of MLB just, you know, kind of unilaterally banning people from the game or wiping out a season for something that's not really already on the books. It's not like betting on baseball or something where you walk into a clubhouse and it says, hey, don't do this. And there's a whole history of people being banned from the game for doing that. This would be a drastic, unprecedented thing. So I think there'd probably be some pushback on that just because, hey, we don't want MLB to suddenly be able to kick players out of the game when they decide that something bad happened. Yeah, this is always the tricky situation we find ourselves in when it comes to player discipline.

Because on the one hand, I think we appreciate that there need to be consequences for bad behavior in a variety of ways, right? A variety of bad behaviors. variety of ways, right? A variety of bad behaviors. But we also, I think, are rightly nervous about introducing more unilateral authority to discipline players because we've seen how, both in baseball and in other leagues, that has sometimes gone very wildly awry. So yeah, I imagine that we will probably be a bit surprised if there is any player discipline at all with how light a touch it might end up entailing just because this is sort of unprecedented territory in this particular way but i don't know for the front office stuff i think we have a lot more recent precedent that we can point to even if it involves a different class of bad behavior so yeah so then

it'll be a question of can we connect this thing that was happening on the field and in the tunnel and in the dugout with people upstairs? And did they have knowledge of it? And did they instigate it? And I don't know. Maybe we'll see. So yes, but as you were saying, it's a lot of dead air, players adjusting to try to prevent this. And it could also have some effect on their performance, one would think, just if this is in their head, if they're paranoid that their signs are being picked up. And it's just another thing to worry about, like you're trying to just execute your pitches and now you're wondering if you have the signs right. And, oh, no, am I have the signs right. And oh, no, am I forgetting the signs because we've got five different sets of signs. And, you know,

I guess if every team is doing it that way all the time, then it's kind of a level playing field. But if we could get away from that entirely, like instead of just making increasingly complex versions of the traditional system, maybe we just wipe out the traditional system entirely and we just go away from the old style of sign calling. And it seems like you should be able to do it. And so when Sam and I talked about it on the last episode, we were talking about how maybe if the catcher has a headset, maybe it's a problem because he's audibly calling signs and maybe the hitter could hear him. And we were thinking, well, you could make sounds or something, and then at least no one else would be able to hear it other than the hitter. We got some emails about this. So I'll read one from another Ben who says,

to avoid sign stealing, why not have the catcher be the one with the earpiece? The pitcher would have the headset and could just tell him what pitch he wants. That would also save time by avoiding confusion. So reverse the traditional direction of the sign calling and just have the pitcher throw what he wants to throw and tell the catcher what he's throwing. What do you think of that solution? I just, that seems like a solution that is unnecessary given that we have the power, we have the technology to maintain the existing kind of relationship between a pitcher and

catcher without having to alter that in any sort of meaningful way. We could just introduce, I mean, I know that you could potentially overhear, I guess, I guess, but I don't know. I think that you could figure a way to make the headset sufficiently responsive without having to shout about it so that the batter can hear. It just seems like a, seems like we have other solutions that would be more direct. We should employ those more direct solutions. Yeah. I don't know how much that would affect the pitcher's job. I mean,

I think pitchers are probably generally thinking along with the catcher and thinking about what they want to throw. And we know that of course they shake off the catcher and thinking about what they want to throw. And we know that, of course, they shake off the catcher sometimes. So they have their idea of what they want to do. So maybe it wouldn't be dramatically different. But I don't know. The pitcher is the one who has to worry about throwing the pitch. And that's a difficult thing to do. And why make their job harder, I guess, if you don't have to?

Not that catchers have an easy job, but catchers maybe prepare more because they're going to be in the whole game. So they probably study the scouting reports on opposing hitters more, or at least they probably should or could. So they may have a better idea of what the hitters' weak points are and how to balance that with the pitcher's strengths. And yeah, I just think if you can kind of take that out of the pitcher's realm of responsibility and just say, hey, just worry about throwing the pitch. And if you don't have confidence in this pitch call for whatever reason, then you can tell me that and you can throw something different. But otherwise, I'll lead the way and you can just kind of worry about doing your thing out there.

Yeah, I think that we should not allow misbehavior to alter the existing sort of allocation of duties on the field just because it exists. We should try to correct the misbehavior before we endeavor to alter the way that guys have played the game for a really long time it just seems it seems like giving up let's not give up we can we can get around that machine learning yeah don't let the estrus win don't let them win don't let anyone win or let them win but let them win because they should you know you? You know what I mean? I think it would be funny, though, if suddenly we were to see, if such a shift were to occur,

and suddenly it's just the pitchers doing what the pitchers think is right, and then we would start to get a very weak signal on the value of play calling. Yeah, that's true. It would be a kind, I mean, it would be hard to isolate to just that, but boy, wouldn't that be funny if that was the breakthrough we got.

Can you imagine if we took away framing and pitch calling from catchers? They were just sitting back there. Let people do their jobs. Continue to be a... Yeah, you take away that framing, you stick the umps with just their little brooms. Devastated. Stop it. framing you stick the umps with just their little brooms devastated stop it it's me getting old i can tell what a weird way for it to manifest well we all have anxiety about being replaced with robots some part of our jobs at least so yeah gosh it's relatable all right is there anything

about the astro's science doing that we haven't yet? I'm sure we'll be willing to engage critically with their franchise. And fans of other teams would perhaps be well-served to not engage in too much schadenfreude because you know it's coming for you. Coming for you. So if I were a Red Sox fan, I'd be like, uh-oh, this seems very dicey. Yeah, right. Yeah, I agree. All right. so we'll table that for now and well not completely table it because i was going to use that as a transition into maybe a brief mvp conversation so cody bellinger won the nl mvp award mike trout won the al mvp award i have no problems with either of those

I would not have had big problems if they had gone in other directions I was forced to take very lukewarm stances on this because I was on MLP Network and we were talking about it but otherwise it's such a toss up statistically speaking I did

say that I supported Trout just because obviously I think we are agreed on the MVP award being basically a best player award and not getting too wild about figuring out the precise meaning of value. And to me, value is just who helped their team more, who helped their team win more games, and whether those games were ones with playoff implications or not, that is something that the player is not directly responsible for. And this is an individual award, not a team award. So to me, I think there is a strong case that Alex Bregman helped his team as much as or more than Mike Trout helped his team. But I think it was very, very close.

I think Trout was the better player when he was healthy. Obviously, he missed a little time at the end of the season, and that counts. But he also faced somewhat stiffer competition. Bregman, of course, was not facing Astros pitching, and Trout was. Bregman, of course, was not facing Astros pitching, and Trout was. And just generally, I kind of err on the side of offense if it's a toss-up just because we are still better at measuring offense than defense. And so if you have someone who is the better hitter or was the better hitter in a certain season, then I still have slightly more confidence in that than I do in our defensive evaluation. So for those reasons, I think Trout would have been my choice if I had had a vote. I will also say that Alex Bregman would have been a deserving candidate, but it is perhaps not the worst thing for baseball and for the discourse that an Astros hitter did not win the MVP award in the midst of this discussion?

I was relieved in a way that was profound because I think that everything you just said is right. The difference here was marginal. I think that if one wanted to mount a vigorous case for Alex Bregman, you could do that and no one would look at you funny or or subtweet you you'd say yeah alex bregman really good and of course as we talked about we don't know exactly how much we don't first of all we don't know for sure although we don't know we don't know am i trying to say that right we don't know we don't know we don't know um the how long the sign stealing stuff may have persisted so we don't know if it carried't know how long the sign-stealing stuff may have persisted. So we don't know if it carried into this season,

and we don't know exactly how much it helped. But if we were going to ballpark it, if we were going to say, eh, we might say we think it did because it seems likely that once you cross that Rubicon, you're not going back. And also that how much did it help? Well, some. It probably helped some. It probably helped some. It probably helped a little bit.

Like Alex Bregman is a terrific ball player, and I don't mean to take anything away from his sort of innate skill. I think he is a really good player. But if it helped anyone, it probably helped them some. And the difference between him and Mike Trout is some. It's a little bit. It might have only helped a little bit, but it's a little bit. And so if it had made, if he had emerged victorious,

I think that in a way that I would feel bad about for him, because I don't know one way or the other if he was a participant in this, don't know, that I think people would have thought, well, the difference between them isn't very significant. But then again, the difference between the difference in a help that a sign stealing guy probably receives probably not very great either. Wonder if the difference is, uh, is, is somewhat that wonder if the gap is actually larger because, uh, he was helped by nefarious means.

We don't know. And so I am very glad to be able to sidestep that entire conversation because the baseball, it's been a bit of a bummer on its own i don't need more bummers i'm sort of i'm i'm reaching my limit on baseball bummers would prefer to have no more yeah right obviously the votes were cast before these recent revelations came out and i don't know that i would have changed my mind on this. I think I'd be in favor of Trout winning regardless. So, but yes, if it's a toss up and you figure there's some chance that Bregman may have benefited from this,

then I guess you could use that as a tiebreaker. Anyway, it's just not a conversation we need to have now. We don't need to question whether that result is illegitimate, whether Mike Trout got jobbed because Mike Trout won. have now we don't need to question whether that result is illegitimate whether mike trout got jobbed because mike trout won and this is his third mvp award he has already received a very impressive number of mvp awards even though he is still pretty young and even though he very easily could have won a couple more awards and it's sort of like with Verlander, which, you know, that was pretty much a toss up to Verlander Cole. But I am, in a sense, sort of pleased, I guess, that Verlander won.

I don't know who I would have voted for. I never had to make up my mind about that. And I wouldn't advise anyone to vote according to like a makeup call. I wouldn't say, you know, well, he should have won that year. So give him a boost this year. But if it works out that way legitimately, then that's fine. Because I feel like there are years where Verlander could have won, probably should have won and didn't. And there are years where Trout could have and should have won and didn't.

and didn't, and there are years where Trout could have and should have won and didn't. And so if it was kind of a 50-50 coin toss thing anyway, then I'm not upset that the person who maybe was deserving in previous seasons got the award this time, if all else is equal. Yeah, I am sympathetic to that argument. Tony Wolfe wrote about Trout's third MVP for us at Fangraphs and sort of made a similar call, right, that these are largely coin flips, but there are other coin flips that Trout could have been on the winning side of and wasn't. plus runs and mike trout makes this list he's he's had a 180 wrc plus from 2016 2018 over that span a 180 which is just man aren't we so lucky to get to watch mike trout but you know tony made the point that if bregman had won it would have been it would have been fine but we might have years later looked back and sort of looked quizzically at the fact that a guy who had this kind of run went away from it without winning an MVP. And so, yeah, I'm fine with the coin flip kind of landing Trout's way in much the same way that I was fine with Verlander winning.

I'm a little bummed for Garrett Cole just because he was so sparkling, but I will admit that part of that impression is absolutely colored by the postseason that he had which isn't relevant to the the vote because votes are cast prior to that so man I just like really lucked out with my voting I just got to pick an easy one I just voted for Jordan Alvarez and everyone else did too and nobody's asked me about it not even once yeah great I'm still very nervous about it though. I still don't really understand why we limit the voting pools to just 30 writers. It makes no

sense. It really doesn't. No. I don't want to, I mean this impacts me in the sense that I basically never get to vote on any awards because I'm in the New York chapter of the BBWA which is very crowded and the votes rotate. And so I never get one, which, you know, I don't mind that much, but I would happily vote if I were eligible to. And I just don't understand beyond that, beyond like giving everyone a chance to do it. It just seems like, why would you willingly choose to decide this based on a much smaller sample than you need to like there are hundreds of writers in the bbwaa we already have

hundreds of writers voting on the hall of fame there's no like problem with soliciting that number of votes so why restrict it to 30 mean, 30 is such a small sample that it may not reflect the larger will of the writers as a whole. So I don't really know why we do it this way. Yeah, it seems very silly to me. It seems that you are prone to, as a result of this, maybe not prone, but at least susceptible to myopic, picky, allegiances emerging in a way that could really impact an important race. And we tend to forget what those little bits and bobs are over time. And then we look back on a guy's career and say, oh, well, there hasn't been a, you know, this guy only had the one Cy Young. This guy only was an MVP the one time,

and it colors our understanding of their legacy in the game in a way that matters a lot for Hall of Fame selection and all sorts of stuff. So it just seems like it would be to the association's benefit to reduce the risk of something like that mattering, you know. You just have a far lower chance of it getting out of whack if you have a larger voting body. And it seems very strange and silly to me that as someone who was in the BBWA for the first time, this was my first year in the association, I had a vote. And, you know, like, I think David Lorla gets his Hall of Fame vote next year. And

I don't know that he's ever voted for uh an end of year award just because the boston chapter is also quite crowded so it does seem a little a little goofy um yeah it's not like it's a privilege or something it's not like awarded to the writer who had the best right blogs that year or something it's just like random, I think, or it just rotates. Yeah. Yeah, I don't get it. Yeah, it seems very strange. It seems like it would just beat everyone's benefit to spread out that kind of thing. We could all feel a little less nervous about it. I can't imagine how nervous I would have been if I had had to cast an MVP ballot.

I mean, I wouldn't have because I think I would have just voted for Mike Trout because I think that that was the right choice. But yeah, it can wreck you. We should decrease the pressure on any one writer. It is sort of odd that Trout has three MVP awards. And I think if you go by Fangraphs War, at least, he didn't win any of them in his three most valuable seasons. It is pretty wild. Yeah. His top Fangraphs of War seasons are 2012, 2013, and 2018 because this year he didn't have the playing time and other years he didn't have the playing time or didn't have the performance. And yeah, he didn't win for any of those years because it was the Cabrera years or it was the Mookie year. So that is sort of strange that you could have as few seasons as he has and as many MVP awards as he has. And yet none of them being in his actual most valuable seasons, at least according to Fangraph.

So, yeah, that's odd, but oh well. It's a little goofy i will say i remain just uh thrilled all the way to the ends of my fingers for both marcus simeon and katel marte what a good job guys look at you look at you getting all them mvp votes i don't know just makes me happy yeah it was great and everyone in the nl field was deserving bellinger yellich couldn't go wrong with either of those guys. Rendon, obviously. Great season. So yeah, okay. Nothing to complain about. There's a part of me that almost misses when there was something to argue about, but not really. I guess it's probably better for all of us. We got plenty of other stuff. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's not like there's any shortage of pleased to see him get another chance. I think it seemed like he sort of got a raw deal. He kind of built the Boston team that won in 2018 or had a big part in building it,

but was not there to reap the rewards. And I don't know whether he was too covetous of prospects and whether he held onto prospects too long and you actually did need a Dave Dombrowski to come in and say some of these prospects are not indispensable we can actually go out and get Chris Sale maybe you did I don't know and maybe Charrington will have learned lessons from that or maybe he thinks I was proven right in the long run by the fact that that team did as well as it did but obviously I think the Pirates needed some sort of change. I don't know how well Charrington can do if he still is not able to spend there.

That seems like maybe a bigger impediment to success. But it seems like he earned another shot. That's about all you can say about him. He seemed to do a pretty good job of developing talent and stockpiling talent, and it paid off for Boston, and now the Pirates can hope it pays off for them. Yep. All right.

So Gabe Kapler, new Giants manager. Bit of a backlash to this hiring, stemming from the 2015 sexual assault incident involving two minor league players on the Dodgers, which he tried to handle without telling police. Yeah, not aided by the man himself and some of his clumsier comments. Should I just read this? I guess I should just read it. It's probably good to be precise. So when he was introduced, and I'm reading from the the tweet there may have been more in the transcript so i will preface it by saying that but this was from alex pavlovich gabe capler said

he spoke to his mom a lot over the past month for quote obvious reasons he regrets that he did not talk to her about what to do during dodgers incidents. Yeah. So here's the thing about this, and I'm going to just say this. We have to, at some point, be responsible for our own behavior. And I am sympathetic to the idea and think that it is valuable to when one encounters people with life experiences that are different from one's own to listen to what they say and to have those life experiences adjust your understanding of the world and your obligations to other people to better equip you with empathy for the situations that other people

find themselves in. I think that's a natural and important part of being alive. That is part of being a human. Gabe Kepler was like 40 when the Dodgers stuff happened. And while I don't think that there is any upper bound to the age at which people can learn things, there comes a point, especially when you are in a professional setting where dealing with these kinds of incidents is sadly a reality that you are going to have, where we might expect that you have learned your lessons sufficiently and don't require the chiding of your mother to do a better job. And I think that baseball would be well served by viewing these kinds of incidents and handling them with integrity and care for potential victims and with an appropriate amount of seriousness in the moment, not months or years later, as a prerequisite for that job. It should just be part of the thing that a team evaluates

a candidate for a major front office hire, for important field staff, what have you. It should just be one of the things, much like being on the same page about how often you bunt, that is just part of your job interview. Because we are lousy with smart baseball folks who want opportunities to be in leadership positions. And we shouldn't have to settle on any of the stuff. We shouldn't have to. And we should expect that this is just handling this stuff in a way that is thoughtful and appropriate is a prerequisite. And if it's not, then we're going to continue to have incidents like this handled in a way

that we all get frustrated by and that have very real impacts on people. And so I found this very disappointing because, I don't know, man, you continue to learn and grow your whole life, but how to be decent and responsible in tough moments like that, even though they are very hard to navigate, it just seems like a thing we should be able to expect. And so I was bummed, Ben. I was bummed out by this very tan man's remarks. Were you mollified at all by Farhan Zaidi's remarks where he perhaps belatedly, but came out and said, I wish we had handled it differently. I wish we had asked different questions. He at least didn't mention his mother that I heard.

I guess I'll answer that two ways. I'm encouraged by the acknowledgement that things were done incorrectly because it sets a standard for how we evaluate future behaviors that might fall into that same category. And it suggests a taking of responsibility for future behavior. But I am also not mollified because I think we very rarely, Ginny Sorrell wrote a very nice piece about this at Baseball Perspectives today, that, you know, there is a lot of saying we will do things differently, I have learned.

But there's very little closing of the loop around whether demonstrating that that's actually happened. And I understand that the way that you demonstrate that has happened, unfortunately, involves future incidents that look like that and then being handled differently. So that's suboptimal. And I am sympathetic to the difficulty of sort of, you know, showing that growth absent an unfortunate incident like that. But yeah, I'm glad that I and I didn't expect any different. I'm glad that he wasn't defiant in the face of questioning around that stuff, which I suppose is always a possibility. But I think that saying you wish you had handled a bad thing differently is sort of just the bare minimum that one can do. And while I'm glad that that is the external posture of the organization, it's now on them to sort of walk that walk in a real way going forward. And I think it is appropriate to be skeptical of how much that is a motivating impulse of the organization if the way they demonstrate that is then to hire someone who seems to not have fully learned those lessons. So I think that,

like, yes, and. I'm hopeful that they will live up to the standard that they have set i remain skeptical that they will do so until we see them do it and given that it is 2019 and we're still having these conversations i think sadly that kind of skepticism is probably appropriate yeah it sounded like and i wasn't listening to the conference call, but from what people said who were, that maybe they weren't totally prepared for this or, you know, conference call, press conference, that there was kind of a long delay, that it didn't sound like Saidi sort of had a statement prepared. And maybe they underestimated the degree to which this would cause kind of an uproar. I don't know. Maybe they thought, well, this was a while ago and he was just managing with this other team.

So why would it be a problem if we brought him in to manage again? I don't know if that's what they thought or if Zaidi just thought, well, I have a relationship with Kapler and we go back a bit. And I guess he just made a calculation that, well, that's more important to me, which is, you know, maybe why it is not really a great defense.

It's just, yeah, you can acknowledge that we did things wrong, but ultimately he's saying that, you know, what matters more is that I guess I get along with this guy and, you know, it'll help us have a good relationship in the future. I don't know. I mean, if Zaydi is saying, well, we can't hire this guy because of these Dodgers incidents, then is he also saying that he shouldn't have a job? He was responsible for it, too. He shouldn't have a job because he was responsible for it too. So there's probably a part of him that maybe doesn't want to hold Kapler fully accountable for it because then he'd have to hold himself fully accountable for it. And I don't know. It's tough because they were both a part of this.

So you can't really separate them, even though I guess Kapler was more directly involved probably with those actual incidents. Yeah, I think, you know, in terms of what we might expect from those public statements, I think we probably got what we could have expected. But you're right that the real difficulty here is that they are both associated with these incidents, one maybe much more closely than the other. But the range of options he could suggest once it comes to both of them being on board is sort of limited because they're both tainted by this and haven't seemed to not fully appreciate the severity of it, at least in terms of the likelihood that they're going to continue to be questioned about it. And given some of the other organizations around the game

that have seemed to misunderstand the timeline on which they'll be held accountable for these things, it was a bit discouraging. So you didn't just learn from your colleagues in Houston that you don't get to dictate how long you talk about this stuff? Really? We're not learning those lessons yet? So, yeah, I found that to be disappointing. But, you know, they will have...

The sad fact of the matter is that they will probably have an opportunity to show how much they've grown because these moments keep presenting themselves to us. So I hope that if they are faced with another moment where a player behaves in a way that is inappropriate, that they will do better. I hope, of course, that they don't have to prove that to us at all. But it seems likely that they will just like Kapler to want to invite this criticism because there are a lot of good qualified potential managers out there probably.

And I don't have a very strong opinion on whether Kapler was a good or bad manager. I know that he was a divisive manager and there were some embarrassing incidents that maybe it seemed like he learned from when it came to like not having a pitcher warmed up, that kind of thing. Or maybe, you know, having too quick a hook at times and not considering how it would play in the clubhouse and all of that. But, you know, it wasn't like he was some sort of managing savant, it didn't seem like. If he had been he probably still would be with the phillies and so if you can choose from a fairly large pool of potential candidates then why choose that one like not that capler should be banned from baseball or something but just like you know there are a lot of options out there yeah and is the difference

between them so great that it is worth welcoming this this criticism and especially when you're the giants and you had the whole larry bear fiasco last year where yeah he was caught on camera pushing his wife to the ground and suspended for three months and so you know this is another story to add to that one so it's a kind of a curious choice and maybe they didn't really realize how it would be perceived or at least how it would be perceived online i don't know how it's perceived offline those are two different worlds yeah yeah we'll see yeah it just i think it's a great point. It's part of why these moments end up being so discouraging because like you just said and like I said, we're lousy with smart baseball folks.

And I think that we can probably find a couple who don't have this kind of prior indifference or bad behavior associated with them. And I'm not saying that Kapler should be banned, but I think that there are a lot of really qualified folks who would do well with a management opportunity. And when candidates who aren't even universally acknowledged as really, really good at the thing they do then get second chances it just makes you wonder when there will actually be a meaningful cultural shift around this stuff and for a team to not appreciate or anticipate that this would be a thing that they would be

held accountable for and questioned about is is also discouraging because it just makes you wonder how important they think this sort of stuff is. So. Yeah. All right. Well, we answered one email. I guess we didn't get shut out. And just to end on a nice happy note, I will tell everyone that the Effectively Wild Secret Santa signups are live right now. So if you are interested in taking part in a baseball themed Secret Santa signups are live right now. So if you are interested in taking part in a baseball themed Secret Santa with other Effectively Wild listeners, which I recommend, I did it last year and it was great. I think we had, I don't know, close to 200 people did it last year, the first time that it had ever been tried. And I got a great Shohei Otani t-shirt.

It's Otani in the Nintendo font and I think I wore it at our live podcast we did at Saber Seminar great t-shirt that someone gave me I don't even know who someone secret a secret Santa out there so if you are interested I'll be doing it again this year

and many other listeners will too signups will be open until November 25th, and it's a $20 recommended limit. I guess you can give whatever you want. If you want to pay off someone's student loans, go for it. But $20 is the recommended limit, and you're just supposed to give a baseball-themed gift.

And so you sign up. We have a sign sign up that listener Zach Wenkos who has taken the lead on organizing this both years thank you to Zach he has set up this registration at a site called Elfster and it's for effectively wild listeners only so I will

link to it and the show page at Fangraphs and encourage you all to do it sometime in the next week or two and maybe I'll be giving you a gift or maybe you'll be giving me a gift. It's great fun. I didn't realize that that shirt was from the Secret Santa. I can

testify that that is a very good shirt. Yeah, cool shirt. Very cool shirt. It's fun because if you're in the Facebook group, once these gifts start shipping, people start posting their gifts. And there are these long threads of just gifts that people gave each other. And it's a lot of cool baseball stuff.

So it is good feelings, glad tidings. So if you want to participate, I encourage you all to do so. Yeah. All right. So that will do it. All right. So that will do it. And I guess next time we talk, or if you didn't get a ticket in time, don't despair. You'll be able to hear all of our bad jokes just a couple of days later. All right. See you then. See you then. So a couple of quick things to add here.

One, since Meg and I finished recording, there's been another little flare up in the sign stealing discussion. So you Darvish, who seems to be at the center of all of this and is acquitting himself quite well, responded to someone's tweet who identified a video from something that Yu Darvish had said that Darvish remembered a game from this season in which he stepped off the mound multiple times because he saw something unusual. The batter had looked out to left center field before the pitch instead of having his eye on the pitcher. So the Bleacher Nation Twitter account went looking for what he was talking about. And given that there have been rumors about some Brewers sign

stealing, he looked at Darvish's start in Milwaukee. And the Brewers bullpen is out in left center. And yes, the video is somewhat suggestive. Jelic's eyes dart to his left just as the sign is shown, and then Darvish steps off. So Darvish found this tweet, and he replied, I'm not sure what he is trying to do, but to be clear, his eyes move first. That's why I step off. So he's saying it was somewhat suspicious, but then he did add that that doesn't mean that the brewers are stealing signs. I don't know if Christian Jowich saw that second tweet about it not meaning that the brewers are stealing signs because he quote tweeted Darvish and said, be better than this. Nobody needs help facing you,

which is not nice. You Darvish is a pretty good pitcher. I'd say that people would benefit from help against him. And in fact, Josh Donaldson then replied and said, hey, I could use some help. Tell me what you know. Anyway, this is not necessarily proof that the Brewers or Christian Jelic were stealing signs, although Jelic did somewhat famously slug 750 at home this year with better strikeout and walk stats. Haven't dug into the even deeper level stats to see what those show. And a single player's

home run splits are a smaller sample than a whole team's, obviously. But this is kind of the culture that we find ourselves in now, where everyone's accusing everyone of everything. And it could be true. There's no way to know for sure. That's one of the unfortunate byproducts of this sign stealing scandal, is that you start seeing sign stealing everywhere, and it may or may not be there. But, of course, it might. Now, one more thing I want to say here, and it may or may not be there, but of course it might. Now one more thing I want to say here, and this is in response to something that keeps coming up about the Astros, and Sam and I mentioned it briefly on the last episode, but I keep seeing the stats cited that the Astros had a dramatic strikeout rate decline between 2016 and 2017,

and they absolutely did. And so people are citing that as evidence that, yes, they must have started sealing signs in 2017, and that's why the team stopped striking out so much. And I'm not trying to be an asterisk apologist here. I think what they did is wrong. I think they should be punished for it. I think they should be punished for it regardless of whether it worked or not. But I do still think that we should try to be somewhat intellectually rigorous when we actually look for evidence or proof of this. The proof can just be that Mike Fiers said they were doing it, that many other people confirmed that they said they were doing it, that we can hear the trash cans banging. All of that is proof enough for me to suggest that this was happening. But if you're going to use the stats to prove that it was happening, then I think

you have to be careful with which stats you cite and how you analyze them, because you can see some things that will inflate the actual effect of this so that it looks like sign stealing is an existential threat to the sport that can have a huge destabilizing effect when it may or may not. It's possible that it does. But if we're going to make that case, we have to use stats that support it. So yes yes, the Astros' team strikeout rate did decrease quite a bit between those two years, but this was entirely foreseeable heading into the 2017 season, before anyone knew about sign stealing. They were projected to have a huge strikeout rate decline at that point,

and we know this because Jeff Sullivan blogged about it for Fangraphs. January 31st, 2017, he wrote a post for Fangraphs called The Astros Have a Completely New Look. And he pointed out that the Astros, who had had one of the highest strikeout rates in baseball in 2016, projected to have one of the lowest strikeout rates in 2017. And again, this is the steamer projection system. It was not that the projection system took into account that they were going to start stealing signs illegally. It was that the projection system looked at the players on the roster and how often they were projected to strike out and produce this team strikeout rate projection. So Jeff wrote at the time, again, January 31st,

2017, quote, non-pitchers for the Astros project to strike out about 17.7% of the time. Last year, they struck out 23.4% of the time. Therefore, there's a projected improvement of 5.7 percentage points. Here's where that would slot in the top 10 year-to-year team strikeout rate improvements since 1950. And it was the top, the very biggest strikeout rate decrease since 1950. So, as Jeff noted, they projected to have this huge strikeout rate decline to 17.7% among non-pitchers, and what happened? That was almost exactly what happened. Their strikeout rate fell to 17.2%, so just barely off of what they were projected to do. And there's no mystery

about why that is. Jeff wrote about it again before the season started. So here's Jeff again, January 2017. The real key is the other players. He's talking about the non-holdover players who were returning from the 2016 team. Last year's six struck out a combined 27% of the time. This year's replacement six are projected to strike out just 16% of the time. Jason Castro is gone, replaced by Brian McCann. Colby Rasmus and Carlos Gomez are gone, replaced by Josh Reddick and Noria Yoki. Carlos Beltran isn't particularly strikeout prone,

and he'll bat most days. Alex Bregman has an excellent minor league record of contact. We know the least about Yulieski Gurriel, but in last year's Cup of Coffee, he whiffed just a dozen times in 137 trips. It's not that every single Astros player now is a contact hitter, but the projected group difference is huge. So, again, it seems almost certain that the Astros cheated in 2017. We have a lot of evidence to support that. But the team's strikeout rate decrease is not evidence in favor of that. But the team strikeout rate decrease is not evidence in favor of that. The team strikeout rate increase was an entirely foreseeable and foreseen by Jeff result of the changes in personnel that offseason. Strikeout wise, they performed almost exactly as projected. So that's all I'm saying. Doesn't change anything about the Astros being bad cheaters. Doesn't change anything about the fact that MLB should throw the book at him. But the strikeout rate decrease is just not the smoking gun that people are citing it as. The smoking gun is the smoking trash can.

And that's all we need here. One last thing. When we were having our production meeting at MLB Network, Smoltz mentioned that there was a time in his career when his team had the opposing pitcher's signs. And I won't mention which pitcher because that was not on air, so I don't know if he would want me to, but he said they had his signs and they knew what was coming and they still couldn't hit him because it was really hard to hit him. He had good stuff, so at least some big league pitchers still pretty tough to hit even if you do know what's coming. And if there's even a seed of doubt in your mind that you might not know, or if you're so focused

on the unfamiliar feeling of knowing what's coming, or you're distracted by looking out to the bullpen or listening for the trash can bangs. Maybe that could adversely affect your performance and it all bounces out. Who knows? Okay, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks to you all for listening.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount Support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Matthew Mudd, Seth Resnick, Justin Dunlap, Dan McBride, and Peter Mazziak. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg,

even though I keep saying we'll get to them and we mostly have not been getting to them. We will get to them, and sometimes we answer just via email, especially if you're a Patreon supporter. Sometimes we answer just via email, especially if you're a Patreon supporter. So email us at podcastatfangraphs.com or contact us via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back with another episode early next week. Banging on a trash can Drumming on a street light Huh? Hey, what the...

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