Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1469: The Cole-Powered Yankees

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller debate the merits of a possible Mike Trout fun fact, banter about Nomar Mazara and the evolving definition of “slugger,” discuss the record Gerrit Cole contract and its implications for the Yankees, the battle to be the best team in baseball, the Dodgers and Angels without Cole, baseball’s competitive balance, […]

I'm trying hard now to take myself away from you And I'm pretty sure that it's something that I can't really do But then you'll find out that it's always been me That's the same thing And I've been wanting for more than nine years to die Hello and welcome to episode 1469 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Ben, I was playing along with the Scott Boris game that you and Meg were doing.

And when it got to apples and onions, I thought, well, that's a very well-crafted, very convincing attempt. I liked it, but I immediately screamed out, fake, because apples and onions, those are the official produce of the state of Washington where Meg lives. It seems too suspicious to me. I did not know that. Right, exactly. It's the two leading exports from their agricultural industry, the state vegetable and the state fruit. I asked Meg whether I was on to something, and she says no, in fact, that I had overthought it. She says that there's nothing significant about it at all, even in her mind subconsciously.

But if it were subconscious, she wouldn't know. That's true, right. Like if you watch that Darren Brown specials from England. Do you ever watch the Darren Brown specials? No. it's a good way to lose an afternoon because he has uh he does these like uh mentalist things where he has like an audience and uh somebody will put a like a word in an envelope and then like he'll he'll guess the word and and in fact the reason that they chose that word is because like four and a half weeks earlier darren brown sent them a like a brochure for a watch catalog and

on the seventh page of the watch catalog the word that he wanted them to say was on the page and he knew that they would see it somehow it's very mysterious and it's not that convincing all right i have a fun fact for you i want to know if you think it's a good fun fact okay uh mike trout of course drafted in i course, drafted in. I like it. Drafted in 2009 by the Angels. So the last draft of that decade, Mike Trout, first round pick, 72.5 war in this decade. And according to a chart in an article at Beyond the Box score today, I can see that the Angels' entire 2010s drafts, every player they've drafted in the 2010s,

have produced about 40 war this decade. They are second to last in baseball, ahead of only the Giants. So Mike Trout, last first round pick of the 2009s, has 72.5 war. Every player picked this decade, 40 rounds 10 years have so far combined for about 40 good fun fact i think i need a little more context just to calibrate my expectations for what a decade's worth of drafting typically gets you so does it have every team's on there do we know what the the average amount that one would get from a decade's worth of drafts would be? I'm sorry to say that we do.

Okay. Yeah, and this is why I think that the fun fact is not that great. The Mariners are the median team at about 70 war. And so the Angels are second to last. I dropped that in hoping that you would just assume that if they were second to last, they must be very low. But in fact, there are like nine teams under 50, including like the Padres, who have had a great farm system for the last few years. I mean, obviously, many players drafted in the 2010s have had no career at all, but will. And then most who have are still.

So here are the players that the angels have drafted that have added value uh the best player they drafted this decade thus far is cole calhoun with 16 war uh mike clevenger who has produced his war elsewhere but was drafted by the angels and traded has 13 and so you know calhoun probably i mean probably he could but he probably doesn't have like a ton more war in him. My guess is if Calhoun has 16 now, if I had to guess, he'll probably retire at 21 or something like that. And Mike Clevenger, he's on the upswing. So he has 13, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he retired with something like 30 or so. CJ Krohn had six.

Probably not a big war monster going forward. 2012, they didn't draft anybody who has produced a single war. 2013, they didn't draft anybody who's over two. 2014, they have Sean Newcomb, who is at three and a half so far and could have a lengthy career ahead of him or could not, too early to say. David Fletcher, who's almost at six. And then after that, 2016 on, then we're talking about mostly prospects. Griffin Canning is the one who has made it thus far, and he might have a long future ahead of him. It's hard to know. And so I don't even know if it would be, I mean, Trout's going to keep making war too. I don't even know if at the end of all this,

if I look at this 45 years from now, and it's like Trout 147 and the Angels draft 133 I don't even know if that would be interesting yeah I think just the combination of it not being that unusual obviously it's unusual to draft Mike Trout but even if you drafted just a really good player who was not Mike Trout's level, but was just really good, that might still be enough to be better than a combined poor drafting decade. Between that and the fact that we just don't know what a lot of those guys are going to be worth, ultimately, not that fun, but superficially impressive, perhaps, and maybe helpful just to remind people that the draft is a kind of a dark game and you

take people and you don't know what you're going to get and so it's helpful to remember maybe that if you get one great player that can be better than what you're going to get from several years or even a decade's worth of a lot of lesser players. Yeah, I think that it still is an impressive fact for Mike Trout. It's just a good fun fact has two things going on at once. And what you wanted this to be is both a tribute to Mike Trout and also a statement about the Angels. And it fails on the latter, I think. Yeah. So one thing I want to bring up before, of course,

we get to the big news of the day, the Garrett Cole signing. And much later in the episode, I will be talking to Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus about the baseball because the summary of the latest report commissioned by MLB about why the ball has been behaving the way it has, has been released. So Rob and I will discuss the implications of that. This is a question that we received about another transaction that happened on Tuesday. This is from Ryan, and it's about the Nomar Mazzara trade. Nomar Mazzara was traded from the Rangers to the White Sox. And Ryan says, I get the White Sox official promotional emails as someone who selected them as his favorite team on MLB.com.

This morning, they proudly announced their acquisition of Nomar Mazzara. I pasted the full email below, but it's really that last paragraph that prompted this question. And in that last paragraph, they call him a slugger. Ryan says they call him a slugger despite the fact that he hit just 19 home runs last year and he has never hit more than 20 in a season. His 469 slugging percentage in 2009 ranked 93rd among batters with at least 400 plate appearances, etc., etc. He's never fewer than 19, though. Yeah, no, he's been incredibly consistent with his home run totals, but as the league has hit more and more home runs, he has not. And so I could have sworn that we had defined slugger at some point on the show, but I don't know.

I just went back and I looked at our emails database and I couldn't find a question about it, so perhaps not. I think that Mazzara seems like he should be a slugger. He has been expected to be a slugger. He sort of fits the profile of a player who's that type of player, but he just has not delivered. And if you're hitting 19 home runs and slugging under 500 in this environment, then you the bar for slugger is probably higher or at least if you were to say like someone was a slugging second baseman or something i think you could say that and have a lower standard for what constitutes a slugger than when you're talking about someone who's expected to be a capital s slugger so you think so you think that uh i think there's a difference between being a slugger and using the modifier slugger. You think so? You think that... I think so. I think there's a difference

between being a slugger and using the modifier slugging before you. Yeah, that's true. So if you're Dan Ugla slugging second baseman, I don't know if that necessarily makes you a slugger.

Yeah. Well, I think Ugla was a slugger. I think Ugla was. Yes, but yes, I think that's true. If you were not going to mention the position, it was independent of position, then I guess you would have to hold him to the same standards. But what is a slugger in You could be a bad slugger. For instance, a leadoff hitter is a leadoff hitter if they're leading off,

and a closer is a closer if they're closing. And we don't necessarily have to say whether they're good at leading off. They can be a bad leadoff hitter. There are bad leadoff hitters, and there are shaky closers, and there are unreliable somethings. So I feel like with a player like mazara he's not anything else he's what what he is if anything is a slugger who hasn't done a very good job of slugging thus far right and so i kind of want to i kind of want to stick with it but

this is promotional material here they're not they're saying it specifically because they want me to think that he has slugged and he has not slugged yes so i don't think that it is fair without if to me if they're gonna call him a slugger in this promotional material they need to have have something to back it up. And it can be cherry-picked stats. I'm fine with that. But you do have to demonstrate the sluggingness, I think. Because, yeah, what, 20 home runs puts you, what, like 70th in the majors these days?

If that. If that. Everyone hits 20. And we're talking about a player who's in Texas where if everybody played in Texasxas it would put you even further further behind and so i mean what word would you put other than slugger for him though i mean you just put young right fielder he's not even young anymore by the standards of the modern aging curve yeah i don't so i don't know it's it's tricky I'm sympathetic to it. He does hit the ball.

If you hit the ball, didn't he have the longest home run in the majors this year? I think he did, right? Yeah, that sounds familiar. I mean, that's a slug. Like, you can slug the ball. Slug is an act. And I don't know. Do you have to slug frequently? Can you have batting practice power and be a slugger right do

you have to slug frequently or can you just be capable of slugging i just i don't know i i guess we need to answer this i think that i would say that a slugger is anybody with an isolated power over 200 yeah in extreme circumstances, I might consider different contexts such as park effects or era. Even though we are in an extreme environment right now, I don't feel the need to make an adjustment. I'm still happy staying with 200 and Nomar Mazzara is not that, although last year he was by one point for the first time. He became a slugger. He finally became a slugger. the first time. He became a slugger. He finally became a slugger. Yeah. I'd even say if you have a 500 slugging percentage, that's usually good enough. I guess if you're hitting 330 or something,

then you're not necessarily a slugger, but most people with a 500 slugging percentage are not doing that. And so if I wanted to use a shorthand without having to explain to someone what isolated power is, I might say that. Or presumably there's some number of homers that makes you a slugger. I don't know what that number is. Obviously, like at certain points in baseball history, hitting 20 would have made you a slugger. Now it does not. Maybe 30? Does 30 make you a slugger now?

There are a lot of 30 homer hitters out there, too. Well, and does one year do it? Right. Yeah. This reminds me, I think Meg and I talked in September maybe about a Rowdy Tellez quote because Rowdy Tellez had hit 21 homers and he said that hitting 20 is pretty special. And Meg and I were talking about whether it actually is special. Obviously, it's special in the sense that, hey, he had to meet the major leagues and he had to stay there for a while and he hit major league home runs. So obviously, that's objectively special just getting there. But in a major league context, it's not all that special at this point in history. Raddy Tellez, for instance, has a 449 slugging percentage this year and a 742 OPS. And I guess he just he did make the 200 ISO mark. So he has that going for him.

Yeah. So I think it's fair to say that Tim Anderson is not a slugger. Yeah. And the reason I'm saying Tim Anderson is because I looked up the lowest isolated power for people who slugged over 500. Yeah, he's who I was thinking of when I said if you hit 330. So my first thought of that was actually Joe Maurer. And sure enough, Joe Maurer has the lowest isolated power ever for a 500 slugging percentage. He was a slugger for one season.

He was, but the year he hit 347, he only hit 13 homers. He slugged.507. So he's number one. Tim Anderson is number two. And Tim Anderson, I think it's pretty clear, not a slugger. We don't think of him as a slugger. And he hit 18 homers this year, which is only one fewer than Nomar Mazzara. And he hit 20 the year before, which is the same as Nomar Mazzara, which to me, again, suggests that the word slugger is often used to,

not always, but often used to denote that that is merely the player's signature skill. Not that he's better than others at that skill, but that it rises above his other tools. And we don't think Tim Anderson is a slugger because he does many other things. And we do think Nomar Mazzara is because he otherwise thus far hasn't. And so in a way, when the White Sox say slugger, it's kind of backhanded and it tells you a lot. thing about Rowdy Tellez, who I'm just Googling, and he has been described as a slugger. And again, he's not very good. He doesn't get on base a lot. He was a below league average hitter this year, but A, he looks like a slugger. He's a big beefy guy, which I think is part of it. You can be a slugger and be a rail thin guy, but I think if you look like a slugger you you look the part that helps that certainly gets you described as a slugger more often and if that is your carrying tool that's that's your skill

that's the reason you're there you hit dingers every now and then even if you're you're batting 220 something with a sub 300 on base you're in there because you're a slugger or at least relative to the other things that you do or don't do yeah it was a it was quite a tense race by the way for me and me only watching to see if nomar mazara would hit exactly 20 home runs this year so for people who don't remember this mazara hit exactly 20 each of his first three years and so if you put him into a fun fact which is players who homered 20 or more times in his first three seasons it It was a very small group. It was a group of like 50 players in history, many of them Hall of Famers, and then Nomar Mazzara.

And yet he hit 20 exactly. So he was like the very worst you could possibly be in that fun fact. And so I was hoping he would hit exactly 20 this year. He was on pace for, you know, around that. And then in August, mid-August, he had, I think, a groin or a hamstring injury, missed a bunch of time. He was sitting on 17, and I thought, that's that.ust, he had, I think, a groin or a hamstring injury. Missed a bunch of time. He was sitting on 17, and I thought, that's that. And then he came back in September, didn't hit anymore.

He was pinch hitting like every so often or playing like once a week. And then he hit a homer on September 17th for number 18, a homer on September 22nd for number 19, and then he never played again. It was so close. Crushing. All right. Slugging. 19 and then he never played again. It was so close. Crushing. Alright, well, we have successfully buried the lead again, although we didn't lead off with Opossum's

anal glands this time, but still, we should get to the big news. Garrett Cole is a Yankee and signed a record contract nine years and $324 million with a full no-trade clause and an opt-out after the fifth season. So Steven Strasburg's reign as the highest-paid pitcher in baseball lasted for exactly one day,

if that long. And the market for Garrett Cole that Scott Boris described as room temperature during the day on Tuesday accelerated to a hot climate by the end of the day. I wondered whether he said room temperature because he wanted to give the impression that the known figure out there of 245 was not close. That it was a way of saying the final dollar is going to be much more than the dollar that you've last heard. And so it's not hot. If it were hot, you might start thinking that 245 had gotten it hot, and that was room temperature.

That's what I wondered. All right. Yeah. So I don't know if the Yankees are the owls who are wise and work at night because that's when this deal was announced, or whether they're the Hawks because they swooped in and nabbed the target that everyone was going after. But one way or another, Garrett Cole, perhaps best pitcher in baseball,

certainly projected to be the best pitcher in baseball next year. Is he really? He is, yeah, by I think about half a win over Jacob deGrom. I could go either way with those two guys, but I think they are the top two contenders for that title now. two guys, but I think they are the top two contenders for that title now. So this is kind of a classic old school Steinbrennerian Yankees signing of the sort that we haven't seen in a while, at least on the free agent market, although they did trade for John Carlos Stanton and his giant contract just two years ago. So it's not as if they haven't done this for a while, but

they have had opportunities to sign an ace or acquire an ace. And granted, they got James Paxton just last offseason. He counts, I think, but he was not a big money guy. They were kind of in on Patrick Corbin. They didn't give Corbin the extra year that the Nationals gave him. They were in on Justin Verlander. The Astros got Verlander. They were in on Garrett Cole before the Astrosals gave him. They were in on Justin Verlander. The Astros got Verlander. They were in on Garrett Cole before the Astros traded for him, but the Pirates chose the Astros

prospect package. So they've obviously gotten very far. They've gotten deep into the playoffs, not necessarily going out and signing a high-priced starter since, I guess, Masahiro Tanaka was the last time they made a major free agent splash, and Jacoby Ellsbury was the same offseason. But now they just blew everyone away, I'm assuming. We don't know what the other offers out there were, but this is an enormous number. Not a surprise based on Strasburg's deal, certainly, but a surprise based on strasburg's deal certainly but a surprise based on pre-offseason expectations and just the fact that we haven't seen a nine-year contract for a free agent pitcher since i believe wayne garland in 1976 signed a 10-year deal so this is out of the ordinary but understandable because it's the yankees and it's Cole. Wayne Garland?

Yeah. The who? Yeah, exactly. He didn't last very long. Wayne Garland retired at 30. Yeah, signed a 10-year deal, and I think he lasted for about half of it. Wow. That was like the dawn of free agency when no one knew how it worked.

I wonder. Yeah, I mean, he made $200,000 a year, which is, so it was 10 year and $2 million. So, I mean, it's always hard to figure out what the big contracts were at the time. David Schoenfield just wrote a piece about the progression of the highest paid pitcher in baseball. So I had a little exposure to 1970s salaries this morning. And $200,000 was not a lot, is my understanding.

Yeah, I mean mean it is it seems to me that he could be the highest paid pitcher ever for like a decade maybe five years at least um which i think that uh that's a that's what that's a lot of what these players want i mean they want to get paid They want to get what they feel they're owed. They also, though, like they have, Garrett Cole now has a lot more money than he'll ever be able to spend. And so at a certain point, the utility of a dollar becomes status-based. And so that's why I think you see so much emphasis in some of these big contracts of being more than whoever had signed before,

in particular in setting some new precedent for either the most dollars or the highest average annual value or the longest. And I mean, I was just thinking about who could possibly topple Garrett Cole and probably almost certainly we don't know his name yet. We've never heard his name, right, as a pitcher? Well, the average annual value is just barely higher than what we've seen, right? It's just barely higher than Trout's. I guess it's not that much higher than Granke's. So this kind of is a case where he got the record but didn't blow away the record on a yearly basis. Not on a yearly, but on a total value.

Yeah, on a total. I mean, it's a total outlier when it comes to pitcher contracts. I mean, Strasburg was the record by a decent margin, and this just blew away Strasburg. Yeah, and it's a perfect—I mean, he's the perfect free agent. He's coming off, you know, to— They both were kind of. I mean, they both hit the market at precisely the right time.

But yes, Cole is— To be the—I mean, Cole was hit the market at precisely the right time. But yes, Cole is... To be the... I mean, Cole was not the best pitcher in baseball at any point until like really right now. And it took him these first seven years of his career to become the best player in baseball. And then right when that... Or the best pitcher in baseball. And then right when that happened is when he was available as a free agent. So that's perfect timing.

And he's quite young he's only 28 well i guess what is 29 now just turned 29 and so he's he's a young free agent and everything about him is is perfect and he's perfect for the modern game and so if you start thinking about who is coming up on free agent in the next few years or whatever there there really isn't anybody that you could imagine who's younger than Cole, who is, I don't know, realistically going to be in a position to push even probably even that average annual value until you get to Jack Flaherty. And he's not a free agent until I think 2025 or 2024. Yeah, who knows?

Yeah. And you have Mike Sirocco and you have Luke Giolito and you have Eduardo Rodriguez. Those are players who are kind of near the war leaderboards this year and also, you know, somewhat young. known as the highest paid at your position in baseball, he got it and he's deserving of it and he's going to have it for a long time. And I imagine that's a big, that's something that probably he thought about a lot. So as for the Yankees end of it, I don't know. It's hard to read too much into these things. I think that what we have all come to realize in the last few years is that it is a lot more fun when the billionaires that own these teams see them as fun teams to own and like a fun hobby where you're going to spend a lot of your money just like you would collecting art or extravagant wine and less like you see it as a corporation where you're going to figure out a way to squeeze every nickel out of it

and run it like your private equity taking over some asset. And so in the sense that the Yankees went and did something that's just incredibly fun and very risky in some ways because of the length of the deal and because we had just moved out of this era where we were writing off long pitcher contracts for it seemed like for a while it just it's fun like i'm looking forward to the press conference for this i'm not thinking about year nine at all the most important thing i think if you're a fan of a team right now that a gm can do is convince ownership to spend more money like that to me is the the central task of a g right now that a GM can do is convince ownership to spend more money. Like that to me is the central task of a GM is to go into that owner every day and convince

them that there are good players available, that those good players are better than the players you have, that the money exists in a big pile somewhere and that it's worth spending. And so I'm pleased. I'm pleased with the Yankees that they've ever had necessarily. And it's sort of a relief because for the last year or two, the Yankees have been restraining themselves, and it wasn't clear to what end they were. I mean, if you're the Yankees, are you really going to strive to get under the competitive balance tax threshold

as an end in itself? You would hope that if you're trying to do that, it's because then you're going to do that, it's because then you're going to splurge after that, after you reset their tax rate. And they have done that, and now they are. And I think they can do it without running some preposterously high payroll, because they have a lot of really good young players who do not have a lot of service time, either homegrown or guys they acquired and then revitalized somehow. So when you have Aaron Judge and Gleyber Torres and Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela and Jordan Montgomery and Chad Green and all these guys who are either

pre-ARP players or first-year ARP-eligible players. They're just not making nearly what they're worth, and so that does leave room for you to go out and occasionally get a Stanton or get a Cole, and especially if you're the Yankees, you should do that. And really, I think, in this case,

I don't know that the Yankees could have just walked to another division title without doing something like this. It's a tough division. Last year, they won 103 games, and they won that division fairly handily. But it was a weird year. It's hard to analyze. But, you know, they outperformed their base runs record by nine games, which was more than any other team.

So they sort of got lucky, and yet they also got very unlucky with injuries. And yet they also in another way got lucky. Because their injury replacements were so good. And in many cases performed as well as the first stringers were supposed to. So the point is they're very good. But they weren't unassailable. And they're in a division that right now projects to have three of the top five teams in war, according to fan graphs. So the Rays are very good. The Red Sox could, should be good,

depending on whether they actually hold on to their players or not. And now I don't know whether the Yankees are the best team in baseball, whether this makes them the consensus best team of baseball once the sort of shock of the signing wears off. I think other teams could potentially catch them, but they don't really have any weak points right now because their rotation was their weak point, such as it was, and now they have Cole, and they have Severino for a full season, and they bring back that bullpen, and they bring back the lineup, and there just isn't really any hole on that roster right now. So it's a pretty formidable team, especially once you think about Cole doing what he just did in the postseason and potentially doing that for the Yankees now and not doing that for the Astros, who are still great, but they're the team that has eliminated the Yankees in two of the last three years. great, but they're the team that has eliminated the Yankees in two of the last three years.

And now they don't necessarily have that dominant guy. I mean, they have Verlander, they have Granke, but they do not have Cole. So it's sort of stealing from a direct rival, albeit not a division rival. Yeah. I was surprised thinking about how the Astros, I don't know. The Astros got less formidable to me very quickly. And I mean, just a month ago, I thought, well, this is the best team I've ever seen. Like, they're the best, they're the most talented team, maybe of like, well, of my writing career, maybe of my life. And last night, I was thinking about how they just didn't seem like automatic anymore. And I don't know how much of that is that they're talking about trading Carlos Correa and how much of it is that they're, you know, they don't have Garrett Cole and how much of it is that you can just imagine that, you know,

like various people can get a little older. You could very easily imagine that, you know, say Justin Verlander and Michael Brantley might not be quite as good next year. And, you know, maybe the bullpen isn't quite as effective and maybe they had some way of i don't just hypothetically some way of cheating that they're not allowed to do anymore hypothetically and so i'm probably overreacting there would you still say that they are okay let's just let's just put it this way what ranked team are they right now to you? I think they're probably,

I don't know that there's really any great separation between them and the Yankees and the Dodgers still. And obviously if they do something, if the Dodgers do something, which it seems like they probably will, then maybe that changes the ordering. But they are not worse than third in that group and if they are third they're not separated by much in my mind okay all right well then then they are then then my feeling of them is not being uh quite as

formidable it was wrong it's just uh it was just a sort of a vague feeling and is is not is not accurate like i was trying to i did not have like the charts and the graphs out or anything like It was just a sort of a vague feeling and is not accurate. Like I was trying to, I did not have like the charts and the graphs out or anything like that. But I was trying to think, could I make the case that the rays have passed the astros? And so I haven't, like I said, I have not looked at it. You think the answer is no, I could not make that case. I think not, but I haven't really looked either. So you subtract coal, they obviously are less formidable.

But if you subtract coal from perhaps the best team of all time, or at least what we thought was the best team of all time, you know, six weeks ago. So I don't know whether it's because of the sign stealing scandal that we are now mentally downgrading them, which maybe we should a little bit. I don't know, but that could be part of it. So another thing I was thinking about, the Yankees' streak of consecutive winning seasons now is up to 27. They have not had a losing season since 1992, and it's hard to envision them actually having one anytime soon. It's like, what scenario could they possibly have a losing team now in the foreseeable future? Because now they've got Cole, they've got all these younger guys who are still signed for quite some time. time they seem to have surmounted the threats that could have taken them down like they had this historic injury year and they didn't miss a beat they had at least one year i think and possibly two under gerardi where they were kind of going through a transitional period and i think they were outscored in at least one or two of those years they were outscored they actually were outscored three out of four years.

Huh? Yeah. And that still didn't stop them. They still had winning records. So if you were going to get them, if you were going to stop the streak, that was when they were vulnerable. And now I just, I don't know if they are for a while. So I'm wondering how long they can extend this thing.

It just, it could keep going and going. Yeah. Well, I mean, clearly next year there there's almost no scenario at all like you can't even imagine a worst case scenario for every player like if you did their 10th percentile projections across the board they might still be an 81 win team if you're just focusing on the streak on that alone then there are 92 win teams and 94 win teams that fail to win 81 games all the time, you know, like true talent teams that just underperform,

that Pathag goes against them, that they get hurt, that someone gets worse faster than you expected, that it all collapses. I mean, there are World Series winning teams that bring everybody back and then are losing teams the next year. So it would not surprise me if this streak did not survive another, say, 17 years. So I am willing to say that if you wanted to make a bet right now, I would say you give me 23 years and I'll take a losing season. But otherwise, right, what we've sort of seen is that teams that, well, I mean, this is one of the side effects to smart teams and rich teams being the same teams

and smart teams and smart teams and rich teams being somewhat ruthlessly small market in some of their decision-making. It's often unsatisfying, but it does create a certain amount of sustainability. And even teams that are losing momentum from that, like the cubs are still a good team and the red sox are still probably a good team and the yankees even

when they pulled back and were trading people away they were still a pretty good team but i mean in the last three years like the dodgers and the astros have managed to sit above 100 wins and in true talent for three years in a row and And the Yankees have been right there with them. And it might be that we're moving into an era where we do see teams that have figured out a way to kind of stay at that dominant level for a really long time, which has its pluses and its minuses. Yeah. Another thing I was thinking about, obviously, this is another sign of a resurgent free agent

market. Although, of course, this is another sign of a resurgent free agent market, although, of course, it is just an ultra elite player. So, of course, he was going to get paid, but he got paid quickly as opposed to the elite players last year who did not get signed until February and March in Machado's and Harper's cases. And I think it's kind of interesting to think about how that changes the experience of following the offseason for a fan, because on the one hand, when everyone was lamenting how long it was taking those two guys to sign last year, part of me was thinking, well, they're going to sign at some point before the season starts. So does it really matter when they sign it's the same number of moves being made

either way for instance now we have strasburg off the board and wheeler and cole and grandal and maybe rendon goes sometime soon and then if you're having a very busy november and december you almost have to have a less busy january and and March. And so there's inevitably going to be a lull in the baseball offseason because there are only so many major moves that can be made. So you could say, who cares? Now we're all just going to be bored in February instead of in December. On the other hand, I do think there are advantages to having it happen in this way. are advantages to having it happen in this way. A, you get less labor strife and tension. You get less of a feeling that teams are trying to screw the players out of their money

because, hey, the deals are done. And obviously this doesn't resolve some of the issues with baseball's economic structure, but at least it doesn't inflame those tensions further. You also just escape the incredibly repetitive stories of when is this guy going to sign and here's the latest rumor and none of the rumors actually come to fruition and you're just sick of hearing about those guys instead of being excited when they sign so that when it finally happens, it's just a relief and it's like, finally, all right, we don't have to talk about this anymore, as opposed to the excitement of it. And I think it gives teams time to build anticipation for the coming season.

They can construct their marketing and promotion around this new star that they sign. They can sell season tickets and that's sort of exciting. And maybe the next dominoes fall so the teams that missed out on strasbourg and cole now they'll be fighting over the leftovers and so i think there are advantages to it as long as we keep in mind that we're still going to have a pretty boring time at some point because that's just the off season. There's no actual baseball going on, so sometimes it's going to get slow. I don't think the timing of the signings was the primary thing the last couple years

that was causing the concern. I think that it was an expression of the concern, but I think the big thing in the last two offseasons was that salaries were actually going down, that the amount of money being spent on players was going down for the first time money being spent on players was going down for the first time or i guess there was that i think there was one blip out a year of not that long years though yeah in back-to-back years the amount of money spent on players had gone down for the

first time and you know more or less in forever and it wasn't like the fact that no players were signing in a robust market where everybody was getting what we were expecting them to get. It would just be like, oh, well, this is an interesting thing. I wonder why this shift in the Major League Baseball rhythm is happening. Why are teams doing this? And it would have been kind of an interesting, non-troubling story. It was that it was happening alongside the more suspicious thing. And I still I mean, I genuinely don't know what to make of the fact that that things have have been so different

this year. It's not like, like, I don't know. I don't I don't know what caused it. I don't know what the narrative is. I see that there's a lot of grasping for a narrative out there. Some some sort of more conspiratorial explanations, some more, I don't know, like sort of more narrow explanations. Dan Zimborski was making the case that the difference between the free agent market where the top players have actually been getting paid, you know, quite a bit versus the suspicious, not suspicious, but the arbitration non-tenders that we talked about where it seemed like there were a bunch of players who were being non-tendered,

which would seem to be something from a previous offseason, like last offseason, where teams didn't want to pay perfectly reasonable prices for perfectly reasonable players. And Dan was making the case that this is the long-awaited realignment of values where teams are finally not treating value linearly, but that a top player, you know, a six-war player is no longer considered twice as good as a three-war player

or six times as good as a one-war player, but kind of more exponentially good because of the scarcity of those types of players and the way that you can use the extra roster spots and things of that nature. and the way that you can use the extra roster spots and things of that nature. So Adam Jones is going to Japan even as these giant deals are being signed because Adam Jones is kind of in this expendable class of player now where teams are not paying for just your generic veteran really anymore. And so he can go make more money overseas. Yeah, and so if you extrapolate that part of the argument, you would say, well, we're being distracted right now by the very shiny Garrett Cole signing and the very shiny Steven Strasburg

signing. But in fact, the underlying structure is still very dangerous for the players as a whole that if you're a young player, if you're a developing player, or if you're a young player if you're a developing player or if you're a marginal player then the forces are still going to be going against you and and all of the the troubling signs of the last two years are still there for like 21,700 of the 22,000 professional baseball players and that right now we're we're only seeing that the benefits are going to the extreme upper end of talent. So that's a possibility. Although it's not just those guys, really.

It's, you know, it's also Mike Moustakis is cashing in all of a sudden or Grandal. And Grandal's really good, but he wasn't paid like he was really good in the previous two off seasons. And then it's even like, you know, relievers or Cole Hamels or really there haven't been any well-known free agents this off season who have signed for a number that you look at and think that's all. It's mostly been that much. And, you know, we talked about Jose Abreu, for instance, and the extension he got. So it seems like it's not just the elite guys this offseason. It seems like a lot of lower tier players, not fungible, disposable players, but not necessarily stars either, are still doing pretty well on the whole. Yeah, 6,000 professional players, by the way. My math failed me while I was sort of suspended midair.

Mike Moustakas is good. Why are we badmouthing Mike Moustakas? Well, because teams were the last couple off seasons. He's not better than he was. I know, but he deserved more in the last couple off seasons. Like the teams that signed him were thrilled. But why all of a sudden did it correct? That's the question.

Right. thrilled but why all of a sudden right well correct that's the question right so is it that there's just a mix of more competitive teams this year it just so happens that you know the yankees reset their tax threshold and now they're ready to spend and the white socks are are about to be good and so they're ready to spend and the rangers suddenly are ready to spend. Oh my gosh, Ben. Yeah. This just came across the Twitter. The Rockies are willing to listen on Nolan Arenado. And so while we have this all going on, this conversation we're talking about, we have the simultaneous conversation that feels so 2017 of Carlos Correa is apparently being shot and Nolan Arenado and Chris Bryant and Mookie Betts. I mean, how are these things happening in the same sport?

Yeah, it's really perplexing. I cannot make a narrative happen out of this. I am really struggling with it. And I'm wondering, it's unsatisfying, but I'm wondering how much of this is just like chaos and not actually that well thought out or governed by anybody. And so you can have very conflicting things from day to day, team to team, player to player. And that there is a certain amount of this that cannot be fit into a single narrative. I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not.

I mean, it certainly seems like the movement of the previous two years was so consistent and forceful and in one direction that it felt like the narrative had become undeniable. But this has been an odd offseason. It has not fit in a lot of the same ways. And I'm not sure whether that's a reason to say that things have changed or if it's a reason to say that these are carve-outs or if it's a reason to say that um that these are carve outs or if it's a reason to say that these are just blips that don't reflect the underlying dynamics at all and that we should not even be making that much about them other than as as outliers yeah or i wonder could it have something to do with teams

planning for the next cpa differently planning for a work stoppage. Cole's contract is nine years. That takes you, I think, into the CBA beyond the next CBA. So, like, I don't know if teams are thinking, well, the next CBA will say this and it will change that. And so we're planning for that. Or we think there will be a work stoppage and we just won't have to even pay the last year of that deal that we just signed this offseason. I don't know what it is, but it is very strange. It's better to have these mixed messages than just to have the negative messages alone. So it's an improvement, but it's a very puzzling one. And just a couple of last things about this. It's interesting that Scott Boris's reputation has been entirely restored, I think, as the markets has. So just in April, late April, Ken Rosenthal was writing about Scott Boris and

essentially saying, well, has he lost his touch? And front offices are saying, well, he doesn't recognize the new reality of the market and he has unrealistic demands and he had a couple players who dropped him for other agents after they were not signed or they signed small deals after rejecting larger deals and then Harper was waiting around forever and Moustakis got his one-year deal and there were questions about well is Boris still good and now Boris is not only representing seemingly every good free agent, but has handled it well as far as we can tell thus far. And he's just done this under so many different conditions. So it was Boris represented the first $100 million contract earner, Kevin Brown, who was the last pitcher as old as Strasburg to land a seven-year deal. He represented A-Rod when he became the first $200 million contract guy. He represented Harper when he became the first guy to go over $300 million. Now he's representing Cole when he becomes the first $300 million pitcher. It's like this is decades going by, owners coming and going,

and front office is operating in a completely different way. And one way or another, Scott Boris is still getting his players paid. And I don't know how much of it is Boris being so great as a salesman or how much of it is like selling himself to really good players who themselves sell themselves to front offices. It's not like Boris necessarily had to talk teams into Garrett Cole being good. And I don't know if he went over Brian Cashman's head. It doesn't seem like that kind of maneuver this time. So I don't know what it is, but he has a proven track record of getting players paid and setting new salary highs over a course of decades. And of course, in a totally different sphere too, he, he did this at the draft level for the longest time and was, uh, he basically, you know, created the modern draft. Well, I guess it's not the modern draft compensation system anymore because eventually

they put strict limits on how much players are going to be able to get. But, uh, you know, he, he more or less created the huge dollar bonus and, and spent 30 years dominating that realm too. Yep. And the last thing I was going to say is that I think from an entertainment standpoint, it's kind of fun to have the best player available go to the Yankees. I know everyone hates the Yankees, but on some level, I think people kind of enjoy hating the Yanke, and it's sort of nice to have them as the big bad villain. So I like it in that sense, but I also would have liked it if he had gone to a less obvious destination like the Angels, for instance, because A, you had this extremely lopsided league this past year. Competitive balance was way out of whack. The standard deviation of team winning percentages was as high as it's been in the expansion era. And if you had transferred Cole's wins from one of the super teams to the Angels, that would have helped correct that unbalance a little bit. And instead, he's going from one super team to another. And instead, he's going from one super team to another.

And of course, as someone who wants to see Mike Trout make the postseason again at some point, especially while he's still in his prime, I would have liked to to Cole around to other players, whether it's Rendon or whether it's, you know, Baumgartner and Ryu or a couple of the lesser pitchers who are still out there. Maybe that is just as good for them because they really just don't have half a rotation right now and wouldn't have even with Cole. But if you're Mike Trout, you might have to be a bit demoralized by not landing the top targets because they sent Joe Madden out there to recruit Strasburg and Cole and Wheeler, and he struck out on all three right now. And so they have to be getting a bit nervous because there's just no pathway to contention for them in 2020 unless they really signed some good free agents and there aren't that many left yeah the counter to that is that they had so many holes that cole might not have made them a good enough team and i just don't know if i can handle

a team that has mike trout shohei otani andleton simmons garrett cole and and still Albert Pujols still being bad every good player they add makes it harder to watch them not make it anywhere there is a part of me that just doesn't want to see them take all the good players into their black hole yeah it's true

alright so we'll see what they do we'll see what the dodgers do and other teams that were in the hunt here and wouldn't be shocked if some of the other remaining big dominoes fall pretty quickly here because it seems like boris said for instance that a lot of teams that are chasing ron are in the right range. So it sounds like he might be amenable to something sometime soon also. So we'll see. Do you think that front office executives know what is different this year? Or do you think there is a narrative that they're aware of? Are there forces that they're aware of?

Or is this just happening in a way that is kind of like above anybody's sphere of comprehension right now? I bet they're pretty puzzled too. I mean, they must talk in a hopefully non-collusive way, but they must be sounding out other people on some level, and they know at least what they're thinking. So they know what one team thinks, which is better than we know. So I would think that there's still probably a lot of confusion, though, because there are clearly teams that are operating in very different ways and seemingly conflicting directions.

All right. Okay. All right. Well, shall we try to speed through the rest of Bill James here? Sure. All right. speed through the rest of Bill James here? Sure. Alright, so last time, or the last time you

and I spoke, we talked about Bill James' essay in the new Bill James Handbook. James, by the way, I did not mention, he no longer works for the Red Sox, so he's just a writer, just like the rest of us. And he wrote an essay for the Bill James Handbook where he laid out 30

ways, 30 rules changes that would address the perceived aesthetic problems with the game today, particularly strikeouts, home runs, and pace of play time of game. So we covered the first 14 last time, and those were mostly related to pace of play and pitching changes and such. So this time we are getting into more of the strikeouts and home runs centric suggestions so rule number 15 this one was sort of new to me move the batter's box one inch farther away from home plate there is now a six inch separation between the plate and the batter's box we could make it seven oh my goodness that's a that's a novel idea i like i without having

thought of it at all i just like that i've never heard this right yeah me neither so his argument could make it seven oh my goodness that's a that's a novel idea i like i without having thought at all i just like that i've never heard this right yeah me neither so his argument is batters stand much closer to the plate than they did 40 years ago and he suggests that's because of batting helmets because they're less scared of getting beamed i guess and so now they are standing closer to the plate that's his argument at least and he also says it's you know less acceptable for pitchers to headhunt and to knock guys down the way that it used to be as well so less fear because of that also and more safety protective equipment elbow guards and other types of guards that players didn't used to have. And so now you have players kind of leaning into the pitch and standing closer.

And he says if a hitter can stand right on top of the plate, that provides three advantages for him. One, it makes it easier for him to get to an outside pitch. Two, it makes it easier for him to pull a pitch in the middle of the plate. And three, it prevents the pitcher from working inside since any inside pitch has a high probability of hitting the batter and putting him on base. And so he says that is a problem because hitters are crowding the plate and trying to crush any pitch on the inside half. And this is his first suggestion for fixing that.

Well, I don't know how much it would affect the hitter. And so this might not be an issue, but I would be worried. To me, it seems like the unhittable pitch in baseball is the strike that's on the outside corner and particularly down. That is the pitch. That's where, for the most part, it feels to me like the strike zone is fought over. Pitchers are trying to get that corner

and also trying to make pitches look like they're at that corner to get you to chase beyond it and if you make it an inch harder to get to that corner it seems conceivable that they're just might not have any chance at all that you just might not be able to ever hit a pitch that is in the strike zone and so that seems like it could be a problem but maybe one inch isn't a factor at all my my batters are bigger i guess they probably have longer arms than they used to yeah on the other hand uh and also well on the other hand or and also maybe that pitch used to be called further off i mean we all remember the old strike zone where sometimes it was six inches off the plate uh and so maybe now that we have an actually regimented strike zone, maybe they don't have to cover as much as it is.

So that all seems fairly fine to me. My preferred, I think that what I would recommend that's along the same lines is that now that we have StatCast, now that we have pitch tracking that's very precise and fine, is I would just make it a rule that if you get hit by a pitch that is not in that is not like in the batter's box that just because it's inside doesn't mean you can get hit by it it has to be far enough inside that it's like in the batter's box so i would just say that like there's that six inch zone between the plate and the batter's box where if it hits you, it's just a ball that you don't get first base. And that seems like it'd be very easy to know instantaneously. I think he may suggest

something like that. We'll get to that in a moment. So his 16th one is actually enforce the rule requiring the batter to stay in the batter's box. Batters like to wipe out the lines that form the batter's box. Stop them from doing that. Use technology to enforce the rule if you have to. He says that he thinks that the rule says that if a batter's out of the batter's box when he hits the ball, he's out, and that if you enforce that right away, then the league would bat 150 or something because he thinks everyone does that. But he says that you can't rigorously enforce it, but you can call out hitters who plant their feet outside the box or step way out of the box to hit the ball.

It would make a huge difference if you just enforce the rule because you would be allowing the pitcher to work inside. I'm going to trust him that this is the issue that he thinks it is. I would not have guessed. If somebody asked me if it's a problem, I have said no nobody ever hardly ever other than i yes definitely the wiping away the the chalk and trying to squeeze that extra inch from where they start i i agree and you could do something about that the stepping way out i i don't see it and so i'm going to trust him that's a thing and say sure right this is sort of like the the pictures coming off the rubber one that we talked about where yeah yeah we just haven't observed this as closely as he seems to have it

does seem weird that they put new chalk down every day and i don't know why they don't have a permanent batter's box there yeah so i would be fine with a permanent batter's box that's part of the field and that you the batter has no influence on at all it does seem very odd that batters get to come out and say changing the rules here i'm just just gonna change the shape of the field just for me and uh it doesn't seem like we need a temporary batter's box we could probably make a permanent one all right 17 this is uh perhaps kind of a controversial one. Get rid of some of the protective gear. So, of course, nobody wants to see batters get hurt, but batters played baseball for 100 years without shin guards and elbow guards and whatever you call those wrist guards. And for that matter, they played for 100 years without batting helmets. batting helmets he says if you cut down on the protective gear you will not increase injuries and you will force the hitters to get off the plate so this is like uh what's that effect called where the bicycle riders right and suddenly they take more risks the yeah uh pelts peltzner

peltzner effect something like that yeah i'll look it up. Peltzman. Peltzman effect. Yeah. Yes. All right. So I think that there are some pitches that hit you in the hand that you can't, that you're not allowing to hit you on purpose. And so, or that, I mean, I guess that's not how the Peltzman effect works. I would say that it is true that not every hit by pitch would still exist in a world without padding, but many would. And this seems like a weird thing that batters shouldn't be allowed to protect their livelihood it's not what nobody goes out there to see a

batter get injured that's not like what we think makes the sport better and and so i am on the batter's side here i think that it is on the fans side as well to say that protection for the batters is good even if it does have these unintended consequences of letting batters have a certain amount of impunity and that changes the offensive game and all that so i would say no to that however i do uh so here's my other here's my the second thing about my don't give them a hit by pitch if it's within six inches of the plate is i would say don't make them get hit by a pitch if it's in the batter's box in order to get first base. I would say give any pitch that is in a designated zone of the batter's box is an automatic hit by pitch, whether it hits the batter or not. And then anything out of that is no base, whether it hits

them or not. And so then that way there is no incentive for batters to get hit. All their incentives would be to avoid all the time and they could still get their bases and pitchers would have a much stronger incentive not to pitch way inside because they would know that it's always going to be a free base i'm now answering a totally different question than phil james's but long story short i'm against this one yeah i'd be wary of taking away pitchers throw harder now pitches move more i think it's just more dangerous they're bigger the pitch gets on you faster than it used to and we they should have had padding then i mean it right they didn't have catcher's pads for a long time it took some time for someone

to say how about that and then they did it and then a bunch of people booed the catcher so you had to deal with that too i mean it's not like we started having padding only when it was a good idea we didn't have it for a long time when it was a good idea right yeah yeah ray chapman didn't die so that we would go back to no batting helmets now yes all right number 18 now tell me if this is what you were sort of just suggesting change the rule from the batter takes first if he is hit with a pitch to the batter takes first if the pitcher throws a pitch that breaks the front plane of the batter's box. That's it. That's my rule. Okay.

So he says make the front line of the batter's box a little bit wider, a little bit brighter. Let's say you put a yellow stripe next to the white stripe so that it's more visible whether the ball has crossed that line and let's also say that you bury a sensor in the ground beneath that that turns on a signal light somewhere if the ball is thrown over that line yeah that's what i'm saying okay except with stat cast yeah all right okay number 19 whatever equipment the batter wears into the batter's box he wears until he gets back to the dugout so if you want to wear the shin guard or the elbow guard or whatever you have to wear it as you run around the bases which i guess he likes partly because of the leaning over the plate thing but also partly because he thinks it slows down the game when batters say on second base have to walk back to first to hand a shin guard to the first

base coach i don't i'm skeptical that it slows the game down so from that perspective i would say that it's unnecessary the other half of it is disincentivizing uh the protective equipment which we have all already gone over i don't want to outlaw it i also don't want to disincentivize it so i would say no the third part of it which is unremarked upon is that it would be more fun to watch players running the bases wearing all sorts of obstacles on their body. And so in that sense, I would say yes, I think that it would be more fun. But to the extent that it would increase lack of player safety, I would say that would be the overriding concern. So probably this doesn't work.

Yeah. All right. Number 20, deaden the ball a little bit, raise the stitches, reduce the resiliency of the ball, something, something that helps the pitchers. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I've think I've written, I have written, I know I've written that. I think that major league baseball would be within its rights to establish, to change the composition of the ball constantly, to do it in a very transparent and open way but to say like we want more offense because offense is down who who knows why it's down but it's down we're gonna have a livelier ball this year and vice versa we're gonna have a deader ball this year that seems like something that i'm in favor of in theory and so i do think

that there are i think dan brooks has convinced me of this unintended consequences to all of these things uh in how players attack the strike zone and where the incentive of a fourth ball or a third strike comes into play so to think this out if you have a deader ball then the batter has less incentive to put the ball in play more incentive to have long at bats that are likely to lead to walks and so you could end up having for instance more walk focused hitters which mean longer plate appearances which mean maybe more fouls and all those sorts of things that actually slow the game down yeah so i i'm not convinced that it would actually do what is intended but if it did uh i i'm fine with tinkering with the ball in

a very transparent and constantly evolving way although maybe you also get fewer all or nothing swings less lifting the ball just trying to slap hit it sort of because you won't get rewarded as often by elevating it and then maybe you get more contact which generally seems like a good thing yeah the anything you do to the ball anything you do to to the average ball in play is going to have an influence on whether the pitcher is willing to throw strikes and whether the batter wants to swing and so those two things result of anything that that you do to balls in play and it's complicated you can go both ways and sometimes in conflicting ways yep all right 21 similar purpose put in place an agreement

among the teams that every fence that creates a home run must be either 340 feet from home plate or 20 feet high one or the other hmm so i don't like high walls at all. I, I, I would, I would not mind lots of space, but I don't like high walls. The problem with lots of space is that it creates worse, worse seating. But on the other hand, you know, lots of people sit much further back from the wall. I mean, only one person sitting in the front row of the bleachers and only, well, one row of people uh most people are happy sitting back further anyway and so uh maybe i'm for that i think uh bigger ballparks would be would be a good fix to me now what are you going to do though like you're going to tell

30 ballparks that they have to like spend millions of dollars uh redesigning themselves it does seem a little tricky at this point but maybe we're grandfathering in everything that's already existent. Right. Yeah. I don't know. Didn't the Marlins are, are moving in the fences now. Right. I think, which, uh, means even more home runs presumably, but, uh, yeah. Do you not like high walls because fewer plays at the wall, fewer home run robberies, that sort of of thing i like like the camden yards walls that are quite low they're like at the perfect height where you can have home run robberies i think the most home run robberies occur there because of that and i'm generally in favor of that it's an exciting play yeah why don't i like them i don't know why i don't like them i find a

ball banging off the wall just aesthetically dull and sort of unsuspenseful i don't like them i find a ball banging off the wall just aesthetically dull and sort of unsuspenseful i don't like that period of waiting i'm just like oh well i know it's a double now let's wait i haven't thought this through this is very immediate reaction i i have not written an article about why i don't like tall walls yet and so i might actually like tall walls yeah or maybe like the the caroms off the wall obviously there's some skill in that in knowing how to play a wall, but that does add an element of randomness to it because it could hit something on the wall and come off in an unpredictable way. Is that good or bad? I don't know for sure, but it means that you get rewarded in an unequal way for the same hit. Here's another thing I don't like about it i don't like the way that a

line drive that would travel 370 feet is worse than a fly ball that would travel 370 feet a high fly ball um which is what tall walls do they incentivize the sort of pop-up fly balls or high fly balls instead of like harder hit line drives. And, um, and in particular, and that is, I don't like that, but then it's even more, I mean, you know, it's really that you can hit a 370 foot line drive for a single or a 330 foot pop-up for a Homer. I mean, that 330 foot pop-up isn't even a good swing. Like Like we see we see home runs in the Crawford boxes all the time that just aren't even really like impressive hits at all. And so that's what I don't like about it. I don't like the the the inequity toward batted balls. All right, 22, similar but more radical. He says, legally a fair fly ball that passes out of the playing field at a point less than 250 feet from home plate shall entitle the batter to advance to second base only and he says that instead of having it be 250 feet make it 350 feet and he says that would not require that you reconfigure their

parks what it would mean is that the foul pole and the home run pole are not necessarily the same thing so you have a foul pole which determines whether the ball is fair foul but also you have a home run pole which determines whether the ball is a home run or a double so a ball hit into the seats but less than 350 feet is not a home run it's a double and, so like the first six rows would be a double and the seventh row would be a homer? Like you'd be able to hit it out of play for a double, but if it's not far enough, it wouldn't be a homer? Yes. He says a lot of fans are going to hate it because we've been raised all our lives to think that a ball hit out of play has to be a home run, but it doesn't have to be a home run. It could very well be just a double. I personally would like the rule because it would get rid of a lot of cheap home runs. And if you get rid of cheap

home runs, then it becomes a less profitable gamble to try to hit home runs, which means that the smart play becomes to put a ball in play. Yeah, this feels a little bit like the four-point line. Yeah, and he does acknowledge that his whole purpose here is to make unobtrusive changes that you would not even notice from afar. And this is clearly something that you would notice from afar. So it may just be too much tradition to do this. I'll think about it, but at the moment, I don't like it. Yeah.

But that's not a fair response because I haven't thought about it. Okay. All right. Number 23, this is about the bat dimensions. So rule 3.02a says the bat shall be a smooth round stick, not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. So the rulebook says the maximum thickness but no minimum thickness and so he wants it to be the bat shall be a smooth round stick not more than 2.6 inches in diameter that's the same at the thickest part but not less than 1.5 inches in diameter at the thinnest part and no more than 41 inches in length so basically this

would be phasing out the whip handled bat the the thin handled bat which players like and therefore bat handles have gotten thinner and you can really whip them around there but he says the fact that hitters like them doesn't mean that they should be allowed that they're good for the sport and that it's part of everyone trying to hit home runs and hitting home runs and striking out. And because there's more wood in the sweet spot and the momentum of the swing is affected by it. And so a thicker handled bat is more of a put the ball in play bat. And he says that if the founders, if the rulebook writers had anticipated the way that the bat shape had evolved then they probably would have put this in but they just didn't see it coming

i'm not sure i believe that last part but i think i support that he doesn't mention the bat the broken bat aspect of it either which he does actually yeah but i i think i mean i think that's been curtailed pretty significantly with the the new woods that are used in the back. I don't think there are as many broken bats as there used to be, but he does mention that as another byproduct of the thin handles. Yeah, I think I like this one. Yeah, I guess so. I don't know if it would affect. I wonder if it would be, if you took a pool of 500 hitters, I wonder if like 50 of them wouldn't be affected at all.

400 would be affected slightly and 50 would be out of the league. Yeah. Or if it would just be like a very fairly subtle shift for everybody and everybody's game would change a little bit in a way that is fairly unobtrusive and would in, make the game better. It seems within the realm of changes that one suggests. Equipment changes, I think, are restrictions on equipment. I think those are good. To me, those are good changes. Across all sports, across all time, equipment restrictions are constantly being tweaked or enforced or suggested or changed. And so they feel like very pure fixes.

Or enforced or suggested or changed And so they feel like very pure fixes And so yeah the size Of the bat that you're allowed to use to Smash a baseball seems within The realm of a good suggestion Alright 24 I think he Suggested this before I think I've heard Rob Nair describe it but

Creating an economic incentive for Teams to play at a better pace So you create some Formula that predicts or correlates with the time of a game. So, you know, 2.5 times the number of half innings plus one minute for each hitter who comes to the plate in the game or something. And so, you know, an average game is this many half innings and this many batters. And so there is a reward system where if the game is actually played in that amount of time, then that's 10 points into the system for each team.

If the game takes twice that long, then that's zero points. And if it's between, then you get some number of points. And basically you are trying to gently incentivize teams to hurry up a little bit. incentivize teams to hurry up a little bit and then you you get some money that's uh paid into you know it's based on tv money or or payroll taxes or or something and uh it creates an incentive for the team not to waste time and uh he thinks that maybe that could be a a powerful thing so so who gets the money? The teams do. I guess it's distributed to the players. So he says...

What I think might... What seems like it could be a problem is... So Garrett Cole has so much money. Like he has so much money. And I just don't feel like throwing a few bucks to him to tell him to speed up would incentivize him in any way now the problem is that if you have garrett cole's teammate say geo or shella doesn't have that much money and for him this might really be welcome money like it like the tip jar yeah at the starbucks and it might be part of, you know, what he comes to consider his income.

And so then do you set up a situation where, A, do you set up a situation where Garrett Cole and Gio Urshela have like this conflict? And is Gio Urshela going to be mad at Garrett Cole? Does Garrett Cole now have an obligation to pitch against his interests in order to be a good teammate? And at the end of it all, are they just taking money from the pot that's already going to the players anyway and redistributing it to them in a way that isn't going to actually

increase Gio Urshela's income at all, but merely make him follow a new regulation in order to earn it. And he also seems to be saying, I guess if part of this or even all of this is that teams, if it's a team level thing, so it's like more of an ownership or front office level reward or penalty, then he says that basically players would get the message that playing quickly is good, is valued by teams, that you're hurting your own market value if you waste time because time will be money to the teams and all else being equal. They will prefer a player who does not take as long between pitches, for instance, and so it would be kind of an indirect encouragement. And so it would be kind of an indirect encouragement. Something I think a lot about as a grownup is one time when I was a kid, my parents declared that, well, there was some sort of power company, the power company had some sort of incentive

where if you cut your power by X percent from the previous year, you got some bonus. So, you know, maybe you save $30 from your bill from last year. And then they'll like, I don't know, they'll double it and they'll give you 60 or something. And so we had a family push to, to make this, to do it. And if we made it, then we'd get a pizza. And I, that month I was like seven or so. And that month I was fanatical. Like I was the most energy conscious person in the world. I'd just go, I'd spend all my free time going around the house, turning off lights, unplugging things, doing everything needed to save, uh, you know, uh, a little bit here and there. And then we did it.

We got the pizza. And as an adult, I now realize that pizza nights are fungible, that you just like, we were going to have pizza some night and they just moved it to that night i don't think that we had an extra pizza because as a grown-up you don't like as soon as you buy that pizza you're like well i spent all that money on pizza do i really need to spend more money on another pizza some night and you just quietly wash the other pizza night away from your plans so i always wonder whether we actually got extra pizza or not. Yeah, I don't know.

It makes you think of your childhood in a whole new light. Yeah, what they needed to do is they should have given me something that I otherwise would not have gotten at all. It needed to be, they just needed to give me cash. Yeah, yeah. So he's saying if by playing at a crisp pace, the team is allowed to spend more money on the free agent draft, for instance. Even cash.

No, even cash wouldn't have worked because my dad sets the next year's allowance. And so he could have just like I didn't I don't know what an appropriate allowance raise is going to be. And so maybe the next year, instead of getting a 50 cent raise, I only get a 25 cent raise because he's already. By the way, I think think max i'm surprised that that that you did not think max scherzer is is there with colin degrom at the top i still think max scherzer might be the best pitcher in baseball yeah i think it's only the the injury concerns in the second half of the season that made me not include him all right those two but yeah all right so this incentive thing uh uh i'm not against

incentives in general i'll think about this one too but on first blush it feels like out of character with how baseball players see themselves as movie stars basically as extremely high paid movie stars who want to be treated with the dignity that comes from being extremely famous and accomplished and elite and don't want to be doing your little uh you know like litter pickup to earn um gift cards yeah right i see that yeah all right it's kind of complicated i'll have to think about this one some more 25 he says another way to encourage players not to waste time would be to restore and strengthen the start of inning curfews. So many cities used to have curfews by law that a baseball team could not start an inning at one in the morning, for instance, and the leagues used

to have curfews. Of course, there was like a natural curfew before you had lights where you could play at night, and so that sort of imposed a curfew. But there were laws on the books that you say couldn't start a new inning after a certain time. So if you had a rule saying that no inning of a nine inning game may start more than three and a half hours after the start of the game. So if the game starts at 730, you can't start an inning after 11 o'clock unless you're in extras by then in which case you could continue so there would just be this subtle pressure hey let's wrap these things up because players would not want to have suspended games hanging over their heads constantly and that would screw up their schedule and their

stats and they wouldn't like the uncertainty of that the problem is that it would speed up like one game a year like one game a year, like one game a year or two games a year that would fall on that 11 p.m. line would be sped up sufficiently. And maybe every game would be sped up like a minute. But then you would have like, you probably would still end up

with eight or nine suspended games. And there's players hate suspended games. Fans hate them 20 times worse. They're the worst right especially if they're not tied a tied suspended game is barely tolerable but a suspended game that's just not suspended because you haven't finished it yet i think would be the horrible and it's so confusing for your fantasy stats yes yeah that's uh he says that that's a bad problem that occasionally fans who pay to see the game do not get to see the end of the game because it hits curfew.

And yeah, that's bad. That probably overrides the good it would do. All right, number 26. An umpire's decision on a stolen base attempt is not an appealable play. He's called safe, he's safe, he's called out, he's called safe he's safe he's called out he's out this is basically his solution to the tag play that looks different technically on replay because someone came off the bag a fraction of an inch or something and you can't see it with the naked eye you know that's a tough call the problem is that that is actually a tough call if you're on the wrong if this came up in the play in the article i just wrote a couple days ago about a complicated play involving a base runner who went around second and then got tagged out going back

into second because he'd overrun the bag and if you're on the wrong side of it as the umpire which it's very easy for you to be on the wrong side of it depending on where the runner slides and where the fielder fields the throw it's hard to see something that's pretty obvious and so i think that a review on a stolen base is is actually a great play for you to have reviews on if you want to solve that problem though i think a simpler one and a speedier one and one that i personally like more from a strategic benefit too is just to rule out the video monitoring guy on the club. And you can challenge, but you have to challenge with the naked eye. I feel like that is a fairly popular proposal

that we want to see the managers who, or the bench coaches or the teams that are challenging because they're better than the umpire at doing the umpire's job, not because they reviewed the technology at a microscopic level i like the dave cameron suggestion of like it's my suggestion is it it is i did it first okay i like the sam miller suggestion of the the airspace awarding the airspace over the bag to the runner once he slides in essentially so if he just takes uh some part of his if he's not in

contact with the bag but he's still over the bag then it it doesn't count because that's not really what we're trying to prevent not trying to prevent the the momentum where it just barely separates you from the bag in a way that you can't even see so yeah i'm in favor of that one i also am obviously in favor of that one and nothing against dave cameron or the other people who have suggested that but i suggested it on this podcast with you ben and you liked it all right i'm sure i heard it and was there okay all right 27 he says too many foul balls it's true that there are a lot more foul balls so he says says, given the talents of modern players, when a batter has two strikes and fouls off a pitch, that's a non-event once. But if he gets to two strikes and fouls off two pitches, that's a strikeout. Yeah, I'd go with that. It'd be a loss. I mean, we would definitely mourn the loss of something.

be a loss. I mean, we would definitely mourn the loss of something. Yeah. Well, the point he makes is that in the short term, it would exacerbate the strikeout problem. You'd have more strikeouts, which is the opposite of what he wants to do. But he's saying that eventually hitters would learn, okay, you can't just stand up there and try to get a piece of it and foul it off, you have to actually try to make contact and sort of, you know, not do the safety swing thing, but actually have to try to put the ball in play earlier in the sequence, which would be good, but in the short term, it would be bad. Oh, I don't think it would cut strikeouts in the long term either. I would only do it because I think that foul balls are really boring and that an eight-pitch at bat is generally boring, more boring than a five-pitch at bat or a six-pitch at bat.

Once you get to 10 or 11, then it becomes interesting again, and that's what we would mourn the loss of. But foul balls are a brutal part of the pace of game problem right now. Yes, there are a ton of them. I still don't think I would do this just because there'd be so many strikeouts and I'd rather try to do something that would address the strikeout problem first. All right, number 28, back off calling strikes on so many check swings. So he says that check swings started to be called differently after video replay became available. called differently after video replay became available. So he says that once replay became common, umpires could see that batters often went further than they thought they had before their

swings were checked. And he asserts that the percentage of check swings, which were called strikes, shot up. He says that's contributed a little bit to the strikeouts. He says that the rule should be not the, you know, break break the plane or whatever break your wrists or whatever the arbitrary standard that we apply now he says it should be that if a batter is attempting to slow his bat down before the ball crosses the plate it's a check swing uh i could be i could talk myself into this or the exact opposite of this i don't know what to do about check swings. I don't know. They probably shouldn't have invented baseball

because they should have seen the check swing coming. The check swing is like this glitch in the whole thing and it never runs properly. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you can use some sort of sensor that tells you if you go beyond a point of no return. Yeah, but it's just, I mean,

I think we all sense from watching these that it's not about the sensor. It's not about where the bat finished. It's about intent. And you want to try to figure out intent some way because it's true. I mean, you know, if your hands stay, if your hands stay back, it just doesn't look like a swing. Like there was no intent there uh i don't know

i'm sorry i'm just gonna defer to anybody anybody can have this one yeah that's a tough one i i i don't know i'm in favor of something that would cut back on strikeouts a little bit i think this would produce so many examples where we would look at it and say of course he swung he went around yeah because he was just barely slowing down i mean well at some point you have to slow down so yeah and it would increase walks and it would give batters uh it would help help hitters to i mean if hitters knew that they could check their swing a lot further than they would probably, I mean, I could imagine this leading to longer games as well. More walks,

more walks, more offense. Um, and, uh, isn't the, the, the fix that they're trying in,

uh, the Atlantic league, the opposite. Yeah. I forget what they exactly did, but it wasn't this. Yeah. I think it was more.

They wanted more swings called strikes. I'll have to look. All right. 29 is as basic as they come. Cut the pitcher's mound down by a couple of inches. Lower the mound. I think that's good. I think that would be fine.

I think a pitcher, well, pitchers all believe in pitching a little too much to be unbiased. But I would be interested to know whether there would be more of an effect than I'm giving credit to, but it seems fair. Yeah, it's been done before. I'm more interested in moving the mound back than lowering the mound, and I think it'd be more effective, but I'm not against it. So the Atlantic League rule was just to make it more batter-friendly. Just a rule on check swings in a batter-friendly manner. Oh, so that is like Bills. It is.

But I don't think they specifically said how to do that. I guess just to give them more leniency, I guess. Okay. All right. And the last one, this is kind of interesting. This is not a suggestion for teams or players, but for the leagues or for MLB. Set targets, set goals, publicly identified, publicly acknowledged goals. My suggestion would be that MLB should adopt the following resolution.

It is the goal of Major League Baseball that nine inning baseball games should be played in an average of two hours, 30 minutes or less, that there should be no more than 0.75 home runs per team per game, and that there should be no more than 6.5 strikeouts per nine innings. If these goals are not met in any season, aggressive actions will be taken to return the game to its historically normal form. historically normal form and obviously you can set your own standards there but the idea is that you state what you want baseball to look like and you tell everyone about it i think that the first part of the resolution would be fine but the it i don't think the league should say what it thinks is the appropriate amount of strikeouts if they want to make it harder to have strikeouts because it used to be harder and now it is for some reason gotten easier then i think it's fine to take action to change the game to make it more challenging to have strikeouts but saying that we don't like strikeouts or we don't like home runs feels both

insulting to the players and also not i don't agree with those things and so then does that mean that i it's not my league anymore that i i'm not a fan of baseball anymore i don't agree with those things. And so then does that mean that it's not my league anymore, that I'm not a fan of baseball anymore? I don't think so. So I would not say that a certain amount of home runs or a certain amount of strikeouts is ideal. It feels very much like staking your flag in the baseball of your youth and being unwilling to change with the sport.

Yeah. I mean, I like the idea of MLB having some goal in mind and not just being totally aimless and thinking, well, we want baseball to look a little more like this, but saying it out loud and having specific numbers attached to it. First of all, yeah, you're kind of denigrating your product if it is not currently matching those standards that you set. B, it's hard to control these things with such precision. So you would never get it completely right and it would always be changing. And so you'd have to be constantly tinkering. I don't know that you need to have it be the same all the time.

I think there's some value in having baseball be different from year to year within reason. I think it's kind of nice to keep things fresh and it keeps fluctuating. So there's that. But in general, I guess I would like them to say, well, especially now as there's all this scrutiny of strikeouts and home runs and the ball and everything, in order to change those things, you do kind of have to come to some determination of what you want the game to look like. Otherwise, it's hard to know what measures to take, really. All right. So that is it. That's the 30 James suggestions. Take them or leave them. And we've gotten through them. Last thought, this just occurred to me.

Do you think it's possible that one reason why Harper and Machado took so long long to sign last year is because they were so young which in theory made them more appealing but also was out of the norm there aren't many good free agents who reach free agency at that age and so you have to figure out what does a contract look like for a player like this and the idea of a 12 or 13 year contract probably sounds scary even if the risk isn't that much greater than whatever an eight or nine or ten year contract for someone who's two or three years older could that be part of it no okay it just occurred to me because it's because they were very appealing players and yet it took forever to sign them. And I'm just thinking what set them apart from this year's top players or most year's top players.

And one thing that set them apart is that they were 26 or whatever they were. And it's like, well, do you go short term? Do you give them a contract short enough that they could then sign another big contract in their 30s? Or do you just lock up their entire career? And what does that even look like? Because there aren't many precedents for a contract that long. So I mean, that makes it more complex than like Anthony Rendon, let's say, where it's like, oh, he's a seven-year guy. That's where you're going to have to give him seven years to get him probably. Yeah. I don't know. Just a theory. All right. I'll be right back to talk to Rob Arthur

about the latest findings about the same. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same. All right, I am back. And as promised, I am joined by Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere on the internet. Hello, Rob.

Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me on. So we have new news about the ball, or at least a little bit of new news. So you have read the report, you've written something that'll be up at BP this week. What have we learned, if anything, from this summary? I guess it's not the full report, but it's a summary of the findings that is a preliminary thing before the full findings come out at some point? Yeah, there's a few different kind of big new results that are in this summary of the full report, as you said. So one of the most important ones is that they actually found a physical culprit for why the aerodynamic drag on the baseball is changing. So we knew from the last report that came out, I believe around a year ago, that air resistance of the baseball is to blame for the increasing home run rates that we've seen in the last few years. But we didn't actually have any reason why the air resistance was changing.

You would want to be able to narrow that down to some particular physical aspect of the ball that was causing the ball to become more aerodynamic. And now we have that. So now we know that it's because of seam height. And it's a really incredibly tiny change in seam height. I believe they said it's less than one thousandth of an inch, which for reference is like,

I was just looking this up, it's about the change in seam height is about the width of one human skin cell. So what they're talking about here is just absolutely minuscule change, but apparently that's enough to produce a major change in the air resistance, and that is really the main factor that explains why home runs have increased so much in the last three, four years. Huh, so that is so tiny. That's even tinier than I thought. And you told me it's not too tiny to be

perceptible to a human finger, which is very sensitive, right? I mean, we've heard pitchers saying that the ball feels different in various ways, but how does that happen? And how is it possible that in earlier eras, it was not varying by the same amount from year to year, because you would think that if anything, the standards would have been less strict then, that there would have been less precision. And if we're talking about that amount of difference, it seems like it would be almost uncontrollable. I guess it has been, but that it would have been uncontrollable in this way before. but that it would have been uncontrollable in this way before. Yeah, it's such a small amount that, like you said, I can't imagine that this wasn't a factor at other times in baseball's history. With that said, I mean, based on, well, a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that we're talking about the mean value of all the baseballs that they tested.

So hundreds of baseballs that they actually looked at with this new technique that they developed specifically for this. hundreds of baseballs that they actually looked at with this new technique that they developed specifically for this. So it was a small mean shift, but that's aggregated over many, many hundreds of tests. Another thing is that based on the drag numbers that we have from past seasons, remember we have pitch effects data going back to 2007, and we didn't really see big drag fluctuations the way that we have the last few years. So at least in the 10 or so years prior to the current era of increasing home runs, they were able to somehow, I can't imagine how, but they were able to control the aerodynamics of the baseball, it seems like, better than they did in the last few years. So I truly, like you said, it's such an awe-inspiringly small change that you think it would be impossible to even measure that or to control the way that baseballs are manufactured with that level of tolerance.

But there it is. report, they said at that time that the entire effect of the home run surge, which was a previous home run surge, I guess the 2017 one, they attributed that to the ball. And I think they dismissed the idea that it could be anything else. This time with this latest surge, they seem to say that it's mostly the ball, but it's also probably player-driven as well? Yeah, so that's another new finding. They sort of look at the combination of exit velocities and launch angles and then spray angles as well to be able to say how much is the ball versus how much is players getting better at hitting the types of batter balls that tend to become home runs. types of batter balls that tend to become home runs.

And they find that in 2019 in particular, batters got significantly better at, essentially better at hitting home run type balls. And so that was a big factor, not quite as large as the change in the aerodynamics, but a significant factor in 2019 and 2018 as well, increasing home runs. That is, that's a new thing. That's not something that they had talked about before. There were some results presented at Sabre Seminar by Jim Albert, one of the committee members to this effect. I want to be careful though to say that even though it's obvious that batters have started to kind of try to generate higher launch angles and hit the ball in the air more often. I think part of the reason that they've tried to do that is because the ball

itself is changing. So the reward for hitting the ball in the air became much higher in the last three years than it was before that. And so there's a much greater impetus for batters to change their approach than there was before. And if you actually look at the launch angles and exit velocities, they didn't really start changing until after the ball changed. So to me, this is evidence that batters were adapting to the new environment, a new kind of ball that was much more home run prone than it was before. So I think that even though this is driven by batters, it's only, or I shouldn't say only, it's at least partially driven by batters adjusting to the ball. So the ultimate cause is still, I think, the baseball and the changes to the baseball that

made it so much easier to get over the fence. And this isn't really different from anything you've found or written. They specified that it was the seam height that was the culprit, they think, but you've written about the reduced drag and that's the effect of it. And you've also acknowledged that there could be some player component to this in some of your work. And this also backs up all of your writing about the postseason ball being deader, right, and the drag being higher in the postseason. So what did they conclude about that? Yeah, so this was also pretty fascinating and new stuff. So they looked at, there are two main

branches of analysis that they can do about measuring the drag on the ball. So one is they can look at batted balls and they can look at how often a batted ball launched at a certain angle and coming off the bat with a certain velocity, how often that becomes a home run. So that's the batter ball section. The other thing that I've done more of is measuring the drag directly from the pitching data, essentially how much speed it loses from the pitcher's hand to the plate. And so they got kind of divergent results from these two methods when they were looking at the postseason. They found that every year in the past four years, the pitching drag has gone up, which is somewhat surprising, and not so much in accord with my own findings.

So that suggests that either MLB has had this problem before, or that there is something wrong with the measurement apparatus in the postseason that causes it to produce an indication that drag is increasing when it's not. And I tend to lean towards the latter that there's a measurement problem because when they looked at the batted ball data instead and they looked at how many home runs there should have been hit versus how many actually were, they found that in 2019 in the postseason uniquely there were a lot fewer home runs than they would have predicted based on the batted ball data that they had. So this confirms what I wrote, that drag went up in the postseason.

But it also suggests there may be problems, in my opinion, with the measurement data that they're getting from pitching in particular in previous postseason years. I think a couple things are notable in terms of what they found, though, in the postseason years. I think a couple things are notable in terms of what they found, though, in the postseason. One is that they found it was a six-foot difference in fly ball carry. So that's pretty substantial. You're talking about with six feet, something like 15%, 20% change in the home run rate based on what we should expect. But they also produced a chart in figure 15.

I'm not sure this will ever get made public, but I hope it is. They produced a chart showing that some batted balls went up to, it looks like almost 50 feet less far than they would have predicted in the postseason. So this goes again to this issue of how much variability there is between individual balls. That suggests to me that there, even though it was a six-foot change, which doesn't sound like a lot, individual baseballs could have much, much reduced carry even beyond that. And so that, again, highlights that the baseball that we thought was very consistent at the

center of the game actually isn't. And any one ball that a pitcher pulls out could be much less likely to become a home run than another one than the next one that they get. Yeah. And we kind of knew that because there had been a previous study, what was it, back in 2000 when there was that high home run rate era and they weren't testing the same attributes of the ball at that time, but the person who was responsible for testing or the institute that was acknowledged in the report that yes two balls within the allowable ranges at the time one at the high end could fly 49 feet farther i think it was than

one at the low end and they're both legal balls they're both within those limits but it's just variation within those limits and maybe they've tightened those limits since then but even if they have there's still a lot of variation there, presumably. And now they're looking at things and testing things and measuring things that they weren't even thinking to look at back then or weren't able to look at back then. So now we can quantify the variability more accurately, and it's maybe even more disturbing to think about how random everything is. to think about how random everything is. But I could accept some randomness, I guess, if it were at least around a reasonable mean,

where I guess the average ball was not as lively as it has been, or at least is not varying as much as the ball has over the past few years. So if it were varying a lot from ball to ball, that's still sort of disturbing, but it's doubly disturbing that it's varying from ball to ball and then also from year to year and sometimes even month to month. So there's just no consistency at all, it seems like. Yeah, it's wild the degree to which it seems to move around. And it also seems to be a new thing. to be a new thing. I mean, one of the MLB's lines in response to this has been, well, if we had this data before, maybe we would have noticed that home run rates were fluctuating because of properties of the ball in previous eras. And there's some truth to that. But I also think that what we've

seen in the last few years is just astounding change in the home run rate from year to year, from month to month. The highest home run rate ever, by far. So even just that. Right. And now even from the regular season to the postseason, these kinds of changes really aren't what we historically saw. So I do think that there is some, there must be some problem in how the baseballs are being produced now that they need to confront and they need to deal with at this point. Otherwise, we're just going to have, you know, a continuously inconsistent baseball and we're never going to know what to expect

from game to game, from ball to ball. Yeah. yeah so on the one hand it sounds like an intractable problem it really is that tiny a difference it almost sounds too small to do anything about but clearly this is a recent problem like something is happening now that was never happening before because the ball was not flying like this and home runs were not being hit like this. So there has to be something that could be done or something that changed, but they don't really say what that is. They say it's the seam height, but they don't identify a specific step in the manufacturing process or something where that is happening. So what, if anything, do they recommend or what's the next step here? Yeah. So the main recommendations, and I think they're good, they sort of sidestep some of the

issues around not knowing what's going on in manufacturing. But the simplest thing that they could be doing, they probably should have been doing, is monitoring the drag on the baseball when the ball was coming out of the factory, as opposed to ex post facto after it's already been hit for a deep fly ball or a home run. So they should have been when the baseballs were coming out of the factory saying, okay, what's the seam height? Is it within the allowable range? And if it's not, let's not use it.

I mean, that's a simple way to make the baseballs more consistent. And then similarly with the drag on the baseball, they can measure the aerodynamics of a baseball pretty easily. And if there are situations like this that come up where suddenly the balls that are coming out of the factory have much lower, much higher aerodynamic drag, they should be able to go back and say, okay, well, like what changed in this last lot that was not the same as the lot before? And can we go back to the way it was? Because this is not, you know, we don't want to radically change the home run rate. So those are the main recommendations essentially to monitor the balls that come out

and where they're going and which games they're getting used in. And then to actually determine what are the seam heights, what are the drag coefficients of these balls so that they know when a problem is developing and they can actually work backwards to figure out what it stems from. To me, those are both sort of common sense things that they should have already been doing. If not 10 years ago, then at least after the home run rate first started, despite really in 2015, 2016, they should have been worrying about this. And if not then, then when the first report came out.

So it's sort of stunning that they have to give these recommendations at this point. It's so far into the process, but that's where we are. And I certainly hope that MLB actually takes these recommendations seriously this time and implements them. of how exactly it has happened. So you can't really prove whether it's intentional or not without even being able to say what exactly happened. But it's possible then, I guess, that MLB could take all this under advisement and presumably the full report will come out at some point over this offseason. And they could, in theory,

implement changes in time for next season, I suppose. And Rob Manford has said that if they were to set out to change the ball, they would do so publicly and transparently. And you can choose to believe that or not, but he for next season that they would say that but whether or not they say it they could do it right because they could be testing new batches just based on these recommendations and seeing if they fly farther or less far have more or less resistance than the balls that have been used before so there's there's no reason why they couldn't control it if they wanted to right right i mean like i said it would be as simple as just measuring the balls that are coming off the assembly line and then discarding the ones that are too high or too low in terms of the characteristics that they determine, whether that be seam height or drag. So it certainly

wouldn't be difficult for them to control it if they wanted to control it. But whether they do that, I think will be another question. I hope that they don't try and change it sort of on the slide, because it's obvious at this point, I think that we can tell when the baseball changes. So it would be pretty obvious, I think, to the public that something was happening. So hopefully they are open and a bit more open to this process in particular than they have been in the past. Right. And the whole point of MLB taking a controlling interest in Rawlings or however exactly that ownership is structured was that they could exert greater control over the manufacturing process. So the fact that they might say, well, it's just

manufacturing variation or something, they can't really pass the buck on that anymore because the buck basically should stop with MLB when it comes to manufacturing the ball right now, I would think. So if there continues to be variation, then it seems like it's a reflection on the league for not being able to iron out that problem. Certainly at this point, yeah. I mean, they've had years now of these scientists studying this and telling them what they should be doing and giving them kind of a recipe for how they could control this. And now they own Rawlings. Now they have the ability to implement those recommendations because they're in this position. So I hope that we don't continue

to sort of give them a pass, like you said, on this and let them skate by saying that, you know, it's just manufacturing variation that they can't control. It's certainly something that's within their ability to monitor and control at this point. Yeah. And then I know the thing that we both think is important because there are a lot of potentially misleading headlines and reports out there that emphasize the fact that the ball was not juiced, which has, I guess, taken on the meaning of one specific aspect of the ball, the bounciness of the ball or the coefficient of restitution of the ball. That's what people typically mean, I suppose, when they say that the ball is juiced or de-juiced. But in effect, what really matters is whether the ball carries or it doesn't, it's lively, or it's not, whatever term you want to use. So the fact that it wasn't juiced in that specific way, it's important to know that to be able to pinpoint what exactly changed. But in

terms of the effect and the culpability of the ball, it really doesn't matter at all. So saying it's not juiced does not actually mean that the ball is not responsible. The ball is responsible. It's just that it's the seams of the ball, not that other aspect of the ball. So don't be misled if you see headlines about juiced or not juiced. That does not mean that the ball was not responsible. It is. There's a mountain of evidence, and MLB is admitting here again in the report that it is primarily the ball. Yeah, these headlines that people have put up lately, unfortunately, they say things like, the ball isn't juiced, it's just more aerodynamic, which I think just

tends to confuse people who read that because they don't understand if it's not juiced, why, you know, but it is the ball, then what's happening? The other thing that's worth pointing out here is they actually did find a little bit of evidence that the coefficient of restitution, the bounciness of the baseball, actually did increase in the last few years, and that it increased exit velocities by 0.3 miles per hour. So it actually is a little bit juiced. I mean, I don't want to overplay that. It's a minor contributor, but even if you want to talk about the coefficient of restitution, there is evidence that that changed as well. So even that is likely a factor here. All right. Well, are there any remaining questions that have yet to be addressed that conceivably could be addressed other than just why is the seam height

different and how can it be made the same? I think that the main thing for me going forward is the fact that it's the seam height that it's on the outside of the ball. It means that it's probably having some impact, I think, on how pitchers are able to get balls to spin and break. And that's something that we haven't been able to study easily to this point because of how much change there is in the tracking system from year to year. But I think now knowing that seam height correlates well with drag, I hope that we can go forward and kind of be able to say like, oh, well, part of the reason that this pitcher had a tough season in 2017

was because the seams got lower and they suddenly weren't able to spin their curveball the way that this pitcher had a tough season in 2017 was because the seams got lower and they suddenly weren't able to spin their curveball the way that they used to. And, you know, I hope we can sort of start to disentangle that and what effect that had on pitching. So that's what I'm looking forward to doing with this data. Okay. Yeah, it's very confusing because the first report, the initial report, I think, didn't it rule out seam height as a major effect? Because I assume they looked into it at the time, but they couldn't identify anything that was different in that first report. So do we know if that initial surge, the 2017 home run rate, was that maybe not seam height? Was that something different? And does seam height maybe not explain the entire effect,

even the non-player driven effect this time maybe it's just a contributor and it might actually be multiple factors like if it's such tiny differences making a major difference in results then it seems like it could potentially be multiple factors combining to produce some effect or different factors changing at different times and producing a similar effect? Yeah, it's got to be more than just seam height. So they go through a calculation in there where they say that seam height is responsible for 35% of the change in drag coefficient. So it's not just seam height from ball to ball, but there's got to be other

factors, but 35% is a fairly large amount so it's probably mostly semite with with a side of other factors that we don't know about yet and the reason that they didn't find it before is because they apparently had to upgrade their equipment to be able to measure differences in seam height this small so it goes to show that like these tiny tiny differences in how the baseballs are built really can have large effects on how they perform so they had to actually go and come up with new testing procedures to be able to detect differences in semi this this tiny and then that is what enabled them to actually make this connection between semi and and. Wow. All right. So this saga just drags on.

It's been more than four years now since we started wondering what the heck is happening with the baseball. If we ever get answers about all of this, we may just have to write a book about it or something, just to set all the questions to rest and explain all the mysteries. I don't know. It's just, it seems like it should be simple, but it turns out that baseballs are really, really complicated. And somehow, even this thing that's been around for centuries, and all of the really sophisticated technology that we can bring to bear to study it now, still doesn't quite shed as much light on it as you would think it would. So there's just every time some new story comes out or the home run rate changes again,

it's like another alley that you have to drive down to hopefully find an answer at the end. Yeah, and that's not even, I think at the end of this, what we're already determining is that this is not even really the beginning of the story of what has happened throughout baseball's history, right? Like, if we can measure all this at this point, think about all the other times, all the other seasons in baseball history, all the other historic home runs and near home runs that were impacted by the baseball. So this is clearly just one tiny window Into a vastly important thing That's been affecting the game

For as long as the game has been played Right, but not quite in as extreme a way As it has lately Which is what brought our attention to it Alright, you can read Rob's latest About this at Baseball Perspectives Follow him on Twitter At NoLittlePlans

With underscores between the words Thank you as always, Rob Thanks Alright, that will do it for today A couple more tidbits from the winter meetings at NoLittlePlans with underscores between the words. Thank you as always, Rob. Thanks. All right, that will do it for today. Couple more tidbits from the winter meetings. Rob Manfred said that all 30 teams are going to have protective netting that goes substantially beyond the far end of the dugout.

Things were clearly trending that way, but that's good news. Once it started happening, it happened very quickly. Another bit of news he dispensed is that the investigation into the Astros' potential sign stealing is, quote, the most thorough investigation that the commissioner's office has ever undertaken. He said MLB has interviewed 60 people and has 76,000 or more instant messages to go through.

Sounds like fun. They also have to do follow-up interviews, so there's no timeline for findings to be released. So maybe we'll find out about the astro sign stealing before we fully find out about the ball you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild the following five listeners have already pledged their support by signing up to send some small monthly amount to us to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks evan ellenberger eugene chong logan davis justin w vandeventer and jason nasi thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at

facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and other podcast platforms keep your questions for me and sam and meg coming via email at podcast of fan graphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you are a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance from the winter meetings. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. On every way that runs long A hundred miles built upon us It's tearing at the seams of all it's been Tearing at the seams of all it's been. Tearing at the seams

of all it's been.